Eyes Wide Shut

Although Stanley Kubrick is one of my favorite directors, I wasn't especially looking forward to seeing his final film. An erotic thriller starring a real (at the time) couple just seemed a bit beneath him, I guess. Of course, it wasn't really that simple. It never is with Kubrick. Even if maybe he died of a heart attack before he was actually totally finished working on it, it's still a remarkable movie, one of his most artful, and easily one of my favorites of the ten I've seen. It's foreboding and exciting, and it does deal heavily in sexual themes, but it's definitely not your standard erotic thriller.

Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman star as Bill and Alice, a married couple with a daughter that begin the story by going to a Christmas party hosted by a patient of Cruise's played by Sydney Pollack. Alice becomes suspicious when she sees Bill with a couple models and then disappears for a while (he's actually treating a prostitute who overdosed when she was with Pollack). In a later argument, Alice reveals that she thought about an affair a year earlier, and Bill gets called away just in time to get sucked into a world of sexual desire and paranoia. He eventually ends up at a weird party that's equal parts orgy and cult ritual, in an infamous sequence that was initially censored in the United States to get an R rating and is one of the most compelling things I've ever watched.

After the party, the intensity doesn't really let up, as Bill continues to learn strange things about what went on that night, and becomes increasingly suspicious of what's really going on all around him. It's a pretty long movie, but I never felt its length pressing on me, due to the constantly interesting cinematography (the movie always looks great, even if the New York scenes were filmed on a London set) and score, which uses various orchestral pieces to great effect. The film eventually has a scene that finally explains what happened to Bill, and taken at face value it's a bit of a letdown compared to the unbearable tension of what came before. Of course, there's no guarantee that it's the whole truth, because we never really see one way or the other. Going along with the upbeat denouement, I can see why the movie might seem like much ado about nothing, but there's always more layers to a Kubrick movie than you might initially expect. He was a great filmmaker, and Eyes Wide Shut is a completely fitting final work for him.

The Invasion

I didn't really expect to see this movie, I just sort of did. I wasn't totally against it, since I like movies about aliens, and if nothing else, there are worse people you could watch for an hour and a half than Nicole Kidman. I remember watching the 1956 version some time ago, and liking the idea. It was like a good, long episode of the Twilight Zone, focusing on an interesting premise and disturbing atmosphere in lieu of a bunch of special effects, and it worked quite well. The Invasion goes the same route, with a few good effects shots to set it up, but most of the tension and excitement comes from just watching normal people try to escape from emotionless shells of their former friends and family.

Most of the problems came from the ways they changed it from the original. They really avoided the whole alien aspect; the antagonist is an alien invasion in the sense that they are a form of life that was not created on earth, coming to take it over, but there are no pods or any of the other science fiction elements that make it a little more entertaining, in my view. It played a bit like just another thriller, when it could have been more interesting than that. With the horror/thriller angle comes the annoying flashes-of-images-with-loud-noises that masquerade as something actually scary and plenty of unbelievably dumb actions taken by the main characters. Kidman is a psychiatrist who holds her own intellectually at dinner parties, but still does things like just sit around when she's supposed to be avoiding sleep, as opposed to, I don't know, doing anything at all to keep herself occupied.

Daniel Craig is fine as the love interest, he's a good actor who can bring some respectability to any part he plays. He and his doctor coworkers are working to find a cure for the epidemic that's taking over the planet, which is explained much more scientifically than it was in previous incarnations. I don't understand the point of this, the audience is fine with the alien spore just working, we don't need medical terms we don't know thrown at us, and when they stumble upon possible cures quite easily it just seems less believable than if they never tried to justify it in the first place. This all leads to a disappointing ending which just isn't as effective as the original's.

The first movie used the premise to comment on topical issues like McCarthyism, and like other remakes, The Invasion updates it to say some things about Iraq. When they've taken over, the aliens bring peace to the world, ending wars and struggle, and it makes a point that maybe the world is better off with everyone turned into conforming, hollow citizens. The protagonists are trying to save the true nature of humanity, but is it really worth it? It's an interesting question which does a lot to make up for a lot of the movie's other deficiencies. It's reasonably exciting and entertaining throughout. There are some dumb moments, but you can just laugh at it and move on. If it's not the best movie in the world, it was at least enjoyable while we were watching it.