Review on Matthew J. Barnard

The Predator (2018) | a belated review

Mon, 13 Aug 2018 08:56:00 +0000

The Predator is a surprisingly enjoyable film. It maintains the recent re-injection of humour into action films that started with Deadpool, whilst telling an intricate story that has very few things that make no sense. The latter is surprising. Sense is in short supply around the world, and must be rationed for more important things than art. And so, we must allow some latitude for the fact that no film has entirely made sense since Inception, which made perfect sense. In fact, it made so much sense that there was no sense left for the public to make sense of it.

The Predator has no more than the median amount of nonsense, and above all had interesting characters that I cared about. I was surprised, therefore, to read that it has been critically panned and bombed. As with Solo: A Star Wars Story, I’ve found myself confused and bemused to have enjoyed something that everyone seems to think is awful. I mean, what more do you want: humour, action, good characters, things making sense, a political point about global warming, and a zombie-film like focus on how a threat makes humans attack each other, rather than rallying together. Hmm, now that you mention it: there was an awful lot going on.

In many ways, it reminds me of the first season of The Black Adder: too many conflicting ideas suffocating each other. The Predator is just a bit saturated. Because of this, it collides with a debate that I am having, and losing, with my friend concerning character in film. I praised films with interesting characters and those without as hollow and empty. The next day, I read Aristotle’s Poetics and found that he sided with my friend instead of me:

The story, then, is the source and is like the soul of the tragedy, and the states of character rank second.

Tragedy is about story first, and character second. By story, Aristotle means action: things being done. A Tragedy should be the presentation of a single deed. Anything else will start to saturate it. Now, Tragedy is a specific art form, but bears much in common with film and theatre. And, indeed, one might expect the claim to hold for the genre that we call “action” film. If we compare The Predator with the franchise’s original film, Predator, we can see the issue. Predator is clearly a film about one action: Dutch killing the Predator, against all odds, where all else have failed. Its characters are forgettable props for the development of that story.

The Predator, by contrast, takes a huge amount of time establishing and developing its characters. Even the two predators have characters! One of them finds a translator and actually makes a joke. It’s quite a good one. If the anonymous alien monsters are making jokes, imagine the character development of the brave and honourable sniper; his autistic son who can read the predator language and come face to face with predator dogs without screaming; the son’s intolerant and childish bullies; the female top-of-her-field biologist who can use a shotgun; the loyal predator dog she adopts; the team of soldiers with mental health issues; and the chirpy but sociopathic federal agent antagonist.

In short, maybe the problem with The Predator is just that it has a too many good parts to be good as a whole. As with everything, Aristotle has some advice here:

So just as, in the other imitative arts, one imitation is of one thing, so to the story, since it is an imitation of an action, ought to be one action, and ought to be the whole. And the parts of the actions performed ought to be organized in such a way that, when any part is displaced or removed, the whole becomes something different and changes. For that which makes no noticeable difference when it is there or not there is no part of the whole.

This is an updated version of an article I published on September 13, 2018 on a very old blog.

Derren Brown — Miracle (2018) | a belated review

Thu, 28 Jun 2018 07:02:00 +0000

Derren Brown — Miracle | a belated review

All argument aims at consensus. We might pretend that we’re “establishing the truth”, but all that really means is trying to get people to agree with us. For this reason, arguments between the religious and non-religious concerning religion rarely achieve anything, since both parties are already convinced of basic principles that are incompatible. For example, arguing that God should not be believed in because there is no evidence will never work, since the believer has, by definition, already decided that God is an exception to this principle of credulity.

So, the question for atheists like Derren Brown who believe the world would be a better place without the influence of religion, even if they don’t want to purge it entirely, becomes one of method: how does one bring someone into a new consensus where one is more sceptical about God’s existence? Miracle, a Netflix special, is an interesting tactic in this vein. Rather than attempting to prove religion wrong, Brown proves at least part of it right. If you haven’t seen it, spoilers begin now.

