Posts Tagged ‘Evan Peters’

Tron: Ares

Director: Joachim Ronning

Cast: Greta Lee, Jared Leto, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, Jeff Bridges, Arturo Castro, Gillian Anderson

Running Time: 1 hour 59 minutes

Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10

It’s been 15 years since Tron was released in 2010 and 43 years since the original Tron was released back in 1982. The good news is that Jeff Bridges stars in all of them.

2025’s Tron: Ares directed by Norwegian director Joachim Ronning who also did Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge.

Tron: Ares is not a bad film and the visual effects are amazing. The cast is sufficiently varied including Greta Lee (Past Lives) as video game founder Eve Kim and her nemesis, Julian Dillinger played with villainous mischief by Emmy winner Evan Peters (Mare of Easttown). Then there are the programs that Dillinger creates, Ares played by Oscar winner Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club) who is a digital being who wants to escape being disintegrated every 30 minutes and Athena played by the fabulous British actress Jodie Turner-Smith (Queen & Slim)  rocking a particularly retro Grace Jones look.

As Eve and her sidekick Seth Flores played by the Guatemalan star Arturo Castro discover the permanence code which allows advanced AI programs like Ares and Athena to exist forever. Dillinger’s corporation which he is trying to wrestle control away from his overbearing mother, pursue Eve and in a flashy motorbike chase through a nameless city, Eve discovers that she is weirdly attracted to Ares, even though he is a computer program.

Ares realizes that he is a disposable program in which Dillinger can reconstitute at any moment, so he teams up with Eve who sends him back into the original 1980’s video game where in this retro computer world reminiscent of 1980’s arcade games, Ares meets Kevin Flynn played with reverence by Oscar winner Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart), video game creator of the original Tron grid.

Tron: Ares has lavish production values with cutting edge visuals assisted by a catchy soundtrack by Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode. Of course Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Oscar winners for best original score for David Fincher’s The Social Network also assist with making this Tron soundtrack edgy and slick.

The best scene is when Ares meets Kevin Flynn in the original 1980’s computer grid of Tron, the first film which captured my imagination as a 10 year boy back in 1982.

If you enjoy the Tron world and the sleek visual aesthetics, then catch Tron: Ares now in cinemas. The acting is not brilliant but the storyline keeps the characters afloat in a treacherous digital world in which artificial intelligence is fighting raw human emotion.

Tron: Ares gets a film rating of 7.5 out of 10 and is worth seeing purely for the entertainment value and this time Disney managed to capture a futuristic world which is hyper contemporary and surprisingly relevant. Recommended viewing for those that love cool science fiction and watch it in the biggest screen possible.

X-Men: Apocalypse

Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Rose Byrne, Oscar Isaac, Nicholas Hoult, Sophie Turner, Tye Sheridan, Olivia Munn, Josh Helman, Ben Hardy, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Lucas Till, Evan Peters

Director Bryan Singer’s latest film forms the conclusion of a prequel trilogy. X-Men Apocalypse is a pastiche of 80’s paranoia even though the main villain Apocalypse originates from Ancient Egypt and is set upon decimating the world of man and mutants circa 1983, having risen out of a gold pyramid in modern day Egypt and decides annihilation is in order.

Reassembling much of the cast of X-Men: First Class, X-Men Apocalypse stars Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games Trilogy) as Raven/Mystique, James McAvoy (Victor Frankenstein) as Charles Xavier, Michael Fassbender (Macbeth) as Magneto, Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy/Beast and Game of Thrones star Sophie Turner as a young Jean Grey and Rose Byrne returns as Moira Mactaggert who first confronts the devastating power of Apocalypse in Cairo and alerts Charles Xavier and his band of mutants to the imminent danger.

Despite some of the mutants not wanting to be drawn into another conflict, they soon all bandy together when they realize how dangerous Apocalypse is, in his unrelenting quest to destroy human civilization circa 1983 and along with that eighties world, the parallel community of the mutants.

X-Men: Apocalypse is more mutants versus a more formidable mutant, than man vs mutant, although like always Magneto has several changes of conscience especially after seeing his young wife and daughter accidentally killed in a Polish forest. Soon Erik Lehnsherr aka Magneto unleashes all his anger and becomes the perfect ally for Apocalypse’s annihilating antics.

Much of the action alternates between America, Poland and Egypt and whilst X-Men: Apocalypse does not have that some groovy retro feel as the seventies set X-Men: First Class, there are some distinct 1980’s signifiers including a collage of Reagan material, nuclear armament as well as stock images pointing to the last decade of the cold war, where mistrust defined global politics.

