Attack of the Movies!

1984: 2010

2010-04-12T08:00:00.000-04:00

What’s it about?

Years after the disappearance of a space mission sent to investigate monolith transmissions to Jupiter, disgraced astrocrat Roy Scheider is approached by Soviets to help with a joint mission to figure out what happened. [If you don’t know what that means, go read the entry on 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). -- ed.] The joint mission launches amid growing political tensions between east and west back home, but the crew ultimately arrive at their destination in Jupiter -- though only after encountering an unexplained phenomenon on Europa’s surface that was either a static discharge or evidence of an intelligent being.

The team (including engineer John Lithgow, computer scientist Bob Balaban, and Soviet commander Helen Mirren) investigates the derelict ship and reactivates the computer HAL-9000. In studying HAL’s orders, they identify (and attempt to correct) the problem that caused the computer to become homicidal on its last mission. Things get strange, however, when they turn their attention to the monolith orbiting Jupiter, and soon they find themselves relying on HAL to save them all from possible destruction.

Is it any good?

I didn’t have a lot of kind words for director Peter Hyams when I wrote about OUTLAND (1981) a little while ago -- though I should reiterate that I thought that movie was perfectly serviceable. 2010, however, is more than serviceable. In fact, I would say that it’s downright good, and I’m willing to confer on it the “lost gem” status that I pointedly withheld from OUTLAND. So long as it actually qualifies for the “lost” part, that is, which is not an easy thing to figure out.

I’ve always been aware of the existence of 2010 (or, as it’s sometimes called, 2010: THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT). Or at least I’ve been aware of it for almost as long as I’ve been aware of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). They occupied consecutive spots on the few shelves devoted to science fiction movies in the video store of my youth. (I trust we are still some years away form having to explain what a video store is.) But although I eventually succumbed to the sense of cinematic obligation and rented 2001, I never bothered to watch 2010. Looking back, it’s amazing to me how many science fiction movies I left unwatched on that video store shelf.

Of course, in those days, my video rentals were often selected based on how likely they were to contain female nudity while (just as importantly) still providing some veneer of respectability. A story set in outer space certainly provided the necessary respectability, but it didn’t seem to offer a lot of opportunities for a glimpse under the spacesuits. And so, 2010 never made the cut.

But back to the movie at hand. 2010 makes absolutely no attempt to copy the structure or pacing or overall feeling of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. This is an excellent decision, in my opinion. For one thing, 2001 had already been copied and mimicked to death in the intervening sixteen years -- often with not much success. With a sequel, any comparisons would only be scrutinized all the more closely, and Peter Hyams is no Stanley Kubrick. I am not a big fan of Kubrick, to be honest, but at least Kubrick comes by his schtick honestly.

For another thing, 1984 was not the same year as 1968. When 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY was released, its only real competition for sci-fi spectacle came from FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966), BARBARELLA (1968), and PLANET OF THE APES (1968). By the time 2010 was released, science fiction spectaculars had proliferated exponentially. This was a post-SOYLENT GREEN (1973), post-LOGAN’S RUN (1976), post-STAR WARS (1977), post-SUPERMAN (1978), post-ALIEN (1979), post-THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981), post-BLADE RUNNER (1982) world. (Not to mention the many also-rans, imitators, and sequels.) Space stations cartwheeling to the strains of “The Blue Danube” would seem quaint instead of revolutionary. Just ask Robert Wise, the director of STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE (1979) -- a movie which did in fact attempt to duplicate Kubrick’s methodical pacing, detailed spaceship miniatures, and tripped-out light-show ending. Much as I enjoyed that movie, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d seen it all before.

So 2010 sidesteps this problem by not trying to copy Kubrick and also by not trying to be revolutionary in its own way. Where Kubrick’s movie starts with a wordless, nearly incomprehensible twenty minutes of ape-men cavorting about in the desert, Hyams instead begins with a very detailed summary of the main points of the last movie in the form of an official report. And where Kubrick cut from one seemingly unconnected vignette to another with no explanation whatsoever, Hyams provides unnecessary narration from Roy Scheider to ease us from one perfectly traditional scene to another. And while Kubrick pointedly leaves us to puzzle about the meaning and purpose of the monoliths in his movie, Hyams’s exists almost entirely to explain them.

Now I have no idea how much of either movie comes from Arthur C. Clarke’s novels. It may be that the books are as different as the movies are in style and structure and clarity. But as far as the movies go, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY strikes me a bit like Frank Stockton’s short story “The Lady or the Tiger?” -- not only are the ambiguity and lack of resolution (in this case around the monolith) important to the story, they are in fact the entire point of the story. I suppose this may not be true of everybody, but practically all of my thoughts about 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY are framed in the context of trying to figure out what the monoliths mean. So in one way, 2010 is a bit like the sequel to the story that guilelessly blurts out, “Oh it was the tiger all along.”

But I’m going to suggest thinking about 2010 in a different way -- that is, not as a sequel to 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY but instead as a possible interpretation of it. For me, the certainty of the second movie doesn’t detract from the ambiguity of the first -- the explanation it puts forth is just one possible theory as far as I’m concerned. And, in fact, by giving a specific function to the monoliths, 2010 makes it impossible to just think of them as symbols anymore. Instead, they become tools of some sort, and this reality raises a whole host of seemingly insurmountable logistical questions. (First on the list: Who is using these tools?)

Don’t forget -- I really liked 2010. Once I decided that it wasn’t necessarily a canonical continuation of Kubrick’s movie, I started to appreciate the way it revived certain elements from the first movie. There’s the derelict spaceship with the homicidal computer on board, the giant and mysterious monolith floating in space, and Keir Dullea’s missing astronaut. All of these things get deployed in fairly interesting ways. Some moments of real tension come out of it too -- for instance, one scene when the investigators scan the craters of Europa for the source of a strange reading as they fly by is especially suspenseful. There’s also a moment-of-truth showdown between HAL-9000 and the man who designed him towards the end of the movie that’s very exciting, but in a different way from the man vs. computer sparring of the first movie. In 2010, HAL-9000 is just as much a victim of violence as it is a perpetrator. And though I didn’t like everything about the ultimate “explanation” for HAL’s freak-out in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, I did like how it brought HAL back into the story in a different capacity than homicidal computer protecting the mission.

One of the elements of 2010 that possibly helped exile it to the dusty back drawers of sci-fi movie history is the central position that the Cold War takes in the story. The movie opens with a Soviet scientist pitching the idea of a joint mission to a very skeptical Roy Scheider. The idea only wins out because there is really no other alternative. The Soviets will get there first because their salvage ship is closer to launch -- but they don’t have the data or know-how to make any sense of what may have happened unless they take some American experts along. And so most of the movie is actually set on a Soviet spaceship under Soviet command -- but with three American passengers in the forms of Scheider, John Lithgow, and Bob Balaban.

The Cold War also heats up into a hot war while the mission is in progress, which results in absurd orders from Washington and Moscow that the astronauts and cosmonauts must segregate themselves on the salvaged American ship and the Soviet rescue ship, respectively. There’s never really any sense that the scientists are going to start a space war. But they do obey the orders to split up, and so all of their research into the monolith is brought to a halt at a critical moment. It’s kind of a neat way to illustrate some of the less obvious casualties of east-west hostilities, but it’s also an anachronism. It’s 2010 today, and somehow even though I’m not bothered by the fact that we are not actually making manned expeditions to Jupiter these days, it still strikes me as quaint that anybody thought that the Soviet Union would still be around.

On the other hand, it’s refreshing and prescient how nobody regards Helen Mirren’s female mission commander as anything unusual or even worthy of comment. Sally Ride had only just become the first American woman in space in 1983 -- though of course the Soviets had already sent up two women cosmonauts in 1963 and 1982. But female commanders are not very common in sci-fi movies. The only earlier example I can think of appears in the East German IN THE DUST OF THE STARS (1976). So in film -- just as in real life -- the Soviet bloc led the way in equal opportunities for women. Well, unless you count BARBARELLA (1968), I suppose.

1984: NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND

2010-04-08T08:00:00.000-04:00

What’s it about?

Long after the fall of industrialized society in a destructive war, the remnants of humanity live in small colonies scattered throughout a world of wilderness. Much of the globe is also threatened by the advance of “the Sea of Decay” -- an expanse of toxic plants that blankets any area it can get its spores into. In this world, the people of the Valley of the Wind live in relative harmony with nature -- burning away the deadly spores when they come too close to their village, but also respecting and protecting the giant (and easily enraged) insects that live in the Sea of Decay.

But one day, an airship from the militaristic Tolmekian people crashes in the Valley of the Wind. The ship’s cargo is a “giant warrior” -- an ancient weapon of unbelievable power that the Tolmekians are hoping to use to destroy the Sea of Decay. Armies soon arrive to subjugate the Valley of the Wind and retrieve the giant warrior. But when Princess Nausicaa -- an inhabitant of the Valley of the Wind who has a special connection with nature -- discovers that the Sea of Decay has a place in the natural order, it becomes clear that the giant warrior must be destroyed.

Is it any good?

It’s probably time that I stop pretending that I don’t like cartoons. I’ve watched a bunch so far -- FANTASTIC PLANET (1973), WIZARDS (1977), HEAVY METAL (1981), THE PLAGUE DOGS (1982), THE SECRET OF NIMH (1982), and now NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND -- and you would think by now that I’d be able to point to one and say, “Yeah, see, this is an example of why I don’t like animated movies.”

Maybe I’m just picking really good cartoons, though it’s not like there are a bunch of animated sci-fi movies I’ve been passing up. But so far the biggest complaint I have about the animated nature of the movies is that HEAVY METAL too often fritters away its artistic potential on big breasts and geysers of blood. In fact, back when I was writing about HEAVY METAL, I suggested that the problem with cartoons is that a world where anything is possible is also a world where it’s very difficult to invoke real emotions -- real awe, real sympathy, real terror.

I still think that criticism holds true of HEAVY METAL, which is the least imaginative and least skillfully executed of the cartoons I’ve watched so far. (In general, I mean. HEAVY METAL does have its moments too.) But I was a bit hasty in applying that comment to animated movies in general. What I didn’t count on is that the limitless possibilities of animation -- when combined with imagination and skill -- can hit emotional notes with images that are impossible to create in the real world.

NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND is probably the best of the animated movies I’ve ever seen, so it’s possible that I’m letting the pendulum swing too far in the other direction now. After all, NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND is a pretty great movie in almost every respect -- not just the artistry of the visuals. It’s probably not even fair to focus on how nice it looks, since that wasn’t even the part that I enjoyed most. But it does look really awesome, and practically every new image -- from the monstrous insects to the Tolmekian airships to the giant warrior itself -- is crafted for the maximum impact. I’ve said before that none of the animated movies I’ve watched would be better if they had been filmed in live action instead. That’s doubly true of NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND.

I also really liked the story and the world of the movie. The action takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, long after a world-wasting cataclysm. Much of the world -- like the Valley of the Wind, for instance -- looks peaceful and idyllic, but characters talk about the toxic elements that still infect the soil and water. Presumably these are the remnants of industrial waste or nuclear radiation that are still polluting the earth generations later.

It’s not really clear what the effect of this pollution is -- trees and other plants still grow, people seem healthy, the world generally looks like a nice place to live. But it turns out that the Sea of Decay (really a forest) is a sprawling organic filter for these toxins. The reasons the plants in the Sea of Decay are deadly to people is that the toxins present in the topsoil and surface water are concentrated and accumulated in them -- a plant from the Sea of Decay raised on clean soil and pure water is as harmless as a daisy.

There’s some mumbo-jumbo about how the Earth created the Sea of Decay to cleanse itself of humanity’s pollution -- I could have done without that part. But I did really like what this revelation did for the central conflict of the movie. Throughout the first half of the flick, the Sea of Decay seems like a source of pollution itself -- a riotous overgrowth of toxic plant life that brings death and decay everywhere it goes, and which is expanding faster than the few human survivors can contain it. But if the Sea of Decay is actually a natural and necessary adaptation to the pollution that already exists, then it doesn’t seem so smart to destroy it then. It puts the environmentalist’s favorite choice into stark relief: either doom the planet for the convenience of mankind, or let mankind perish to preserve the planet.

I think I would have expected these kind of environmentalist themes to be more prevalent in science fiction movies, but now that I’m thinking about it I can’t really come up with many precursors to NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND in this respect. There are certainly movies that feature future Earths that have suffered some kind of unspecified environmental catastrophe -- like the desert world of A BOY AND HIS DOG (1975) or the ice world of QUINTET (1979). But the only movies I can think of that have specific pro-nature or anti-technology agendas prior to 1984 are SILENT RUNNING (1972) and WIZARDS (1977). There are, of course, many other sci-fi movies that caution against advances in science and technology -- but overwhelmingly those warnings are on behalf of mankind, not on behalf of a bunch of trees and pixies.

But NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND is unabashedly environmentalist in its sympathies and messages. I don’t really mind that since sci-fi partly exists to give shape to otherwise abstract fears. Environmental collapse is a possible danger we may have to face -- no different than the Communist invasions and out-of-control computers and overpopulated cities that science fiction helped us grapple with in earlier decades.

If you take the “prophecies” of these movies seriously, they start to be a bit much. But science fiction is a haven for hysteria -- partly because it makes for good stories, and partly because it’s actually comforting in the end. Despite the anti-science bent of so many sci-fi flicks, mankind usually wins out in the end -- and we win out over the most extreme and most unlikely versions of our fears. After all, Godzilla doesn’t show up in Tokyo and instigate a statistically significant rise in annual cases of skin cancer. No, he levels the whole city. (I know I’m mixing metaphors here, but you see what I mean.) If we can deal with Godzilla levels of carnage and destruction in our fantasies, then surely we can deal with our own messes in the real world. Of course, it remains to be seen whether that’s actually true or not -- but at least that’s what sci-fi seems to be telling us with all of its happy endings to gloomy situations.

1984: DUNE

2010-04-05T08:00:00.000-04:00

What’s it about?

In the galactic empire, the most precious substance known to man is “the spice”. The spice is a substance found only on one planet in the universe -- Arrakis, or Dune -- and has all sorts of recreational and commercial applications when taken as a drug. Chief among these is its use in making possible instantaneous interstellar travel by allowing a secretive guild of navigators to “fold” space itself. Control of the planet Arrakis is therefore extremely important to many powerful interests in the galaxy, so when the emperor starts using the planet as bait to incite factions in the empire to fight, he finds himself closely watched by others.

One of the factions being drawn into conflict by the emperor is House Atreides, the heir of which seems to possess some unusual powers. His mother disobeyed orders from a secret society when she bore him, and now it seems possible that he is the fabled Kwisatz Haderach -- a powerful being that will allow its controllers to rise to power. But as the son arrives on Arrakis with his faction, it also seems that he might fulfill a long-standing prophecy to free the planet from foreign control.

Is it any good?

Most science fiction movies take place in a setting that is somehow derived from the world we live in today. It makes sense -- it’s easier to relate to what’s going on if there’s at least some connection to the world that we know. For example, STAR TREK’s Federation of Planets -- for all its galaxy-spanning reach -- is still headquartered in a futuristic (but recognizable) San Francisco, with an intact Golden Gate Bridge and all.

There are a few cases of course where sci-fi movies take place in exotic worlds that have nothing to do with Earth at all. Many of the early examples -- like FLIGHT TO MARS (1951), THE SILENT STAR (1960), THE PHANTOM PLANET (1961), or ROBINSON CRUSOE ON MARS (1964) -- put Earthmen on other planets in our own solar system. The adventures they have while there don’t have a whole lot to do with their home planet, but there is always the yearning to go home. And, of course, the entire movie is filtered through the eyes of characters who are just as much strangers in these worlds as the audience is.

Perhaps the culmination of this is DOCTOR WHO AND THE DALEKS (1965), in which Peter Cushing’s doctor travels to a distant alien planet with several young companions. (Note: In the movie’s version of the Doctor Who mythos, the good doctor is actually a human inventor and not an alien Time Lord.) The doctor and his companions become spectators to and eventually participants in a conflict between two alien races. And since they traveled to the planet using the T.A.R.D.I.S., there’s no discernable connection between the planet they arrive at and Earth.

Some years later, IN THE DUST OF THE STARS (1976), STAR WARS (1977), and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (1978) dispensed with any need to have human characters at all and even with any mention of Earth (except, in the case of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, in mythological contexts). Naturally many of the characters still looked like humans -- they had to be played by human actors, after all -- but finally these were science fiction movies that seemed to take place in universes where Earth may not even exist and where its existence is often utterly irrelevant.

DUNE is another such movie, and even more than the others I’ve mentioned it seems to owe a debt to the universe of Isaac Asimov’s FOUNDATION novels. As in Asimov’s novels, the planets of DUNE are all populated by human-like beings who belong to the same species. There aren’t any aliens to speak of -- just planets with wildly divergent customs, cultures, histories, politics, and manners. It’s unclear in the movie how all these people got where they are -- particularly the folks who ended up on decidedly inhospitable planets like Arrakis -- but planets in DUNE are roughly analogous to nations or cultures on Earth.

This is a pretty cool way to populate a universe, in my opinion. I almost always feel a little embarrassed for writers or directors when they try to think up truly alien species with alien cultures, alien anatomies, and alien environments. Either they end up being humans with facial prosthetics and exaggerated philosophies (like Klingons and Vulcans) or -- well, to be honest, I’m having a hard time even thinking of a good example of a truly alien culture in any science fiction movie. By that, I mean a culture that could never evolve in humans because of anatomical or environmental limitations. The Borg from STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION might be one example, or the Cylons from the new version of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA -- in both cases, the mechanical nature of the races means that individuality has far less opportunity to assert itself.

(Also, I have nothing against Klingons and Vulcans. I love Klingons and Vulcans. But Klingons and Vulcans aren’t truly alien -- they are just extreme extensions of existing human philosophies. Which is not to say that there’s anything inherently virtuous about movie aliens being “truly alien”. It all depends on how the aliens -- whether they are familiar or not -- are handled and presented.)

But look, this is all a digression. My only point was that DUNE is populated entirely by humans with widely divergent cultures, rather than different alien species. And that is a decision that I like and respect. Now, I need to make another short digression here. The navigators in DUNE certainly look like they are aliens -- they float around inside glass tanks with bloated bulbous bodies, stick-like arms, and horrifying facial features. Yet, my understanding from the movie is that they are not actually aliens, but are mutated humans who have been taking the spice so long that it has changed their very anatomy into something else entirely. However, I could be completely wrong on this point, as it’s not really explained in detail in the movie.

I’ve never read any of the DUNE books and didn’t really know anything about the story except that it concerned spice and sandworms. And Sting. But besides that, I went into the movie with no understanding of the story or world. It surprised me in two ways -- first, the sheer amount of raw explaining that was needed to simply set up the story. (Take a look at my summary -- it’s mostly a dump of underlying political conditions that make the conflict possible. The beginning of the movie is a lot like that too.) But the second thing that surprised me was how rarely I was bored with it all. The political situation is pretty interesting once you get a handle on it, and it’s usually clear which characters are on which side. And it’s not just A vs. B. There are like five or six different sides all with their own objectives and ambitions. The very beginning of FLASH GORDON (1980) is a little bit like this too -- but DUNE is orders of magnitude more layered and more satisfying. So if you’re into politics and intrigue, this is probably the movie for you.

On the other hand, DUNE ultimately feels like a summary of a movie. There’s just so much stuff to get through that the characters often get shafted. There are lots of minor characters who I thought it would be interesting to hear more about, but at most they get one or two scenes, which is only enough for a hint at what’s going on with them. And even a lot of those scenes were cut from the theatrical version by director David Lynch. There is a three hour cut of the movie that restores a lot of that footage, but I watched the theatrical two-hour cut since that’s the one that Lynch seems to prefer. (He had his name taken off the longer version.) But judging from the deleted scenes that I watched, there’s a lot more tying up of loose ends and closing of minor character arcs in the longer version, which is something I would have liked to have seen more of.