In Miracle, Derren Brown adopts the techniques and vocabulary of the faith healer, and successfully heals people. He takes away pain. He improves someone’s eyesight. He even takes a non-believer’s eyesight away. He speaks in tongues. He knows things he (seemingly) shouldn’t be able to know about family and friends and illness. And, through all this, he speaks the prayerful language of the evangelical tradition, something he has learned to do both through analytical observation of professional faith healers, and no doubt from memory of his misguided youth as a fundamentalist Christian.

All of this is the greatest refutation of faith healing there could be: the proof that it does actually works. In his closing remarks, he tells the audience he does not believe that the Holy Spirit is responsible, but rather the mind’s remarkable psychosomatic power to reduce pain if it is convinced that the pain will go away, no different to how psychosomatic pains can arise out of the belief that they will. This I think is typified in this exchange with a member of the audience, which I am quoting from memory because I can’t be bothered to load up Netflix right now:

DB: Do you believe in God?

Woman: [Hesitates] Yes.

DB [slipping out of his faith-healer character]: Have you ever had any real proof?

Woman: No.

DB: Well, I’m about to give you some.

In the words of Douglas Adams’ version of God in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, God cannot prove his existence because proof denies faith and without faith he is nothing. Religious faith is a living conviction that breaths mystery. Where mystery is explained, faith is less compelling.

An atheist proving that faith healing is nonsense can always be doubted. But, an atheist proving it works by performing the same “miracles” as the self-avowed faith healer cannot be ignored. Finding out that it actually does work, and that how it works has everything to do with psychosomatic embodiment and nothing to do with a divine hand is, well, boring. Faith is strong when it is exhilarating and brightens your world. When it is proven and obvious, it becomes banal.

This is an updated version of a review originally published at on June 28, 2018 on a very old blog

The Young Pope | a belated review

Sun, 05 Mar 2017 08:01:00 +0000

The philosopher Jacques Derrida once said ‘Inheritance is an act’. At least, I’ve been told he did. I’ve never read it myself, and as much as I care about both people who occasionally read this blog, I don’t care enough to go chasing up a reference. More importantly, the statement “inheritance is an act” is true. Our history is not something lingering in our past behind us, unchangeable and completed. It is before us and ready to be taken up; it is there for us to learn, ignore, understand and misinterpret, for us to use and to abuse. Which course we select, how we choose to inherit it, is an act. The Young Pope deals with this problem in the specific institution of the Catholic Church.

Pope Pius XIII was chosen by the cardinals to resolve an impasse. The progressive candidate and the conservative candidate could not win the election, and Lenny (Jude Law) was selected as a bridge between the two positions. Unfortunately for those behind this move, Pope Lenny is far more conservative than anyone had dreamed of. He recalls the Papal Tiara, from its rightful place in museum, so he can start wearing it, he refuses to address the public, he introduces screening measures against homosexuals in the clergy, he forbids the absolution of abortion in confession, and insists the cardinals kiss his feet. As Cardinal Spencer observes (Lenny’s mentor and the passed-over conservative candidate for the papacy) ‘The young are always more conservative than the old.’

Jude Law’s character is the anti-Francis: the inverse of the liberal dream of a progressive reformer to bring the Church into the 20th (sic) Century and reunite Catholicism with its merciful Christian roots. A long time ago, in a blog site long lost to time, I presented this sort of view, because I was still Liberal then:

The Church is old, very old. So old that even its teachings that are usually associated with political conservatism are relatively new (it is over ten times older than capitalism, for example). To me, Francis’ tactic for Church reform is not to introduce something new, but to remind the Church of its ancient past: to bring it back to an older, more inclusive and doctrinally ambiguous version of itself prior to its contamination by the Ancient Greek tradition, Roman imperialism, and global capitalism.

