The Least of These: THE KING OF KINGS

The King of Kings is an unusual hodgepodge movie: a Sunday School-style Biblical literary adaptation twice removed made by a South Korean animator with Hollywood voice performances and released by Christian indie production company Angel Studios. All that to end up with a pretty routine retelling of the story of Jesus Christ in blandly produced, generic family-friendly digital images just in time for Easter. As is always the case with interpretations of religious texts, however, it’s most interesting, and revealing, for what it leaves out and for what it emphasizes. Furthermore, this one’s complicated by being based on a slim posthumous Charles Dickens book called The Life of Our Lord. That book is a charmingly Victorian effort, not up to the depths of feeling and wit of Dickens’ best work, but an earnest effort at distilling the importance of the Gospels’ message for an intended audience of his own children. The animated version makes Dickens (Kenneth Branagh) telling his youngest son (Roman Griffin Davis) the story of Jesus (Oscar Isaac) a framing device, and then puts the little lad, along with his doughy cat, in the New Testament tableaux as an unseen observer. There it hits all the expected highlights—the nativity, the baptism, the disciples, the loaves and fishes, walking on water, the last supper, the crucifixion, the resurrection. What’s more curious is the balance of what’s left out to what’s included.

Any condensing of these stories is inevitably going to pick and chose points of emphasis that shifts theological implications. For instance, Dickens didn’t have time for the Devil’s temptations in his book, but The King of Kings makes sure we hear about it, along with a flashback to Original Sin in the Garden of Eden. That’s fitting for a telling that’s all about the Power of Belief above all else. It puts weight on Christ the powerful—telling off the devil, expelling demons, raising the dead, and calming stormy seas. Christ the vulnerable, the compassionate, the defender of the meek and impoverished, gets shorter shrift, when it even appears at all. The end result is a movie that says Jesus should be worshiped because of what he can do for you, but doesn’t care too much about what he asks you to do for others. The Sermon on the Mount is glossed over, but skipped entirely are the Parables, and the Blessing of Children, and the Widow’s Mite, and the Woman at the Well, and nearly all moments of Jesus’ teaching that emphasize a need to care for those who’re marginalized or forgotten by societal norms.

The movie’s dry liturgical value, when it isn’t upstaged by the frame story, is clearly slanted in this one obvious direction, worshiping His power, but failing to mention that we should “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” and that “the last shall be first,” and what we “have done unto one of the least of these, we have done it unto [Him]”, and that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” Even the manger scene opening only has time for the genuflecting Wise Men, and not the shepherds. The ending resurrection has Jesus greet Dickens’ son in the garden instead of Mary. The filmmakers include a lot of the Greatest Hits of Jesus, but take most every opportunity to downplay or diminish women and the poor in them. (There’s time for many minutes devoted to the Dickens chasing that cat, though.) It says a lot about modern mainstream American Christianity to see what concepts are ignored when the idea is to make something broadly appealing and unobjectionable to the masses. I’d say it’s some upside-down accomplishment to make a Christian movie without wrangling with the actual tough questions of the faith, but that’s sadly par for the course.

Where the Boys Are: WARFARE

The soldiers burst into a house and shuffle the civilians to the side. The civilians don’t even become characters. This is a movie about the men with guns. They set up a stakeout shouting jargon and tersely staring down the barrel of their guns. They talk over their radios. They look warily out the windows. They wait. This is Warfare, a movie set in Iraq in 2006. It tells a very small story. There are a handful of military men—boys, really, with fresh faces and dewey eyes and a sense that, if not for their training and ranks, they’d be in the club. The opening scene shows them bopping around to the electronic dance hit “Call On Me,” a very mid-aughts reference. That’s also the only scene of happiness. The rest of the film is about fear and futility. They’re hunkered down in this random home, a place of shattered domesticity. The enemies are encroaching. A trap is set. Suddenly, they’re pinned down, with danger on all sides. A few are wounded, screaming in agonizing pain. Others’ pain is internal, mental. Still others are dead straight away. They all wait as the minutes tick by, with an agonizing wait filled only with fumbling attempts to help each other survive, and with desperate counting down the time elapsing before reinforcements can arrive. This spare, stripped-down war movie is advertised as coming from actual memories of service members who lived through these moments—a few harrowing hours in a larger conflict.

In its telling, it becomes the story of the entire Iraq War in miniature. It begins with invasion easily accomplished, then a difficult stay that grows violent and scary, before ultimately ending with a messy withdrawal leaving all the worse for wear. (The final shots of Iraqis carefully stepping through the debris of their neighborhood are an especially sharp closing note.) The film proceeds in extremely precise moments calibrated for experiential momentum, both the long stretches of procedural waiting, and the sudden thumping terror of gunfire and explosions. The characters are a blur of familiar and unfamiliar faces, and some familiar faces that are barely recognizable in their combat grimace and anonymizing uniforms. Boyish young actors including Joseph Quinn, Michael Gandolfini, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, Noah Centineo, and Charles Melton are totally enveloped in their roles. They form a tight unit as characters who fall back on training, with flickers of personality subsumed by the urgent need to do the next right thing. Writer-director Alex Garland, with Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza serving as his co-writer and co-director, has made a technical and even clinical war movie that succeeds in conjuring a hellish look at what the monotonous unpredictability of war does to a body. Garland’s usual interest in the fragility of men and of systems, through movies like Ex Machina and Civil War, here finds another gripping expression. Here’s the story of a whole war in just a few well-observed stretches of chaos rushing in where control falters.

Played Out: A MINECRAFT MOVIE

I was in elementary school when Pokémon: The First Movie was released. It was greeted like Moses returning from the mountaintop on the playground. It was the must-see event of the fall if you were between the ages of 6 and 11. Here was the totemic video game craze of the age at long last on the big screen. That used to be an important sign that your corner of pop cultural awareness had gotten the upgrade in importance. Now it’s just another link in the chain. I remember being a little perplexed by the adults’ reaction to the movie. Why didn’t they agree we needed to be there opening night? And how could the critics syndicated in our local newspaper and on television review programs be so baffled by its premise? The children have to go out into the wilderness to collect the pocket monsters in little laser balls and then have the creatures fight each other to gain points toward evolving them into other iterations of those same critters. What’s not to get? Ah, but of course, I thought as a child then. Now I go into something like A Minecraft Movie and feel a million years old. I get why adults wouldn’t get Pokémon then, because seeing Minecraft threatens to turn me into a humorless scold.

I was a full adult when that video game first booted up and I’ve gained only a passing understanding of its mechanics and lore in the decade-plus since. I thought it was some building game where everything is out of blocks. I’ve been told it’s about creativity or something? Don’t you have to mine for materials and then craft them into buildings or stuff? And there are weird blocky creepers and villagers? Now here’s the movie. It’s a painfully formulaic green-screened fantasy picture with a motley crew of live-action misfits tumbling through a portal and forced to save the animated Minecraft world from an evil pig sorceress who is plotting to shoot a purple beam into the sky. Jack Black stars in a fit of wild-eyed derangement, accompanied by Jason Momoa in a bad Billy “King of Kong” Mitchell wig, Danielle Brooks in a track suit, and a couple kids. They proceed through ostensibly wacky comedy and action in sequences that are basically just levels and puzzles punctuated by exposition. It’s all brightly, flatly lit, totally phony as the characters pose and joke in groaning—or cringe as the kids might say—one-liners.

It’s directed by Jared Hess, he of Napoleon Dynamite, and the whole thing feels like that film’s flat affect, simple blocking, and boundless insincerity yanked into a dull copy of a video game fantasyland. Hess is also surely responsible for its most absurdist touches, like Jennifer Coolidge falling in love with an animated character in an uncomfortable, but brief, couple scenes. The resulting mix is hectic and vulgar and violent—dismembered cartoony zombies lit afire and portly pig henchmen skewered—in a way that’s just barely not PG-13. It oozes irony and innuendo. (A joke about “yearning” to work in “the mines” doesn’t go over as well this week, does it?) And it refuses to do anything seriously other than flatter fans who, in my screening, reacted in cheers to every reference to the games. It’s so empty and awkward and flat, coasting on combative tropes and empty peons to creativity. I felt ancient as I grew discomfited that so many children would be putting this annoyance in their minds.

The Lost World: PRINCESS MONONOKE

Animation master Hayao Miyazaki’s 1997 fantasy epic Princess Mononoke is back in theaters with a beautiful new 4K restoration showing exclusively in IMAX. It’s always a pleasure to be transported into its world of squabbling mortal factions made small in the face of the gods of nature. There’s the noble prince Ashitaka, cursed by a demonic infection, sent into exile to find the root of the disruption to the natural order. There he finds the wild girl San, who lives with the wolves, and is in battle with Lady Eboshi of Irontown for control of the forest. The forces of nature are besieged by the incursion of a burgeoning technological revolution—exemplified by the massive bellows forging iron that’ll make rifles and bullets. What are the wolves and apes and boars to do in the midst of this impending destruction? Conflict draws nearer. There’s also a beatific god of the forest, an elk with the face of a man, who walks on water and wordlessly wanders the woods leaving fresh growth in his wake. He’s endangered by poachers sent from the greedy emperor who has asked for the god’s head. The various factions of man do battle as the needs of industry and the free flow of nature reach a crisis point. In true Miyazaki fashion, all villainy and heroism is brought out in the fullness of complicated humanity, and all gripping action flows with fluid motion and a sense of scale and consequence.

Here is a complicated fantasy vision, effortlessly involving world-building and vividly imagined creatures and places, that unfurls with folkloric earnestness, spiritually engaged and classically structured. It feels like it’s a story that’s always existed. And its every frame reminds us it’s been crafted with human touch. Its hand-drawn spectacle, full of the deep breaths and luxurious pauses, the extra attention to details of wind and ripples and sighs and flinches that bring such richness to Miyazaki’s animation, is an illusion of movement and life given shape and form through the dedicated focus and attention of skilled artists with pen and brush. The characters are memorable, complicated, and lovable. The action is quick and exciting. The tension is gripping, and the detail of the environments are enveloping. And it’s all done in the patient, lovingly drafted images of Miyazaki and his team. This re-release is a good excuse to sit in the dark in front of an enormous screen, surrounded by booming sound, and be reminded of the primal magic of moving drawings. More than even the best CG animation, and certainly more than the pernicious anti-art prompted by technologists who think algorithmic computer programs can entirely replace the minds and efforts of artists, hand-drawn animation is a direct access to our shared humanity, and the wonders of which the human mind is capable. A film like Princess Mononoke will last; dishonest images spat out by a server copying its style won’t.