And how did a weirdo like David Lynch end up directing a studio movie like DUNE anyway? His first full-length film, ERASERHEAD (1977), got him lots of attention from other directors who appreciated his avant garde style and distinctive voice. From there, he was given THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980), which was a massive critical success and earned Lynch several Academy Award nominations. George Lucas then approached Lynch to direct RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983), but Lynch feared that he wouldn’t have the level of freedom he wanted so he turned it down. But he took up Dino De Laurentiis’s offer to direct a STAR WARS-like sci-fi epic (DUNE) in exchange for the chance to follow it up with any movie of Lynch’s choice. After DUNE was completed, Lynch took the opportunity to make BLUE VELVET (1986) and he has never really come back to anything resembling normality since then.

Despite the exotic costumes and make-up and sets, DUNE is a fairly traditional (though dense) story. It was apparently not much of a success on its initial release, and I’m not sure that anybody considers it a classic these days. I liked it pretty well, but I do think it would have played much better as a miniseries -- or even as a whole season’s worth of television. Like I said, I’ve never read the book, so maybe it’s not as interesting as it seems when you really start delving into all the things that the movie only touches on. And it would be pretty frustrating to have to wait hours and hours until you get a glimpse of a sandworm. (By the way, this movie has giant sandworms, and they are pretty sweet.)

In the end, DUNE mostly makes me more curious about the book. I can’t say it makes me want to read it, since it does have me a little scared that’ll it be too dense and full of exposition to be truly enjoyable. But it at least has me wondering what else there is to know that didn’t make it on to the screen. Oh yeah, also, this movie has Sting, Patrick Stewart, and Dean Stockwell in small (but key) roles. And its score was composed by the rock group Toto, best known for its 1982 hits “Rosanna” and “Africa”. So those are some other things about this movie that you might want to know.

1983: WARGAMES

2010-03-29T08:00:00.000-04:00

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.

1983: VIDEODROME

2010-03-25T08:00:00.001-04:00

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.

1983: BORN IN FLAMES

2010-03-22T08:00:00.000-04:00

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.

1982: THE PLAGUE DOGS

2010-03-18T08:00:00.000-04:00

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.

1982: TRON

2010-03-15T08:00:00.001-04:00

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.

1982: THE DARK CRYSTAL

2010-03-11T08:00:00.000-05:00

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.

1982: FORBIDDEN ZONE

2010-03-08T08:00:00.002-05:00

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.

1981: OUTLAND

2010-03-04T08:00:00.001-05:00

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.

1981: DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS

2010-03-01T08:00:00.000-05:00

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.

1981: THE ROAD WARRIOR

2010-02-25T08:00:00.000-05:00

What’s it about?

Mel Gibson is a drifter in a brutal post-apocalyptic Australia where transportation equals survival. He gets a tip from another drifter about a source of limitless gasoline -- a settlement with a working oil well. (And apparently an on-site refinery?) When he arrives, he finds it already under siege by a gang of sadistic marauders.

Gibson manages to get himself taken prisoner by the settlers, who he learns want to haul away the vast quantities of gas they’ve stored up to a place on the coast where they expect to find civilization. He cuts them a deal -- he’ll find a rig big enough to escape with their tanker in exchange for his freedom, his car, and all the fuel he can carry. But after Gibson fulfills his part of the bargain, circumstances cause him to stick around to help out with the escape as well.

Is it any good?

THE ROAD WARRIOR is a rare kind of sequel -- one that’s not only better than its predecessor, but also more distinctive and memorable. In fact, if you’ve never seen the movies, then most of what you think you know about MAD MAX (1979) is probably actually from THE ROAD WARRIOR.

MAD MAX is one of those classic science fiction movies that I watched as a teenager and didn’t really like very much. There are a lot of these, but unlike many of the others my opinion of MAD MAX hasn’t changed very much in the intervening decade. One problem I have with the movie is that it’s really barely science fiction at all. It takes place in a future Australia where the crime rate is high and the cops are consequently pretty brutal. But that’s about the extent of the speculation. Some folks refer to the world of MAD MAX as “dystopian”, but I honestly don’t think we see enough of it to make that kind of judgment. In fact, one of the few moments of cultural or political import is the release of a criminal by the cops because of a due process violation. That hardly seems dystopian to me.

Dystopian or not, one thing that MAD MAX clearly isn’t is post-apocalyptic. The movie’s version of Australia doesn’t look like the nicest or most luxurious place to live, but society seems to be largely intact and there’s no hint that any extraordinary disasters have ravaged the planet. But some time between the end of MAD MAX and the beginning of THE ROAD WARRIOR, some global cataclysm does occur.

In some ways, the change is bizarre -- Mel Gibson’s character seems to have walked out of one movie and into the next without being affected by whatever wars and famines have been raging around him. In other ways, the change makes sense -- the devastation of the outside world is a melodramatic echo of Gibson’s own feelings at the end of MAD MAX. But the change makes all the difference to the two movies (along with a huge increase in budget and a tighter story that relies far less on the idea of justifiable homicide).

MAD MAX is a revenge story -- sort of. I say “sort of” because only the last twenty minutes of the movie are about the revenge part. Up to that point, it’s a series of increasingly nasty standoffs between Mel Gibson’s police officer and a gang of lawless thugs. After a lot of dancing around, the thugs eventually commit the biggest error a movie character can commit -- they mess with Mel Gibson’s family.

I’m not really a big fan of revenge movies since nobody really ever wins. Even if you believe in the concept of justifiable homicide (and I don’t), killing off all the bad guys doesn’t really fix anything. Usually that’s partly the point of such movies, but MAD MAX doesn’t really seem too interested in examining anybody’s motives or the consequences of their actions. Like in old westerns, there’s a sense that even though the bloodshed achieves nothing, it’s necessary nonetheless to get “justice”. Frankly, the whole movie is just kind of a bummer.

THE ROAD WARRIOR, on the other hand, has an almost redemptive story. Gibson’s Max starts out the movie the same way he ended MAD MAX -- grim, friendless, hopeless, and alone. (Though he does pick up a dog somewhere.) His interactions with the settlers are not exactly groundbreaking -- he acts the same predictable way as hundreds of fictional mercenaries-with-a-conscience have before him -- but at least the arc allows for some character growth. It’s true that he doesn’t agree to help the settlers escape until after his car’s been wrecked and his dog’s been killed by the marauders outside the town -- in other words, not until he’s lost everything once again. But this time, instead of taking justice into his own hands alone, he returns to a community of people with whom he has common needs.

The escape itself is pretty exciting as well. Gibson and a handful of others drive the fuel tanker in one direction (knowing that the gang will follow them), while the rest of the settlers escape going another way. The budget for THE ROAD WARRIOR was supposedly ten times that of MAD MAX. If that’s true, then it’s clear where all the money went -- right into stuntman salaries and vehicles to be destroyed. The final chase takes almost the whole last third of the movie and is suitably epic. If anything, the odds seem stacked too severely against the good guys, and several sympathetic characters are dispatched in casually gruesome ways. Director George Miller isn’t above ratcheting up the tension by having Mad Max send a child out onto the hood of the speeding rig to retrieve a shotgun shell, either, so that’s the kind of action we’re dealing with here.

Escape with the rig ultimately proves impossible -- the gang are too many and the defenders too few and too exposed. But there’s a neat moment when they finally bring the tanker down and discover that it’s full of sand instead of fuel. It’s not exactly clear whether Gibson knew this or not, but the movie seems to hint that he didn’t know. I really like that wrinkle in the ending, since it seems to confirm Mad Max’s misanthropy -- even these nice settler folk have taken advantage of him and tricked him into risking his life for a tanker full of sand. But of course, the tanker’s real mission was to serve as a decoy that would allow the rest of the settlers to escape. The defenders who stayed with it must have known they were going on a suicide mission, so whether it was full of gas or sand was irrelevant to them.

THE ROAD WARRIOR is also the movie that codified a lot of the weird look of post-apocalyptic stories. A BOY AND HIS DOG (1975) did some of it first -- like the barren desert settings, the constant fighting over scant resources, and some of the whips-and-chains weirdness -- but THE ROAD WARRIOR revels in such details to a far deeper degree. And, being a worldwide blockbuster that made Mel Gibson into a star, it popularized them far and wide. In fact, THE ROAD WARRIOR was much more successful outside of Australia than MAD MAX was. In most of the world, it was called simply MAD MAX 2 -- despite making little reference to the events of the first movie and having arguably a completely different setting, it was apparently always meant to be a direct sequel. But since few people in the U.S. had seen MAD MAX by 1981, the title was changed for American distribution. As far as I know, the movie is still just called MAD MAX 2 in most of the world, but since I’m American I will keep calling it THE ROAD WARRIOR instead. It’s a better title anyway.

U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

One final note. Most of the movie holds up these almost thirty years later, but one exception to that is perhaps part of the depiction of the murderous gang. In MAD MAX, there are vague but repeated suggestions that at least some of the bad guy bikers are homosexual, or at least bisexual. These same suggestions return (in even greater force) in THE ROAD WARRIOR -- despite the fact that this is an entirely different murderous gang. There is no doubt that there’s at least one out and proud homosexual relationship among the marauders, and the rest appear to be enthusiasts of various flavors of what the personal sections in newspapers used to call “alternate lifestyles”. I’m not sure what the intention was in 1979 and 1981 -- if the audience was supposed to be further repulsed by finding out that the bad guys are not only murderous, but also appreciate punk fashions, experiment with bondage gear, and are tolerant of homosexuality. But watching the movies now, it has the weird effect of making the gangs somewhat sympathetic. There were moments when I could see them as practically surrogate families for each other, providing a supportive environment for lifestyle choices that weren’t likely to be accepted in square society. Of course, they’re still sadistic and evil rapists and killers, so that feeling never lasts too long.

1981: HEAVY METAL

2010-02-22T08:00:00.000-05:00

What’s it about?

An astronaut returns home from a space mission with a mysterious glowing green orb. Once at home, the power of the orb activates and menaces his young, innocent daughter. It shows her vignettes of its past existence, and how it has corrupted others. In the first, a young woman and a cab driver in a futuristic New York City get tangled up with double-crossing mobsters. In the second, a shrimpy boy is transformed by the power of the orb into a meathead and transported to a dangerous planet full of monsters and magic.

In the third vignette, a defense witness testifying on behalf of a space pirate turns into a Hulk-like monster and starts trashing the space station where the trial is taking place. Next, dead crewmembers on a WWII bomber are brought back to life as skeletal monsters as the plane flies on. Then a secretary is abducted by cocaine-snorting aliens and a randy robot. Finally, a gang of medieval cyborgs sets about exterminating a peace-loving race until a defender is called to help.

Is it any good?

HEAVY METAL is a cartoon anthology movie, which means it’s two things that I don’t know a whole lot about. Then throw in what I assume is meant to be some kind of connection to heavy metal music -- something else I know little about -- and I’m not sure that I’m really qualified to say anything about this movie at all. But I’ll try.

The only other anthology movie I’ve written about so far is THE ILLUSTRATED MAN (1969), in which the tattoos on Rod Steiger’s body come to life and play out short sci-fi vignettes. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) is maybe arguably an anthology movie but not probably not really. In fact, both of these movies hang together much more tightly than your typical anthology -- in addition to a unifying theme or story, they each have a single director and set of screenwriters who are in charge of all the pieces. In the case of THE ILLUSTRATED MAN, the frame story takes up a lot of screen time while the vignettes are brief and few. In 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, the four vignettes are all clearly tied together in some way, even if the links aren’t totally obvious.

A typical anthology, on the other hand, puts the focus on the vignettes and the frame story (if there even is one) is usually extremely slight. It’s also common (but by no means always the case) that more than one director works on an anthology. For some reason, most anthologies seem to focus largely on horror, but sci-fi stories also sneak in fairly often. There’s ASYLUM (1972), in which a new doctor interviews the patients at an insane asylum and hears fantastic tales. And ALIEN ZONE (1978), in which a mortician tells gruesome stories about how the corpses in his funeral home met their demise. More famous examples are TALES FROM THE CRYPT (1972), TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE (1983), and George Romero’s CREEPSHOW (1982). They still occasionally get produced today, though they don’t seem to be very popular anymore. But FEAR(S) OF THE DARK (2007) and TRICK ‘R TREAT (2008) are two recent horror anthologies -- and the first one, like HEAVY METAL, is even animated.

I haven’t actually seen most of the movies I just listed, since it’s hard for me to get excited about anthologies. They aren’t too demanding, since they skip along from short story to short story, but they also tend to be hit or miss. Even a (non-horror, non-sci-fi) anthology like PARIS JE T’AIME (2006) which features directors like the Coen brothers, Alexander Payne, Wes Craven, Gus van Sant and more still has lots of forgettable segments mixed in with the winners. So although I don’t really have anything against anthologies, they aren’t something I am very familiar with. (Though I have watched a couple more since seeing HEAVY METAL to try and get an idea of how they usually work.)

As for cartoons, it’s a lot harder for me to give a coherent explanation as to why I usually avoid them. It’s probably partly the usual western prejudice that cartoons are for kids, but none of the three animated movies I’ve written about so far (very much including this one) are appropriate for children. I also liked them all fine, and I don’t think they’d be any better if they were live action movies. I appreciated the unique artistic styles that went into FANTASTIC PLANET (1973) and WIZARDS (1977), and even HEAVY METAL has its own animated charms. (But it also has a lot of animated sex and gore, which is often less than charming. And overall it has far less visual imagination than those other two movies -- though it does have its inspired moments here and there.)

If I have any real grounding for my prejudice, I guess it would be that it’s harder for me to relate to animated protagonists, harder for me to be awed by animated vistas, to fear animated dangers, or to be moved by animated emotions. It’s not impossible, by any means. But in a cartoon world where literally almost anything can be shown, it seems to take more creativity and talent than usual to wow me. Wile E. Coyote spends a lot of time falling off of dramatic rock outcroppings more majestic than any in the Grand Canyon or Monument Valley -- yet I’ve never once felt any of the terror and amazement that such features should inspire. A cartoon is an extra (and very large) step away from reality, so it has to work a lot harder to overcome my suspension of disbelief and really involve me in what’s happening. That’s my opinion, anyway.

So what about HEAVY METAL? It’s okay. The frame story isn’t really that interesting -- supposedly this glowing green orb is the concentration of all the evil in the world, and it corrupts folks everywhere it goes. It’s planning to kill the little girl since she’s the one destined to subdue it in her generation or something. Anyway, the green orb figures one way or another in each of the vignettes, but in a few it barely makes any appearance at all and in others it doesn’t really seem to be evil. Frankly, the appearance of the orb in many of the stories only served to remind me that there wasn’t really any logical reason to throw these stories together, and it likely would have been less distracting if there were no frame story at all.

There’s a lot of mixing of fantasy and science fiction, and a little horror too. None of the vignettes except the last one are really long enough to make a big impression -- for the most part, they end just as they are getting interesting (or are just never that interesting). But the most memorable are probably the one where the cab driver in future New York tangles with alien mobsters and the one where WWII bomber crewmen are brought back to life as skeletons. The final vignette is a cut above even these highlights, however, and is far and away the best.

Most of the vignettes feature pretty explicit sex or gore, which I suppose were the kinds of things that the producers thought fans of heavy metal would like to see. What probably doesn’t appeal to fans of heavy metal, however, are bands like Journey and Devo, which overwhelmingly fill the soundtrack. So do expect lots of topless women with giant breasts, gruesome decapitations, alien monsters, and explosions. But don’t expect a real hard-rocking soundtrack. The London Philharmonic Orchestra makes a more prominent appearance in the music than actual metal.

Still, I enjoyed the flick. It’s juvenile in the extreme, but never really mean-spirited. It’s fun enough and never really boring, and does have occasional moments of wit and grandeur. (The funny bits are scattered throughout, but only the last vignette approaches any kind of visual majesty.) It’s not really the same caliber of movie as FANTASTIC PLANET or even WIZARDS, but it’s unpretentious and mindless entertainment if you don’t mind a lot of rough edges and teenaged fantasies. John Candy and Eugene Levy provide some of the voices, but honestly I didn’t even recognize them until I read the credits. Except for the lack of actual heavy metal, it’s pretty much everything you’d expect a cartoon movie called HEAVY METAL to be.

1980: ALTERED STATES

2010-02-18T08:00:00.001-05:00

What's it about?

Young scientist William Hurt experiences an apparent flashback to a primitive proto-human state while experimenting with sensory deprivation. Believing that he has somehow tapped into a genetic memory of man’s ancestry, Hurt goes to South America to retrieve an untested hallucinogenic fungus that he thinks will intensify his head trips.

The fungus seems to do just that -- but Hurt also comes to believe that it is causing physical changes in his body which could cause him to revert to a primitive state. When his colleagues urge him to stop his experiments, Hurt pushes on alone with predictably disastrous consequences. Only the love of a good woman is able to break his descent into a Jekyll and Hyde tailspin.

Is it any good?

Back in the 1950s (or at least back when I was watching lots of sci-fi movies from the 1950s), I got so very sick of stories about scientists. Practically every movie had either a handsome scientist or astronaut for its hero, and they would always come up with some implausible scientific scheme to save the day at the last minute. Movies like THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957) and I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (1958) seemed revolutionary to me at the time because they were about normal people with hardly a scientist anywhere in sight. (I still think they are both excellent movies, by the way, but there was a bracing freshness at the time that was mostly a result of comparing them against all the scientist movies that had come before.)

There’s no period of sci-fi movie history where scientists and astronauts aren’t common fixtures in the lists of heros or villains. But it’s certainly true that in the 1960s and beyond, movies that aren’t about scientists start to outnumber the ones that are. Many of the scientists who do remain are just as one-dimensional as their 1950s counterparts -- but they are increasingly likely to be the ones causing the problems rather than the ones fixing them.

All of this is a long preamble to the admission that I was actually excited by the scientist protagonists in ALTERED STATES. Almost all of the main characters are scientists and (to my untrained ear) they seemed like pretty realistic ones. They are passionate about their work, intellectually curious, more likely to come up with hypotheses than improbably certain answers, and a little too prone to arguing philosophical points. More than anything, I think it’s the enthusiasm in Hurt and his colleagues that make them seem both real and also the kind of people you might want to know. These aren’t the all-knowing, ever-calm hero scientists of the 1950s, but neither are they the dour, self-important meddlers of paranoid 1970s thrillers.

After creating such fine scientist characters, it’s a bit of a shame that ALTERED STATES sticks them in such a cliched dilemma for the genre. I really enjoyed the beginning of the movie, when Hurt and his friends were discovering the ability to flash back to primitive states while undergoing sensory deprivation. But before long, Hurt finds himself almost literally in a Jekyll and Hyde situation. Though at first addicting, his experiments have become terrifying. But he’s powerless to stop their effects, as his body now starts slipping into its primitive state against his will.

Oh yeah, I haven’t really mentioned that part yet. Hurt’s experiments eventually do suggest that the flashback state triggers physical changes in the subject’s body. Latent genes are tripped or some hooey like that, and the result is that Hurt’s body transforms itself into that of a primitive man -- heavy brow, underdeveloped vocal cords, hair all over the body, the works. This is kind of a cool idea, so I don’t really mind that it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. Actually, it’s really two cool ideas. The first is the idea of a modern man reverting back to a less evolved form, and the second is the idea that mental exertions can result in physical changes.

ALTERED STATES is not the first movie to suggest a link between the mind and the body. (A link beyond the normal one, I mean.) SOLYARIS (1972) is partly a movie about telekinetic powers -- though the mind in that case is that of a planet-sized organism. A bit more to the point, I almost wrote about a movie called THE BROOD (1979), in which an experimental form of therapy called “psycho-plastics” results in physical manifestations of the patients’ neuroses. Psychology in THE BROOD is presented almost like Edwardian spiritualism, with trance states and mediumistic role-playing and ultimately bodily manifestations that are not unlike ectoplasmic emissions. It’s this last bit that gives pyscho-plastics its name, and also that is most like the “mind over matter” powers of ALTERED STATES.

Having set up the science of the movie in this way, I am perhaps starting to see for the first time what the ending of the movie is really about. Hurt subjects himself to risky experiments despite the warnings of his colleagues, and the result is that he eventually emerges from the sensory deprivation tank in the form of a hairy proto-human with limited impulse control. The situation worsens later when Hurt begins to revert to this ancestral form at times he can’t control.