I have no idea why I used to believe that, but never mind. I stand by the idea that Church has a rich tradition of mercy and charity in its past, but it also has a rich tradition of imperial oppression and arbitrary persecution. Which destiny the Church will claim is a question for it. It is always a question of conservatism, but which tradition is to be conserved: charity or empire? mercy or fear? love or power? Which destiny will the Church own? The Young Pope plays out this contradiction through personal arc of the titular character. The show’s solution is surprisingly Hegelian: both.

Pius is simultaneously cruel and kind, vengeful and merciful, naive and wise, atheist and theist, mad and sane, emperor and priest. The series starts off like one of the later series of the original House of Cards: the ruler must use Machiavellian tactics to consolidate and expand his power. It feels like a thinly veiled critique of the dark content of Catholic tradition and doctrine. As a critique, all it needs to do is display this content by allowing a Pope character to activate long abandoned precedents, wipe the dust off them, and use them.

One could imagine a similar story about a British Monarch who, not content to only have potentially absolute power, starts using that authority, sending the elected establishment into chaos. Similarly, the cardinals around the Young Pope do not know what to do to stop him. Several attempts are made to depose him, yet all fail because the perpetrators’ consciences get in the way. ‘I couldn’t do it’, says the secretary of state, ‘I couldn’t get him to sign his own resignation.’ The cardinals, not able to fully tap into either the merciful or vengeful Catholic tradition are paralysed between the extremes.

As the series progresses and Pope Lenny’s personal issues begin to be resolved, he starts to mellow. In the final scene, he smiles kindly in his first truly public address, visible to all, and encourages the faithful to smile also, spreading love and happiness. And so, it seems that Pope Pius XIII, who at the beginning of the season taps into the worst of the Catholic tradition, has finally come to affirm what is best in it, forsaking his archaic views and even appointing a gay cardinal as his secretary. This is not the lesson. It is not about moving from a false inheritance of the corrupt tradition to the authentic inheritance of the divine tradition: Pius is empire and charity at the same time, just as is the Catholic Church.

The Church is was, is now and ever shall be the smiling face of kind corruption and oppression. The gentleness of John Paul II is at the same time the statement that campaigns for equal marriage are the result of an ‘ideology of evil’ and the comforting silence of the church is at the same time the quietism implicit in all religion and all charity. In short, a Pope is always a tyrant with a smile because the Catholic God is love, but only because love is also power.

This is an updated version of a review first published on March 5, 2017 on a very old blog

Avatar (2009) | a belated review

Fri, 18 Sep 2015 07:01:00 +0000

Avatar is a film that argues that human beings are mortally evil and inescapably isolated. It claims that the only moral solution to which is to betray one’s own kind and convert to being a member giant blue alien species isn’t so damned. In spite of this overtly pessimistic and cynical worldview, it is seen as a utopian fantasy film. It was so popular that it was the first film to gross more than two billion dollars, and triggered the longest wait for a sequel nobody wanted to see, distracting on of the most successful Hollywood directors from making real films for over a decade.

My question is this: how was the success of the original film possible? What desire does this pessimistic, anti-humanistic film fulfil? Why is it that it caused depression in fans , who perceived the world it presented as paradise? The answer can only be that our culture believes that humanity is fundamentally incapable of achieving happiness. Not by accident, not because of political difficulties, but a priori. Avatar is not just a terrible film, it is concrete proof of European nihilism.

It’s important to recognise that the message of Avatar is not that of Pocahontas, although the plot comparison is just and hilarious. In Pocahontas, John Smith is taught to be one with nature by Native Americans. The difference between the opposition of western civilisation to Native Americans and that between humans and the Na’Vi in *Avatar is *simple. Westerners and Native Americans are of the same species. John Smith is taught to fulfil his truly human potential, a potential that was always ready to be actualised. Jake Sully, on the contrary is, as human, incapable of achieving the togetherness, immortality, and oneness with nature of the Na’Vi as he does not possess the necessary organ: a USB cable plugged into his nervous system.

