Author: Corrina Lee

Monos begins high above the rest of the world. So high, that one can watch the fluffy tops of clouds as they meander across the sky. So high, that trouble seems a distant, unthinkable thing. But trouble finds its way everywhere eventually. It will hunt you down with relentless feet and unbounded strength. For the eight teenaged soldiers stationed atop a Columbian mountain, trouble comes in the form of a dairy cow. Or maybe that is an oversimplification. Maybe trouble was always there, awaiting an opportunity to rear its bloody head. Because these are isolated teenagers, orphans really, conscripted into a war they don’t fully understand. The tragedy is that for this group, peace was never truly an option.

Choice is always lacking in Monos. There is no escape from this beautiful, isolated place. They are trapped together and so, together they form a makeshift family with makeshift names. Throughout the film, the teenagers only use pseudonyms. Their false names are like flimsy costumes, war-like personas that they assume as they pretend to be soldiers. Still, for all their bravado, they are young. There is so much potential in their youth and so much danger. Youth is corruptible and all that potential can quickly turn sour. The question becomes if any of that budding hope can survive in such an unforgiving environment. The adults, those who should be caretakers to the children, hand them guns instead. And so, when there is no one to turn to and nowhere to go, what can they do except obey orders and shoot to kill? In the rampage of war, they are the most helpless pawns of all. In their attempts to gain a semblance of power for themselves, the teenagers can only imitate the system that they know, one of violence and oppression. Even imagining a world without endless conflict seems impossible.

The film, though, is not devoid of hope or beauty. There is no lack of beautiful landscapes, even when they become marred by blood. The stony majesty of the mountain is framed in beautiful wide shots by cinematographer, Jasper Wolf. The camera soars above all, to the heavens, rendering every person small and insignificant. Against the vast expanses of sky, the teenagers are only black shadows. They are rendered indistinct, without detail as they stare into a universe that seems infinite. The tragedy, though, is in the limitations. During their brutal training sessions, the frame becomes claustrophobically tight on their faces. We see all the strain, all the terror of failing or showing any weakness. For, no weakness will be tolerated. They are trapped again. The way Monos alternates between different kinds of shots is unsettling. It throws audiences into an uncomfortable situation where nothing is quite safe. Even during the moments of exhilaration, when there exists the possibility of a haven within the confines of war, there always looms a sense of dread. This is reinforced by an intermittent score that kicks in without warning and ends in a searing screech. Otherwise, the film is almost entirely silent, broken only by snatches of dialogue.

That dialogue is delivered with equal amounts of veracity and vulnerability by the young actors. Especially prominent is Sofia Buenaventura as Rambo. Rambo is the gentlest of the group and therefore, tasked with the most inner conflict. She has still not quite given up the idea of a different life, one that she can see with eyes that express every feeling. But even the harshest of the teenagers do not begin as stony killers. They are capable of happiness, capable of openness. Gradually, though, as they close their hearts, as they embrace violence, the actors become harsher too. Their expressions sharpen and bodies move more wildly, desperation in every tendon. But no matter how hard they strive, they can’t escape. Their actions are meaningless in a grander scheme.

Monos is an unrelenting ride. It alternates between loud and quiet, between small and large. However, for all its varying extremes, there is one overwhelming direction. Down. The film plummets from the beautiful mountaintop into the depths of the jungle. We fall with it, knowing that there is nothing to waiting to catch us at the bottom.

Joker is an oozing scab. It is the itching feeling at the back of your throat, the one that portends a particularly bad cold. It is raw and frustrating, petty and painful. It is a film that so much wants to be grand and ends up so very small. Much like the man at its center, Joker wants to be an exhibition, but not because it has any special message to send. Instead, it craves attention for its misery. It will slam heads into walls and then revel in its own unpleasantness. The entire film is an open wound, one that will not stop reopening itself.

From its very first scene, Joker kicks the audience with its grimy feet. Filmmakers have always used Gotham as an extension of their Batman’s psyche. In Christopher Nolan’s version, Gotham is sleekly modern, featuring a contemporary Batman who uses recognizable military tech. Then, there is Schumacher’s campy gothic Gotham with a Bruce Wayne who thought nipples on his suit were a good idea. This Gotham is another extension; this time a world as tightly twisted as Arthur Fleck. This city is wound up, ready to spring apart at the slightest touch. It has been a hot and smelly summer. The sanitation workers of Gotham have been on strike and there is no one to pay them. The prevailing smell of trash hangs over everybody as they trudge through garbage. The desperation is plainly obvious in their surroundings, but no one will admit that everything is collapsing around them. It is enough to break anyone.

And Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is a man that is ready to be broken. He is alone in the world, taking care of his aging mother on a street clown’s salary. Society seems to take a glee in stepping on him, always ready with a kick or a punch to the stomach whenever Arthur gets even the slightest bit of hope. To make things worse, he has a particular condition that makes him laugh uncontrollably at inexplicable times. Joaquin Phoenix makes this helplessness chilling. At their most affecting, tears spring up in Arthur’s eyes as he tries to stop the laughter. At its most monstrous, the laugh becomes a slow chuckle. It is clear that Arthur has never been understood, and he is rarely cared for. Even his mother’s caresses seem possessive rather than loving. Arthur is seen not as a person, but as an object for disgust and ridicule. It is hard not to feel sympathy for this man who is always treated as less than one. But this is also the man who will become a mass murderer, a man who will take his suffering and spread it across the entire city. The film purposefully chooses to depict events from Arthur’s point of view. It makes him the punching bag, so that when he chooses to punch back, it is necessary to follow him to the bloody end. It leaves you with a feeling of complicity.

Understanding Arthur seems to be equivalent to supporting him. When does a film cross the line from creating a full-bodied villain to willfully supporting his actions? The separation between these two points of view is a thin boundary indeed, one that Joker never fully solves. The people who bully Arthur are cruel and vicious, yet they are protected from consequences by their upright societal standings. So, when Arthur splatters their blood across a subway platform, who are we supposed to feel sorry for? This is no victory. It is only violence, one that feels meaningless, a limp swing at a society that is too corrupt to care. Perhaps, this is the point. Perhaps Arthur’s violence is supposed to disgust us in its uselessness and depravity. But the film would dispute this too. For, within its boundaries, Arthur becomes a cult hero for other downtrodden people. They take his bloody acts as a symbol. It is when the film chooses to elevate Arthur that it clarifies its own message. The film suggests that many, an entire city, in fact, could be susceptible to falling to violence. This is a deep nihilism, one that suspects that there is a surge of destructive desire shallowly hidden within everyone. Rather than supposing the best, Joker assumes the worst about humanity. It is a film designed to make you feel vile about what you watched, about yourself even. Whether this is a meaningful sentiment to spread is debatable to say the least.

The final frontier. Glittering, sharp edged galaxies and exploding supernovas. Voids without end swallowing light and time. Majesty beyond measure, splendor beyond comprehension. Ad Astra imagines a time in the not too distant future, when the extraordinary becomes ordinary, when all the glimmering space becomes just another excuse for mankind to ignore its problems. It is a slightly gloomy proposition; yet, it is also one that seems, in all probability, the most realistic outcome. For as easy as it is to imagine the limitless possibilities of the cosmos, it is even easier to imagine humankind finding a way to corrupt the untouched unknowns. For, even as we travel further into the galaxies beyond, we cannot travel beyond ourselves.

Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) is a man who knows his limitations more than most. We hear his voice first. Calm and measured, he completes the mandatory psychological test, authorizing him as fit to perform a spacewalk. Composed and deliberate, he walks through a corridor, filled with cheerful colleagues. They greet him with enthusiastic smiles and a respectful, “Major”. He nods in return. Every word so considered, every action so purposeful. And perhaps, Roy is right to do so. As an astronaut, life is a delicate thing, easily destroyed by the slightest step outside of regulation. Surviving in space means dedicating every possible scrap of mental and physical energy to enduring. It is a harsh life, one that has helped alienate Roy from any semblance of a personal life. We are granted only glimpses of a previous relationship with Eve (Liv Tyler) before Roy compartmentalizes, shutting out pain. Acknowledging pain is a distraction after all, and Roy is far too practiced at drifting from his emotions instead. And so he does, until Roy is called on upon to find the man who caused him to fence off the world in the first place: his father.

Like its main character, Ad Astra is lonely. Much of its run time is devoted to contemplation of beauty, of emptiness. It is the beauty and the emptiness, after all, that define mankind’s expansion into the solar system. As Roy notes in one of his many (only sometimes tedious) asides, the development of viable space travel has not substantially changed human nature. Even the rocket trip to the moon is dispiritingly familiar. The same cramped seating with limited leg room. The same wrinkled in-flight magazine. The human race may have figured out a path to the stars, but it still can’t outgrow its ceaseless need to demand payment for flight upgrades. The contrast between the extraordinary and the mundane is what differentiates the film from its more wide-eyed counterparts. Despite its lunar landscapes and its Martian set pieces, what is most stunning about the film is how it makes this fantastical future seem all too possible. This probable tomorrow must have seemed all too tempting to Roy’s father, H. Clifford McBride (Tommy Lee Jones). A vision that must have been even more tantalizing than staying home to take care of his young son. It is that tender pain consistently jabbing into Roy’s heart and wounding Brad Pitt’s composure throughout the movie. A pain that tells him that he wasn’t worth enough to his father. It is that pain is what carries the film most realistically through its travails through space. Like all space films, Ad Astra risks drifting beyond its Earthly ties and disengaging from audience interest. But it remains committed to the story of Roy above all, never losing focus among the stars.

Ad Astra is a film as interested in the vastness of one man’s psyche as it is in the immensity of outer space. And perhaps, this limits the scope of the film as it tunnels deeper and deeper into Roy’s mind. But perhaps, the limits are precisely the point. We are not unrestrained beings. We are held back by all our human humdrum, all our pleasantries used to cover up unpleasant realities. We get lost because we want to lose ourselves, for a little while anyway. There is no more beautiful place to get lost than outer space.