When Michael (James Jude Courtney and Nick Castle) escapes during a transfer to a new facility, Laurie is in a race against time to protect her family as the Shape resumes his rampage through town...
I usually leave movies with a rough idea of how I felt about it. This time... I'm still figuring it out.
First thing first, this is easily the best Halloween sequel. The characters are more interesting, most of their interactions (even the minor characters) benefit from Gordon Green's background in improvised banter, and Carpenter's score is great. There are some neat inversions of moments from the original (I loved the appearance of the masks from Halloween III).
But as a movie in its own right? Hmm...
It's a good movie, but there certain pieces of the story which feel either under-developed or in the wrong place.
The movie's most interesting element is Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode. Curtis has played a version of this characterisation before, in Halloween H20, but that version felt like a sandwich with no filling. Having stripped out the familial connection from the previous sequels, this version has the benefit of focusing on what makes the original film so terrifying: Laurie and her friends were no one significant to Myers - they just were unlucky enough to be the people who chose to attack.
Jamie Lee Curtis is great here. Traumatised by her encounter 40 years ago, Laurie has geared her entire adult life around preparing for the Boogeyman's return. Curtis's Laurie has been whittled down to the wick, simultaneously exposed and armour-plated. It's an understated but fiery performance - with characters like this, it is easy to just lean into the warrior woman. With Curtis, you never lose sight of the traumatised teenage girl from 1978. It has defined and moulded her existence, but it has not blunted her humanity. Laurie may try to present a hardened exterior, but she is not made of stone.
Curtis's performance is so nuanced it really lays bare how un-adventurous the script is.
The main problem with any Halloween sequel is that it is not Halloween. The original movie is almost ridiculously simple, and its power comes from the perfect conflation of filmmakers and aesthetic choices - choices which play a big part in overcome any logic jumps or plot holes that the story has. It is a story so simple it could only work as a movie, and it can really only work once.
The ethos of this new Halloween is to return to the simplicity of the original, but with an additional focus on how trauma and the passage of time has affected its central characters. There is a contradiction there that movie never figures out.
When this movie came out, I remember a tweet from critic April Wolfe pondering what Halloween '18 would have been like with women as the key creatives. Throughout the movie, this same hypothetical nagged at me.
The idea of trauma and the way it informs and influences future generations is a fascinating idea, particularly when framed within the context of the original Halloween. Laurie discovered that the Boogeyman was real. How does that inform the rest of her life?
It's a potentially dark, complex trajectory for a sequel, using the pure, elemental dread of the Shape as the starting point for examining trauma and emotional fallout. It is adult and complicated, and ultimately beyond this movie's scope.
We get one real indication of Laurie's parenting - a short montage narrated by Karen - and little else. The way Karen's backstory is shoved into the story feels very jarring and out of keeping with the movie as a whole - it felt like a scene out of a network TV show. I can appreciate inference and respecting the viewer's intelligence, but there is so little emphasis placed on what this movie is supposedly about that it just ends up feeling like a solid slasher movie, rather than a strong second chapter to Carpenter's original.
The power of the original Halloween is similar to Jaws and Alien, in that its antagonist is kept to the periphery of the frame - Michael Myers is terrifying because you cannot get a solid grasp on where he is or what he is.
Here, Green falls into the trap of putting Meyers front and centre - in the original, he feels like an omniscient premise, able to appear and disappear at will. James Jude Courtney moves well, but Green's camerawork never gives him that same sense of spatial control. He feels like a typical slasher movie villain.
It's a good movie, but there certain pieces of the story which feel either under-developed or in the wrong place.
The movie's most interesting element is Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode. Curtis has played a version of this characterisation before, in Halloween H20, but that version felt like a sandwich with no filling. Having stripped out the familial connection from the previous sequels, this version has the benefit of focusing on what makes the original film so terrifying: Laurie and her friends were no one significant to Myers - they just were unlucky enough to be the people who chose to attack.
Jamie Lee Curtis is great here. Traumatised by her encounter 40 years ago, Laurie has geared her entire adult life around preparing for the Boogeyman's return. Curtis's Laurie has been whittled down to the wick, simultaneously exposed and armour-plated. It's an understated but fiery performance - with characters like this, it is easy to just lean into the warrior woman. With Curtis, you never lose sight of the traumatised teenage girl from 1978. It has defined and moulded her existence, but it has not blunted her humanity. Laurie may try to present a hardened exterior, but she is not made of stone.