Humans in Avatar lack the necessary biological properties to achieve oneness with nature. They are irredeemably evil capitalist exploiters of nature. Jake Sully only achieves this by being becoming his Na’Vi avatar. He overcomes the limitations of humanity, becoming something greater.

Avatar is a reflection of how the nihilistic westerner sees themself. It is a mirror. We see ourselves as isolated from each other, isolated from nature, and isolated from God. We are isolated from God because neither he nor the afterlife exist. We are isolated from nature because it lacks our intelligence and creative power, it is just fuel for our exploits. We are isolated from each other because we are all individuals, social atoms. As individual, independent subjects, we are all ultimately alone.

That this is a well-seated belief of our culture is the only explanation for a biological USB cable in a terrible film to seem like a good thing. The Na’Vi gain an afterlife by plugging their USB cable into a massive tree that is a hard drive. They are one with nature by plugging into trees and animals, gaining a genuine, physical connectedness that allows true communication. They are one with each other in the same way.

The basic presupposition of Avatar is a materialistic solipsism. Solipsism is a philosophical doctrine that states that the only thing I know is that I exist. This is because while I have an absolute intuition of my existence in self-consciousness, I have no such intuition of anything else. I don’t really know that the world exists, that God exists, or that other people exists. This is materialistic in Avatar because it is conceived, not as the independent substantiality of a spiritual substance, but as a lack of physical properties. Human social cognition is only an illusory attempt to bridge the gap between individuals. Love does not present a real connection between partners, but the Na’Vi USB cable does. It provides a physical link between beings in a way that language and emotion never could.

This is fundamentally nihilistic, a symptom our culture’s complete misunderstanding of the nature of the human being. Phenomenology is one discipline in the 20th Century that has vehemently argued against this misunderstanding. Whilst typically atheistic, it forces us to turn to our experience to recognise that (among other things) human beings are fundamentally bound up with each other, implicated in each other, and gain a sense of self only because there are others.

The most famous example of this argument is Sartre’s “look”. Sartre talks about a voyeur watching a couple have sex through the keyhole of a door. One presumes this is from experience. Whilst watching the couple, the gazer has no sense of self. His consciousness is solely the consciousness of what he is seeing. He only gains self-consciousness when someone comes down the corridor and sees what he is doing, at this point the gazer feels shame.

The claim here is that the only reason that recognition of oneself in the other could bring one to self-consciousness in shame is because we are implicated with each other at a fundamental level. If we were truly social atoms, no other could ever have such an effect on us.

The success of Avatar was predicated on the inability of the westerner to believe in what they are: a social being. It is an indication of a sense of isolation and quiet despair in our time. The only good that comes of it is that it is a case in point for the need for phenomenology.

This is a revised version of a review I first published on September 18, 2015 on a very old blog

The Matrix Reloaded (2003) | a belated review

Thu, 10 Sep 2015 11:01:00 +0000

I want to speak about a film I recently rewatched for the first time in years: The Matrix Reloaded. This is a fact I’m sure some of you do not consider right and normal. Who on earth would want to watch The Matrix Reloaded more than once? Well, me. I liked it, and I don’t care that many other people didn’t.

Watching The Matrix Reloaded again made one thing that always bothered me a bit clearer: “the one as just another instrument of control” stuff. The Matrix (1999) has a basic messianic plot where the main question is whether or not Neo is actually the One, a free human with unexplained ability to control the matrix because of his greater insight into the falsity of its virtual reality, or rather conscious insight of its reality as virtual. He’s basically a mix of hacker, superman, and Jesus.

In the sequels, we find that the One is actually a known quantity by the machines. The Resistance and the One are necessary products of an “equation” that the Architect, machine designer of the Matrix, seeks to balance. The Architect explains to Neo-in abysmal pseudo-intellectual dialogue, like Stephen Fry vomiting a thesaurus-that in order to keep human inmates sane, they are given an unconscious choice whether to be a part of it or not. The small fraction who chooses not eventually free themselves and organise in the underground city of Zion.

