What’s it about?
After a military assessment reveals the unreliability of human officers in launching ICBMs, the U.S. government decides to install a computer system called WOPR to control the country’s nuclear arsenal. Later, high school computer whiz Matthew Broderick inadvertently hacks into WOPR while looking for secret information on upcoming computer games.
Broderick challenges WOPR to what he believes is a game called “Global Thermonuclear War” -- it’s actually a war simulation, but WOPR’s handling of it sends NORAD into nuclear alert and the brink of war. The incident ends with the government holding Broderick on espionage charges, but unaware that WOPR is continuing the game on its own. As the simulation gets closer and closer to outright war, the bewildered government prepares to retaliate against what appears to be an overwhelming Soviet strike.
Is it any good?
WARGAMES is probably not a movie that I would ordinarily write about in this blog. It’s not bad -- in fact I think it’s pretty good -- and it’s a pretty interesting step on the road from DR STRANGELOVE, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964) to THE MATRIX (1999). (That’s the road of killer computers who can or do initiate Armageddon, natch.)
But I talked about all that stuff back when I wrote about COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970), and I am not sure I have anything further to say about it. In fact, WARGAMES is a lot like a junior version of that movie, where everything is just a bit dumber and the main characters are a lot younger. There’s a certain amount of lowered expectations that comes with a movie featuring the handsome young stars of the 1980s (in this case, Ally Sheedy and Matthew Broderick, both near the starts of their careers), and taken in that context, WARGAMES is very good. But it’s also a dumbed-down version of the same man vs. computer Frankenstein story that’s been popping up in the movies since the 1960s. And taken in that context, WARGAMES has far more in common with John Carpenter’s supremely dumb DARK STAR (1974) than it does with Kubrick or Colossus.
I don’t really want to write a thousand words taking down WARGAMES since I think it’s a pretty enjoyable movie. But here are a couple of glaring annoyances. First, it’s never clearly explained what WOPR thinks it’s doing. Is it playing a game? Running a simulation? Actually trying to win a thermonuclear war? At various points in the movie it acts in different ways regarding the situation and is never consistent or rational about what it’s trying to achieve. There’s even a big countdown clock that WOPR brings online for no particular reason.
Second, the moral of the movie is summed up in WOPR’s ultimate assessment of global thermonuclear war: “The only winning move is not to play.” That’s all well and good, but WOPR goes through practically the entire movie acting as though it believes such a war could be won. It’s not until Matthew Broderick has WOPR play a few games of tic-tac-toe that the computer finally gets the concept of an unwinnable game. It’s just a too-pat ending -- the whiz kid who saves the day with an obvious observation that the grown-ups somehow didn’t think of.
I mentioned DARK STAR a few paragraphs up, and I don’t think I’ve talked about that movie yet. It was John Carpenter’s first film -- a sci-fi comedy about space madness and suicidal smart bombs made on a shoestring budget. It’s not a great movie. The low budget effects are alternately charming and boring, but the real problem is that the story is a mish-mash of plots stolen from better movies and books. The suicidal smart bomb -- a nuke which threatens to blow up an entire spaceship -- is a variation on HAL-9000, and the situation is eventually defused when one of the crewmen locks its circuits by posing a philosophical quandary so stupid that I don’t even remember what it was.
The similarity between that and WARGAMES is that the movie thinks it’s smarter than it really is. The story doesn’t reveal anything new about people or computers -- it just restates an obvious piece of wisdom which is already common knowledge, but robs it of any of the shades of grey that might make it interesting. When I wrote about THE WAR GAME (1965) -- a movie that highlighted the absurdity and hopelessness of nuclear war in very uncomfortable ways -- I said that I almost couldn’t believe after watching it that we managed to get out of the Cold War alive. WARGAMES has the opposite effect -- it argues so bluntly that nuclear war is such a bonehead move that it makes it seem like there was never any danger at all.
Let’s talk about what I like about WARGAMES though. Matthew Broderick gets to play with lots of old fashioned computer equipment that looks neat and possibly authentic. (I have no idea really -- I was certainly not a hacker in 1983.) Outside of WOPR itself, computers in WARGAMES are the gatekeepers to easily manipulated systems with inadequate security and apparently no human checks and balances. Broderick changes his grades, hacks into servers, bypasses computer locks, and gets free long distance calling at a payphone. It’s a credit to the movie that I could always follow exactly what he was doing to break into these systems -- high tech crime seems positively low tech in WARGAMES and the feeling is that computers are tools that can be broken down and controlled by anybody who knows the tricks.
That’s an idea I like, and I really enjoyed all of Broderick’s shenanigans (even the ones that struck me as wildly implausible) for their MacGyver-ish charm. Of course, all of this makes it all the more perplexing why WOPR is such a different kind of computer and why it can’t be stopped even after the brass know what’s happening. (Perhaps there’s a cautionary tale in all of this about giving too much control to computers?) But I promised I was going to talk about good stuff.
I also really enjoyed the very beginning of the movie. In fact, it is probably my favorite part of the whole picture. Before Matthew Broderick or Ally Sheedy even show up, we meet two military officers who operate a missile silo somewhere in the U.S. They are given orders to launch their missiles and then are faced with the dilemma of whether they ought to follow the orders or not. They have no information about what’s going on outside -- only that the chain of command has ordered them to launch their nuclear missiles. They don’t know if it’s a first strike or a retaliation or (as it eventually turns out) a training exercise. I really love this part -- it’s such an unreal situation, like something out of a hypothetical morality question. Yet, it was (and is) potentially reality for thousands of folks who are stationed in these silos or on submarines. But then WARGAMES proper begins, and all such interesting moral dilemmas are intentionally wiped out by the introduction of WOPR.
Monday, March 29, 2010
Thursday, March 25, 2010
1983: VIDEODROME
What’s it about?
Cable channel executive James Woods goes out looking for the next big thing in television -- something that will break barriers and shock viewers into massive ratings. He thinks he’s found it when he stumbles across a pirate broadcast of a show called “Videodrome”. The program has no content except for depictions of torture, mutilations, and murders which all take place in the same featureless room.
Woods, believing the program to be staged, attempts to find the creators so he can offer them a broadcast deal. The trail leads him first to renowned television prophet and personality Brian O’Blivion, and then deeper into a shadowy underworld. Meanwhile, Woods begins having powerful and disturbing hallucinations, which he eventually learns have been triggered by signals hidden in the Videodrome broadcasts. By the time he realizes he’s caught up in a weird conspiracy, it seems too late for Woods to save himself.
Is it any good?
I’ve been avoiding writing about David Cronenberg movies because -- well, just because. I watched both THE BROOD (1979) and SCANNERS (1981) back when I was covering the years they were released in, but couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to say a whole lot about them. I got pretty close with THE BROOD, since I was interested in how it used a “soft” science like psychology as the springboard for sci-fi speculations instead of a harder science like robotics or physical medicine or computer science. I also mentioned THE BROOD in my entry about ALTERED STATES (1980) when I talked about the mind-over-matter themes of that latter movie.
After watching a couple more David Cronenberg movies, it certainly seems like he keeps obsessively returning to those mind-over-matter themes. SCANNERS is about warring factions of folks with telepathic powers -- including the ability to link in to other peoples’ bodies and affect their bodily functions (sometimes with explosive consequences). Likewise, VIDEODROME is at least partly interested in how hallucinations can change subjective (and possibly objective) reality.
There are really two sci-fi stories running in parallel in VIDEODROME, though they are unavoidably intertwined with each other. The first is Woods’s quest to find ever more shocking content for his cable channel. This leads him to seek out programs that feature sex, violence, gore, perversion, or (ideally) some combination of them all. To be honest, the sci-fi edge here is a distinction in degree rather than in kind -- and only by the slightest degree. The quest for shock value certainly isn’t new of itself, and the programs that Woods reviews don’t even necessarily seem more depraved than some that exist in the real world. In 1983, it wouldn’t have been so easy to distribute such things on a mainstream cable channel, but today the Internet has removed essentially all doubt that there’s an audience out there for even the most envelope-pushing or stomach-turning content.
The other sci-fi twist involves Videodrome’s ability to trigger hallucinations in those who watch it. If you look at that from a metaphorical point of view, it could be saying something about how watching violent or perverted content can warp a person’s view of reality. It also pretty clearly separates “those who watch” from “those who don’t” -- anybody who watches enough of the show will be easily recognizable by their raving insanity. When Woods finally meets the folks responsible for the shows, for instance, they ask him why on earth a person would want to watch a show like Videodrome. They’ve never seen it themselves -- if they had, they would have gone crazy too.
On a more surface level, the hallucinations are part of a plot to do something or other. To be honest, I’m not really clear what the makers of Videodrome were trying to accomplish. They don’t appear to be anarchists who are just intent on driving everyone crazy. Seemingly the hallucinations are controllable -- that is, the shadowy forces in control of Videodrome use Woods’s freak-outs to control his behavior, and at one point even get him to assassinate some people for them. (Though the logic behind the assassination is never clear either.) So potentially Videodrome could be a recruitment tool for insane assassins, but it’s such a blunt tool that it would be difficult to really manage the program. The movie doesn’t really spend much time developing that part of the plot either, which is probably just as well. As far as brainwashing assassins goes, I can’t really imagine that VIDEODROME would be able to top the audacity of similar plots in movies like THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962) and THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974).
David Cronenberg has a reputation as a guy who loves disturbing or gross images. I haven’t seen that many of his movies besides the ones I mentioned already, but I can see where folks might get that impression. THE BROOD isn’t particularly gross, but it does make use of some freaky child-like killers in creepy masks. They’re a bit too similar to the big gotcha from Nicholas Roeg’s DON’T LOOK NOW (1973) to be deeply disturbing, but there are a few frightening moments. These killers are also the physical manifestations of mental anguish, and one late scene where one is shown budding out of a woman’s body is pretty darn grotesque.
SCANNERS ups the gore considerably with its iconic exploding head. It’s an amazing special effect, and it still looks cool even when watching it happen frame by frame in slow motion. The climactic battle between the final two telepaths is a revolting splatterfest as well. When the fight’s over, we’ve seen ruptured blood vessels, burst eyeballs, and burning and melting flesh.
VIDEODROME takes things in a different, but no less unnerving direction. We never see the worst of the torture on the Videodrome program -- it’s still unpleasant, but it’s very brief and never particularly graphic. James Woods’s hallucinations, however, are extremely graphic, and they seem to have a recurring theme of combining organic flesh and technology. In one recurring bit, Woods’s appendix scar splits open, allowing access to his innards so videotapes or guns can be deposited inside his body (or, later in the movie, retrieved for use). There’s not a lot of blood and gore necessarily, but Cronenberg seems to hone in instantly on what makes people say “yuck”. I’ve got at least THE FLY (1986) and NAKED LUNCH (1991) upcoming from him as well, so I expect to be saying “yuck” many more times.
Ultimately, I don’t think that any of the three Cronenberg movies I’ve seen so far are that great. They all start out with very interesting premises, but then end up in pretty standard patterns. THE BROOD turns into a slasher flick in the second half, and both SCANNERS and VIDEODROME end up as conspiracy thrillers. The conspiracy part of VIDEODROME is especially half-baked -- as I said, I’m still not clear on what the objective of the conspiracy is, and I have no clue whatsoever why the bad guys went to all the trouble they did to rope in Woods. (A half-hearted answer is given to that second question, but it doesn’t really make any sense.) VIDEODROME looks better than either of the other two, and the special effects on the hallucinations are worth seeing. It’s kind of unpleasant at times, but it’s also fairly unique (at least in the early going). And James Woods is a great actor for this role. Based on all this, I’m really looking forward to seeing Jeff Goldblum in THE FLY. I could easily see that being the magic combination that makes a really great movie.
Cable channel executive James Woods goes out looking for the next big thing in television -- something that will break barriers and shock viewers into massive ratings. He thinks he’s found it when he stumbles across a pirate broadcast of a show called “Videodrome”. The program has no content except for depictions of torture, mutilations, and murders which all take place in the same featureless room.
Woods, believing the program to be staged, attempts to find the creators so he can offer them a broadcast deal. The trail leads him first to renowned television prophet and personality Brian O’Blivion, and then deeper into a shadowy underworld. Meanwhile, Woods begins having powerful and disturbing hallucinations, which he eventually learns have been triggered by signals hidden in the Videodrome broadcasts. By the time he realizes he’s caught up in a weird conspiracy, it seems too late for Woods to save himself.
Is it any good?
I’ve been avoiding writing about David Cronenberg movies because -- well, just because. I watched both THE BROOD (1979) and SCANNERS (1981) back when I was covering the years they were released in, but couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to say a whole lot about them. I got pretty close with THE BROOD, since I was interested in how it used a “soft” science like psychology as the springboard for sci-fi speculations instead of a harder science like robotics or physical medicine or computer science. I also mentioned THE BROOD in my entry about ALTERED STATES (1980) when I talked about the mind-over-matter themes of that latter movie.
After watching a couple more David Cronenberg movies, it certainly seems like he keeps obsessively returning to those mind-over-matter themes. SCANNERS is about warring factions of folks with telepathic powers -- including the ability to link in to other peoples’ bodies and affect their bodily functions (sometimes with explosive consequences). Likewise, VIDEODROME is at least partly interested in how hallucinations can change subjective (and possibly objective) reality.
There are really two sci-fi stories running in parallel in VIDEODROME, though they are unavoidably intertwined with each other. The first is Woods’s quest to find ever more shocking content for his cable channel. This leads him to seek out programs that feature sex, violence, gore, perversion, or (ideally) some combination of them all. To be honest, the sci-fi edge here is a distinction in degree rather than in kind -- and only by the slightest degree. The quest for shock value certainly isn’t new of itself, and the programs that Woods reviews don’t even necessarily seem more depraved than some that exist in the real world. In 1983, it wouldn’t have been so easy to distribute such things on a mainstream cable channel, but today the Internet has removed essentially all doubt that there’s an audience out there for even the most envelope-pushing or stomach-turning content.
The other sci-fi twist involves Videodrome’s ability to trigger hallucinations in those who watch it. If you look at that from a metaphorical point of view, it could be saying something about how watching violent or perverted content can warp a person’s view of reality. It also pretty clearly separates “those who watch” from “those who don’t” -- anybody who watches enough of the show will be easily recognizable by their raving insanity. When Woods finally meets the folks responsible for the shows, for instance, they ask him why on earth a person would want to watch a show like Videodrome. They’ve never seen it themselves -- if they had, they would have gone crazy too.
On a more surface level, the hallucinations are part of a plot to do something or other. To be honest, I’m not really clear what the makers of Videodrome were trying to accomplish. They don’t appear to be anarchists who are just intent on driving everyone crazy. Seemingly the hallucinations are controllable -- that is, the shadowy forces in control of Videodrome use Woods’s freak-outs to control his behavior, and at one point even get him to assassinate some people for them. (Though the logic behind the assassination is never clear either.) So potentially Videodrome could be a recruitment tool for insane assassins, but it’s such a blunt tool that it would be difficult to really manage the program. The movie doesn’t really spend much time developing that part of the plot either, which is probably just as well. As far as brainwashing assassins goes, I can’t really imagine that VIDEODROME would be able to top the audacity of similar plots in movies like THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962) and THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974).
David Cronenberg has a reputation as a guy who loves disturbing or gross images. I haven’t seen that many of his movies besides the ones I mentioned already, but I can see where folks might get that impression. THE BROOD isn’t particularly gross, but it does make use of some freaky child-like killers in creepy masks. They’re a bit too similar to the big gotcha from Nicholas Roeg’s DON’T LOOK NOW (1973) to be deeply disturbing, but there are a few frightening moments. These killers are also the physical manifestations of mental anguish, and one late scene where one is shown budding out of a woman’s body is pretty darn grotesque.
SCANNERS ups the gore considerably with its iconic exploding head. It’s an amazing special effect, and it still looks cool even when watching it happen frame by frame in slow motion. The climactic battle between the final two telepaths is a revolting splatterfest as well. When the fight’s over, we’ve seen ruptured blood vessels, burst eyeballs, and burning and melting flesh.
VIDEODROME takes things in a different, but no less unnerving direction. We never see the worst of the torture on the Videodrome program -- it’s still unpleasant, but it’s very brief and never particularly graphic. James Woods’s hallucinations, however, are extremely graphic, and they seem to have a recurring theme of combining organic flesh and technology. In one recurring bit, Woods’s appendix scar splits open, allowing access to his innards so videotapes or guns can be deposited inside his body (or, later in the movie, retrieved for use). There’s not a lot of blood and gore necessarily, but Cronenberg seems to hone in instantly on what makes people say “yuck”. I’ve got at least THE FLY (1986) and NAKED LUNCH (1991) upcoming from him as well, so I expect to be saying “yuck” many more times.
Ultimately, I don’t think that any of the three Cronenberg movies I’ve seen so far are that great. They all start out with very interesting premises, but then end up in pretty standard patterns. THE BROOD turns into a slasher flick in the second half, and both SCANNERS and VIDEODROME end up as conspiracy thrillers. The conspiracy part of VIDEODROME is especially half-baked -- as I said, I’m still not clear on what the objective of the conspiracy is, and I have no clue whatsoever why the bad guys went to all the trouble they did to rope in Woods. (A half-hearted answer is given to that second question, but it doesn’t really make any sense.) VIDEODROME looks better than either of the other two, and the special effects on the hallucinations are worth seeing. It’s kind of unpleasant at times, but it’s also fairly unique (at least in the early going). And James Woods is a great actor for this role. Based on all this, I’m really looking forward to seeing Jeff Goldblum in THE FLY. I could easily see that being the magic combination that makes a really great movie.
Monday, March 22, 2010
1983: BORN IN FLAMES
What’s it about?
In the near future, the socialist party is elected into office in the United States, marking the beginning of a peaceful revolution. Ten years later, large segments of the population are dissatisfied with the government -- especially with work programs that are perceived as giving good jobs to some and meaningless jobs to others.
One group of dissidents is a self-styled “army” mostly composed of homosexual and minority women. When protesting doesn’t get results in curbing violence against women or marginalization in the workforce, radical elements in the army start to take more definitive action. When the government hits back -- apparently assassinating a prominent leader and burning two pirate radio stations -- the women turn to terrorist tactics to make themselves heard.
Is it any good?
I’ve already written about several “soft” sci-fi movies that speculate about changes in society rather than changes in technology -- for instance, PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! (1962), WILD IN THE STREETS (1968), and PUNISHMENT PARK (1971). One of the movies I didn’t write about was INVASION U.S.A. (1952), a piece of outright propaganda that makes the case that ignorance or apathy in ordinary citizens could result in a communist takeover of the United States.
The reason I bring up INVASION U.S.A. is that it’s seemingly an early example of a long string of “red scare” pictures that depicted the United States attacked or invaded or even conquered by Soviet forces. That type of movie had by no means vanished in the 1980s -- you need look no further than RED DAWN (1984) for proof of that. But BORN IN FLAMES is also evidence that it had become possible to take a somewhat more nuanced look at competing political systems as well.
BORN IN FLAMES is very similar in form and content to PUNISHMENT PARK, a pseudo-documentary movie in which counter-cultural types are systematically (and sadistically) hunted down by law enforcement officers in vast wilderness areas -- ostensibly for training purposes. Although the sympathies of the director clearly lie with the hippies, a series of drumhead tribunals ensure that the opposing establishment side gets ample chance to state its case. I loved the movie despite the bluntness and almost offensive extremity of its premise, and it’s still one of my favorites out of all the ones I’ve seen for this blog.
BORN IN FLAMES never purports to be a documentary itself, but it does take a fly-on-the-wall approach that feels similar to the style of PUNISHMENT PARK. But by making the establishment figures the representatives of an elected socialist government, it seemingly turns the politics of the other movie on its head. Seemingly, the same idealists who were pleading for peace, love and understanding in PUNISHMENT PARK are now the ones helming a failing socialist experiment and issuing assassination orders. But the connection isn’t really that clear. Neither of the movies are really about left vs. right. Instead, they are both about the corrupt establishment vs. the idealistic counter-culture, and by making the United States a socialist state, BORN IN FLAMES seemingly tries to demonstrate that it doesn’t really matter which side is in power if you’re the little guy.
The similarities between the two movies don’t stop there. They both show a counter-cultural movement that is obsessed with intellectual rhetoric -- these revolutionaries do much more talking than anything else. Likewise, both movies depict a counter-culture that’s split on whether action or violence is permissible -- a question that only results in even more endless debates. In some ways, BORN IN FLAMES is the more ambitious movie, as it follows the rise of an organic revolutionary movement in the wild. PUNISHMENT PARK, meanwhile, limits itself to the interactions between two clearly defined groups in an entirely artificial setting.
Despite all that, I’m not sure that I would have found BORN IN FLAMES all that interesting on its own and without the context of other similar movies. The documentary style is fairly compelling, but the acting is not always that great and the characters are hard to keep track of sometimes. The depictions of urban blight in the early eighties are pretty riveting, but the frequent collages of unconnected images that separate vignettes make the movie feel pretentious and self-consciously artsy. I enjoyed thinking about it as an extension (or possibly inversion) of PUNISHMENT PARK, but it seems too slight and muddled to pack much of a punch on its own. I’m still a bit confused about what exactly I’m meant to take away from BORN IN FLAMES -- unless it’s the sense that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The socialist government might also have been used to make the radicalized women more sympathetic, since it clearly couldn’t be intended to be a depiction of any actual American government. The women end the movie by hijacking news stations at gunpoint, and then ultimately by destroying the transmitter towers on the World Trade Center with explosives. (By the way, it’s really hard to watch people staging a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center without feeling some emotion colored by events that the movie could not have foreseen.) Just as CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (1972) concocted a vaguely fascist American government that could be toppled by the ape revolution, so too does BORN IN FLAMES offer a target that is arguably not representative of the America of the time.
But if this was an attempt to protect the film-makers from accusations of being anti-American, then I guess it’s a bit disappointing. PUNISHMENT PARK doesn’t pull any such punches -- and although the depiction of the establishment is unfair and cheap at times, there are at least broader metaphorical points that are impossible to miss. And it seems almost impossible that the producers of BORN IN FLAMES would be the sorts to chicken out of a fight. The director, after all, is a woman who enthusiastically calls herself “Lizzie Borden”, who featured revolutionary-minded punk music throughout the movie, and who didn’t flinch from putting a completely gratuitous close-up shot of an erect penis on the screen. In other words, it seems unlikely that such a provocateur would be concerned about hurting Ronald Reagan’s feelings.
But this is what I mean when I say the movie seems too slight and muddled. It seems to be saying too many things at once, and the confusion makes it both less sharp and easier to dismiss as an indulgent fantasy. It’s not a bad movie, but it’s certainly not going to be one that I think about much months from now.
In the near future, the socialist party is elected into office in the United States, marking the beginning of a peaceful revolution. Ten years later, large segments of the population are dissatisfied with the government -- especially with work programs that are perceived as giving good jobs to some and meaningless jobs to others.
One group of dissidents is a self-styled “army” mostly composed of homosexual and minority women. When protesting doesn’t get results in curbing violence against women or marginalization in the workforce, radical elements in the army start to take more definitive action. When the government hits back -- apparently assassinating a prominent leader and burning two pirate radio stations -- the women turn to terrorist tactics to make themselves heard.
Is it any good?
I’ve already written about several “soft” sci-fi movies that speculate about changes in society rather than changes in technology -- for instance, PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! (1962), WILD IN THE STREETS (1968), and PUNISHMENT PARK (1971). One of the movies I didn’t write about was INVASION U.S.A. (1952), a piece of outright propaganda that makes the case that ignorance or apathy in ordinary citizens could result in a communist takeover of the United States.
The reason I bring up INVASION U.S.A. is that it’s seemingly an early example of a long string of “red scare” pictures that depicted the United States attacked or invaded or even conquered by Soviet forces. That type of movie had by no means vanished in the 1980s -- you need look no further than RED DAWN (1984) for proof of that. But BORN IN FLAMES is also evidence that it had become possible to take a somewhat more nuanced look at competing political systems as well.
BORN IN FLAMES is very similar in form and content to PUNISHMENT PARK, a pseudo-documentary movie in which counter-cultural types are systematically (and sadistically) hunted down by law enforcement officers in vast wilderness areas -- ostensibly for training purposes. Although the sympathies of the director clearly lie with the hippies, a series of drumhead tribunals ensure that the opposing establishment side gets ample chance to state its case. I loved the movie despite the bluntness and almost offensive extremity of its premise, and it’s still one of my favorites out of all the ones I’ve seen for this blog.
BORN IN FLAMES never purports to be a documentary itself, but it does take a fly-on-the-wall approach that feels similar to the style of PUNISHMENT PARK. But by making the establishment figures the representatives of an elected socialist government, it seemingly turns the politics of the other movie on its head. Seemingly, the same idealists who were pleading for peace, love and understanding in PUNISHMENT PARK are now the ones helming a failing socialist experiment and issuing assassination orders. But the connection isn’t really that clear. Neither of the movies are really about left vs. right. Instead, they are both about the corrupt establishment vs. the idealistic counter-culture, and by making the United States a socialist state, BORN IN FLAMES seemingly tries to demonstrate that it doesn’t really matter which side is in power if you’re the little guy.
The similarities between the two movies don’t stop there. They both show a counter-cultural movement that is obsessed with intellectual rhetoric -- these revolutionaries do much more talking than anything else. Likewise, both movies depict a counter-culture that’s split on whether action or violence is permissible -- a question that only results in even more endless debates. In some ways, BORN IN FLAMES is the more ambitious movie, as it follows the rise of an organic revolutionary movement in the wild. PUNISHMENT PARK, meanwhile, limits itself to the interactions between two clearly defined groups in an entirely artificial setting.
Despite all that, I’m not sure that I would have found BORN IN FLAMES all that interesting on its own and without the context of other similar movies. The documentary style is fairly compelling, but the acting is not always that great and the characters are hard to keep track of sometimes. The depictions of urban blight in the early eighties are pretty riveting, but the frequent collages of unconnected images that separate vignettes make the movie feel pretentious and self-consciously artsy. I enjoyed thinking about it as an extension (or possibly inversion) of PUNISHMENT PARK, but it seems too slight and muddled to pack much of a punch on its own. I’m still a bit confused about what exactly I’m meant to take away from BORN IN FLAMES -- unless it’s the sense that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The socialist government might also have been used to make the radicalized women more sympathetic, since it clearly couldn’t be intended to be a depiction of any actual American government. The women end the movie by hijacking news stations at gunpoint, and then ultimately by destroying the transmitter towers on the World Trade Center with explosives. (By the way, it’s really hard to watch people staging a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center without feeling some emotion colored by events that the movie could not have foreseen.) Just as CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (1972) concocted a vaguely fascist American government that could be toppled by the ape revolution, so too does BORN IN FLAMES offer a target that is arguably not representative of the America of the time.
But if this was an attempt to protect the film-makers from accusations of being anti-American, then I guess it’s a bit disappointing. PUNISHMENT PARK doesn’t pull any such punches -- and although the depiction of the establishment is unfair and cheap at times, there are at least broader metaphorical points that are impossible to miss. And it seems almost impossible that the producers of BORN IN FLAMES would be the sorts to chicken out of a fight. The director, after all, is a woman who enthusiastically calls herself “Lizzie Borden”, who featured revolutionary-minded punk music throughout the movie, and who didn’t flinch from putting a completely gratuitous close-up shot of an erect penis on the screen. In other words, it seems unlikely that such a provocateur would be concerned about hurting Ronald Reagan’s feelings.
But this is what I mean when I say the movie seems too slight and muddled. It seems to be saying too many things at once, and the confusion makes it both less sharp and easier to dismiss as an indulgent fantasy. It’s not a bad movie, but it’s certainly not going to be one that I think about much months from now.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
1982: THE PLAGUE DOGS
What’s it about?
Two dogs named Snitter and Rowf escape from a secret government research station in the wilds of Scotland. After being subjected to cruel experiments during their time there, they are only too happy to get away. But what they don’t realize (being dogs) is that their escape route took them through another laboratory where scientists were working with the bubonic plague.
The government at first tries to cover up the escape, but soon a dragnet is being cast for the dogs to prevent the possible spread of infection. As the days pass, the two dogs resort to killing sheep to eat, and before long the army is called in. Led by effective (but compassionate) commander Patrick Stewart, it seems certain they will quickly get the job done.
Is it any good?
Based on a novel by Richard Adams (who also wrote WATERSHIP DOWNS), THE PLAGUE DOGS is yet another animated sci-fi movie that isn’t really appropriate for kids. This is despite the fact that it’s a movie about two talking dogs (one voiced by John Hurt) and their animal pals, including a crafty fox named “the Tod”.
To be honest, this is the only movie I can think of where the talking animals are all anatomically correct. There’s no reason why dog testicles shouldn’t be in a kids’ movie, I suppose, but they just usually aren’t. After all, any kid who has owned a dog (or who has even played with one) would quickly be exposed to such anatomical realities, and yet for some reason it still seems strange to see them onscreen in a cartoon where someone deliberately drew them.
That’s not really what makes this movie less than ideal for kids though. The main reason is what I will call “adult themes” -- that is, the hopelessness of the dogs’ situation. It’s not their fault if they are infected with the plague, but all the same they need to be hunted down and destroyed. And the fact that the dogs understand none of this -- they talk, but they are still fairly simple-minded -- only adds to the pathos of the situation.
There’s also some cussing and a couple scenes of fairly shocking violence. Besides killing sheep for food, the dogs are also ultimately responsible for two human deaths -- one an accident, and the other in self-defense. In fact, the cut of the movie that I watched is an abridged version that apparently leaves out some even more disturbing material -- such as implications that Snitter and Rowf (while starving) make a meal out of a dead human. The animal experiments at the beginning of the movie are pretty tough to watch as well. In particular, Rowf is repeatedly thrown into a tank of water with no exit and allowed to practically drown -- presumably to measure his endurance or something.
Snitter, meanwhile, was subjected to experimental brain surgery before the start of the movie. It’s not really clear what the point of this surgery is, but it’s explained once as removing the wall between the subjective and the objective. Mostly, it results in Snitter having flashbacks to previous moments in his life at inopportune moments. During these flashbacks, he’s blinded to the world outside, and only sees what his memory shows him. This experimental brain surgery is really the only part of the movie that would traditionally be considered science fiction. But the whole thing is about animal experimentation and the arrogance of science and all that. If a movie about the ramifications of scientific research doesn’t count as science fiction, then we may have to reassess what science fiction is.
As far as the normal movie things go, I liked the story a lot -- even though there didn’t seem to be any possible happy ending. (Spoiler alert: In an odd twist of the usual paradigm, the book is apparently cheerier on the ultimate prospects of the dogs than the movie is. I haven’t read the book myself, but the comment boards on IMDb were pretty vocal on this subject.) There were some particular scenes that I thought were overwrought -- the accidental human death especially comes out of nowhere and is handled in a way that made me laugh out loud in a totally inappropriate way. The animation is pretty neat though. In addition to featuring more realistic character designs, the movie also has a dull, muddy look that fits well with the Scottish setting and the dispiriting, quasi-misanthropic themes. If you’re a fan of animation (especially animation for adults) or if you’re just interested in movies that are unique or unusual, then I’d definitely recommend checking it out.
THE PLAGUE DOGS would also make an interesting double feature with THE SECRET OF NIMH (1982) -- another animated flick from the same year which is coincidentally also about escaped laboratory animals. I’m not going to write about THE SECRET OF NIMH separately, but it’s worth a mention here. It was directed and produced by Don Bluth, a former Disney animator who left the company and started competing directly with his former employer by putting out high-quality cartoon movies like THE SECRET OF NIMH, AN AMERICAN TAIL (1986), and THE LAND BEFORE TIME (1988). In fact, Bluth’s movies often went head-to-head with Disney’s animated releases and beat them at the box office. To be fair, the 1970s and 1980s were not exactly rife with animated Disney classics, and some folks credit Bluth’s movies with shocking Disney out of its slump. After the 1980s, Bluth continued to turn out animated films and achieved some mainstream success again with ANASTASIA (1997) and notice among sci-fi fans with TITAN A.E. (2000).
In any event, THE SECRET OF NIMH is pretty exciting and surprisingly dark -- as it opens, the main (mouse) character’s husband has just been violently killed, her son is sick with a serious case of pneumonia, and a human farmer’s equipment is about to plow her home under and kill everyone still inside. There’s a lot of tension and action -- including some bloody swordfights -- but it still looks a lot like a kids’ movie and is clearly intended to be enjoyed by children. But since it contains hardly any pandering at all, there’s no reason adults can’t like it too.
I will say that the “message” of the movie strikes me as a little lame in places. The escaped lab animals I referred to earlier are rats who were made hyper-intelligent by the National Institute of Mental Health (the “NIMH” of the title, natch) and who then used their newfound smarts to escape the lab. They now live under a rosebush in this farmer’s yard, and in the past few years have figured out how to tap into the power grid and provide electricity to their colony. That’s not the lame part, though. The lame part is that in this movie, increases in intelligence and knowledge are linked directly to increases in moral awareness. The rats are preparing to move out of their home because they have realized that stealing is wrong, and they no longer want to rely on the human power grid to serve their needs.
To be fair, there is some internal disagreement among the rats about whether the move is really necessary. But the ones who want to stay and continue stealing are depicted as both morally corrupt and also not as intelligent as the others. If you don’t know stealing is wrong, says the movie, then you really aren’t that smart. That’s fine, I guess. But if the rats who want to stay aren’t even intelligent enough to be capable of moral awareness, then why should I feel satisfied when they get their comeuppance? Where’s the justice in punishing folks who don’t know right from wrong? Granted, it’s not 100% clear this is what the movie is saying, but that’s because the motivations the rats have for wanting to leave or wanting to stay are glossed over. THE SECRET OF NIMH is still an exciting, interesting movie -- but it doesn’t feel like as much thought was put into the moral center of the movie as was put into the world of mice and rats.
Two dogs named Snitter and Rowf escape from a secret government research station in the wilds of Scotland. After being subjected to cruel experiments during their time there, they are only too happy to get away. But what they don’t realize (being dogs) is that their escape route took them through another laboratory where scientists were working with the bubonic plague.
The government at first tries to cover up the escape, but soon a dragnet is being cast for the dogs to prevent the possible spread of infection. As the days pass, the two dogs resort to killing sheep to eat, and before long the army is called in. Led by effective (but compassionate) commander Patrick Stewart, it seems certain they will quickly get the job done.
Is it any good?
Based on a novel by Richard Adams (who also wrote WATERSHIP DOWNS), THE PLAGUE DOGS is yet another animated sci-fi movie that isn’t really appropriate for kids. This is despite the fact that it’s a movie about two talking dogs (one voiced by John Hurt) and their animal pals, including a crafty fox named “the Tod”.
To be honest, this is the only movie I can think of where the talking animals are all anatomically correct. There’s no reason why dog testicles shouldn’t be in a kids’ movie, I suppose, but they just usually aren’t. After all, any kid who has owned a dog (or who has even played with one) would quickly be exposed to such anatomical realities, and yet for some reason it still seems strange to see them onscreen in a cartoon where someone deliberately drew them.
That’s not really what makes this movie less than ideal for kids though. The main reason is what I will call “adult themes” -- that is, the hopelessness of the dogs’ situation. It’s not their fault if they are infected with the plague, but all the same they need to be hunted down and destroyed. And the fact that the dogs understand none of this -- they talk, but they are still fairly simple-minded -- only adds to the pathos of the situation.
There’s also some cussing and a couple scenes of fairly shocking violence. Besides killing sheep for food, the dogs are also ultimately responsible for two human deaths -- one an accident, and the other in self-defense. In fact, the cut of the movie that I watched is an abridged version that apparently leaves out some even more disturbing material -- such as implications that Snitter and Rowf (while starving) make a meal out of a dead human. The animal experiments at the beginning of the movie are pretty tough to watch as well. In particular, Rowf is repeatedly thrown into a tank of water with no exit and allowed to practically drown -- presumably to measure his endurance or something.
Snitter, meanwhile, was subjected to experimental brain surgery before the start of the movie. It’s not really clear what the point of this surgery is, but it’s explained once as removing the wall between the subjective and the objective. Mostly, it results in Snitter having flashbacks to previous moments in his life at inopportune moments. During these flashbacks, he’s blinded to the world outside, and only sees what his memory shows him. This experimental brain surgery is really the only part of the movie that would traditionally be considered science fiction. But the whole thing is about animal experimentation and the arrogance of science and all that. If a movie about the ramifications of scientific research doesn’t count as science fiction, then we may have to reassess what science fiction is.
As far as the normal movie things go, I liked the story a lot -- even though there didn’t seem to be any possible happy ending. (Spoiler alert: In an odd twist of the usual paradigm, the book is apparently cheerier on the ultimate prospects of the dogs than the movie is. I haven’t read the book myself, but the comment boards on IMDb were pretty vocal on this subject.) There were some particular scenes that I thought were overwrought -- the accidental human death especially comes out of nowhere and is handled in a way that made me laugh out loud in a totally inappropriate way. The animation is pretty neat though. In addition to featuring more realistic character designs, the movie also has a dull, muddy look that fits well with the Scottish setting and the dispiriting, quasi-misanthropic themes. If you’re a fan of animation (especially animation for adults) or if you’re just interested in movies that are unique or unusual, then I’d definitely recommend checking it out.
THE PLAGUE DOGS would also make an interesting double feature with THE SECRET OF NIMH (1982) -- another animated flick from the same year which is coincidentally also about escaped laboratory animals. I’m not going to write about THE SECRET OF NIMH separately, but it’s worth a mention here. It was directed and produced by Don Bluth, a former Disney animator who left the company and started competing directly with his former employer by putting out high-quality cartoon movies like THE SECRET OF NIMH, AN AMERICAN TAIL (1986), and THE LAND BEFORE TIME (1988). In fact, Bluth’s movies often went head-to-head with Disney’s animated releases and beat them at the box office. To be fair, the 1970s and 1980s were not exactly rife with animated Disney classics, and some folks credit Bluth’s movies with shocking Disney out of its slump. After the 1980s, Bluth continued to turn out animated films and achieved some mainstream success again with ANASTASIA (1997) and notice among sci-fi fans with TITAN A.E. (2000).
In any event, THE SECRET OF NIMH is pretty exciting and surprisingly dark -- as it opens, the main (mouse) character’s husband has just been violently killed, her son is sick with a serious case of pneumonia, and a human farmer’s equipment is about to plow her home under and kill everyone still inside. There’s a lot of tension and action -- including some bloody swordfights -- but it still looks a lot like a kids’ movie and is clearly intended to be enjoyed by children. But since it contains hardly any pandering at all, there’s no reason adults can’t like it too.
I will say that the “message” of the movie strikes me as a little lame in places. The escaped lab animals I referred to earlier are rats who were made hyper-intelligent by the National Institute of Mental Health (the “NIMH” of the title, natch) and who then used their newfound smarts to escape the lab. They now live under a rosebush in this farmer’s yard, and in the past few years have figured out how to tap into the power grid and provide electricity to their colony. That’s not the lame part, though. The lame part is that in this movie, increases in intelligence and knowledge are linked directly to increases in moral awareness. The rats are preparing to move out of their home because they have realized that stealing is wrong, and they no longer want to rely on the human power grid to serve their needs.
To be fair, there is some internal disagreement among the rats about whether the move is really necessary. But the ones who want to stay and continue stealing are depicted as both morally corrupt and also not as intelligent as the others. If you don’t know stealing is wrong, says the movie, then you really aren’t that smart. That’s fine, I guess. But if the rats who want to stay aren’t even intelligent enough to be capable of moral awareness, then why should I feel satisfied when they get their comeuppance? Where’s the justice in punishing folks who don’t know right from wrong? Granted, it’s not 100% clear this is what the movie is saying, but that’s because the motivations the rats have for wanting to leave or wanting to stay are glossed over. THE SECRET OF NIMH is still an exciting, interesting movie -- but it doesn’t feel like as much thought was put into the moral center of the movie as was put into the world of mice and rats.
Monday, March 15, 2010
1982: TRON
What’s it about?
After being bilked out of some lucrative intellectual property by a corporate bigwig, programmer Jeff Bridges sneaks back into his old office to find evidence of the theft. But while hacking the mainframe in search of proof, the Master Control Program -- an all-knowing sentient program that runs the company’s entire computer system (and then some) -- uses an experimental ray gun to trap Bridges inside the computer system itself.
Once inside, Bridges finds himself in a weird dystopian world patrolled by the Master Control Program’s jackbooted goons. But rather than put Bridges to death outright, he is instead forced to compete in a series of gladiatorial games against the personifications of renegade programs who refuse to renounce their belief in “the users” or submit to the Master Control Program. After escaping from one such game, Bridges sets out with a couple of free-thinking programs (including a digital warrior named Tron who was written specifically for the task) to take down the Master Control Program.
Is it any good?
Somehow I’ve never seen TRON before, so I knew from the start of this project that I’d certainly have to watch it. I’m not sure if it exactly counts as a classic, but if you tell folks that you’ve spent two years watching practically every science fiction movie worth seeing, then they’re going to expect that you’ve seen TRON. (Note: This blog will likely take me two years to finish, but one thing I’ve learned in the process is that it would take far longer than two years for me to watch every science fiction movie worth seeing.)
I’m not even sure what exactly I thought TRON was about before I saw it. I really ought to have written a little summary of my expectations before hand, but the truth is that I didn’t really think too much about what I’d be getting myself into. I knew it starred Jeff Bridges, and I knew it took place inside a computer, and I knew it involved something called “light cycles”. (I only knew this last fact because, many years ago, I used to spend hours playing an addictive freeware game called Tron Light Cycles against my brothers.)
I’ve spent many of this blog’s entries arguing why such-and-such fantasy movie really ought to be considered science fiction at heart. (Look no further than last week’s DARK CRYSTAL entry for an example.) So it’s with some hesitation that I find myself about to say that TRON is really a fantasy movie at heart. It’s not just that the insides of the computer as imagined by TRON bear no resemblance to the actual workings of a computer. But the explanation for computers that the movie comes up with is so primitive and so benighted that it boggles my mind. Let me try to explain what I mean.
When faced with the need to explain what goes on inside computers, the movie TRON tells us that there are little people inside that make them work. Again, a second time -- according to TRON, there are thousands of little people inside your computer right now, without whom the computer would no longer function. There’s a little man who runs your word processor, and a little man who runs your spreadsheet, and a little man who runs your solitaire game. This is the same explanation that ignorant and unsophisticated peoples came up with when they were confronted with inexplicable natural forces. There’s a big man who makes the lightning, a big man who makes the tides, and a big man who makes the west wind. That was all very well and good before the scientific method was invented, but we’ve moved considerably past that point by now. If THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981) is a fantasy because it relies on Zeus and Hera and the rest of the gods to explain the workings of the natural world, then TRON is just as much a fantasy because it relies on little men to explain the workings of a calculating engine.
I understand that the world of TRON is meant to represent the virtual world of digital space -- that is, that the little men of the movie are not meant to be literally living inside the physical space of the computer. Instead, they are supposed to live in the computer’s memory, and everything we see is a fanciful representation of what’s going on in the memory. I get that. The problem is that this explanation doesn’t really make any logical sense either. Why would the virtual representation of a computer program have visible circuitry on its bodysuit? Why would they need to travel from point to point as if they were traversing physical space (something that happens in this movie A LOT)? What happens to the functions that the programs were supposed to control when they are terminated? Why is there a separate program that controls the input/output functions of all other programs? And so on.
I don’t really want to get into every nuance of how TRON blows my mind with its illogic and incuriosity about the details of computer science. Suffice to say that the world itself only intermittently makes sense if you take it as a representation of actual technology. I could be way off base here (and please let me know if I am), but the world of TRON is a fantasy world dressed up in a circuit-spangled bodysuit.
I haven’t forgotten that when I was writing about STAR WARS (1977), I spent a lot of time arguing that fantasies can still be called science fiction so long as they look like science fiction. In the case of STAR WARS, this means that the robots and spaceships qualify it for sci-fi status, even though the mystical forces at work and the importance of “destiny” and the general lack of interest in actual science are strong marks against it. But robots and spaceships have been common features of science fiction movies since the early 1900s. George Lucas clearly wanted STAR WARS to look like a sci-fi flick, no matter what else was going on in the story and themes, and so he used easily recognizable visual shorthand. It’s sort of like how you only really need Monument Valley, a ten-gallon hat, and a hoss to make a western. It doesn’t matter what the story is about -- if you put it in the right setting with the right costumes and props, it’s going to look like a western even if it violates every traditional theme of the genre. (Exhibit A for the defense: there are actually a handful of “Soviet westerns”.)
But I’m not sure if bodysuits painted with glowing circuitry are any kind of recognizable visual shorthand for science fiction. It’s certainly shorthand for “computer stuff”, but is dressing magical computer men in circuit-inspired outfits really any different than giving Bacchus a crown of grape leaves and a double chin? TRON doesn’t want to look like a science fiction movie necessarily -- it just wants to look like a fantasy computer world.
I obviously don’t think that the makers of TRON really believe that computers are really run by little men inside them. But I also don’t think that the ancient Greeks honestly believed that the sun was a chariot driven across the sky. Myths were partly a way of “explaining” things that couldn’t really be fathomed by ancient people, but the stories were really ways of passing on shared ideals and culture. That’s why many myths are still affecting today, even in a post-Enlightenment world when we should all know better. The fact that a myth may have involved, say, Poseidon and Vulcan didn’t necessarily mean that it was supposed to be regarded as proto-scientific commentary on the ocean and volcanoes. Likewise, I don’t see the computery setting of TRON as suggesting that it has any kind of commentary on computers or computer science. It is concerned with intellectual property rights, which is pretty prescient, but there's nothing about the world inside the computer that makes it fundamentally different from the real world. The program world has jobs, religious faiths, government, military -- but these things aren't set up in any particularly computery way. They are just translations of human institutions into a computer setting.
Anyway, I’ve done much more complaining about TRON than I expected I would. I enjoyed it okay, though the story is really just a run-of-the-mill dystopian pastiche. It definitely had its moments -- the gladiatorial bits were probably my favorites, and I was impressed that some of the games that Jeff Bridges was forced to play actually look like they could be fun computer games. (In the case of the light cycles, I can attest that this is definitely true.) The special effects are neat, but the world they depict has no logical underpinnings. So everything feels flat and empty. And this is no FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966) where the characters go from lungs to heart to brain -- that is, to recognizable places that the audience might want to see. The only interesting "places" in TRON's computer world are an input/output tower and the nexus of the Master Control Program. But I don't know what an input/output tower is. Is it a program function? A piece of hardware? What keeps FANTASTIC VOYAGE interesting is that each destination depicts a real organ, and the nature of each results in distinct dangers and opportunities. In TRON, it all largely feels the same.
But look -- I’d be a hypocrite if I seriously asked you all to agree with me that TRON is a fantasy movie. It takes in place inside of a computer, and a computer is a science thing, so it’s science fiction -- no matter how else I might feel about it.
After being bilked out of some lucrative intellectual property by a corporate bigwig, programmer Jeff Bridges sneaks back into his old office to find evidence of the theft. But while hacking the mainframe in search of proof, the Master Control Program -- an all-knowing sentient program that runs the company’s entire computer system (and then some) -- uses an experimental ray gun to trap Bridges inside the computer system itself.
Once inside, Bridges finds himself in a weird dystopian world patrolled by the Master Control Program’s jackbooted goons. But rather than put Bridges to death outright, he is instead forced to compete in a series of gladiatorial games against the personifications of renegade programs who refuse to renounce their belief in “the users” or submit to the Master Control Program. After escaping from one such game, Bridges sets out with a couple of free-thinking programs (including a digital warrior named Tron who was written specifically for the task) to take down the Master Control Program.
Is it any good?
Somehow I’ve never seen TRON before, so I knew from the start of this project that I’d certainly have to watch it. I’m not sure if it exactly counts as a classic, but if you tell folks that you’ve spent two years watching practically every science fiction movie worth seeing, then they’re going to expect that you’ve seen TRON. (Note: This blog will likely take me two years to finish, but one thing I’ve learned in the process is that it would take far longer than two years for me to watch every science fiction movie worth seeing.)
I’m not even sure what exactly I thought TRON was about before I saw it. I really ought to have written a little summary of my expectations before hand, but the truth is that I didn’t really think too much about what I’d be getting myself into. I knew it starred Jeff Bridges, and I knew it took place inside a computer, and I knew it involved something called “light cycles”. (I only knew this last fact because, many years ago, I used to spend hours playing an addictive freeware game called Tron Light Cycles against my brothers.)
I’ve spent many of this blog’s entries arguing why such-and-such fantasy movie really ought to be considered science fiction at heart. (Look no further than last week’s DARK CRYSTAL entry for an example.) So it’s with some hesitation that I find myself about to say that TRON is really a fantasy movie at heart. It’s not just that the insides of the computer as imagined by TRON bear no resemblance to the actual workings of a computer. But the explanation for computers that the movie comes up with is so primitive and so benighted that it boggles my mind. Let me try to explain what I mean.
When faced with the need to explain what goes on inside computers, the movie TRON tells us that there are little people inside that make them work. Again, a second time -- according to TRON, there are thousands of little people inside your computer right now, without whom the computer would no longer function. There’s a little man who runs your word processor, and a little man who runs your spreadsheet, and a little man who runs your solitaire game. This is the same explanation that ignorant and unsophisticated peoples came up with when they were confronted with inexplicable natural forces. There’s a big man who makes the lightning, a big man who makes the tides, and a big man who makes the west wind. That was all very well and good before the scientific method was invented, but we’ve moved considerably past that point by now. If THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981) is a fantasy because it relies on Zeus and Hera and the rest of the gods to explain the workings of the natural world, then TRON is just as much a fantasy because it relies on little men to explain the workings of a calculating engine.
I understand that the world of TRON is meant to represent the virtual world of digital space -- that is, that the little men of the movie are not meant to be literally living inside the physical space of the computer. Instead, they are supposed to live in the computer’s memory, and everything we see is a fanciful representation of what’s going on in the memory. I get that. The problem is that this explanation doesn’t really make any logical sense either. Why would the virtual representation of a computer program have visible circuitry on its bodysuit? Why would they need to travel from point to point as if they were traversing physical space (something that happens in this movie A LOT)? What happens to the functions that the programs were supposed to control when they are terminated? Why is there a separate program that controls the input/output functions of all other programs? And so on.
I don’t really want to get into every nuance of how TRON blows my mind with its illogic and incuriosity about the details of computer science. Suffice to say that the world itself only intermittently makes sense if you take it as a representation of actual technology. I could be way off base here (and please let me know if I am), but the world of TRON is a fantasy world dressed up in a circuit-spangled bodysuit.
I haven’t forgotten that when I was writing about STAR WARS (1977), I spent a lot of time arguing that fantasies can still be called science fiction so long as they look like science fiction. In the case of STAR WARS, this means that the robots and spaceships qualify it for sci-fi status, even though the mystical forces at work and the importance of “destiny” and the general lack of interest in actual science are strong marks against it. But robots and spaceships have been common features of science fiction movies since the early 1900s. George Lucas clearly wanted STAR WARS to look like a sci-fi flick, no matter what else was going on in the story and themes, and so he used easily recognizable visual shorthand. It’s sort of like how you only really need Monument Valley, a ten-gallon hat, and a hoss to make a western. It doesn’t matter what the story is about -- if you put it in the right setting with the right costumes and props, it’s going to look like a western even if it violates every traditional theme of the genre. (Exhibit A for the defense: there are actually a handful of “Soviet westerns”.)
But I’m not sure if bodysuits painted with glowing circuitry are any kind of recognizable visual shorthand for science fiction. It’s certainly shorthand for “computer stuff”, but is dressing magical computer men in circuit-inspired outfits really any different than giving Bacchus a crown of grape leaves and a double chin? TRON doesn’t want to look like a science fiction movie necessarily -- it just wants to look like a fantasy computer world.
I obviously don’t think that the makers of TRON really believe that computers are really run by little men inside them. But I also don’t think that the ancient Greeks honestly believed that the sun was a chariot driven across the sky. Myths were partly a way of “explaining” things that couldn’t really be fathomed by ancient people, but the stories were really ways of passing on shared ideals and culture. That’s why many myths are still affecting today, even in a post-Enlightenment world when we should all know better. The fact that a myth may have involved, say, Poseidon and Vulcan didn’t necessarily mean that it was supposed to be regarded as proto-scientific commentary on the ocean and volcanoes. Likewise, I don’t see the computery setting of TRON as suggesting that it has any kind of commentary on computers or computer science. It is concerned with intellectual property rights, which is pretty prescient, but there's nothing about the world inside the computer that makes it fundamentally different from the real world. The program world has jobs, religious faiths, government, military -- but these things aren't set up in any particularly computery way. They are just translations of human institutions into a computer setting.
Anyway, I’ve done much more complaining about TRON than I expected I would. I enjoyed it okay, though the story is really just a run-of-the-mill dystopian pastiche. It definitely had its moments -- the gladiatorial bits were probably my favorites, and I was impressed that some of the games that Jeff Bridges was forced to play actually look like they could be fun computer games. (In the case of the light cycles, I can attest that this is definitely true.) The special effects are neat, but the world they depict has no logical underpinnings. So everything feels flat and empty. And this is no FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966) where the characters go from lungs to heart to brain -- that is, to recognizable places that the audience might want to see. The only interesting "places" in TRON's computer world are an input/output tower and the nexus of the Master Control Program. But I don't know what an input/output tower is. Is it a program function? A piece of hardware? What keeps FANTASTIC VOYAGE interesting is that each destination depicts a real organ, and the nature of each results in distinct dangers and opportunities. In TRON, it all largely feels the same.
But look -- I’d be a hypocrite if I seriously asked you all to agree with me that TRON is a fantasy movie. It takes in place inside of a computer, and a computer is a science thing, so it’s science fiction -- no matter how else I might feel about it.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
1982: THE DARK CRYSTAL
What’s it about?
On “another world”, the conjunction of three suns results in the appearance of a mysterious powerful crystal and two new races -- the cruel and vulture-like Skeksis and the peaceful Mystics. After a thousand years, both races are dying out, but the Skeksis have succeeded in taking control of the world. A prophecy predicts that a Gelfling (an elf-like creature) will be the downfall of the Skeksis, so they have eradicated practically all of the race.
As the wisest of the Mystics lies on his deathbed, he sends the last of the Gelflings (or so he thinks) on a quest to find a missing shard of the crystal, which is in some fashion the key to defeating the Skeksis. Though he succeeds in finding the shard, he doesn’t know what to do with it, and soon the Skeksis are hunting him with a variety of fearsome monsters. The Gelfling’s journey takes him to many strange places in the world, but there is limited time in which to fulfill the prophecy.
Is it any good?
I didn’t really expect to end up writing about THE DARK CRYSTAL when I started watching it. I’d never seen it before, but it always sounded like a straight-up fantasy story with elves and crystals and sorcerers. And superficially that’s exactly what it is. But one of the big differences between this movies and other fantasy movies like THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981) or the SINBAD movies or LABYRINTH is that THE DARK CRYSTAL takes place on a world with no humans. In many ways, it might as well be an alien planet.
Like FANTASTIC PLANET (1973) or many of the planets in the STAR WARS movies, the world of THE DARK CRYSTAL has its own alien ecosystem. It’s not necessarily fully developed, but it is full of lots of strange creatures that don’t really have any traditional fantasy analogs. Instead, the world seems to be the product of imagination run amok -- just like a good alien planet should be.
Of course, there are limits to imagination. The world of THE DARK CRYSTAL still has forests and swamps and deserts. It has animals and plants and fish. Most of the creatures, in fact, seem to be based more on Earth animals than anything else. But one result of that is to make the creatures seem more “real” -- or at least as real as Muppets can feel. There’s no real sense that the ecosystem of the world “evolved” in any natural way, but familiar plant and animal shapes do lend a veneer of naturalness to the world, even if things are twisted all out of shape. And it’s worth noting that nothing looks exactly like an Earth animal.
There’s also not a whole lot of magic in THE DARK CRYSTAL. The crystal itself has some ill-defined powers that affect the world and its inhabitants, and there is the prophecy. But otherwise, things proceed more or less without any outright fantasy. Even these elements have a bit of logic behind them. There’s an old crone who uses a complicated piece of machinery to assist in figuring out her prophecies, for instance. And the Skeksis likewise use mechanical devices to focus the power of the crystal. The magical elements, in other words, don’t operate outside the logic of the world. They are inexplicable forces -- but forces that obey some natural laws of science nonetheless.
The other reason I decided to write about THE DARK CRYSTAL is that it’s a movie starring puppets. Like LABYRINTH, this is a Jim Henson movie through and through. But unlike that one, THE DARK CRYSTAL has no human actors at all. Every character is a Muppet of some sort -- either a hand puppet, a marionette, or a full-body puppet suit. (And possibly other kinds of puppets I couldn’t identify.)
There aren’t that many movies that have casts made up entirely of puppets. In fact, the only others I’ve watched for this blog are THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO (1966) and JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN (1969), both of which were created by British puppeteers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. There may be a few others I missed -- there’s at least one other THUNDERBIRDS movie anyway -- but it’s just not a common way to make a movie. Of course, puppet effects for specific monsters are fairly common -- Mothra and her offspring in MOTHRA (1961), the alien in ALIEN (1979), Yoda in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1981), E.T. in E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982) and countless others -- but its very rare that a movie relies solely on puppets to generate sympathy and excitement.
One reason for this is pretty clear from THE DARK CRYSTAL -- there’s a limit to what puppets can do and to how realistic they can be. The pace of the action in this movie is always hampered by the constraints of getting puppets to hit each other. And the faces of the puppets are often stiff and unemotional. Even some of the creatures (like the landstriders) are cooler in concept than they are in execution, and even in a relatively dark movie like this there are still Muppet-ish bits of comical character design that creep in.
I’m not really complaining though. There are always trade-offs when you use any kind of surrogates for human actors -- whether it’s cartoon animation, stop-motion animation, animal performers, computer graphics, or puppets. There is definitely a lot of artistry and craft in the puppets of THE DARK CRYSTAL. Even though none of them look much like the traditional Muppets, it’s still always obvious that the characters were designed by Jim Henson’s shop. There’s a clear and consistent aesthetic that ties everything together.
In the end, THE DARK CRYSTAL is yet another movie that’s not really science fiction. But its world is certainly believably alien in a way that most sci-fi alien worlds aren’t. The alien qualities of the characters are less well developed -- we don’t really see enough of any of the races’ cultures to get a taste of that. And the story and character arcs are all very much standard issue fantasy fare. But since I can’t really think of any other sci-fi movies that are set entirely on alien planets with no human characters at all, THE DARK CRYSTAL is probably as close as I’ll get to talking about that kind of story in this blog.
On “another world”, the conjunction of three suns results in the appearance of a mysterious powerful crystal and two new races -- the cruel and vulture-like Skeksis and the peaceful Mystics. After a thousand years, both races are dying out, but the Skeksis have succeeded in taking control of the world. A prophecy predicts that a Gelfling (an elf-like creature) will be the downfall of the Skeksis, so they have eradicated practically all of the race.
As the wisest of the Mystics lies on his deathbed, he sends the last of the Gelflings (or so he thinks) on a quest to find a missing shard of the crystal, which is in some fashion the key to defeating the Skeksis. Though he succeeds in finding the shard, he doesn’t know what to do with it, and soon the Skeksis are hunting him with a variety of fearsome monsters. The Gelfling’s journey takes him to many strange places in the world, but there is limited time in which to fulfill the prophecy.
Is it any good?
I didn’t really expect to end up writing about THE DARK CRYSTAL when I started watching it. I’d never seen it before, but it always sounded like a straight-up fantasy story with elves and crystals and sorcerers. And superficially that’s exactly what it is. But one of the big differences between this movies and other fantasy movies like THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981) or the SINBAD movies or LABYRINTH is that THE DARK CRYSTAL takes place on a world with no humans. In many ways, it might as well be an alien planet.
Like FANTASTIC PLANET (1973) or many of the planets in the STAR WARS movies, the world of THE DARK CRYSTAL has its own alien ecosystem. It’s not necessarily fully developed, but it is full of lots of strange creatures that don’t really have any traditional fantasy analogs. Instead, the world seems to be the product of imagination run amok -- just like a good alien planet should be.
Of course, there are limits to imagination. The world of THE DARK CRYSTAL still has forests and swamps and deserts. It has animals and plants and fish. Most of the creatures, in fact, seem to be based more on Earth animals than anything else. But one result of that is to make the creatures seem more “real” -- or at least as real as Muppets can feel. There’s no real sense that the ecosystem of the world “evolved” in any natural way, but familiar plant and animal shapes do lend a veneer of naturalness to the world, even if things are twisted all out of shape. And it’s worth noting that nothing looks exactly like an Earth animal.
There’s also not a whole lot of magic in THE DARK CRYSTAL. The crystal itself has some ill-defined powers that affect the world and its inhabitants, and there is the prophecy. But otherwise, things proceed more or less without any outright fantasy. Even these elements have a bit of logic behind them. There’s an old crone who uses a complicated piece of machinery to assist in figuring out her prophecies, for instance. And the Skeksis likewise use mechanical devices to focus the power of the crystal. The magical elements, in other words, don’t operate outside the logic of the world. They are inexplicable forces -- but forces that obey some natural laws of science nonetheless.
The other reason I decided to write about THE DARK CRYSTAL is that it’s a movie starring puppets. Like LABYRINTH, this is a Jim Henson movie through and through. But unlike that one, THE DARK CRYSTAL has no human actors at all. Every character is a Muppet of some sort -- either a hand puppet, a marionette, or a full-body puppet suit. (And possibly other kinds of puppets I couldn’t identify.)
There aren’t that many movies that have casts made up entirely of puppets. In fact, the only others I’ve watched for this blog are THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO (1966) and JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN (1969), both of which were created by British puppeteers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. There may be a few others I missed -- there’s at least one other THUNDERBIRDS movie anyway -- but it’s just not a common way to make a movie. Of course, puppet effects for specific monsters are fairly common -- Mothra and her offspring in MOTHRA (1961), the alien in ALIEN (1979), Yoda in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1981), E.T. in E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982) and countless others -- but its very rare that a movie relies solely on puppets to generate sympathy and excitement.
One reason for this is pretty clear from THE DARK CRYSTAL -- there’s a limit to what puppets can do and to how realistic they can be. The pace of the action in this movie is always hampered by the constraints of getting puppets to hit each other. And the faces of the puppets are often stiff and unemotional. Even some of the creatures (like the landstriders) are cooler in concept than they are in execution, and even in a relatively dark movie like this there are still Muppet-ish bits of comical character design that creep in.
I’m not really complaining though. There are always trade-offs when you use any kind of surrogates for human actors -- whether it’s cartoon animation, stop-motion animation, animal performers, computer graphics, or puppets. There is definitely a lot of artistry and craft in the puppets of THE DARK CRYSTAL. Even though none of them look much like the traditional Muppets, it’s still always obvious that the characters were designed by Jim Henson’s shop. There’s a clear and consistent aesthetic that ties everything together.
In the end, THE DARK CRYSTAL is yet another movie that’s not really science fiction. But its world is certainly believably alien in a way that most sci-fi alien worlds aren’t. The alien qualities of the characters are less well developed -- we don’t really see enough of any of the races’ cultures to get a taste of that. And the story and character arcs are all very much standard issue fantasy fare. But since I can’t really think of any other sci-fi movies that are set entirely on alien planets with no human characters at all, THE DARK CRYSTAL is probably as close as I’ll get to talking about that kind of story in this blog.
Monday, March 8, 2010
1982: FORBIDDEN ZONE
What’s it about?
When Frenchy Hercules disappears through a door in her family home’s basement into the freakish Sixth Dimension, her young brother (played by an old vaudeville comedian) enlists their grandfather (a retired Jewish wrestler) to enter the portal and get her back. Meanwhile, Frenchy finds love with the King Fausto of the Sixth Dimension (played by Herve Villechaize).
But trouble arises when the jealous Queen Doris (played by Susan Tyrrell) gets word of her husband’s “peccadilloes”. Others soon find their way into the Sixth Dimension, and they encounter weirdos like a frog-headed butler, a constantly topless princess, and Satan himself (played by Danny Elfman). Numerous musical numbers featuring vintage big band recordings interrupt the proceedings with additional craziness.
Is it any good?
Heck if I know. I first saw this movie as an impressionable youngster while at a weeklong art camp at Miami University in Ohio. I was probably fifteen at the time, and I wandered over during a movie night to see what the college-aged camp counselors were watching. They had rented FORBIDDEN ZONE (and not for the first time, it seems). The movie left me confused, excited, and disturbed in equal measure -- but I admit primarily I was mesmerized by the constantly topless princess.
Like FANTASTIC PLANET (1973), this movie has continued to exist in my memory as a collage of strange, unconnected images. (Is it coincidence that they both prominently feature toplessness? Who can say?) Even though it’s practically impossible to defend it as science fiction (the journey to the Sixth Dimension is more THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS or THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE than it is, say, A WRINKLE IN TIME), I knew I would have to watch it again anyway just to see what it is really about. But even though I am less distracted now by naked breasts than I was as a teenager, I am still not sure I understand what it is really about.
A brief aside here. I watched this with my girlfriend, and we both agreed that the naked breasts in FORBIDDEN ZONE are incredibly distracting. It is impossible not to be entranced when they are onscreen -- the main difference between now and 1995 is that I didn’t spend the scenes without the breasts impatiently waiting for them to come back. But whenever they were there, it became very difficult to focus on anything else. In fact, the girlfriend believes that the quality of the breasts in the movie exceeds the quality of anything else it has to offer.
Something I didn’t know until after I watched FORBIDDEN ZONE again recently is that the movie was created primarily to capture on film some of the stage show of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. This is the band that evolved into Oingo Boingo in the early 1980s, but FORBIDDEN ZONE was a record of an earlier incarnation when they were a quasi-theatrical troupe obsessed with old songs and vaudeville acts. In some ways, it is exactly what I had hoped SPACE IS THE PLACE (1974) might be -- a document of an offbeat musical group. But Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist cosmic jazz is explicitly sci-fi in some ways, whereas The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo recontextualized historical curiosities into even weirder packages.
But like SPACE IS THE PLACE, the non-musical portions of FORBIDDEN ZONE dominate the movie, and that’s too bad. Some of the performers in the movie are members of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, and their imagination shines brightest when they are choreographing weird accompaniments to weird old songs. My favorite is a scene of absurd factory work set to “Pico and Sepulveda”. (Look up that song if you can -- it totally rules.) The scene includes a catchy curiosity from the 1940s, an amusing dance number, elements of both the distinctive production design and animation that pepper the movie, and an imaginative (and funny) interpretation of the song. It’s delightfully weird, but (unlike much of the movie) it doesn’t feel like it’s designed to be off-putting or bizarre for its own sake.
There are a few more moments like this in the movie, and it’s occasionally a trippy good time as a result of it. For example, there’s an otherwise totally unnecessary alphabet song inspired by the Three Stooges that still manages to incorporate some pretty cool early breakdancing. But too often, it’s more like weirdness without a point or weirdness that’s designed to offend. (There are some extremely uncomfortable blackface moments in FORBIDDEN ZONE, as well as several other ethnic caricatures, for instance.) It is clear that this movie is the product of a few imaginative folks who had nobody to tell them “no” -- and that is always kind of appealing, at least in theory. If I knew more about the kinds of things The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo were into in the late 1970s (like big band music, Max Fleischer cartoons, and vaudeville comedians), I would probably understand more of what they were trying to do. As it is, I can only make guesses -- and unless I want to do a lot of research, there’s no way for me to really find out whether their references are witty and well-informed, or if they are simply unnecessarily bizarre and occasionally offensive.
FORBIDDEN ZONE is also the kind of movie that couldn't exist without pop culture. It references almost entirely pop culture from the 1950s and earlier, but its still nonetheless very much what you might call a postmodern pastiche. A little bit of cabaret singing, a little bit of the Three Stooges, a little bit of greaser movies, a little bit of minstrel shows, a little bit of German expressionistic set design, and so on -- all mixed together in a chaotic stew.
Beyond the weirdness of the thing, FORBIDDEN ZONE is pretty impenetrable -- and I’m not even totally sure there is much to penetrate in the end. There is a plot of sort, but it’s not a very interesting one. (See the description above.) There are no actual characters -- just caricatures and stereotypes. Originally, the intention of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo was to present lost entertainments that were no longer being performed live -- in other words, to bring vaudeville and the cabarets to people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to experience them in a live setting. (And then to add a unique Oingo Boingo flair of weirdness.) FORBIDDEN ZONE isn’t a live performance, so it’s a valid question exactly what is the point of the movie. Why watch a recording of Danny Elfman singing a modified version of “Minnie the Moocher” when you could listen to a recording of Cab Calloway himself? If the references and songs were better curated -- if they were identified or explained in some way -- there might be a case for FORBIDDEN ZONE as an educational movie. But as it is, it’s a catalog of weird things that you will enjoy only so much as your sensibility is aligned with those of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.
Ultimately, FORBIDDEN ZONE is 73 minutes of your life that you will never get back. So whether it’s worth your time or not probably depends on how much you value 73 minutes of your life. It seems unlikely that most people would enjoy the entire movie -- though I have no doubt that those folks are out there. For me, I’d say there are ten or fifteen minutes of the movie that are a good time. Much of the rest is mostly just waiting for a funny joke, a neat bit of animation, a cool dance, or a catchy song, but there are also times when I got uncomfortable or annoyed. The movie’s too weird and unpredictable to ever be boring, but it’s also definitely not trying to be your friend. Look -- if you want to watch it, go ahead and watch it. If you’re not sure, skip it.
When Frenchy Hercules disappears through a door in her family home’s basement into the freakish Sixth Dimension, her young brother (played by an old vaudeville comedian) enlists their grandfather (a retired Jewish wrestler) to enter the portal and get her back. Meanwhile, Frenchy finds love with the King Fausto of the Sixth Dimension (played by Herve Villechaize).
But trouble arises when the jealous Queen Doris (played by Susan Tyrrell) gets word of her husband’s “peccadilloes”. Others soon find their way into the Sixth Dimension, and they encounter weirdos like a frog-headed butler, a constantly topless princess, and Satan himself (played by Danny Elfman). Numerous musical numbers featuring vintage big band recordings interrupt the proceedings with additional craziness.
Is it any good?
Heck if I know. I first saw this movie as an impressionable youngster while at a weeklong art camp at Miami University in Ohio. I was probably fifteen at the time, and I wandered over during a movie night to see what the college-aged camp counselors were watching. They had rented FORBIDDEN ZONE (and not for the first time, it seems). The movie left me confused, excited, and disturbed in equal measure -- but I admit primarily I was mesmerized by the constantly topless princess.
Like FANTASTIC PLANET (1973), this movie has continued to exist in my memory as a collage of strange, unconnected images. (Is it coincidence that they both prominently feature toplessness? Who can say?) Even though it’s practically impossible to defend it as science fiction (the journey to the Sixth Dimension is more THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS or THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE than it is, say, A WRINKLE IN TIME), I knew I would have to watch it again anyway just to see what it is really about. But even though I am less distracted now by naked breasts than I was as a teenager, I am still not sure I understand what it is really about.
A brief aside here. I watched this with my girlfriend, and we both agreed that the naked breasts in FORBIDDEN ZONE are incredibly distracting. It is impossible not to be entranced when they are onscreen -- the main difference between now and 1995 is that I didn’t spend the scenes without the breasts impatiently waiting for them to come back. But whenever they were there, it became very difficult to focus on anything else. In fact, the girlfriend believes that the quality of the breasts in the movie exceeds the quality of anything else it has to offer.
Something I didn’t know until after I watched FORBIDDEN ZONE again recently is that the movie was created primarily to capture on film some of the stage show of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. This is the band that evolved into Oingo Boingo in the early 1980s, but FORBIDDEN ZONE was a record of an earlier incarnation when they were a quasi-theatrical troupe obsessed with old songs and vaudeville acts. In some ways, it is exactly what I had hoped SPACE IS THE PLACE (1974) might be -- a document of an offbeat musical group. But Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist cosmic jazz is explicitly sci-fi in some ways, whereas The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo recontextualized historical curiosities into even weirder packages.
But like SPACE IS THE PLACE, the non-musical portions of FORBIDDEN ZONE dominate the movie, and that’s too bad. Some of the performers in the movie are members of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, and their imagination shines brightest when they are choreographing weird accompaniments to weird old songs. My favorite is a scene of absurd factory work set to “Pico and Sepulveda”. (Look up that song if you can -- it totally rules.) The scene includes a catchy curiosity from the 1940s, an amusing dance number, elements of both the distinctive production design and animation that pepper the movie, and an imaginative (and funny) interpretation of the song. It’s delightfully weird, but (unlike much of the movie) it doesn’t feel like it’s designed to be off-putting or bizarre for its own sake.
There are a few more moments like this in the movie, and it’s occasionally a trippy good time as a result of it. For example, there’s an otherwise totally unnecessary alphabet song inspired by the Three Stooges that still manages to incorporate some pretty cool early breakdancing. But too often, it’s more like weirdness without a point or weirdness that’s designed to offend. (There are some extremely uncomfortable blackface moments in FORBIDDEN ZONE, as well as several other ethnic caricatures, for instance.) It is clear that this movie is the product of a few imaginative folks who had nobody to tell them “no” -- and that is always kind of appealing, at least in theory. If I knew more about the kinds of things The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo were into in the late 1970s (like big band music, Max Fleischer cartoons, and vaudeville comedians), I would probably understand more of what they were trying to do. As it is, I can only make guesses -- and unless I want to do a lot of research, there’s no way for me to really find out whether their references are witty and well-informed, or if they are simply unnecessarily bizarre and occasionally offensive.
FORBIDDEN ZONE is also the kind of movie that couldn't exist without pop culture. It references almost entirely pop culture from the 1950s and earlier, but its still nonetheless very much what you might call a postmodern pastiche. A little bit of cabaret singing, a little bit of the Three Stooges, a little bit of greaser movies, a little bit of minstrel shows, a little bit of German expressionistic set design, and so on -- all mixed together in a chaotic stew.
Beyond the weirdness of the thing, FORBIDDEN ZONE is pretty impenetrable -- and I’m not even totally sure there is much to penetrate in the end. There is a plot of sort, but it’s not a very interesting one. (See the description above.) There are no actual characters -- just caricatures and stereotypes. Originally, the intention of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo was to present lost entertainments that were no longer being performed live -- in other words, to bring vaudeville and the cabarets to people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to experience them in a live setting. (And then to add a unique Oingo Boingo flair of weirdness.) FORBIDDEN ZONE isn’t a live performance, so it’s a valid question exactly what is the point of the movie. Why watch a recording of Danny Elfman singing a modified version of “Minnie the Moocher” when you could listen to a recording of Cab Calloway himself? If the references and songs were better curated -- if they were identified or explained in some way -- there might be a case for FORBIDDEN ZONE as an educational movie. But as it is, it’s a catalog of weird things that you will enjoy only so much as your sensibility is aligned with those of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.
Ultimately, FORBIDDEN ZONE is 73 minutes of your life that you will never get back. So whether it’s worth your time or not probably depends on how much you value 73 minutes of your life. It seems unlikely that most people would enjoy the entire movie -- though I have no doubt that those folks are out there. For me, I’d say there are ten or fifteen minutes of the movie that are a good time. Much of the rest is mostly just waiting for a funny joke, a neat bit of animation, a cool dance, or a catchy song, but there are also times when I got uncomfortable or annoyed. The movie’s too weird and unpredictable to ever be boring, but it’s also definitely not trying to be your friend. Look -- if you want to watch it, go ahead and watch it. If you’re not sure, skip it.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
1981: OUTLAND
What’s it about?
Two weeks after being assigned to a remote mining outpost on one of Saturn’s moons, space cop Sean Connery begins investigating a string of strange suicides when workers begin offing themselves in gruesome ways. Although there doesn’t seem to be any other explanation for the deaths, the outpost’s doctor soon reveals that the suicides (which everybody says are the kind of thing that “just happens” in deep space) have increased more than ten-fold over the past year.
When an experimental stimulant with deadly side effects turns up in the blood of one victim, Connery investigates the drug dealing underworld of the outpost. The trail leads him straight to the mine’s operator, Peter Boyle. But as Connery gets closer to the truth, his friends begin deserting him while Boyle calls in for reinforcements.
Is it any good?
I didn’t really expect to enjoy OUTLAND very much. Sean Connery is such a big superstar, that I figured any sci-fi movie where he played a space cop would be something I would have heard more about if it were even halfway enjoyable. I’m not really sure how to explain the lack of awareness around the movie since Wikipedia tells me that it’s been available on VHS and DVD for over ten years. But since OUTLAND is in fact at least halfway enjoyable, I can only conclude that this is a case of there being more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy, Horatio. It makes me wonder what else is out there that nobody has really talked about in ages.
I don’t want to oversell OUTLAND here -- it’s not exactly what I would call a lost gem. It does some of its broad strokes very well, but the details are often less than compelling. The relationship between Connery and most of the other characters -- his wife, the other marshals reporting to him, Peter Boyle’s mine boss -- are all pretty interesting. It’s repeatedly suggested that Connery has been given this assignment because he’s not really fit for any other duty. We never learn any details about his past to justify this, but we do get the sense that nobody thinks he’s that good of a cop.
In fact, Boyle’s drug smuggling operation relies heavily on the apathy or corruptibility of the marshals stationed at the mine. There are only a couple thousand people in the whole place, so secrets aren’t easy to keep. Boyle imports the stimulants to keep his workforce producing at maximum efficiency -- which nets him big bonuses from his bosses. The extravagant suicides (which mostly involve workers exposing themselves to the vacuum of space one way or another) are a side effect of the drug, and over the past year about sixty workers have taken their own lives as a result of the drug.
The other key to Boyle’s scheme is the willingness of his superiors to turn a blind eye to the shady source of his success. There’s a strong anti-corporate undercurrent in OUTLAND which is very similar to that in ALIEN (1979). Both movies imagine a future where labor and management are at odds with one another, and where management ultimately has the upper hand. Of course, once you’ve signed up for a tour of duty on a space freighter or a mine on a moon of Saturn, there’s not much you can do if you decide you’re getting a bum deal once you’re there. The reveal of the callousness of the corporation in OUTLAND didn’t make me nearly as queasy as the similar reveal in ALIEN, however. That’s probably because it’s impossible to imagine that anybody else besides the corporation is behind the mysterious deaths in OUTLAND right from the beginning. Connery thinks there’s something fishy going on from the start, and so immediately the corporation becomes the prime target of suspicion. In ALIEN, on the other hand, there's no reason to suspect the corporation is complicit until deep into the movie when the danger's been heightened significantly.
Once Connery gets on the scent, Boyle doesn’t do much to hide his guilt. Things quickly get violent as Boyle decides that the quickest way to solve the problem is just to eliminate the nosey marshal who isn’t playing along as expected. OUTLAND is often compared to HIGH NOON (1952), and this part of the movie is a big reason why. I was also reminded of 3:10 TO YUMA (1957), and I’m sure there are plenty of other westerns that would fit the pattern as well.
What happens is that Connery decides he won’t roll over. Instead, he’ll stand up to the corrupt powers simply because it's the only way to prove to himself that he's not the useless, cowardly cop everybody thinks he is. So he refuses to back down even when it becomes clear that nobody else will stand with him. The most blatant reference (homage? rip off?) to HIGH NOON comes when Boyle calls for a couple of enforcers to come down on the next supply shuttle. Connery then spends the next several scenes in front of a giant clock counting down the arrival of the shuttle. It’s impossible to think of anything else besides HIGH NOON during this part of the movie, but it’s also a relatively short sequence, so suggestions that OUTLAND is simply “HIGH NOON in space” don’t really ring true to me. It's more like a space mystery/conspiracy thriller with HIGH NOON shoved in the middle.
In any event, this sequence is also one of several that I didn’t totally buy. Connery is supposed to be the supreme legal authority at the mine -- or at least the top cop. (It’s unclear who performs judicial functions, if anybody.) Yet he’s somehow powerless to stop the arrival of a shuttle that he knows is bringing two assassins to kill him. Somebody has to have the authority to shut down the space docks -- if Connery can't use probable cause to petition for that, then who can? And even if the shuttle did end up landing, it should be a trivial exercise to deny the bad guys access to the mine. All of the other marshals are afraid to stand up to the incoming goons. But they know exactly where and when they will be arriving, so three or four guys with space shotguns should be more than enough to keep them pinned down in the shuttle airlock. Connery, however, doesn’t even try any tactics like that. He just sits back and waits for them to enter the mine.
Another thing -- when Connery is asking the workers for help against the arrival of the assassins, one of them turns him down by saying, “You’re supposed to protect us.” Yet Connery is the only marshal in the past year who has even cared about the dangerous drugs being fed to the workers. He’s not trying to take down Boyle just out of some sense of manly obligation to justice -- he’s also protecting the lives and health of all the workers. In HIGH NOON and 3:10 TO YUMA, the townspeople all tell Gary Cooper and Van Heflin that the they (the townspeople) don't have any stake in the fight. But in OUTLAND, the fight very much is the fight of the workers -- it’s Connery who doesn’t really have a stake in the game except professional duty.
I’m not going to go on listing all the little flaws of OUTLAND. I will say that the movie has a 12 year old’s notion of what happens to people when they enter low pressure environments without proper protection. (Spoiler alert: They explode and make a bloody mess.) These scenes alone should qualify OUTLAND for midnight movie status. There are also space prostitutes, improbable fights in pressure suits, some poorly placed rifle shots in sensitive environments, and one of the worst child actors I have ever seen.
Those are the details, though. As I said at the beginning of this post, the broad strokes are interesting. Translating HIGH NOON to outer space could definitely make sense, even if OUTLAND doesn’t fully get there. Connery’s marshal is a pretty neat character, and it doesn’t hurt that he taps in liberally to the tradition of western tough guys. Boyle’s drug pushing scheme is a little cartoonish for my tastes, but here again the overall conflict between productivity and safety is worth exploring.
Back when I was writing about THE BLACK HOLE (1979), I said that part of me wanted to see that movie re-made while the other part of me was sure that any re-make would only be a bigger plate of hash than the movie we already have. With OUTLAND, on the other hand, I think the prospects for a re-make are much brighter. It would have to be handled gently, but it should be easy enough to take the working skeleton of the movie, strip away the parts that haven’t aged well, and beef up the bits that are more interesting. And since very little in the movie is iconic -- except perhaps the wide-screen space helmet designs -- there shouldn’t be much temptation to include anything silly just because people will expect it. (Note: IMDb informs me that an OUTLAND re-make is in fact in some stage of pre-production, which doesn't mean much except that somebody else thinks it's worth another go.)
OUTLAND’s director, Peter Hyams, has never been one of my favorites. I didn’t look up his filmography before I watched this movie, but I have it in front of me now. It’s probably saying everything I need to say that my “favorite” of Peter Hyams’s movies until I watched OUTLAND was probably the Jean Claude van Damme movie TIMECOP (1994). He also directed the surprisingly boring CAPRICORN ONE (1978), in which three astronauts (James Brolin, Sam Watterson, and O.J. Simpson -- wrap your head around that casting if you can) are forced to fake a landing on Mars. In any event, I haven’t made it a habit of pointing out directors I don’t like, but I’m going to be hearing from Peter Hyams again when I watch 2010 (1984). Hopefully it’ll be another in the vein of OUTLAND, and not any of his numerous bad movies.
Two weeks after being assigned to a remote mining outpost on one of Saturn’s moons, space cop Sean Connery begins investigating a string of strange suicides when workers begin offing themselves in gruesome ways. Although there doesn’t seem to be any other explanation for the deaths, the outpost’s doctor soon reveals that the suicides (which everybody says are the kind of thing that “just happens” in deep space) have increased more than ten-fold over the past year.
When an experimental stimulant with deadly side effects turns up in the blood of one victim, Connery investigates the drug dealing underworld of the outpost. The trail leads him straight to the mine’s operator, Peter Boyle. But as Connery gets closer to the truth, his friends begin deserting him while Boyle calls in for reinforcements.
Is it any good?
I didn’t really expect to enjoy OUTLAND very much. Sean Connery is such a big superstar, that I figured any sci-fi movie where he played a space cop would be something I would have heard more about if it were even halfway enjoyable. I’m not really sure how to explain the lack of awareness around the movie since Wikipedia tells me that it’s been available on VHS and DVD for over ten years. But since OUTLAND is in fact at least halfway enjoyable, I can only conclude that this is a case of there being more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy, Horatio. It makes me wonder what else is out there that nobody has really talked about in ages.
I don’t want to oversell OUTLAND here -- it’s not exactly what I would call a lost gem. It does some of its broad strokes very well, but the details are often less than compelling. The relationship between Connery and most of the other characters -- his wife, the other marshals reporting to him, Peter Boyle’s mine boss -- are all pretty interesting. It’s repeatedly suggested that Connery has been given this assignment because he’s not really fit for any other duty. We never learn any details about his past to justify this, but we do get the sense that nobody thinks he’s that good of a cop.
In fact, Boyle’s drug smuggling operation relies heavily on the apathy or corruptibility of the marshals stationed at the mine. There are only a couple thousand people in the whole place, so secrets aren’t easy to keep. Boyle imports the stimulants to keep his workforce producing at maximum efficiency -- which nets him big bonuses from his bosses. The extravagant suicides (which mostly involve workers exposing themselves to the vacuum of space one way or another) are a side effect of the drug, and over the past year about sixty workers have taken their own lives as a result of the drug.
The other key to Boyle’s scheme is the willingness of his superiors to turn a blind eye to the shady source of his success. There’s a strong anti-corporate undercurrent in OUTLAND which is very similar to that in ALIEN (1979). Both movies imagine a future where labor and management are at odds with one another, and where management ultimately has the upper hand. Of course, once you’ve signed up for a tour of duty on a space freighter or a mine on a moon of Saturn, there’s not much you can do if you decide you’re getting a bum deal once you’re there. The reveal of the callousness of the corporation in OUTLAND didn’t make me nearly as queasy as the similar reveal in ALIEN, however. That’s probably because it’s impossible to imagine that anybody else besides the corporation is behind the mysterious deaths in OUTLAND right from the beginning. Connery thinks there’s something fishy going on from the start, and so immediately the corporation becomes the prime target of suspicion. In ALIEN, on the other hand, there's no reason to suspect the corporation is complicit until deep into the movie when the danger's been heightened significantly.
Once Connery gets on the scent, Boyle doesn’t do much to hide his guilt. Things quickly get violent as Boyle decides that the quickest way to solve the problem is just to eliminate the nosey marshal who isn’t playing along as expected. OUTLAND is often compared to HIGH NOON (1952), and this part of the movie is a big reason why. I was also reminded of 3:10 TO YUMA (1957), and I’m sure there are plenty of other westerns that would fit the pattern as well.
What happens is that Connery decides he won’t roll over. Instead, he’ll stand up to the corrupt powers simply because it's the only way to prove to himself that he's not the useless, cowardly cop everybody thinks he is. So he refuses to back down even when it becomes clear that nobody else will stand with him. The most blatant reference (homage? rip off?) to HIGH NOON comes when Boyle calls for a couple of enforcers to come down on the next supply shuttle. Connery then spends the next several scenes in front of a giant clock counting down the arrival of the shuttle. It’s impossible to think of anything else besides HIGH NOON during this part of the movie, but it’s also a relatively short sequence, so suggestions that OUTLAND is simply “HIGH NOON in space” don’t really ring true to me. It's more like a space mystery/conspiracy thriller with HIGH NOON shoved in the middle.
In any event, this sequence is also one of several that I didn’t totally buy. Connery is supposed to be the supreme legal authority at the mine -- or at least the top cop. (It’s unclear who performs judicial functions, if anybody.) Yet he’s somehow powerless to stop the arrival of a shuttle that he knows is bringing two assassins to kill him. Somebody has to have the authority to shut down the space docks -- if Connery can't use probable cause to petition for that, then who can? And even if the shuttle did end up landing, it should be a trivial exercise to deny the bad guys access to the mine. All of the other marshals are afraid to stand up to the incoming goons. But they know exactly where and when they will be arriving, so three or four guys with space shotguns should be more than enough to keep them pinned down in the shuttle airlock. Connery, however, doesn’t even try any tactics like that. He just sits back and waits for them to enter the mine.
Another thing -- when Connery is asking the workers for help against the arrival of the assassins, one of them turns him down by saying, “You’re supposed to protect us.” Yet Connery is the only marshal in the past year who has even cared about the dangerous drugs being fed to the workers. He’s not trying to take down Boyle just out of some sense of manly obligation to justice -- he’s also protecting the lives and health of all the workers. In HIGH NOON and 3:10 TO YUMA, the townspeople all tell Gary Cooper and Van Heflin that the they (the townspeople) don't have any stake in the fight. But in OUTLAND, the fight very much is the fight of the workers -- it’s Connery who doesn’t really have a stake in the game except professional duty.
I’m not going to go on listing all the little flaws of OUTLAND. I will say that the movie has a 12 year old’s notion of what happens to people when they enter low pressure environments without proper protection. (Spoiler alert: They explode and make a bloody mess.) These scenes alone should qualify OUTLAND for midnight movie status. There are also space prostitutes, improbable fights in pressure suits, some poorly placed rifle shots in sensitive environments, and one of the worst child actors I have ever seen.
Those are the details, though. As I said at the beginning of this post, the broad strokes are interesting. Translating HIGH NOON to outer space could definitely make sense, even if OUTLAND doesn’t fully get there. Connery’s marshal is a pretty neat character, and it doesn’t hurt that he taps in liberally to the tradition of western tough guys. Boyle’s drug pushing scheme is a little cartoonish for my tastes, but here again the overall conflict between productivity and safety is worth exploring.
Back when I was writing about THE BLACK HOLE (1979), I said that part of me wanted to see that movie re-made while the other part of me was sure that any re-make would only be a bigger plate of hash than the movie we already have. With OUTLAND, on the other hand, I think the prospects for a re-make are much brighter. It would have to be handled gently, but it should be easy enough to take the working skeleton of the movie, strip away the parts that haven’t aged well, and beef up the bits that are more interesting. And since very little in the movie is iconic -- except perhaps the wide-screen space helmet designs -- there shouldn’t be much temptation to include anything silly just because people will expect it. (Note: IMDb informs me that an OUTLAND re-make is in fact in some stage of pre-production, which doesn't mean much except that somebody else thinks it's worth another go.)
OUTLAND’s director, Peter Hyams, has never been one of my favorites. I didn’t look up his filmography before I watched this movie, but I have it in front of me now. It’s probably saying everything I need to say that my “favorite” of Peter Hyams’s movies until I watched OUTLAND was probably the Jean Claude van Damme movie TIMECOP (1994). He also directed the surprisingly boring CAPRICORN ONE (1978), in which three astronauts (James Brolin, Sam Watterson, and O.J. Simpson -- wrap your head around that casting if you can) are forced to fake a landing on Mars. In any event, I haven’t made it a habit of pointing out directors I don’t like, but I’m going to be hearing from Peter Hyams again when I watch 2010 (1984). Hopefully it’ll be another in the vein of OUTLAND, and not any of his numerous bad movies.
Monday, March 1, 2010
1981: DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS
What’s it about?
A farmer raising highly venomous (and carnivorous and mobile) plants called triffids is stung by one and almost blinded. On the day his bandages are due to come off, he wakes up in the hospital to find that everyone else has gone blind due to radiation from lights seen in the sky the night before. The farmer -- whose sight was protected by the bandages -- sets out looking for others who can still see as well.
As he wanders through England, the farmer encounters many people trying to cope with the new epidemic of blindness. Some are trying to help the blind population survive, while others are taking advantage of the situation for personal gain, and still others are trying to stockpile supplies to ride out the inevitable violence, fires and disease that will soon follow. Meanwhile, the triffids -- which had been raised for a precious chemical they produce -- escape their farms and begin terrorizing the countryside.
Is it any good?
This version of DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS is a six-episode BBC miniseries. There was also an earlier version, a theatrical feature in 1962 that is widely derided as cheesy and ridiculous. (I haven’t seen that one myself, so I can’t comment directly.) Both versions are of course based on John Wyndham’s novel of the same name, which is one of those modern classics of sci-fi that everybody has heard of but probably nobody has read. (John Wyndham also, incidentally, wrote a novel called THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS, which has been adapted into film more than once under the title VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED.)
Having never read the novel myself, I’d always thought that DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS was about some kind of alien plant invasion. But in fact the triffids are implied to be either the discovery or the invention of Soviet scientists. The miniseries gives a bit of history of the triffids -- they appeared throughout the world, starting in South America, and quickly became both curiosity and nuisance. Wild growths were contained by fire teams, and soon only a few specimens with their stingers removed remained in gardens. But then it was discovered that triffids produced a chemical that increased the efficiency of fuel by 30% -- and extensive commercial farming commenced.
The weird lights that blind the human population of Earth aren’t part of an alien attack either -- they’re simply a natural phenomenon that nobody has seen before. It’s an interesting twist in an old type of story. The triffids aren’t actually launching a coordinated attack. Rather, they’re taking advantage of a weakness at the top of the food chain to break out of captivity and become the dominant species. With most humans blinded, they can easily hunt down food and evade destruction, and soon the rural areas of England are overrun with deadly triffids.
In the end, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS really focuses far more on the blindness than it does on the triffids. The triffids are there mostly to provide evolutionary pressure on humans -- to underline the fact that an epidemic of blindness wouldn’t just result in man-made chaos. In addition, it would be a chance for the rest of the natural world to get an upper hand on mankind again.
But the blindness is also an opportunity for all kinds of amateur survivalists to reform the world in whatever way they think is right for the new circumstances. For much of the miniseries, the protagonists are shuttled from group to group (sometimes forcibly), each with a different objective. They start with an organization of mostly sighted people that’s preparing to flee the cities for the countryside, leaving the blind folks to fend for themselves while they save what they can of civilization. Next, they are kidnapped by a group that handcuffs them to a set of blind people, forcing them to look after them. After escaping that, they find a country estate being run as a Christian commune, and then set up their own small family home for a while until they are found out by a neo-feudal paramilitary organization that wants to set them up as lords in vassal to a central authority.
This is not necessarily the most realistic part of the movie, since every group they fall in with is curiously well organized. There hardly seem to be any sighted people who are just hiding out and trying to get by -- everyone seems to have an agenda and a plan to resurrect the world from the ashes. But realism is not always the greatest virtue in science fiction, and there is ample opportunity for reminders that civilization isn’t always a force for good. It took thousands of years for the cultural and governmental organs of the world to evolve to the state they’re in today -- and hardly anybody would say we’ve got a perfect system even now. DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS shows some of the imperfect systems that could rise and fail in the wake of a catastrophic blow to law and order. And if it does show them in a neat, compressed timeline -- oh well.
I realize that I haven’t said very much about triffids. As I mentioned earlier, that’s because the movie is really more about blindness than about killer plants. But there are killer plants. They mostly succeed in not being ridiculous, but mostly only because there’s relatively little seen of them. I’ve said it before -- plants aren’t really scary. Moving plants with venomous stingers are perhaps a bit scarier, but they are still just vegetables.
Overall, the special effects are decent and the acting is adequate. It’s obvious that this is a television miniseries and not a feature film. On the other hand, the script is very good, and there are a lot of ideas banging around to think about. In those respects, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS has a lot in common with PBS’s THE LATHE OF HEAVEN (1979) or with another BBC sci-fi miniseries, THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (1981). It’s smart sci-fi made by smart people, doing the best they can with limited means.
A farmer raising highly venomous (and carnivorous and mobile) plants called triffids is stung by one and almost blinded. On the day his bandages are due to come off, he wakes up in the hospital to find that everyone else has gone blind due to radiation from lights seen in the sky the night before. The farmer -- whose sight was protected by the bandages -- sets out looking for others who can still see as well.
As he wanders through England, the farmer encounters many people trying to cope with the new epidemic of blindness. Some are trying to help the blind population survive, while others are taking advantage of the situation for personal gain, and still others are trying to stockpile supplies to ride out the inevitable violence, fires and disease that will soon follow. Meanwhile, the triffids -- which had been raised for a precious chemical they produce -- escape their farms and begin terrorizing the countryside.
Is it any good?
This version of DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS is a six-episode BBC miniseries. There was also an earlier version, a theatrical feature in 1962 that is widely derided as cheesy and ridiculous. (I haven’t seen that one myself, so I can’t comment directly.) Both versions are of course based on John Wyndham’s novel of the same name, which is one of those modern classics of sci-fi that everybody has heard of but probably nobody has read. (John Wyndham also, incidentally, wrote a novel called THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS, which has been adapted into film more than once under the title VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED.)
Having never read the novel myself, I’d always thought that DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS was about some kind of alien plant invasion. But in fact the triffids are implied to be either the discovery or the invention of Soviet scientists. The miniseries gives a bit of history of the triffids -- they appeared throughout the world, starting in South America, and quickly became both curiosity and nuisance. Wild growths were contained by fire teams, and soon only a few specimens with their stingers removed remained in gardens. But then it was discovered that triffids produced a chemical that increased the efficiency of fuel by 30% -- and extensive commercial farming commenced.
The weird lights that blind the human population of Earth aren’t part of an alien attack either -- they’re simply a natural phenomenon that nobody has seen before. It’s an interesting twist in an old type of story. The triffids aren’t actually launching a coordinated attack. Rather, they’re taking advantage of a weakness at the top of the food chain to break out of captivity and become the dominant species. With most humans blinded, they can easily hunt down food and evade destruction, and soon the rural areas of England are overrun with deadly triffids.
In the end, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS really focuses far more on the blindness than it does on the triffids. The triffids are there mostly to provide evolutionary pressure on humans -- to underline the fact that an epidemic of blindness wouldn’t just result in man-made chaos. In addition, it would be a chance for the rest of the natural world to get an upper hand on mankind again.
But the blindness is also an opportunity for all kinds of amateur survivalists to reform the world in whatever way they think is right for the new circumstances. For much of the miniseries, the protagonists are shuttled from group to group (sometimes forcibly), each with a different objective. They start with an organization of mostly sighted people that’s preparing to flee the cities for the countryside, leaving the blind folks to fend for themselves while they save what they can of civilization. Next, they are kidnapped by a group that handcuffs them to a set of blind people, forcing them to look after them. After escaping that, they find a country estate being run as a Christian commune, and then set up their own small family home for a while until they are found out by a neo-feudal paramilitary organization that wants to set them up as lords in vassal to a central authority.
This is not necessarily the most realistic part of the movie, since every group they fall in with is curiously well organized. There hardly seem to be any sighted people who are just hiding out and trying to get by -- everyone seems to have an agenda and a plan to resurrect the world from the ashes. But realism is not always the greatest virtue in science fiction, and there is ample opportunity for reminders that civilization isn’t always a force for good. It took thousands of years for the cultural and governmental organs of the world to evolve to the state they’re in today -- and hardly anybody would say we’ve got a perfect system even now. DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS shows some of the imperfect systems that could rise and fail in the wake of a catastrophic blow to law and order. And if it does show them in a neat, compressed timeline -- oh well.
I realize that I haven’t said very much about triffids. As I mentioned earlier, that’s because the movie is really more about blindness than about killer plants. But there are killer plants. They mostly succeed in not being ridiculous, but mostly only because there’s relatively little seen of them. I’ve said it before -- plants aren’t really scary. Moving plants with venomous stingers are perhaps a bit scarier, but they are still just vegetables.
Overall, the special effects are decent and the acting is adequate. It’s obvious that this is a television miniseries and not a feature film. On the other hand, the script is very good, and there are a lot of ideas banging around to think about. In those respects, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS has a lot in common with PBS’s THE LATHE OF HEAVEN (1979) or with another BBC sci-fi miniseries, THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (1981). It’s smart sci-fi made by smart people, doing the best they can with limited means.
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