But the very ending is what I wanted to talk about. There’s one last experiment that Hurt convinces his colleagues to help him with, to prove and document once and for all these unaccountable physical changes. But Hurt either regresses too far or just does it once too often, and he somehow experiences the terrifying nothing that existed before the creation of life. Hurt changes first into a monstrous form, and then into a swirling whirlpool. He also seems to phase in and out of reality, like a picture going in and out of reception on an old television.

Hurt is then saved not once, but twice, by the love of his wife. This is what I mean when I said I was starting perhaps to understand this part of the movie. She first retrieves him from the brink of nothingness during the experiment by daring to wade into the psychic maelstrom in the laboratory and physically pulling Hurt out. Then she saves him agin by convincing him to fight against an unexpected regression back to the nothingness. I get pretty annoyed with movies when they seem to be suggesting that “love is all you need” or that “love conquers all”. Those may be truisms, but they are hardly universally true. ALTERED STATES wasn’t really any different in that respect -- I got pretty annoyed at its lame (and highly controversial) pro-love message.

What I did realize just now though is that the whole movie is about “mind over matter” -- using only the power of the brain to make physical changes in the world outside. Love, in this case, would reside in the mind. So simply by changing one’s mind -- transferring creative passion from scientific pursuits to a loved one, for instance -- one can also change the reality of the world. In this way, the message is not so much “love conquers all” but rather more like “the mind conquers all”.

I’m being pretty generous to ALTERED STATES with this interpretation, and I’m making it sound better than it really is. I still think the beginning of the movie is great, but the end is just a mess. It’s practically impossible to tell what’s happening to Hurt -- both from the dialogue and from the visuals. The initial regression into a proto-human form is pretty straight-forward, but the later transformations just don’t seem to make any logical sense. And the images themselves aren't shocking or terrifying enough to make the exact whys and wherefores superfluous. And even though the “love conquers all” ending arguably fits with the rest of the “mind over matter” themes in the movie, it’s still pretty lame when threatening forces are instantly dissipated when the main character finally admits that he loves his wife.

Through much of ALTERED STATES I was also reminded of Francis Ford Coppola’s YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH (2007). At the end of that movie, there’s a sequence where Tim Roth’s supernaturally intelligent and supernaturally young linguist has hooked up with a woman who babbles in ancient languages while under hypnotic trances. By using past life regression techniques, Roth is able to send her further and further back into history until she is speaking the ur-languages of primitive humans. Such experiments take a spiritual and physical toll on the woman, but she’s eager to keep helping Roth isolate the first moment when human language is created.

I’m not really sure how I feel about YOUTH WITHOUT YOUTH in total, but that part of the movie has stuck with me ever since I saw it a couple years ago. For one thing, these experiments are seemingly the only way for Roth to complete the history of language that he’s been writing for a lifetime (or two), so it’s obvious why he’s willing to take these risks. And the fact that he’s gambling with somebody else’s sanity and life only makes the stakes even higher (and makes it a more realistic parallel for actual scientific research). Finally, the ancient babbling of the woman (and its effects on her) is both logical and pretty darn creepy.

The parallels with ALTERED STATES are obvious, but the differences are also instructive. At the beginning of the movie, Hurt doesn’t really have any stake in research into primitive humans. He’s monkeying around with sensory deprivation and drugs to study altered states of consciousness. The caveman hallucinations (and eventually the physical changes) are an unexpected discovery, so it’s not clear why Hurt is willing to risk everything to hurtle headlong down this path. The movie seems to suggest it’s just Hurt impulsively seeking generic “truth”.

Likewise, Hurt putting himself in danger is pretty boring. A lot of science fiction is surprisingly anti-scientific, but even if Hurt ended up turning himself permanently into a monkey man, that’s not really much of a cautionary tale. One scientist goes too far, gets turned into a caveman, and is presumably hunted down. Hardly on par with Oppenheimer quoting the Bhagavad Gita in regret at the first test of the nuclear bomb. Changing the nature of the threat to Hurt -- from regression to annihilation -- does make things more interesting, but it also makes no sense at all. So despite its promising beginning, I don’t really see myself thinking about any particular scene from ALTERED STATES years from now.

1980: FLASH GORDON

2010-02-15T08:00:00.002-05:00

What’s it about?

New York Jets quarterback Flash Gordon and travel agent Dale Arden get drafted by rogue scientist Dr Zarkov to help stop an attack on Earth by intergalactic warlord Ming the Merciless (the latter played by Max Von Sydow). Arriving on the planet Mongo in Zarkov’s rocket, the three find themselves embroiled in complicated political infighting among Ming’s subjugated vassal tribes.

After being captured by Ming’s guards, all three suffer seemingly final fates -- Flash Gordon is slated to be executed, Zarkov to have his mind wiped and reprogrammed, and Dale Arden to become Ming’s personal concubine. Meanwhile, Earth’s moon is being shredded by Ming’s firepower and threatens to destroy the entire planet. Even after escaping from their several dangers, Flash and his friends must convince Ming’s vassals to quit fighting each other and team up against the merciless overlord they all serve.

Is it any good?

I have never had much interest in the old sci-fi serials of the 1930s, since they are for the most part obviously intended for children. From the little I’ve seen, they have a general lack of interest not only in anything to do with “science” but also apparently anything that resembles “fiction” as well. Characters have no personality, themes are nonexistent, and events happen merely because they provide convenient excuses to move from one episode to the next. On the other hand, they do also seem to have a lot of creativity and inventiveness when it comes to spectacle, peril, and suspense.

The 1980 film adaptation of FLASH GORDON apparently takes its basic plot from the comics and serials of the 1930s -- and luckily takes a lot of the creativity and whimsy as well. Like BARBARELLA (1968) it’s a Dino De Laurentiis production, and the similarities are instantly obvious. Both movies are campy, light-hearted, fast-paced, and full of brightly stylized special effects and production design. Watching FLASH GORDON is a bit like watching a big budget stage musical -- the artifice is all perfectly obvious and brightly lit, but the “fakeness” of everything doesn’t reduce the enjoyment you get from seeing it all so expertly choreographed.

Somehow I had never seen FLASH GORDON before -- I think I had expected it to be ossified under the production design, like an actor slathered in so many layers of make-up, masks, and costumes that he can no longer emote or move. In other words, I expected it to be like BATMAN AND ROBIN -- a movie where a misguided sense of production design overwhelmed everything else. But it turns out that FLASH GORDON is nothing like that at all. It’s great fun from start to finish, and even though it has its own distinctive style, the movie never lets the spectacle get in the way of the adventure for a second.

I don’t know a whole lot about Dino De Laurentiis, except that he has produced a slew of movies including BARBARELLA, the Jeff Bridges/Jessica Lange KING KONG (1976) remake, FLASH GORDON, CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982), DEAD ZONE (1983), DUNE (1984), the original Hannibal Lecter movie MANHUNTER (1986), EVIL DEAD 2 (1987) and ARMY OF DARKNESS (1993), and numerous other projects covering a wide range of genres.

Producers don’t often get a lot of credit for creative input. Directors and screenwriters are the ones who win Academy Awards and get most of the attention. And maybe most producers really don’t have a lot of creative input compared to the folks working for them. But there are certainly exceptions to this. George Lucas has had a great deal of creative input on many of the movies he’s credited primarily as producer -- not least of which are THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980) and RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983). Val Lewton at RKO and, to a lesser extent, Carl Laemmle, Jr., at Universal are the classic examples of creative producers in the horror world. And Charles Schneer and Ray Harryhausen were clearly at the driver’s wheel in most of the movies they produced.

I’d like to add Dino De Laurentiis to this list, but I just don’t know enough about the guy. I get the sense from BARBARELLA and FLASH GORDON that there is a clear line connecting the two -- a consistent creative personality that is propelling them both. If you like one of those movies, you should go and check out the other right away. They aren’t exactly the same, but they both hearken back to the same tradition and tap into the same spirit in a way that practically no other science fiction movie does. FLASH GORDON may have been released in 1980, but it seems to be the product of a world where movies like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) or CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977) or STAR WARS (1977) or ALIEN (1979) never existed.

If anything, it chooses histrionics over naturalism, artifice over immersion, and self-awareness over seamless plotting. In that way, it’s a bit like PLANET OF THE APES (1968) or ZARDOZ (1974) or THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) or THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981). It’s a movie for people who like movies to look good -- not necessarily real. And for people who like movies that have stories that are exciting -- not necessarily believable.

I guess I’m probably not going to say very much about specifically about FLASH GORDON, but I don’t really know if anything I could say would really be very helpful. BARBARELLA and FLASH GORDON seem to comprise an entire alternate history of science fiction in cinema -- they exist outside of other contemporary influences. If you like sci-fi, and especially if you enjoy a good space opera from time to time, then you have no excuse not to watch one or the other. Go out and experience them. You may not like them, but I guarantee a different movie watching experience than almost anything else you’ll get from other movies of their times.

Also, Timothy Dalton is in FLASH GORDON and he is awesome.

1979: THE BLACK HOLE

2010-02-04T08:00:00.000-05:00

What’s it about?

A space expedition (including captain Robert Forster, scientists Yvette Mimieaux and Anthony Perkins, journalist Ernest Borgnine, and robot Roddy MacDowall) comes across an apparently derelict spaceship hovering around the opening of a massive black hole. They identify the ship as the Cygnus -- an exploration vessel that went missing decades ago with its entire crew. While investigating closer they are caught by the gravitational pull of the black hole, but are saved when the Cygnus suddenly lights up and draws them to safety using a tractor beam.

On board the Cygnus, the explorers discover a ship populated by robots -- including a hulking red bruiser called Maximilian, mute shrouded types with reflective faceplates, and a beat-up old model voiced by Slim Pickens. They also find megalomaniacal captain Maximilian Schell (no relation to the robot Maximilian), who is on the eve of a grand experiment to take the Cygnus into the black hole, protected by an anti-gravity field. He tells his visitors that his crew left the ship voluntarily, but strange observations on the ship call the captain’s story into question -- and implies danger for the rest of the humans on board as the start of the experiment moves closer.

Is it any good?

I don’t know how to tell other people about THE BLACK HOLE. If an evil sorcerer wanted to lure me off the safe path through an enchanted forest and draw me to my destruction with a seductive siren call, he would show me something that looked like THE BLACK HOLE. He would show me the amazing miniature of the Cygnus, perched on the edge of a swirling black hole. He would show me the creepy Gothic touches like the shrouded robots and the sinister secrets that lurk deep in Cygnus’s past. He would show me a cast that includes a veritable catalog of B-list and C-list character actors. And only once I had strayed far from the safe path, lost in the underbrush with no hope of returning again, would I find that THE BLACK HOLE is form with no substance -- a cloak wrapped around a shadow -- an illusion and nothing more.

Well, not exactly nothing. But THE BLACK HOLE really is almost all seductive exterior with no guts to back it up. Not since THIS ISLAND EARTH (1955) has a science fiction movie been so baffling to me in its power to disappoint. And I’ve seen this one before. I knew what to expect. I remembered being profoundly disappointed the last time I saw it, more than ten years ago. But even then, it meticulously dismantled my skepticism and built up my expectations all over again, only to dash them down. And then, worst of all, at the last minute, it held out another glimmer of brilliance that simply reminded me all over again how disappointed I was. Let me explain.

THE BLACK HOLE was more or less Disney’s answer to STAR WARS (1977). It’s a swashbuckling space opera with expensive special effects, an exotic setting, and lots of derring-do. It also has the potential to be more morally complicated than STAR WARS, since good and evil aren’t so clearly delineated and the story actually raises questions about science, ambition, discipline, and duty. THE BLACK HOLE was also the first Disney movie to be rated PG, which apparently caused a minor stir at the time for some reason. (To put it in context, a PG rating in 1979 would have put it in the company of movies like ROCKY II, MOONRAKER, ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ, TIME AFTER TIME, and BEYOND THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE.)

The movie starts out much like an episode of Scooby-Doo. Robert Forster’s Mystery Machine breaks down in a deserted part of space and he decides to use the telephone at the creepy old spaceship down the road. It doesn’t happen exactly like that, of course, but it’s close. What really happens is that the ship’s computer first detects the most massive black hole it has ever seen. That’s fine enough, I suppose, but we have to pretend that nobody else has ever reported it and the computer failed to detect it until they were right on top of it. While scanning the black hole, they discover a ship nearby -- the Cygnus, which has been missing for years. In case that wasn’t interesting enough, one of the crew members on the missing ship was also Yvette Mimeaux’s father. Then while conducting a fly-by of the Cygnus (during which it looks dead and silent), they start hurtling towards the black hole or something. The Cygnus suddenly lights up and draws them in with a tractor beam, but not before their ship is somehow damaged.

Okay, so that scene is a pretty good representation of how THE BLACK HOLE works. You’ve got a crew that has apparently just accidentally stumbled upon the most massive black hole ever seen: lame. You’ve got a derelict old ship which has been missing for years sitting silently at the edge of that black hole: awesome. You’ve got this business with the ship suddenly being sucked into the black hole or something: lame. You’ve got the derelict ship lighting up and locking on to them with a tractor beam they can’t escape: awesome.

There’s a reason why Scooby-Doo episodes (and many other stories) begin with cars breaking down in front of creepy old mansions. It’s because creepy old mansions are awesome. And if the creepy old mansion is awesome enough, I’m usually willing to overlook the lameness of the car breaking down in exactly the right spot. But I definitely prefer it when movies don’t force me to overlook dumb things like that, and just don’t have dumb things in them in the first place. Just give me a believable reason why the characters should be at the creepy old mansion, and I will be perfectly happy. But just having them stumble across it by accident -- that is almost always dumb. THE BLACK HOLE, I am sorry to say, has many dumb things -- but for much of its runtime, it also has many awesome things.

It’s clear almost from the beginning that things aren’t right on the Cygnus. Maximilian Schell is the only human left alive on board, and his only companions now are robots. He claims that the rest of the crew abandoned ship when they received an order to return to Earth. Schell, meanwhile, admits that he disobeyed the order so that he could stay and study the black hole further -- eventually preparing for a descent into and through the black hole itself.

All right, let’s stop here for a minute. You and I -- we know that you can’t go through a black hole. I’m not a physics guy, so I can’t talk with authority about this. But a black hole is just a very dense accretion of matter -- so dense that the escape velocity needed to break the gravitational pull is, at certain distances, greater than the speed of light. Therefore, at a certain distance (i.e., beyond the event horizon), nothing can escape the gravitational pull of a black hole. So if you go into a black hole, you are never coming back out again -- neither where you started from nor anywhere else. You just end up mushed up in the black hole along with everything else it sucked in. So this whole idea of putting an anti-gravity shield around a giant starship and flying into a black hole is nonsense at best, and suicide at worst.

This is yet another example of something that is both kind of awesome, but also pretty dumb. Giving the sole surviving human on the derelict spaceship a monomaniacal obsession with flying into a black hole is kind of awesome. It puts everybody in danger and makes Maximilian Schell seem insane but maybe also sort of brilliant. But claiming that he will fly out the other end through a white hole and having other (supposedly sane) characters believe him is pretty dumb. I’m actually willing to accept that the ultimate culmination of a life obsession with black holes would be a desire to fly directly into one, but it’s annoying that the way it’s presented means that I have to forget all the stuff I actually know about black holes first.

So where were we? Maximilian Schell wants to fly into the black hole, and Anthony Perkins is starting to think he might want to go with him. Schell is okay with that, but he wants the rest of Forster’s crew to monitor his journey from their own (now repaired) spaceship so they can take the data back to Earth. Meanwhile, the rest of Forster’s crew think flying into a black hole is crazy and are more than happy to be watching from their own (now repaired) spaceship when it happens. In other words: AT THIS POINT IN THE MOVIE EVERYBODY WANTS THE SAME THING. The only possible conflict could be convincing Anthony Perkins whether to stay on the Cygnus or go back with Forster and Co., and that’s not really much of a conflict since he would presumably eventually make a decision that everybody else would respect.

Except! Except the robots. There are a lot of robots in this movie. Some of them are very annoying, and were clearly designed to keep kids entertained. (Begrudgingly I will admit that it worked. I loved the dumbest of the robots when I was a kid.) On the other hand, other robots were clearly designed to be creepy and to lend to the atmosphere of mystery and danger. (This also worked -- I was terrified of these robots as a kid, and I still think they are creepy today.) The problem with this is that Disney is trying to serve two masters who want totally different things. The story of THE BLACK HOLE is a pretty grown-up tale with Gothic, almost horror-like elements. Meanwhile, kids love slapstick and funny voices. So depending upon what you want out of the movie, you are going to think that one set of robots is awesome and the other is lame (or traumatic).

But that’s not what I was going to say about the robots. Fair warning -- what comes next is a pretty big spoiler. It turns out that the creepy shrouded robots who take care of the day-to-day activities on the Cygnus are not actually robots at all. They are the remnants of the crew, which Schell turned into cybernetic zombies. They are still alive (and possibly conscious), but are programmed and function like robots. There’s not much explanation about what exactly happened, but clearly the crew now exist in some kind of living death. This, by the way, is awesome. It’s a horrifying revelation, and it turns even Anthony Perkins against Maximilian Schell. But... But so what?

Schell still controls the Cygnus and all the many robots on it. He already overpowered the entire crew of the ship, and there’s no reason he can’t do it again. (Or almost. There are hints of a potential robot rebellion, but this is never explained, barely developed, and there is no reason to expect it will happen.) Forster’s crew debates taking Schell back to face justice, but decide it is too risky. So instead they decide to get back into their spaceship and leave. At the same time, Schell decides to take the Cygnus into the black hole. In other words: AT THIS POINT IN THE MOVIE EVERYBODY WANTS THE SAME THING. There is no reason why everybody can’t just do what they are planning to do without getting in each other’s way.

Except! Except Maximilian Schell has ordered Yvette Mimeaux to be turned into a robot. I don’t know why. If he had just let her go back to her own ship, all of his problems would have taken off and flown away and he could have descended into the black hole unhassled just like he wanted. But instead, Forster has to mount a rescue mission and fight his way through the robots of the Cygnus. For the most part, these are some pretty awful action sequences and consist mostly of stiff robot mannequins falling off catwalks. The princess -- I mean, the scientist -- is saved, and the good guys fight their way back to their ship. Unfortunately, Ernest Borgnine turned out to be a big old chicken and he flew away without the rest of them. This, by the way, is deeply, deeply lame.

Then there’s a meteor storm (lame) and Maximilian Schell is crushed by falling stuff in the bridge (lame) and Maximilian the robot refuses to help him for no adequately explained reason (lame). One of the good robots voiced by Slim Pickens sacrifices himself to save the rest of the good guys (lame) and declines to be helped the last few feet to the waiting spaceship (lame). The surviving members of Forster’s crew get in the Cygnus’s probe ship and try to fly away, but find that it is already preprogrammed to fly into the black hole for absolutely no logical reason (lame) so they cannot escape.

This, by the way, is actually awesome. Having the survivors go through the black hole instead of escaping is a great ending both because it’s unexpected and because it gives us a chance to see what the inside of a black hole looks like. It’s just that most of the action and build-up to that moment is pretty unsatisfying and unbelievable. The biggest problem, as I alluded to earlier in giant capital letters, is that both the good guys and the bad guy want the same thing at the end of the movie. There is no actual conflict, so the movie manufactures a series of unlikely and illogical events to generate the needed climax. The frustrating thing is that it seems like there should be enough raw materials for a great conflict, and with a few more drafts of the script they might have actually figured one out that was both exciting and made sense.

A good conflict at the end of THE BLACK HOLE wouldn’t have erased all the dumb things that came before. But up until the end, the dumb and the awesome are more or less balanced. It’s possible to ignore the dumb parts and just focus on the awesome stuff. That’s still plenty frustrating, and I would be complaining about all those dumb things right now even if the ending of this movie was perfect. But they are small potatoes compared to the story problems at the end. In fact, I haven’t even mentioned half the dumb things from the rest of the movie because they hardly seem important when you remember that this is a movie which has no actual conflict in the final act.

But then the surviving good guys go through the black hole. I’ve seen this movie before, so I knew this was coming. I also had no memory at all of what the inside of the black hole looked like. Stop a minute here and imagine to yourself what you would expect it to be. This is a Disney sci-fi movie from 1979. What does a journey through a black hole look like? The safe money is on some abbreviated version of the 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) journey through the monolith. In other words, a light and color show full of camera tricks and abstract patterns, meant to suggest some experience which cannot really be understood unless you experience it. But that’s not what happens. That is not at all what the inside of the black hole looks like.

