If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything.

The X-Files

11.5 Ghouli

(SPOILERS) Perhaps great partnerships should never break up. Together, Glen Morgan and James Wong wrote some of the best episodes of the original run, but their solo efforts for the return have been entirely adequate, entirely unremarkable. Wong’s the better director of the two, as his feature work on a couple of Final Destinations evidenced, but it isn’t enough to make Ghouli seem either necessary or earned, particularly as it returns to the barren well of not-so-wee William.

The most curious aspect of the episode is that it feels as if Wong decided he had to shotgun wedding two diverse concepts, such that the seams show unforgivingly. As a consequence, I was initially waiting for a reveal that Scully had fooled herself into thinking Jackson Van De Kamp (Miles Robbins) was William, and she was being duped by a creepy kid. After all, why would said creepy kid be engineering a Slenderman-inspired encounter between his two girlfriends Brianna (Sarah Jeffery) and Sarah (Madeleine Arthur), in which they attack each other imagining the other is a monster, unless he was a bit of a loon? That we’re supposed to sympathise with what he did, because he was apologetically unable to control his id, doesn’t really wash, and evidences awkward attempts to finesse the material.

Mulder: This is my problem with modern day monsters, Scully. There’s no chance for emotional investment.

As a result, the Ghouli/Slenderman side is given short shrift, aside from the effective opening teaser featuring derelict ship the Chimera; on one level, this might be for the best, since we only just had a psychically projected adversary in Plus One. On another, it’s a flagrant waste of a modern urban legend that has had actual rather nasty consequences. The opening scenes also take in Mulder quoting Edgar Cayce (“Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions”), a first for the series I think, so probably overdue, and also an effectively staged dream paralysis encounter between Scully and her son.

The conspiracy side of Ghouli is typically muddled and murky, hastened along by an unwieldy burst of exposition from Skinner attempting to marry alien-human hybrid experimentation with Mulder and Scully’s – or CSM’s and Scully’s – son. There’s some effective old-style law enforcement friction as Mulder encounters Detective Costa (Louis Ferreira), who’d rather just put the case to bed, and DoD guys hot on the trail of Jackson/William. Scully meanwhile receives pep talks from who she thinks may be the architect of the hybrid programme (Peter Wong of Lost fame) but turns out to be Jackson pulling some psychic shapeshifting. I’m still not really going for Scully’s emotional burden over having lost William, but that’s because I was completely uninvested in the plotline in the first place.

Having Skinner reluctantly working with CSM again is plain annoying, especially as it involves actually helping Mulder and in so doing duping him. We learn that a Dr Matsumoto developed eugenics programme Project Crossroads, eventually forsaken due to the unpredictable attributes manifesting in test subjects, and that it was defunded 15 years ago (as if something like that would ever really be knocked on the head), with the doctor going on the run and the DoD trying to track down his test subjects.

Not only is the unwanted William manifesting big time (but joy, he connects with mom), but we’re back at the unholy mess that was the Season 10 finale, as it’s still very much in line of sight – William is dreaming of the apocalypse, just like Sculls. Wong keeps the episode watchable, incorporating several effective set pieces such as the hospital altercation in which William causes DoD guys to see each other as first Ghouli and then Scully, but so far this season has very much kept in step with the previous (as such the media response of a return to form feels like wishful thinking); crap Carter mythology, merely acceptable Morgan & Wongs, and only Darin to remind you just how good the show can be.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

Comments

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

So you want me to be half-monk, half-hitman.

Casino Royale (2006)
(SPOILERS) Despite the doubts and trepidation from devotees (too blonde, uncouth etc.) that greeted Daniel Craig’s casting as Bond, and the highly cynical and low-inspiration route taken by Eon in looking to Jason Bourne's example to reboot a series that had reached a nadir with Die Another Day, Casino Royale ends up getting an enormous amount right. If anything, its failure is that it doesn’t push far enough, so successful is it in disarming itself of the overblown set pieces and perfunctory plotting that characterise the series (even at its best), elements that would resurge with unabated gusto in subsequent Craig excursions.

For the majority of its first two hours, Casino Royale is top-flight entertainment, with returning director Martin Campbell managing to exceed his excellent work reformatting Bond for the ‘90s. That the weakest sequence (still good, mind) prior to the finale is a traditional “big” (but not too big) action set piece involving an attempt to…

I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.

