A different role for Hemsworth in Spiderhead

The Thor star plays a man in charge of human guinea pigs in this character-driven movie in need of a lot more character.

Chris Hemsworth as Abnesti in Spiderhead

Spiderhead (MA15+)
Netflix
★★★

Are some books impossible to film? JD Salinger’s 1951 classic The Catcher in the Rye has not made it to the screen despite people from Billy Wilder to Steven Spielberg wanting to make it.

While Holden Caulfield’s inner life would be a challenge to film, the main obstacle was the author’s refusal to sell the screen rights, which his estate has honoured since his death in 2010.

Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 masterpiece Blood Meridian is a more straightforward example. Directors and actors who have circled it include Rid­ley Scott, James Franco, Russell Crowe and Tommy Lee Jones (who stars in the Oscar-winning adaptation of another McCarthy novel, No Country for Old Men). Franco is said to have shot 25 minutes of test footage, and that’s as far as anyone has gone with this novel generally believed to be too violent to film.

This idea of the unfilmable film came to mind as I watched Chris Hemsworth in Spiderhead, based on a 2010 New Yorker story by the darkly funny American writer George Saunders.

It’s a complex psychological drama set in near-future America. The setting is a prison that doubles as a research lab. The facilities are a lot more pleasant than Alcatraz but the trade-off is the inmates are fed a suite of mind-altering drugs.

The man in charge of the human guinea pigs is Steve Abnesti (Hemsworth). The spiderhead concept is better explained in the story: he sits in the control room (the spider’s head) and speaks to the prisoners in work rooms (the spider’s legs).

He must ask their permission each time he wants to release drugs via a pack surgically attached to their backs. He tells them which drug it will be and to agree they must say “Acknowledge”.

In the opening scene a prisoner is told lame jokes and laughs until he cries. Then he is told about the Rwandan genocide and he keeps laughing. This is interesting, but unfortunately it’s not followed up.

This 107-minute film is directed by Joseph Kosinski, who has the blockbuster Top Gun Maverick in cinemas at the moment. The cinematographer from that film, Oscar winner Claudio Miranda, shot this one, too, in Queensland.

The main story involves Abnesti and prisoners named Jeff (Miles Teller, also in Top Gun Maverick) and Lizzy (Jurnee Smollett). Two Australian actors, Bebe Bettencourt and Tess Haubrich, also play convicts.

Abnesti sees himself as a saviour. If he can manufacture a drug that makes everyone love each other, what could go wrong? “We’re selling peace and harmony itself,” he says.

“Selling” is a telling word. And part of the sale contract is limiting or eliminating the right to free will. There are also other, less romantic drugs on the menu. “In science,” Abnesti says, “we have to explore the unknown.”

Speaking of the unknown, it feels as if there is something missing from this movie. The actors are not to blame; all the performances are strong, especially from Hemsworth and Teller.

Plot-wise, too much is unexplained. I don’t like movies that dot every I and cross every T but this is one where a few more could be dotted and crossed.

And the script, by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, known for the Deadpool movies, does not capitalise on the slightly zany writing from which it is drawn. Saunders produces lines, ignored here, that would raise eyebrows and laughs from audiences.

There are some humorous moments made for the movie. When we see a hulking prisoner with tattoos on his face, he is reading Tenth of December, Saunders’s short-story collection that includes Escape from Spiderhead.

And this line from Abnesti is scripted purely for the star: “Beautiful people get away with too much. I say that having benefited myself from time to time.”

Speaking at a preview screening, Hemsworth, who we will soon see in Thor: Love and Thunder, said he was attracted to the role because there was a “complexity to the character unlike anything I’d done before”.

It’s good to hear that this Hollywood star is interested in character-driven movies. This time the result falls short but let’s hope his interest continues.

There are fleeting backstories that explain the minds and hearts of Abnesti and the inmates, but these are thinly treated and not as dark as in the story. If anything, this is a character-driven movie that needs a lot more character.

By the way, seven years after Saunders wrote Spiderhead, he published his first novel, the experimental Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize. No one has yet tried to make it into a feature film.

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Lightyear (PG)
In cinemas
★★½

The funniest scene in the Pixar animated movie Lightyear involves a timid trainee space ranger (voiced by New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi) and a vending machine from which he acquires meat sandwiches.

When the bona fide space ranger Buzz Lightyear asks for how long meat sandwiches have been made with the meat on the outside and the bread in the middle, the answer is “forever”.

This is what happens when one mucks around with time. Buzz, due to a bending of the space-time continuum, is sitting around with people who would consider the Earl of Sandwich a culinary lunatic.

Time is central to this 105-minute movie, which is the solo directorial debut of Pixar regular Angus MacLane. He co-directed Finding Dory in 2016.

Where it sits in the Toy Story universe is explained at the outset: “In 1995, a boy called Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday. It was from his favourite movie. This is that movie.”

So we are watching a 1995 flick (made in 2022) about an astronaut who inspired the action figure we know from the four Toy Story movies.

There he is voiced by Tim Allen; here Chris Evans, aka Captain America, takes over. The director says the change is to differentiate the two characters; one human, one a toy. He describes the 1995 movie as “Andy’s Star Wars”.

The nutshell plot is that Captain Buzz Lightyear makes a mistake and finds himself and about 1200 colleagues marooned on a hostile planet 4.2m light years from Earth. Determined to fix his mistake and complete his mission, he sets his lantern jaw and returns to space time and time again.

He moves at such speed that his four-minute flights equate to four years back on the ground.

So he tries and fails, tries and fails, as everyone else ages and remains stuck on the unwelcoming planet. Talk about infinity and beyond.

By the vending machine moment, his former commander’s granddaughter (voiced by Keke Palmer) is another of the wannabe space rangers. “We don’t need you to save us,’’ she tells Buzz, a work-alone warrior. “We need you to join us.”

The baddie (of sorts) is a giant robot known as Zurg (voiced by James Brolin). Of sorts because there is an existential twist that poses a question we all ask ourselves: “What would my older self think of me, and what would I think of my older self?”

The comedian is a robotic cat named Sox (voiced by Peter Sohn) assigned as Buzz’s emotional support companion. He will be a hit with young and old alike.

There are some off-screen results of the messing with time. For a movie set in 1995, it is ahead of the curve on LGBTQI issues. As a result it has been banned in the United Arab Emirates, and other Arab and Asian countries are expected to follow suit.

This movie is no Toy Story, but the animation is superb, as expected from Pixar, the plot is mildly entertaining and there are some worthwhile messages for younger viewers.

In Disney and Pixar’s Lightyear, Buzz (voice of Chris Evans) returns to the planet he’s been marooned on for decades after a monumental test flight