It sums up every feature on the brilliant Amazon Studios series The Last Tycoon, a loose adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s incomplete final novel, The Love of the Last Tycoon. With a nine-episode first season only touching on the threads of Fitzgerald’s original ideas, just as the characters begin to fall apart in the season’s cliffhanger finale, Amazon Studios does what studios do–tightens it belt and cancels the series. It helps to know this before you watch this one-season-wonder (we’ll add it to the list), because you will get pulled into the world of 1936 Hollywood in a way you could only be reeled in by a genuine 1930s picture. Even if it was all filmed in Canada in an unthinkably short 65 day production.
The Last Tycoon does it all differently and gets it all right–it’s the series we hoped the film Mank would be. It’s not an exact adaptation of Fitzgerald’s work, but the bones are there, and creator/writer/executive producer/director Billy Ray (The Hunger Games, Terminator: Dark Fate) creates something perfect, probably better than any Fitzgerald adaptation you’ve ever seen, with some of your favorite genre actors.
If a movie project languishes for twenty years, thee might be several reasons to explain why. Gemini Man, in theaters now, has had both Tony Scott and Jerry Bruckheimer involved in the idea behind the film, but the timing didn’t seem right for them–digital technology had not yet evolved where an actor portraying a 51-year-old could fight himself at age 23, in a believable way. Now here we are in a Hollywood (New York City, Atlanta, Toronto, etc.) where motion capture performances are the norm. It’s not a spoiler if it’s in the movie poster, and that’s the case with Gemini Man. The movie is Will Smith, a retiring government assassin, who must face off against a younger version of himself, raised and trained for combat. So it shouldn’t surprise you thatGemini Man: The Official Movie Novelization, is a character study of what might happen when an assassin meets himself.
If you’re a fan of science fiction, a rush of prior stories and films should come to mind. First of all the novelization, which does not give an author credit, instead listing the screenplay writers, Darren Lemke, David Benioff, and Billy Ray, reads very much like an early Philip K. Dick short story expanded to be novel (or movie) length. The spoiler (if you can call it that) is that there aren’t many surprises. How would a trained assassin react when confronting a younger clone of himself? This is a single sitting read, filled with some interesting characters (the kind you’d find in supporting roles in any film, like Mission: Impossible, the Bourne Legacy films, Tomb Raider, or even Dick adaptations like Paycheck. It’s also heavy on the action, something that would be spotlighted with CGI in the film, leaving the characters in the novel to internalize what is happening on the big screen. The story feels like it was written for Will Smith. His character Henry Brogan is the same guy we’ve seen Smith play in Bright, Suicide Squad, I am Legend, Hitch, I, Robot, Enemy of the State, and Independence Day. Which fortunately means we have a likable protagonist.
The novelization brings in bits and pieces from across decades of science fiction, from addressing the question of how you select who you clone (from Star Wars: Attack of the Clones), to how you control your newly minted human military weapon (from The Manchurian Candidate), to how you survive when the world is crashing in on you (from the Jason Bourne, Shooter, and Mission: Impossible movies), to how you react when you learn you are not really you (from RoboCop, Moon, and the new series Living with Yourself).
With costumes designed by Anna B. Sheppard, the designer for Schindler’s List, Band of Brothers, Inglourious Basterds, and Captain America: The First Avenger, you know your World War II movie is in good hands.
The first ninety minutes of Overlord is the stuff of the classic World War II movie. Think Guns of Navarone or Von Ryan’s Express or a later film, Force 10 From Navarone. It’s also modern in the way of Inglourious Basterds, but that movie if it had been filmed by John Carpenter, complete with special effects from The Thing and action from They Live. It also co-stars Kurt Russell’s son Wyatt Russell (also Goldie Hawn’s son) as the tough and confident Corporal Ford, a John Wayne role like he plays like he’s been making movies for 40 years. If that isn’t enough to go out and get your hands on Overlord, I don’t know what you could want.
It begins with a paratrooper drop, filmed believably, like Memphis Belle, but with the action of Edge of Tomorrow. The first 40 minutes follows British actor Jovan Adepo as American soldier Private Boyce, a nice, naïve kid drafted recently and dropped into harm’s way behind enemy lines in France the day before D-Day. Like Starship Troopers and Edge of Tomorrow, this is 100% authentic war, look and feel, and we follow Ford and boyce and their squad from the air on down to the gates of a town where they hide out and plan to blow up a German radio tower. Despite J.J. Abrams producing this film and hints to the contrary, don’t expect aliens or zombies–this is not a secret Cloverfield 4. What Boyce, Ford, & Co. find is a lab beneath the tower where the Germans are conducting experiments on the local French villagers and their own men. It’s here where the story takes a turn for the weird.
The first 90 minutes are brilliant, face-paced, heart-pounding, nail-biting stuff. Young director Julius Avery and writer Billy Ray pursue the lore of the German experiments toward a the creation of a “superman” or “super soldier” and what that might be like. To their credit, they approach this like the Korean series Kingdom, which looked to a virus as the creation of a village of zombie-like villagers. Here Avery and Ray look to twisted science as well, but they add in a bit of a fountain of youth element as part of the creation of these soldiers. Spoiler: They don’t all turn out exactly as planned by the Germans.