Bryan Singer knows how to direct such a large ensemble cast even though audiences at times might get a sense of Mutant overload, but then again this is X-Men: Apocalypse and the more superhumans the better. X-Men: Apocalypse is definitely a case of the Unusual Suspects.

Clearly the cast of this film had great fun making it and the visual effects are truly inspiring especially the Egyptian sequence when the Mutants take on Apocalypse with his band of malevolent mutants including Psylocke played by Olivia Munn and birdman Angel played by Ben Hardy.

Audiences should also watch out for Tye Sheridan as a young Cyclops and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the turquoise teleporter Nightcrawler, who Mystique discovers in a cage fight in East Berlin.

X-Men: Apocalypse is recommended viewing for those that enjoyed X-Men: First Class and X-Men: Days of Future Past, all three films now make up the prequel trilogy. Marvel is certainly milking a lucrative franchise for all its worth and audiences are lapping up the ever expanding mutant universe.

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Director: Bryan Singer

Cast: Hugh Jackman, Jennifer Lawrence, Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, Halle Berry, Michael Fassbender, James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult, Anna Paquin, Ellen Page, Shawn Ashmore, Peter Dinklage, Famke Janssen, James Marsden, Karine Vanasse, Evan Peters, Josh Helman

Which director could resist bringing such a fabulous a-list cast together in one film?

Naturally the original X-Men director Bryan Singer who takes this huge cinematic opportunity to reboot the X-Men franchise and include the original cast members in a mutant time travel fantasy which sees Wolverine, Storm, Raven and Magneto and Professor Xavier battling literally against time in a war to save the mutants from utter destruction at the hands of evil humans, represented by none other than Dr Bolivar Trask, wonderfully played by Peter Dinklage, whose star is clearly rising after the phenomenal success of the allegorical revenge fantasy series Game of Thrones.

Set between 1973 and presumably the present day of 2013, so a forty year time span, the original X-Men including Magneto and Professor Xavier played by Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart send Wolverine aka Logan back forty years to confront a younger version of themselves and change a pivotal moment in history, the capture of the uniquely chameleon Raven played by Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence from being captured by the duplicitious Trask. Wolverine with all the braun and charm of the original series gamely played by Hugh Jackman confronts a younger Xavier (a wonderful turn by James McAvoy) and convinces him to set Magneto free from a metal less prison in the heart of the Pentagon in Washington D. C.

In a spell bounding special effects sequence, Xavier, Beast and Wolverine with the able assistance of Quiksilver played with charm by Evan Peters free the unpredictable Erik Lehnsherr aka Magneto and together they go in search of Raven/Mystique as she infiltrates a Vietnamese peace signing ceremony in Paris in 1973 in a bid to assassinate the formidable weapons specialist Dr Bolivar Trask who is hellbent on obliterating all mutants with new Transformeresque type machines known as the Sentinels.

The rest of the action packed hugely spectacular X-Men Days of Future Past is a time travel mutant orgy in the same vein as Marvel’s film The Avengers was with a bunch of superheroes coming together to battle the evil Loki. The cast is just as spectacular and director Singer gives as much screen time as possible to the prolific actors as well as to the lesser cast members but its his lingering cinematic gaze on the gorgeous male cast including Nicholas Hoult (A Single Man) as Beast, Michael Fassbender (Shame) as Erik, James McAvoy (Atonement) as a younger Xavier that gives this superhero mutant fantasy a distinctly homoerotic quality seldom seen in other superhero films.

By their nature superheroes are slightly narcissistic (look at Man of Steel, Batman, Iron Man) but especially so in X-Men Days of Future Past. The female superheroes in this film pale in comparison to their attention grabbing male counterparts with director Singer even giving Wolverine a nude scene as he wakes up in a New York apartment overlooking Time Square in the swinging seventies.

Ultimately, X-Men Days of Future Past is a Hollywood vehicle to reboot the old X-Men franchise and breath fresh life into the cast of the younger selves seen in X-Men: First Class. The film is wonderfully retro in parts and adds to the glamour of recreating the 1970’s on screen with Fassbender and McAvoy looking particularly fetching as the younger Magneto and Xavier. Gone are all the dark overtones of the earlier X-Men films and in this invigorated version, all the mutants look glossy, stylized and supremely accessible. This is a Hollywood blockbuster not just for its multitude of stars but also for the riveting special effects, never mind the convoluted narrative. A must see film for all fans of the X-Men movies and those that follow such commercial gloss with vigour.