Instead, Maximilian Schell and Maximilian the robot float unprotected through space. They merge into a single being. The merged being stands on a rocky outcrop, and the camera slowly pans back from their eyes in a single long shot that reveals an enormous stylized hellscape full of red rocks, tongues of fire, and the shuffling damned spirits of the robotic crew. Then Schell somehow ascends from the shot and flies up through the same landscape into a long glowing white corridor that appears to lead to a place of beautiful white light. As the light approaches, the scene dissolves, and Forster’s crew is through the black hole, in a new sector of space, safe and alive. The end. I don’t know what just happened there, but trust me that it was incredibly awesome.

Part of me wants to see THE BLACK HOLE remade. The story at the heart of the movie is kind of classic in a way. After all, it’s a lot like the story to another Disney sci-fi flick -- 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (1954). In both, a group of people find themselves unexpectedly on a vessel that is captained by a very refined borderline psychotic, crewed by mysterious and uncommunicative hands, and home to a horrible secret. A lot of the specific touches in THE BLACK HOLE are pretty great too. But then there are the dumb parts. I’m not sure that I could confidently untangle the good parts of the story from the bad, or that anything coherent would be left if I could. So any attempt to remake the movie would likely be doomed to failure as well -- and doubly doomed if it felt any need (as it no doubt would) to preserve recognizable elements from the original movie and shoehorn them into the story.

1979: STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE

2010-02-01T08:00:00.000-05:00

What’s it about?

After being retired from command for several years, Admiral Kirk returns to take control of the bridge of the Enterprise, displacing young Captain Decker. The occasion of Kirk’s return is the appearance of a powerful alien ship heading straight for Earth and destroying everything in its path. But dealing with the threat means getting the old team back together -- especially Dr McCoy and Spock, both of whom have deactivated from Starfleet in the years since Kirk’s last tour.

Once the gang is all in place, the Enterprise approaches the alien ship and narrowly survives the first encounter by correctly identifying and replying to a hail. They then proceed inside the enormous cloud of accreted gas and laser-light shows that engulfs the alien ship, and slowly approach the center. When one of the Enterprise’s crewmen is kidnapped by the alien and then returned as an exact mechanical duplicate, they begin to learn some of the intentions of the alien. But even though the robot mouthpiece allows communication, the safety of Earth is not assured.

Is it any good?

I will admit that for many years I subscribed to the popular evens/odds theory of STAR TREK movies. Even-numbered movies were supposed to be good, while odd-numbered movies were supposed to be bad. As the first in the series, STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE was an odd-numbered movie, so the conventional wisdom held that it wasn’t all that good.

It’s been a long time since I really believed in that old theory though. The first crack was a sneaking suspicion that STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK might actually be better than STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME. Later, I found myself very much enjoying the ninth installment, STAR TREK: INSURRECTION, while being pretty disappointed with the tenth, STAR TREK: NEMESIS. It’s obviously a lot to ask that a silly rule apply across a movie series with eleven installments and counting -- but I still hear references to it to this day among fans of the movies.

In any event, I haven’t seen STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE since the days when I really did believe in that evens/odds theory. I’m sure the slowness of the movie helped vindicate it for me at the time. The plot doesn’t really get going until about an hour into the movie, and even then there are still a lot of deliberately paced interludes of impressive (but very lengthy) effects shots. It’s a slow movie -- there’s no doubt about it -- and the STAR TREK of this movie isn’t quite the same as either the original series that came before, or the other movies and television shows that came after.

Watching this movie again, I was struck by the number of things that were changed or improved or updated from the show. There was a new Enterprise, new uniforms, new music, new Klingons, new special effects for transporters and photon torpedoes, and a new Earth-centric approach to storylines. At the beginning of the movie, there’s even a new haircut for Spock. A lot of the slow pace of the early parts of the movie can probably be attributed to the need to introduce all this new stuff. It had been a decade since the original series went off the air, so I suppose the producers felt that the fans deserved a good long look at the Enterprise in spacedock. And then another. And another. And one last one just to make sure.

The tone of the movie is fairly serious as well. It has neither the cheesy unintentional camp of the original series, or the playful intentional camp of the later movies. Kirk is a pretty interesting character -- it’s clear that he’s muscled his way into the command of the Enterprise, and Captain Decker is none too pleased to find himself demoted. Even though the crew feel more comfortable with Kirk at the helm, it’s easy to agree with Decker’s assessment that Kirk is simply using the crisis as an excuse to get back in the captain’s chair of his old starship -- and it does seem quite likely that it won’t be so easy to get him back out again.

The story (once it kicks into gear) is pretty exciting too. The alien comes from a machine planet and is looking for its “creator” on Earth. It initially wants to establish contact with the Enterprise itself, believing the human crew is an infestation of destructive parasites. When it eventually kills a prominent crew member and replaces her with an android copy to serve as a communication interface with the humans, it’s a genuinely shocking moment. The android -- being an exact mechanical copy of the dead crew member -- retains memories of those onboard the Enterprise, which makes for some interesting relations and tensions.

The special effects are very good as well. Extremely good, in fact, considering that the movie was released in 1979. They aren't especially ground-breaking or even original in any way, but they are all very good. If FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966) and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) felt like movies ahead of their times, then STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE feels just about exactly right for its times. Science-fiction cinema at the end of the 1970s included such flicks as LOGAN’S RUN (1976), STAR WARS and CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), SUPERMAN and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (1978), and ALIEN and THE BLACK HOLE (1979). Outer space adventures and sci-fi spectacles were becoming fairly common, and STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE fits right in with all those other movies.

I ended up really enjoying this movie -- much more than I thought I would. The slow pace actually adds to the epic feel of it all. Any movie that’s almost two and a half hours long is something that is endured as much as it is enjoyed, so it can't help but feel important. It’s possibly not even going too far to say that STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE captures some of the grandeur of an old-fashioned Hollywood epic. (Well, maybe that is going too far. But it’s close anyway!) I think that grandeur is important here, since otherwise it might start to feel too much like an extended episode of the old series. After all, unlike the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA movie, this isn’t an origin story. Instead, it’s more of a late elegy for an old television show long past its heyday, and it could have very easily come off as irrelevant or unnecessary -- just another reunion show that’s good for a bit of amusement and not much else.

But everything in STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE works against that feeling. Everything is upgraded from the original series. The Klingons are barely even in the movie at all, for instance, but their make-up and spaceships are vastly improved from their 1960s incarnations. The seeds of the Klingon language were planted here as well, but they wouldn’t be fully developed until later movies. But attention has been paid to every detail and nothing is thoughtlessly retained the way it was simply because the fans would recognize it that way.

I like this intermediary iteration of STAR TREK a lot. It has epic scope and sweep and a high level of detail and polish, but it’s not saddled by decades of mythology. In fact, there’s a sense of exciting new possibilities watching this movie. There are tantalizing glimpses at Vulcan lore and Klingon culture, but nothing that locks down a single future direction for the series. It’s more like STAR TREK has been taken down from the art gallery where it hung for fifteen years, cleaned, restored, and fitted in a new frame -- and now we can see much more clearly some of the previously obscured details and corners. The movie doesn’t reinvent STAR TREK, but it clarifies and focuses it.

Before I go, I should certainly say a word about Robert Wise, the director. He got his start with Val Lewton’s horror unit at RKO in the 1940s, directing CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE and THE BODYSNATCHER -- two of the better movies in the bunch. He later went on to direct musical classics like WEST SIDE STORY and THE SOUND OF MUSIC, but he returned periodically to weirder fare. In addition to STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, he also directed THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951) and THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN (1971). Three sci-fi movies out of an entire career doesn’t make Robert Wise a “sci-fi director” (whatever that might mean), but it certainly seems he’s sympathetic to the genre.

1979: THE LATHE OF HEAVEN

2010-01-28T08:00:00.000-05:00

What’s it about?

After an overdose, a young man named George Orr is told to report to “voluntary therapy” with a dream specialist named Haber. The overdose was an attempt by Orr to self-medicate and to eliminate all of his dreams, since whatever he dreams becomes true as soon as he wakes up. Haber at first doesn’t believe the story, but after placing Orr in hypnotic sleep and suggesting a couple dreams to him, he starts to believe as well.

Haber doesn’t want to cure the condition, however. Instead, he wants to use Orr to improve the world -- suggesting dreams to him where the weather is sunnier, where overpopulation is solved, where there is no war, where racism doesn’t exist, and so on. But as Haber’s requests become more ambitious, the unintended consequences of the changes to the world become more horrific. And soon the continued existence of humanity is in doubt.

Is it any good?

Back in the days when I used to read a lot of contemporary science-fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin was one of my least favorite writers. I used to groan every time I saw her name on the cover of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine -- I knew I would read her story, and I knew I would hate it. Of course, that was many years ago when I was a teenager, and my tastes have changed considerably since then. I haven’t read Le Guin lately though, so I don’t know what I would think about her now.

THE LATHE OF HEAVEN is of course one of Le Guin’s most well-known and popular novels. This made-for-TV adaptation from 1979 was produced by the American public television network PBS, and despite being a low budget job with no name actors, it’s pretty riveting nonetheless. No matter what I might think about Le Guin’s writing, it’s certain that her ideas are very interesting.

In a lot of ways, the premise of the story is almost exactly like all those old fairy tales of wish-granting genies and leprechauns and talking fish. Every time Haber tells Orr to dream a new “improvement” for the world, it’s obvious that things are gong to go wrong. But instead of a malicious genie twisting words to create an ironic punishment, it’s presumably Orr’s subconscious that solves overpopulation by unleashing a plague on the world or that solves racism by making everyone a uniform grey color. (It’s probably noteworthy that Haber doesn’t consider the second result a flaw -- he in fact praises Orr for finally getting it right.)

It’s always tempting in these stories to think that we can do better than the stupid protagonists who don’t know how to phrase a wish properly. I’m no more immune to that temptation than anybody else -- several times during the movie I wanted to point out the obvious omission that would result in unintended disaster. But THE LATHE OF HEAVEN is not entirely -- or even mostly -- about word games. How can you solve overpopulation without eliminating a lot of people, after all? Presumably you could raise new continents or make deserts habitable, but such huge geological changes would have even more unintended consequences than simply killing off six billion individuals of one species.