Remember, you're fighting for this woman's honour – which is probably more than she ever did.

Duck Soup (1933)
(SPOILERS) Not for nothing is Duck Soup acclaimed as one of the greatest comedies ever, and while you’d never hold it against Marx Brothers movies for having little in the way of coherent plotting in – indeed, it’s pretty much essential to their approach – the presence of actual thematic content this time helps sharpen the edges of both their slapstick and their satire.

Afraid, me? A man who’s licked his weight in wild caterpillars? You bet I’m afraid.

Monkey Business (1931)
(SPOILERS) The Marx Brothers’ first feature possessed of a wholly original screenplay, Monkey Business is almost brazenly dismissive towards notions of coherence, just as long as it loosely supports their trademark antics. And it does so in spades, depositing them as stowaways bound for America who fall in with a couple of mutually antagonistic racketeers/ gangsters while attempting to avoid being cast in irons. There’s no Margaret Dumont this time out, but Groucho is more than matched by flirtation-interest Thelma Todd.

You killed my sandwich!

Birds of Prey (and the Fanatabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (2020)
(SPOILERS) One has to wonder at Bird of Prey’s 79% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I mean, such things are to be taken with a pinch of salt at the best of times, but it would be easy, given the disparity between such evident approval and the actually quality of the movie, to suspect insincere motives on the part of critics, that they’re actually responding to its nominally progressive credentials – female protagonists in a superhero flick! – rather than its content. Which I’m quite sure couldn’t possibly be the case. Birds of Prey (and the Fanatabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) isn’t very good. The trailers did not lie, even if the positive reviews might have misled you into thinking they were misleading.

On account of you, I nearly heard the opera.

A Night at the Opera (1935)
(SPOILERS) The Marx Brothers head over to MGM, minus one Zeppo, and despite their variably citing A Night at the Opera as their best film, you can see – well, perhaps not instantly, but by about the half-hour mark – that something was undoubtedly lost along the way. It isn’t that there’s an absence of very funny material – there’s a strong contender for their best scene in the mix – but that there’s a lot else too. Added to which, the best of the very funny material can be found during the first half of the picture.

You’re a disgrace to the family name of Wagstaff, if such a thing is possible.

Horse Feathers (1932)
(SPOILERS) After a scenario that seemed feasible in Monkey Business – the brothers as stowaways – Horse Feathers opts for a massive stretch. Somehow, Groucho (Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff) has been appointed as the president of Huxley University, proceeding to offer the trustees and assembled throng a few suggestions on how he’ll run things (by way of anarchistic creed “Whatever it is, I’m against it”). There’s a reasonably coherent mission statement in this one, however, at least until inevitably it devolves into gleeful incoherence.

Haven’t you ever heard of the healing power of laughter?

Batman (1989)
(SPOILERS) There’s Jaws, there’s Star Wars, and then there’s Batman in terms of defining the modern blockbuster. Jaws’ success was so profound, it changed the way movies were made and marketed. Batman’s marketing was so profound, it changed the way tentpoles would be perceived: as cash cows. Disney tried to reproduce the effect the following year with Dick Tracy, to markedly less enthusiastic response. None of this places Batman in the company of Jaws as a classic movie sold well, far from it. It just so happened to hit the spot. As Tim Burton put it, it was “more of a cultural phenomenon than a great movie”. It’s difficult to disagree with his verdict that the finished product (for that is what it is) is “mainly boring”.

Now, of course, the Burton bat has been usurped by the Nolan incarnation (and soon the Snyder). They have some things in common. Both take the character seriously and favour a sombre tone, which was much more of shock to the system when Burton did it (even…

To defeat the darkness out there, you must defeat the darkness inside yourself.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010)
Easily the best of the Narnia films, which is maybe damning it with faint praise.

Michael Apted does a competent job directing (certainly compared to his Bond film - maybe he talked to his second unit this time), Dante Spinotti's cinematography is stunning and the CGI mostly well-integrated with the action.

Performance-wise, Will Poulter is a stand-out as a tremendously obnoxious little toff, so charismatic you're almost rooting for him. Simon Pegg replaces Eddie Izzard as the voice of Reepicheep and delivers a touching performance.
***

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog