Albatross Junkyard

Writing of Josh Lambert. Cross-posted here. Twitter - @nonoathbreaker

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48 Hrs., directed by Walter Hill (1982)

Walter Hill made a career out of the stripped-down aesthetic.  His films are often less about a high concept and more toward a simple, good idea.  The one here is playing Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy against one another in a timed race to stop former associates of Murphy’s Hammond.  The script for the movie was volatile, and characters reportedly were being changed up until the literal end of the shoot, and it’s a testament to the performers how well it works.  There’s little that doesn’t land, and the rapport between the two leads is top shelf stuff.  Nolte is a gruff belligerent, with a voice that sounds like audial degradation, mixed against Murphy’s inexhaustible charisma.  The humor gets mixed in with nastiness.  No one is afraid to kill, Murphy and Nolte don’t have much choice in how to respond, and anytime someone fires a shot there’s a good chance a casualty will be the result.  Racial separation is examined, and cold underlying racism is all that comes up.  In an amazing scene where Murphy rousts an entire redneck bar, you feel a sense of triumph, righteousness crushing down on a tapestry of Confederate flags.  But then you get Nolte’s piecemeal casual racism strung along throughout, quick to turn into the outright variety when frustration reaches whatever internal threshold there is.  He later apologizes, and what can Murphy do?  His position in the film is like a referendum on having to face normalized prejudice each day, marginal control being the best you can hope for.  Hill shoots San Francisco like a vibrant place of teeming danger.  He’s in love with the hills of the city, slowly cresting over them or lingering on their ascent at the base when cars aren’t chasing through them.  Interior locations are equally riveting, packed motion substituting for spaciousness, whether it’s a classic crowded train station chase, clubs and bars, or a squad working through a case in real time, the camera pivoting around the police station to follow Nolte, the madcap energy and information of the surroundings all funneling into him.

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Batman vs Superman:  Dawn of Justice, directed by Zack Snyder, (2016)

How do you approach a movie that the cultural consciousness has panned before its release? Having not seen Man of Steel, which I'm guessing is the starting point for DC's shared film universe, Dawn of Justice lets us know that if DC is indeed copying Marvel's model, they're not afraid to allow some slack in the creative process. And we got a weird film, one where if you're not willing to at the very least take it for what is, rather than what you want it to be, it's probably impenetrable. On principle, having to use this film as the setup for the sure-to-be many followup film projects does it no favors. You can only groan at how these movies are sapped of anything but the most basic immediacy in order to stoke future releases and begin hype cycles. The story seems like it was melded together from separate ideas, an interconnectedness that never goes beyond dullness trying to evoke the word intertwined. It doesn't help that the showdown is mostly manipulated into being by Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor, whose extravagant annoyance might have made him a compelling villain if you ever wanted to see him on screen again after he first shows up, but his performance ensures that isn't the case. That the plot is so perfunctory only undermines one of, if not the, strongest parts of the movie, the way the leads are framed against each other.

The film occurs in a confused world. People are being toyed with, they don't know who to trust, and they're lashing out in fear as a response. Batman and Superman are not exempt from this. Tying Batman's initial misgivings towards Superman from the end of Man of Steel works more and more as the film goes along. This is a tired Batman, a veteran, the Joker-emblazoned Robin suit a signifier that he's known contemporary tragedy, not just the fixation on his parent's origin-creating death, which we see multiple times and which he dreams about. Ben Affleck's bitter stillness works well, and when he tells Alfred that he's twenty years in and nothing's changed, you believe him. He's been running on autopilot, and the uncertainty around Superman develops into a goal that might actually be worth a shit, a possible tangible win. Superman has retreated to those closest to him, his mother and Lois, as he tries to comprehend the reaction he generates. Cavill just works here, a chunk of normal whose absentness ties well into an alien who is questioning whether or not the world he saved, methods be damned, even wants him. His exchanges with the always excellent Laurence Fishburne as Perry White, are great, his pragmatic, consistent cynicism trampling Clark, who can only reply like he's still developing basic motor functions. Clark's antagonism towards Batman is because he's seemingly the only one in the movie who questions his actions, rightly judging how ineffective they are, and while the story kind of has to clumsily set that up to build antagonism, it's Clark pushing frustration at his perception out onto others, a member of the environment like any other.

We see them directly in comparison too. Both have dreamlike interactions based around their family. Bruce dreams of being in his parent's crypt, before transferring into one of the best parts of the film, future Batman coming out of a bunker into a post-apocalyptic hellscape, into a gun's blazing battle with a lockstep army of Superman soldiers before demons descend from the sky to finish his resistance. It's a summation of a plausible endpoint for the character tied into his underlying rage and familial disconnect. Superman's vision is of his father, sharing stories and further reiterating the nature of chaos through a story of a family's misfortune after his saving of the Kent farm, a direct result of his actions. He, his vision or whatever, is trying to reassure Clark, assuage possible guilt. Coupled with his mother's comments that he doesn't owe anyone anything, you see how the closeness with them affects his attitude. He draws from them like Batman does his own family, though Affleck's Batman knows nothing of them before the moment they were killed, those memories were erased long ago. They're just a concept, a motivator. Cavill's Superman still has his mother, and still can commune with his father, but their conversations don't lead to clarity. Both are tormented by their family in ways.

How their physicality is shown is reflective also. Both Cavill and Affleck have physical accumulation to spare, but it's tonally different. We see both shirtless at points. Cavill is casually standing in front of the stove listening to the TV. He's anything but "just a guy", but he's trying to be that more than anything and people aren't buying it through his alter ego. Affleck, on the other hand, is in the middle of a ridiculous training session that highlights why Batman as a character who is a regular dude is so great. He's worked to get every ounce of muscle he's got, you know he's eating those reverberations every time that sledgehammer hits that tire, you see the sweat drip off after every weight-loaded chinup. How many superhero movies have sports-movie esque training sequences? This might be the first one. Batman's motivated again, shit is about to go down. They're both physical specimens, one can't help it and wears it like an ill-fitting outfit and the other is looking for every single advantage he can get.

It's unfortunate all the captivating duality the film can muster can't save a lot of it. Superman as a character is a wet blanket for any kind of action, his encompassing nature necessitating effects overload. The fight with Batman isn't horrible but it isn't great, and the massive showdown at the end is unforgettable well before it ends. Wonder Woman shows up to join the battle, her inclusion a payoff to a thankless role throughout the whole film, more blaring foreshadowing rather than anything of substance in the movie you're watching. Sandwiched in between these is another one of the film's bright spots, a nice action scene that feels so out of place not just in this movie but in this type of movie that it takes a second to even register. Batman takes on a cadre of warehouse goons, incorporating all kinds of environmental shenanigans and visually taking from the recent Batman video games constantly. He gets shot and stabbed and is actually physically beaten up, and it's shot so cleanly and well executed, I was kind of in awe. No idea how it holds up, but in that instant, it's something you don't expect. Which is kind of funny and depressing, to say that about having a good action scene in a Batman movie, but that's where we are. The oasis is gone when Doomsday shows up, and then the movie ends about five times, so they can push pieces around on the vague speculation chessboard. If these future films contain the odd moments that slip through like in this film, well, that might be about the best we can hope for. They have an oddball example to work from.

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Down Terrace, directed by Ben Wheatley (2009)

Never let it be said that British crime films exist on a straight line.  Much like Dead Man’s Shoes, Down Terrace is more concerned with a grungy, normalized world, a middle class, at best, lineage that never has a chance to reach toward style or riches because they are unattainable.  Rural council housing rather than an expected urban affluence.  Into this literal and figurative house a dynamic of paranoia spurred by a recent short jail sentence for a father and son is created, everyone looking for an answer on who talked.  The total dysfunction is humorous in a way that seems distinctly British to these ignorant American eyes, a style made up of only the blackest laughs, semi-professional killers unable to take out targets because they have their son for the day.  The mistrust surges into a Stalinist fervor, and any association or knowledge is grounds for death.  The introduction of a pregnant former girlfriend of the son is such a problem because of her interloper status.  There’s rarely a moment outside the titular terrace where someone isn’t getting killed, planning a killing, or surviving an attempt on their life.  The living space itself isn’t free from this, but there’s a familiarity there.  The son declaring his intention to move out of the house into his own family life is unthinkable.  And the mom and dad fearing the newcomer isn’t nonsensical.  When you’re closing ranks this fast and with these methods, trying to reestablish relations is just asking for it.

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Seven Samurai, directed by Akira Kurosawa (1954)

If Seven Samurai is objectively too long, at least it uses its ample runtime to highlight the incredible talents of Toshiro Mifune.  Not the main character in the script, but definitely so in terms of performance, he steals almost every scene he's in.  You can tell someone noticed, because the theatrical poster has him emblazoned in the middle, full figured and triumphant, a film about him and six other guys, apparently.  Mifune's character is the sort of comic fool that allows him to express all kinds of emotion.  For a film that is frequently funny, Mifune doesn't get the most humorous lines, but Kurosawa places all the funny scenes for him, which he carries with no problem.  That humor is relatively constant until the last stage of the final battle, when the siege element breaks down into open fighting.  Kurosawa has a gift in all his work for capturing large groups of people in motion, put to great effect here.  Set in a downpour, people slog and drop through mud, horses struggle to find pathways through throngs of villagers, and the calculated defense set up breaks down into open chaos.  In the end, the victory only leads to uncertainty, and Kurosawa makes prominent the costs that were paid.  The samurai left seemingly realize their situation, survivors left to stare at graves of comrades in a remote village, made up of a collective that they have no greater connection to than before, despite the battle they shared.

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First Blood, directed by Ted Kotcheff (1982)

First Blood is ostensibly about a neglected Vietnam vet, haunted by PTSD and permanently adrift in civilian life,  who gets pushed by too far.  John Rambo is the victim, harassed and hunted for doing nothing but walking through a small town to try and find a place to eat.  So detached he can hardly talk until a complete breakdown at the film’s climax, one of the few things he says is he didn’t do anything, and technically he’s right, or at most what he does is self defense.  His main enemy is an overbearing prick of a sheriff, played so well by Brian Dennehy, who cloaks anger at getting shown up under the guise of upholding the law, no matter how complicit the enforcers of that law were in starting the whole ordeal.  Rambo’s survival tactics cause considerable pain to his pursuers but he stops short of killing, another thing he lets them know verbally.  We empathize with him.  But Rambo isn’t wholly reacting against outside forces enabling him.  When he turns around on the bridge to walk back into the town after being dumped on the outskirts by the sheriff, he’s been caught at the wrong time, recently finding out about the death of a former friend in his unit, which we later learn makes him the final survivor.  He’s looking for his own outlet, timidly until the flashbacks break him, then he goes straight into the wilderness and any uncertainty vanishes, a substitute jungle for a new decade.  He wanted to be left alone and he doesn’t want anyone to die, but now he has a purpose.  He can’t park cars, but he can do this forever.

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Exiled, directed by Johnnie To (2006)

There are moments in Exiled where the the cast of four to five main characters, depending on the time, don’t appear in the same shot.  Sometimes To even deigns himself to cut back and forth between them.  But mostly they’re always together through a variety of angles and techniques.  Iconic posed shots fit for a promotional poster mix with To panning along, each person moving horizontally through, one by one.  Expansive vistas in wide shot contain all four actors, while overhead shots allow vertical movement as they are either followed through or enter at a fixed stopping point.  Scaled closer, To places them in a car, always shot from the front, all participants visible through the glass.  Houses and hotel rooms are pared down further, seemingly containing just enough space for all of them to squeeze in together.  Right at the end, this culminates in a frenzied session in a photo booth machine, each one pushing and shoving in and out, jockeying for position.  It takes a while for the picture to develop, but it comes out like all the others from throughout their lives, with them together.  They’re brothers, partners, and friends until the end.

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Manhunter, directed by Michael Mann (1986)

As I’ve gone through these films, I’ve brought up before how weird expectations are when going into things, and how it can be tough to see something with fresh eyes even if you’ve never seen it before.  Manhunter is the first film that trampled the expectations I had, and they were high.  Mann’s hold on this film is rigorous.  He takes a compelling thriller and interjects himself into it on every occasion, but in doing so, never overwhelms the story.  It’s so meticulous and mannered, and so vibrant and primal, it’s as close to a perfectly balanced film as there is.  It’s filled with excellent performances by all the actors, the sound and the music are intercut phenomenally, the cinematography is amazing, the writing is so taut, the editing shifts to fit individual scenes so well, and Mann’s camera work is fixating without the negative consequences that could be associated with that description.  The level of scope to write about it is beyond what I’ve been doing with these pieces, it’s too big for this.  I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I saw it.  I want to watch it again now, because it made me feel alive.

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Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, directed by Hayao Miyazaki (1984)

Nausicaa is a character woefully out of place, bearing similarities to her elders only.  Surrounded by conflict stemming from distrust, fear, and misunderstanding, she seeks to learn.  Her optimism and hope discards her era’s rationality.  She channels this into a form of militant sacrificial pacifism.  She, like the elder swordmaster and the village witch, will take incredible risks, up to dying, in order to save lives or stop violence.  They are shot, stabbed, burned by acid, and even stampeded over, in order to defuse situations and protect others, even occasionally stopping one another upon a momentary lapse.  Their courage seeps out into others, motivating them to change alliances and take their owns risks to benefit her superior worldview.  Miyazaki molds her from a character into an ideal.

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Come and See, directed by Elem Klimov (1985)

History is geographically variable.  How it is taught, how it becomes learned knowledge through our culture and interactions over time, these are not universal.  Any singular historical narrative is a lie, and Come and See is a flagrant dismissal of the American record of World War II, that of a bunch of people bumbling around across the Atlantic, and us having to step in and save the helpless good people from the bad.  We died for them, Earth became and is our planet.  We barely have any collective recognition of the Eastern Front, much less Total War, even less the approximate 24 million deaths suffered in the Soviet Union.  We know of the Holocaust, but not of the early stages, where German reserves wholesale murdered civilian populations primarily in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia without the use of gas chambers or death camps.  Klimov’s camera is often directly on characters faces to show a personal element or reaction to ground level extermination, finding only inhumanity among its regular people.  Something as transformative and gigantic as World War II gets reduced down to snippets and surveys to make it more palatable, an unavoidable result for mass consumption.  Ordinary people have no chance in this version, just like they didn’t years ago.

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Jaws, directed by Steven Spielberg (1975)

For almost it’s entire runtime, Jaws is like every criticism of sentimentality thrown at Spielberg.  The doldrums are temporary at best, a downer moment is just that, a moment, and the uplift is coming in the next scene.  Assholes have redeeming qualities, characters that clash are going to right that ship soon enough, and any kind of cynicism can only hold water for so long (look at all these puns!).  The whole premise is so pulpy it still works, a man hamstrung by inept bureaucratic government that cows to private economic demands, setting out with a young exuberant expert and an old-timey war veteran game hunter into the vast empty expanse of the ocean to kill a mythical beast.  But for about ten minutes almost near the end of the film, that changes.  By not showing the monster until well past the hour mark, there’s no damaging tonal conflict with everything else, no matter how weird it might come off at times.  When the shark becomes aggressive, the totality of the situation blasts forth and you realize how hopelessly screwed they are.  John Williams’ score, which even in its less upbeat and soaring parts fails to contain any kind of contemplative regret or conflict, drops out completely at points, and his famous piece is even absent, making an underwater cage segment contain a legitimate jump scare.  When Robert Shaw’s Quint, the fearless marine killer, gets eaten alive, it feels like Spielberg slapping you.  This masculine titan fails spectacularly, barely offering any fight.  The blood gushes and he screams and screams.  You realize how tame the rest of the film has been up to this point, how little gore there’s been, how well the film has balanced up to this endpoint.  When Scheider’s Brody kills the shark, there’s a brief time, where based on what came before, that the crushing weight of realization will bury our survivors.  But no, it’s a simple matter of swimming back to shore, with ample time to crack some jokes along the way.  That small chunk lingers though, as if a director tucked a moment away in his work to try and silence criticism he would receive over the course of a career just beginning.

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In the Mouth of Madness, directed by John Carpenter (1995)

Horror as a genre baseline for a story that explores heavy metatextual questions surrounding facets of art seems a bit off base, if not outright incompatible, but actually works quite well.  The work of Sutter Cane is incredibly popular, sells massive numbers, and provokes, let’s say, a strong reaction in readers.  It’s successful entertainment, but the fevered desire it provokes in its readers skews more towards rabid consumption rather than qualitative output.  Merchandising, marketing, and film rights are as important to Cane’s publisher.  The book needs to come out so they can sell it to the people rioting in the streets because it isn’t available, not to calm them down but to get a cash flow going.  The use of ‘tentpole’ in the dialogue is comically prescient, and the invocation of Stephen King by name grounds the story, doing a nice job of removing that much more of the hypothetical.  But is Cane’s work any good, does it have value?  Sam Neil’s Trent doesn’t think so.  He refers to Cane as a hack, and his constant refusal to believe the insanity he sees in front of him is an indirect further denial of Cane’s ability.  But upon reading Cane’s work, he becomes caught up, stating that while all the same beats, characters, and plots are there, it’s how Cane uses them that makes for strong work.  Carpenter didn’t write this film, but whether coincidental or not, this screams to reflect back at him.  A director (presumably) near the end of his career, who made his name making genre films across a strong and consistent body of work, remaining an outsider to those who would ignore him on principle, despite his considerable ability.  He’s at work again here, taking what could peter off into a navel-gazing exploratory mess of a concept and keeping it tight and moving with an approximate ninety minute run time.  These stories of stories within stories are so often replete with reverence, hope, or positive elements in some regard, but that’s not how he works.  Here, everybody just dies.

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Zero Dark Thirty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow (2012)

Jessica Chastain’s Maya is dedicated, ruthless, and confident.  She’s near totally detached from human interaction.  She only cedes to people who are superiors she can’t take on, she only shows happiness when people get her things she needs, people she has to work with infer she show humanity, or she reads a situation as needing it to progress her goal, killing Osama bin Laden.  Otherwise she works them or presses them.  She’s like a surrogate American in a way, able to tentatively accept awfulness while on the periphery.  She never directly tortures anyone, and even though she is slightly taken aback, she soon upgrades to leading interrogations where she directs the torturers.  Acceptance is easy.  The film’s controversy over showing torture as leading to results is a step for her character to utilize it.  It works, so any kind of moral contrary argument is immaterial.  She is a child of this time, recruited out of high school and doing this and only this.  9/11 is the foundation of her existence.  Bigelow ties this single-minded, desensitized character to digital information through technology.  Shots pan through server racks and along lengths of cables and chords.  Screens are everywhere, showing triangulations, maps, live video of drone strikes and recordings of detainee interrogations.  There’s no ideology, no purpose left at the end, if there ever was to begin with.  The effect on lives has been reduced to terabytes and data transmissions, and finally, probability over certainty.  Throwaway shots seen in countless other films of fingers on keyboards or cascading windows spread across multiple monitors gain a certain vigor here.  And if Maya is partially a representation of a remote, unaffected populace, then the operatives who enter the compound are the other end.  They exhibit many of her traits, but are directly involved, on the ground.  A character asks, roughly, when the raid is being pitched, “If you did do it, how would you do it?”  But there is no explanation, no precursor of exposition.  Bigelow shows rather than tells and gains so much by it.  We briefly see these men before, at ease, playful, normal, they don’t register as killing machines.  But when dropped directly in, we follow them every step of the way.  We see how their tactical precision is infallible.  They kill and talk about killing as if it’s nothing, and afterwards hold rooms of children at gunpoint.  In the moment, it means nothing, emotion is buried.  The one who shoots bin Laden is briefly derailed, he staggers around, but this momentous occasion gets interrupted quickly.  His reward?  A garbage bag to fill with hard drives and video tapes, more information to keep things moving.

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Enter the Dragon, directed by Robert Clouse (1973)

It doesn’t take a set of discerning eyes to see that Bruce Lee is in excellent physical condition.  But Lee’s commitment when he moves makes him over into the unstoppable fighter from the scenes he made for himself.  Every vein is visible, so taut you might believe they’re on the cusp of popping out like a whip.  Muscles and bones protrude and shift all over his body, a walking anatomy exercise, his skin a thin covering only there to ensure proper operation and containment.  He’s peak fitness, speed and strength, distilled into a human form.  He can barely be touched, let alone lose.

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Dawn of the Dead, directed by George Romero (1978)

Romero’s second film shows the ten years between this and Night of the Living Dead haven’t made him any less cynical.  Dawn of the Dead is an angry, angry film, bursting with contempt for everything around it.  The mall the survivors find themselves in becomes a way to rebuild a microcosm of society, and one of Romero’s better buried points is the class distinction brought out by the raider assault that ends the film.  There is a clear distinction between the four survivors we follow, and the attackers.  The survivors are all from a broad middle class background, and they try to hold on to a remembrance of before.  In the massive structure of prosperity they find themselves without any want or need for the foreseeable future.  They create their own private sanctuary, with a monopoly on excess just by the nature of the situation across the world and just outside the mall doors.  When the raiders strike, there’s a clear delineation that they’re doing the wrong thing, but as their leader says, “You didn’t share.”  They have the knowledge that the world now is far from separated from the past, and they only want to tear it down.  It’s not a soulless desire for these things.  Here lies a gluttony of everything you could need or want.  Look at what we are able to produce, design, and offer.  Too bad you can’t afford it.

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Hard Boiled, directed by John Woo (1992)

In similar ways to watching Scanners, it can be daunting going into a movie that has this much of a reputation.  With Scanners, you have a scene tied to a director, but with Hard Boiled, the director and the style are as one, sent into general movie DNA both by his Hong Kong and later American movie releases, and by all the other filmmakers who integrated his techniques into their stuff.  But Hard Boiled was anything but tepid, an original superseded by its offspring.  Much of this comes from how strongly the film escalates into complete insanity with the approximately hour long finale at the hospital.  Early within that period, you realize that anyone on screen is there to be shot, and the final body count is well in the hundreds.  Woo shoots action multiple ways, but he’s foremost interested in preparatory and brief respite moments, impact and follow through.  Each shotgun pump is in slow motion, tension is elongated by it.  Bodies are inflated, the air discharged in slow motion by connecting bullets.  The environment in every shoot out is seemingly rigged with proximity explosives, hair triggers set off with each death.  No table remains on four legs, no door on its hinges, and no pane of glass isn’t shattered.  The movie is a good example of how strong editing can help a film. It’s easy to fall prey to the sentiment of motion in long shots.  Whether it’s The Shot from True Detective or John Wick, whether digitally edited together or not, these things, through their exhilaration, bring a conflicting sense of superiority.  Woo’s style doesn’t allow for this, but in spite of stringing together complicated shots with large numbers of participants, it still works.  Whether it’s sliding down the rail of a staircase in a crowd, rolling out of a morgue slab, or coming out from under sheets on a gurney, the spacing is always strong, the eye follows precisely, even though the action is so choppy.  That being said, Woo drops all that late in the hospital scene and goes continuous, following Chow Yun-Fat and Tony Leung for an extended take down hallways, around corners, with an elevator interlude, and then into rooms, with adversaries coming out side doors and through windows like the rest of the movie, but discarded as quickly as they appear, dropped by the sheer surging forwardness of the movement, like a rail shooter, no time for the outcome to register.  Woo being able to insert this break from his stylistic trademark within such an enormous set piece is remarkable.  You got comfortable, and he pulled the rug out.

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Inherent Vice, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (2014)

Inherent Vice being set in 1970 is key.  The majority of the characters can't let go of the false promises and general environment of the 60s, mirrored by Joaquin Phoenix's Leo not being able to let go of his relationship with Katherine Waterston's Shasta.  A drudging, confusing reality has set in.  Capitalism has realized that it's much easier to monetize inefficiency rather than create any kind of helpful efficiency for consumers.  Black Guerrilla members are associating with the Aryan Brotherhood, who walk around everywhere without comment.  The cops are too busy at private parties to do anything when they aren't using assassins and framing their number one enemy, the dirty hippie, for murder.  As a further reflection, the plot is as convoluted as they come.  Everybody knows something, but bringing it all together is impossible because the mess is inherently insolvable.  That's why almost all the jokes, and there are a lot of them, land, because what else can you make of this without humor?  When Leo passes on money in order to free someone who seems to have made a mistake and is right on the edge of forever falling into this larger trap, it's a bit of a rebellion.  A personal sacrifice, removed from the center of the near-nihilism around him.  He and Shasta are still uncertain, but there is still hope there, at an individual level.  It's the only relatively clear thing in the whole film.

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10 Cloverfield Lane, directed by Dan Trachtenberg, (2016)

Everyone in 10 Cloverfield Lane is running from something emotionally, but are physically stuck.  John Gallagher Jr.’s Emmett is a small town native, annoyed by an opportunity he threw away years ago to get out, afraid of what existed outside of his everyday surroundings.  John Goodman’s Howard builds a survival bunker the three characters find themselves in, to retreat from social mores, getting his wish that one day he could create the life he longs for in unobstructed, revolting peace.  Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Michelle is running from her inability to stand up for anyone but herself, and somewhat from guilt she feels for being so good at being unable to commit to anything outside of what she feels is best.  She wants to defend others, but is too preoccupied with herself as an individual.  Unwittingly stuck in a doomsday shelter, she becomes the real survivalist.  Early on, we see her scanning inside rural gas stations and taking note of approaching vehicles.  It’s less paranoia and more reading spaces and situations for anything that might happen.  Later, underground, she works within a limited environment to escape rooms, make clothing, steal items, and piece together what is happening.  Upon finding Howard’s true nature, in a moment of crisis, she holes up in herself, with Emmett covering for her.  After that moment, she uses her considerable abilities to put her in a position to change, to use those abilities outside herself.  That the film inserts a lazy threat then, along with an attempt at scope and the unknown that fails to captivate, is unfortunate but expected due to associated franchising.  That it further doubles down by rendering the conclusion blatantly tied to this laziness is frustrating.  For a film that gets so much out of slight touches of the unknown at a human level, it’s ending is too worried about pat course correction.