Though the process has altered your consciousness you remain irrevocably human. Ergo, some of my answers you will understand and some you will not. Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also the most irrelevant. — The Architect “speaking”

When the system produces the One as an inevitable flaw emanating from free will, it appears to Zion to be a way of fighting the machines and a path to final victory. In reality, the One is expected to return to the machine mainframe, “the Source”, from where his power comes and collaborate in the destruction of Zion in order to prevent the genocide of humanity.

Forgive me if I was just a bit stupid, but as a fourteen-year-old, I didn’t not even nearly understand any of that. I still find the “return to the source” stuff a bit strange. But, one thing I did understand a bit more after watching it again was its political meaning, deliberate or not. And, I think I only really understand this after Snowden and PRISM.

The liberal hippy geeks who invented the internet have been surprised to find that the creations they produced for the democratic good of humanity have been to some extent used to erode that freedom. The Matrix Reloaded tells us something about that problem. What appeared to be an instrument of salvation, as with the home computer “revolution”, was, in virtue of the fact that it had its “source” in our prison (which I guess for liberal hippies is the state), was just another instrument of control.

In embracing this role within the system, Neo became an unwitting collaborator, as did Silicone Valley, the Free Software Foundation, and the Open Source Community — I am reminded of Stewart Lee’s description of Twitter as “a state surveillance service run by gullible volunteers, a Stasi for the ‘angry birds generation’”. Just as the state funded technology, developed for military purposes, is used by the state as a means of control so the One contained the risk of total domination of human freedom.

It is banal to point out that dystopian Sci-Fi contains a warning. The Terminator and* Logan’s Run* warned us about giving too much power to machines, and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier warned us what happens when you let William Shatner direct something.* The Matrix Reloaded’*s warning is that what is given to us by a dangerous political context as a means of salvation is, by necessity, yet another danger.

*This is an updated version of a review I first published on September 10, 2015 on an old blog. *

Robocop (2014) | a belated review

Sun, 14 Dec 2014 08:02:00 +0000

When it came out, the Robocop reboot gave me faith that sci-fi isn’t dead. I expected a moody Nolan-esque remake, similar to the Dredd (2012), that would replace the clever satire of the original with fantastically boring special effects. I was wrong. Admittedly, it lacks the subtlety of the original to the point where I wouldn’t even want to call it an action film; there aren’t many action scenes and, to be honest, hardly anything happens. The driving force is, instead, the problem of human freedom in the face of increasingly perfect technology.

The film portrays two parallel conceptual battles. The first is the battle between the human and machine aspects of Robocop. The corporation, OmniCorp, discover early on that Robocop’s human elements are affecting his efficiency. His emotion and compassion mean that he hesitates before shooting and is simply not able to move or think as fast as the drone technology that his body is based on. To resolve this issue, they bypass his free will so that, whilst he is in combat mode, the machine body acts like a drone, shooting and arresting on its own, while giving him the illusion that it is really him doing it.

Eventually, his humanity becomes such a problem that they sedate him and allow the machine to run on its own. But, after an encounter with his wife, his humanity is reawakened, and he works to defeat the corporate heads who have attempted to assassinate him. This is a battle about Murphy’s human freedom, his will, and whether or not he can take control of the technology that has bypassed his autonomy.

The second battle is about political freedom. OmniCorp have sophisticated drone technology that has practically replaced human troops in military action. This allows efficient policing of occupied territories in the middle east without risk to American lives. They work absolutely perfectly, but a law called “The Dreyfus Act”, headed by Senator Hubert Dreyfus (an interesting reference to the renowned American philosopher) prevents the use of these drones on American soil. American can only be the land of the free if it makes everywhere else the land of the secured. This security technology maintains American freedom at home, but it remains a risk to American freedom in that there seems nothing to stop its implementation there. This is the intent of the villains. OmniCorp decide to develop the Robocop programme, conceived as a drone with humanity, in order to shift public opinion in favour of the purely mechanical drone technology in order to repeal the Dreyfus act and make a lot of money selling drones to police forces.