Curtis's performance is so nuanced it really lays bare how un-adventurous the script is.
The main problem with any Halloween sequel is that it is not Halloween. The original movie is almost ridiculously simple, and its power comes from the perfect conflation of filmmakers and aesthetic choices - choices which play a big part in overcome any logic jumps or plot holes that the story has. It is a story so simple it could only work as a movie, and it can really only work once.
The ethos of this new Halloween is to return to the simplicity of the original, but with an additional focus on how trauma and the passage of time has affected its central characters. There is a contradiction there that movie never figures out.
When this movie came out, I remember a tweet from critic April Wolfe pondering what Halloween '18 would have been like with women as the key creatives. Throughout the movie, this same hypothetical nagged at me.
The idea of trauma and the way it informs and influences future generations is a fascinating idea, particularly when framed within the context of the original Halloween. Laurie discovered that the Boogeyman was real. How does that inform the rest of her life?
It's a potentially dark, complex trajectory for a sequel, using the pure, elemental dread of the Shape as the starting point for examining trauma and emotional fallout. It is adult and complicated, and ultimately beyond this movie's scope.
We get one real indication of Laurie's parenting - a short montage narrated by Karen - and little else. The way Karen's backstory is shoved into the story feels very jarring and out of keeping with the movie as a whole - it felt like a scene out of a network TV show. I can appreciate inference and respecting the viewer's intelligence, but there is so little emphasis placed on what this movie is supposedly about that it just ends up feeling like a solid slasher movie, rather than a strong second chapter to Carpenter's original.
The power of the original Halloween is similar to Jaws and Alien, in that its antagonist is kept to the periphery of the frame - Michael Myers is terrifying because you cannot get a solid grasp on where he is or what he is.
Here, Green falls into the trap of putting Meyers front and centre - in the original, he feels like an omniscient premise, able to appear and disappear at will. James Jude Courtney moves well, but Green's camerawork never gives him that same sense of spatial control. He feels like a typical slasher movie villain.
One of the most interesting elements of this movie is the idea of Michael Myers ageing. While the filmmakers avoid showing him clearly sans mask, their presentation does not hide his mortality - wrinkled skin, white hair, the scarred dead eye.
This creates an interesting contradiction with Myers' invulnerability that the movie does not really deal with.
Once he has regained his mask, I was expecting some interesting variations on the Shape's modus operandi - how does a 60-year-old man navigate a world that he has not experienced in 40 years? The movie seems to be walking a line between awareness of time, and a desire to present Michael Myers as he always has been - an unstoppable killing machine.
This creates an interesting contradiction with Myers' invulnerability that the movie does not really deal with.
Once he has regained his mask, I was expecting some interesting variations on the Shape's modus operandi - how does a 60-year-old man navigate a world that he has not experienced in 40 years? The movie seems to be walking a line between awareness of time, and a desire to present Michael Myers as he always has been - an unstoppable killing machine.
This aspect of the movie highlights my big issue with it - it ultimately does not really deviate from the formula.
Even the way in which (spoilers) Laurie and her family turn the tables on Michael feels like an amped-up version of the Final Girl. What are we supposed to take away from this? Laurie outsmarts the villain and wins.
Cool. But that is basically what happens in most slasher movies. The underwhelming climax feels like the result of Michael as an antagonist - he not a mastermind who has to be out-thought. He is never shown to have much personality - he is more of an elemental force.
His characterisation is powerful in the context of the original film - a pure embodiment of evil disrupting an ordinary community - but that simplicity is really only workable once.
That's great, but there is something unbelievable about that posture. We now live in a media environment in which IP, reboots and sequels are the foundation of American genre entertainment. Despite this movie's attempts at providing closure for Laurie, the fact that this is the 10th sequel (and third retcon) in the franchise.
I was missing something missing from Laurie. She secures her family, which is great, but there is something missing from her character arc. The problem is that her character appears to be set from the beginning. She does not need to change.
Funnily enough, my issue with this movie is the same as with Jamie Lee Curtis's last return to franchise, Halloween H20: The opening and closing acts are built on a character progression that feels sidelined in the body of the movie. The movie almost reads as an extended third act in which Laurie Strode waits for the Shape to return so she can finally put him out of her misery.
Halloween '18 is a good movie. But in trying to emulate the qualities of the original film, it ends up hamstrung by the limitations of those qualities, rather than invigorated by them.
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