The Phantom 2

Contains spoilers.

The Phantom 2 is one of those "threshold movies", where the director steps over a certain quality line and opens themselves up to all kinds of neat criticism. You see, on the other side of the quality line lie movies like James Preston's immortal classic "Toilet Training" -- movies that simply have too much wrong with them to bother seriously getting into. The director just has too much they still have to learn, making any attempt at criticism into a laundry list of explanations about basic storytelling, construction, direction, and most importantly how to use the program. Once a director has reached a certain level and can tell a rudimentary, vaguely coherent story using different camera angles and a given artistic look, they pass over the invisible quality line. You can tell when a director does this, because people start saying things like "That was actually pretty good" in the release thread. The movies can now be addressed rather than dismissed. However, they also tend to be things like The Phantom 2, which have reached that threshold incrementally, improving the individual parts of a film but not its whole. Stepping over that line is a mixed blessing, because now everything that goes wrong in your movies is held up to a much higher standard. The Phantom 2 is a lot more impressive as an early effort than as a "real movie".

I wasn't able to watch the original Phantom movie due to some nasty expansion conflicts, so I don't know what I've missed out on exactly, but there doesn't seem to be much of a premise. Rick Kimble is some kind of police investigator. That's about it. He has no motivation and no apparent personality, and plays no role in the way the plot unfolds. And as things happen to him, the movie makes no effort to have him react to them, so I wouldn't really even call him a protagonist.

Which is the big problem with The Phantom 2; Raynor has ideas for what should happen, but doesn't bother to translate them onto the screen in a way that's even slightly clear. The movie opens with a flashback detailing the deaths of two officers, but cuts to a present day driving scene with "Let it Snow" playing on the radio so abruptly that we don't even slightly care about them. Kimble is riding the car with a friend, who asks him to drop him off, but the friend is almost completely obscured by Kimble due to the camera angle, so I didn't even know he was there. The buildings are moving in the wrong direction, so they appear to be driving backwards. Kimble stops by the office where they're having a Christmas party, which I only know because there's 3D Text somewhere that said "Christmas Party". He meets up with Pvt. Jenkins without any conversation and we catch a glimpse of only one other person in the office, who is definitely working and not partying. Who the hell are these people? Does Raynor even care about them? They don't even feel like characters, just actors Jim needed to occupy the screen so that stereotypical crime/action sequences could happen later.

Jenkins says that the chief wants to talk to Kimble about his new office, but is confused when he isn't where he was expecting. Wordlessly, Kimble opens a door and a dead body falls out. Is this the chief? Why was he killed? How do Jenkins and Kimble feel about it? The movie doesn't even slightly care, because at this point the sniper shows up, the whole reason The Phantom 2 seems to exist in the first place. The sniper scope and some of the moments in the action sequence aren't badly done, but why is any of this happening? The movie ends on a note that Raynor obviously intended to be a shocker and leave us hanging until after the credits, but there's nothing in the narrative so far that allows it to be a surprise, or have an impact, or make us care.

Let's take a look at where this chase sequence goes wrong: The shooter gets into his car and drives off quickly. We cut to a flat-angle shot of the police station, where Kimble is (slowly) running out to his car. The music abruptly stops during this, immediately killing the tension. Kimble is still running to his car. A few seconds later, he gets there. He opens the door with a kachunk. He kneels and gets in.

The car moves offscreen and is immediately behind the other the car, and Kimble gets out his car at a completely different mountainous location, all in the space of two seconds. He looks to the left. The shot cuts and he is walking to the right from further in the background. The sound of the car accelerating has continued throughout the past two shots of him walking, which have lasted less than three seconds. At this point my brain is asking me "What the fuck is going on??" This sequence is so rushed and so obviously counter-intuitive it's practically self-parody. It's the kind of thing a Leslie Nielsen movie might do during an action sequence to fuck with the audience, breaking as many entrenched rules of good direction as possible as quickly as possible.

But where that section is too much wrong, too quickly, Raynor is just as willing to make his characters walk across any distance, drilling footstep noises at us for over 100 frames without scaling the volume, and refusing to cut the angle until they have left the shot or passed out of view behind something. This is a common early mistake, but Jim, you've been working on movies for the past two years: why is this, as visual information, important? Trust viewers to fill in the gap. We know they're walking in a direction, and if the shot cuts to them opening a door from inside the room they're entering next, we will fill in the gap. Yet at the same time, there's that car chase that tried to skip over huge passages in time, breaking every logical visual rule, so it's hard to tell you to trust your instincts to fix the problem of giving us too much of the same thing. I guess the best advice would be to watch other people's movies and look carefully at what kinds of shots are chained together. If you're watching scenes like Phantom 2's car chase and you don't understand how it doesn't make visual sense, I really don't know what to tell you.

This wasn't a total bust, it's certainly a step up from some of your earlier work. You've essentially created a pastiche of a crime/action movie, an impressive imitation for someone who was just learning how to direct. There are shots that were pretty neat, like the shadows under Kimble and the car in the garage, or the sniper scope, or the first-person view shot of Crash holding the gun out, or the last two shots of Kimble out in the mountains. The movie has a distinct atmosphere, in that it feels like what you're trying to imitate. That's a good start, but in areas of direction, animation (you're still jumpy, missing secondary animation in objects, and too fast/slow most of the time), and storytelling, you've got a lot of work ahead of you. Take it slow, because even if you've moved out of the beginner's circle, "real movies" take a lot more effort and care to make them work.