As a line into the issues involved here, it might be interesting to consider two differences from the 1987 original. The first is that the 2014 film has far more trust in the performance of technology. In the original, one of the earliest and most infamous scenes is the malfunctioning of the ED-209 robot. In a board meeting, it fails to recognise that someone has put a gun down and kills him. In the new film, the first thing we see is the ED-209 units working perfectly overseas in militarily occupied territories. In 2014, none of the OmniCorp drones malfunction at all.

The second point of contrast is that in 1984, the OCP’s aim is to develop robotic policing in the US and then sell it to the military for use overseas. In 2014, this is the reverse. The military is OmniCorp’s only legal American customer because of the Dreyfus Act. The films are mirror opposites on this point.

As far as I can tell, the reason for both of these changes is because the 1987 film is more about the privatisation of the public services than it is technology, cybernetics and their threat to freedom. In 1987, we see the ED-209 consistently malfunction as a warning that corporations will always cut corners for profit, and ought not to be trusted with essential services like law enforcement, “Who cares if it worked or not?!”.

This becomes even more obvious in Robocop 2 (1990) where OCP create a scenario in which they take ownership of all public assets of the City of Detroit. When the outgoing mayor demands of the The Old Man where this leaves democracy, he replies “Anyone can buy OCP stock and own a piece of our city. What could be more democratic than that?”

In the original film, ED-209 is a joke. It is a barely functioning, underfunded failure, demonstrating the detrimental effect of a profit motive on an essential public service: an unsurprising theme at the dawn of neo-liberalism. In Robocop 2014, however, we are confronted with the increasingly efficient security technology as a threat to our freedom. The entire film plays out the problem of how perfectly functioning security technology, or what we might call “technological policing”, is a threat to human freedom and the American way of life.

In the reboot, Murphy retains his memories, his personality, and his humanity. In one brilliant scene, the machinery is taken away, and we see what is left of him: his brain, lungs, right hand, and face. In the 1987 film, a scene like this never happens. This is not because the graphics technology wasn’t available, but because the distinction between the man and the machine is never drawn. Then, Robocop simply was a machine.

It is true that the original Robocop’s humanity does become a problem in a way that never occurs in the 2014, insofar as we are not sure if he is still Murphy or even still human. He does not retain full memory of his family (“I can feel them, but I cannot remember them”). And, when OCP interfere with his programming in order to control him, they are not manipulating the machine as opposed to his humanity, they are manipulating him.

For this reason, the original Robocop is not able to go against his directives. This becomes an issue in both *Robocop *and Robocop 2. In the sequel, OCP fill him with hundreds of focus-group-led directives such as “do not drive through puddles when people are walking past on the sidewalk”. He has to shock himself and wipe the directives in order to regain control over himself. In the first film, he is limited by Directive 4, which prevents him taking action against a senior OCP employer, and is only able to kill the bad guy once he is fired.

Yet, in the 2014 film, Robocop overcomes the parallel limitation (his inability to attack someone labelled as a “red asset”) in an expression of pure will power. In short, his humanity is able to wrest control of the machine from OCP. Something only possible because the new film draws that distinction between the remains of Murphy and the prosthetic body. This is why the new Murphy has to keep his family and maintain a relationship with him. The film is about the battle between humanity and the machine, and his family is what makes him human.

Ultimately, the message seems to be that as soon as we start to use technology on ourselves to ensure our security, it puts freedom in jeopardy unless our will is strong enough to overcome it and control it. At this point, the film betrays an almost spiritual worship of the will and of the power of human freedom that comes close to contradicting its premise. If a strong will can control technology, then why would it be a problem allowing it to police our lives as long as the right people are in control?

This is an updated version of an article I published on December 14, 2014 on a very old blog.