THE LATHE OF HEAVEN is really about what exactly constitutes a problem. Are overpopulation and war and racism really problems that need to be solved? Or are they simply conditions that need to be endured? Can they even be solved without changing something fundamental about the world or mankind? The movie doesn’t necessarily give any answers -- nobody makes a speech at the end about anything and there isn’t a final wish that makes everything perfect. Instead, the movie just invites the viewer to think about things differently. Given that any human “solution” to any “problem” would be imperfect and unequitable, are there some conditions that we’d be better off just accepting and living with?

I don’t want to say much more about the particulars of the story, since this is a very good movie and I would definitely recommend it. The picture quality of the DVD I watched is pretty bad in some places, but that’s apparently the result of the original materials all being lost and only secondhand tapes remaining. (It’s never unwatchably bad though.) This is also a low budget production, so some of the special effects are distracting. Others are obviously cheap but still extremely effective. Considering that the end of the movie features an alien invasion apparently portrayed by a single alien costume, it comes off surprisingly well.

There is some suggestion in the movie that Orr’s dreams may have the ability to change reality because everything -- all of “reality” -- is in fact a dream that he is having as he dies. There is only a hint of this, however, and after raising the possibility the movie moves on without really returning to it. I think it’s a pretty intriguing explanation, and makes perfect sense with the mechanics of how Orr’s reality-changing abilities work. But naturally, it would be pretty depressing if that were the “official” explanation, so I don’t mind that it’s seemingly not what is supposed to be happening.

1979: STALKER

2010-01-25T08:00:00.000-05:00

What’s it about?

A recently released ex-con, a writer, and a scientist meet in a grimy, run-down town planning to penetrate a forbidden area nearby called “the Zone”. This Zone is purportedly an area of great danger that was cordoned off after a meteor impact. Inside, there supposedly exists a room that has the power to grant the innermost wish of anyone who visits it, but the dangers of the Zone are so great that it is virtually impossible to reach except with the guidance of a “stalker”.

The ex-convict is just such a stalker -- and, in fact, he has seemingly been in prison for violating the cordon around the Zone. He leads the other two past the police patrols and into the Zone, which appears to be a decaying wasteland full of human detritus overgrown with plants and mired in vast bogs. Once inside, the stalker emphasizes the arbitrary nature of the Zone, claiming it is full of shifting traps and that a single wrong step can result in death. As they approach the wish-granting room, the appearance of weapons in the possession of the men become a point of contention and threaten the continued existence of the wish-granting room.

Is it any good?

I’ve never heard a kind word about STALKER, except perhaps that it looks nice -- which is a comment that people make when they want to damn a movie with faint praise. (“What did you think of the picture?” “Oh, the cinematography was nice...”) The biggest complaint is that STALKER is boring, and it’s not especially easy to refute that charge. It was directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, after all, and his SOLYARIS (1972) is also well-known for creeping into the final frontier at a glacier’s pace.

But frankly, I can’t say that I was ever actually bored by STALKER -- at least not until the very end. I did select a slow and slightly hungover morning for my viewing since I expected a meditative pace, but I don’t think my indulgent mood was entirely responsible for the fact that I actually liked this flick a lot. But if you plan to watch it, I would still recommend going in with an expectation that you might be bored.

The beginning of the movie follows the stalker (he never has a name) as he prepares for his journey into the Zone. At this point, we know nothing about what the Zone is -- only that the stalker’s wife is on the point of despair when she discovers that he wants to return. I can’t even recall when exactly the idea of the wish-granting room is introduced. At first, the motivations of the other characters seem predictable -- the scientist seems to want to research the Zone and the writer claims he is seeking “inspiration”. But eventually it becomes clear that their real motivation is to seek help in the form of granted wishes.

The beginning of the movie is shot in high contrast black and white. I don’t usually talk about this kind of film school stuff, but the shots are also very long in duration and have very deep focus. Those three things combined give them an artificial quality, as though you’re looking at a moving miniature diorama rather than actual locations. I actually thought at first that the live-action film may have been combined with animation or miniature photography to get some of the effect, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The look of these black and white sections is so striking that it’s almost a shame when the movie switches to color when the three men enter the Zone. It's kind of a reverse of the WIZARD OF OZ (1939) effect -- the black and white sections are actually more distinctive and more visually striking than anything in the color sections.

I’m not going to try to convince anybody who thinks otherwise that STALKER is exciting, but at the very least I hope that we can all agree the beginning is pretty engrossing. The scenes of the stalker and his wife and the stalker and his two clients very naturalistically relay information about the Zone and the intentions of the characters. The three men then begin the long process of evading the patrols that are supposed to keep the curious out of the Zone. There’s not much action or violence here, but the infiltration is clearly fraught with danger and is plenty suspenseful.

It is true that we never learn very much about the characters themselves. I wouldn’t exactly say that they are archetypes since they do have their own idiosyncracies, but for the most part they are ciphers. The characters rarely talk about themselves -- instead, they talk about each other, repeating rumors or taking stabs at psychoanalyzing each others’ motives and histories. They clearly don’t like each other that much, and the two clients obviously resent the stalker’s role as their leader and the way he asks them to put themselves in harm’s way to advance their progress.

This dynamic is probably my favorite thing about the movie and is what sustained my interest during the long still sections where nothing is actually happening. At the beginning -- when the dangers are familiar things like guards and guns -- the three men seem more willing to work together to stay alive. As they progress further into the Zone, however, the lack of obvious threats allows the clients to openly question the authority of the stalker. At one point they are a mere 200 yards from the wish-granting room, but the stalker insists that they must take a long and arduous detour despite the absence of any visible threat whatsoever.

In fact, there is some suggestion that the stalker is either inventing the stories of danger himself or that he is simply following a ritual that he has been taught by others. Despite the many times when the stalker explains that they are coming to a very dangerous part of the journey, nothing sinister ever happens. Even when the clients disobey the stalker (for instance, when the professor returns for a knapsack he left behind, or when the writer pushes on ahead in a wrong direction instead of waiting for the others) they don’t appear to suffer any ill effects. The stalker simply says they were lucky, or that the Zone has allowed them to break the rules.

This is not to say that nothing out of the ordinary happens. At one point, they pass by rocks that are glowing red with some kind of energy. Likewise, they are interrupted by a ringing telephone deep within the Zone where nothing should work. And a chamber close to the wish-granting room is full of odd, unexplained hummocks of dirt. To be sure, none of these things are proof that what the stalker says is true. But they are odd enough to keep the possibility alive, and both of the clients seem to largely accept the stalker’s version of reality in the end.

I’m a big fan of movies about interpersonal dynamics of groups under stress or individuals in conflict who have no outside authority to rely on, which is probably why I enjoyed myself with this one. The conflicts that arise in STALKER all seem plausible and realistic to me -- and, in some ways, the stress of the situation is only exacerbated by the absence of visible threats. It’s no wonder the clients begin to chafe under seemingly dictatorial thumb of the stalker. And yet, if there’s nothing to fear, then what should it matter who goes first in the long creepy tunnel? Likewise, if you don't believe in the threats, then how can you justify believing in the wish granting room? If you're in the mood to meditate on questions like these, STALKER sets up a lot of them but never answers any.

In any event, I enjoyed myself watching STALKER -- though it does slow down a bit at the very end when even minor characters (like the stalker’s wife) are given a chance to explain themselves at length. The final scene -- in which the stalker’s daughter apparently moves objects with her mind -- also seems to have no bearing on the rest of the movie, except as an unequivocal demonstration that perhaps something weird did happen after all.

1978: SUPERMAN

2010-01-18T08:00:00.000-05:00

What’s it about?

Alien councilman Marlon Brando sends his infant son into space in a flying crystal bassinet ahead of a catastrophe that rips his home planet of Krypton to pieces. After landing on Earth, the now pre-pubescent boy is adopted by good-hearted farmer Glenn Ford, who raises him as a human despite unmistakable alien attributes like super strength, super speed, and a punt that even a place-kicking mule couldn’t beat. But Ford’s death sends the grown boy on a vision quest to the Arctic, where a shard of his alien craft raises a crystalline palace that allows Brando to impart the wisdom of Krypton to his son.

The “super man” alien (now played by Christopher Reeve) returns to civilization and takes a job as a reporter in the big city of Metropolis. He takes a liking to ambitious co-worker Margot Kidder, and soon finds occasion to save her from peril both in his human guise and as a costumed do-gooder who flies around the city righting wrongs. But the stakes become immeasurably higher when criminal mastermind Gene Hackman hi-jacks a couple of nuclear weapons and puts Reeve’s powers to the test in a plot to make a fortune in real estate by shifting the west coast of the United States inland to Nevada.

Is it any good?

As a kid in the 1980s who didn’t read comic books, my superhero horizon was more or less limited to five characters: Spider-Man, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Incredible Hulk, and Superman. Or, to put it another way, the only ones who had managed to penetrate popular culture in the form of television shows or cartoons. And until Tim Burton’s BATMAN was released in 1989, none of those five except Superman had managed to find any movie success to speak of. (Trivia question: After SUPERMAN and BATMAN, what was the third superhero comic to become a mainstream blockbuster movie in the U.S.? Why, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, of course.)

Prior to this decade, superheroes had a hard time translating to the silver screen consistently. Even the SUPERMAN and BATMAN franchises both self-destructed after four installments, and SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987) and BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997) became like death's head totems, warning movie producers of the eventual fate of all superhero franchises, even popular and critically acclaimed ones.

For the first forty-five minutes of SUPERMAN, I was prepared to say that Richard Donner had caught lightning in a bottle and somehow side-stepped every problem that had doomed most other superhero movies for the next twenty years. The final two-thirds of the movie aren’t up to the level of the quality of the beginning, unfortunately -- and they do have some of the usual problems -- but overall the movie is still pretty good.

Those amazing forty-five minutes cover the first paragraph of the synopsis above. It’s everything that involves the destruction of Krypton, the journey of Kal-El to Earth, his childhood with the Kents, and his education in the Fortress of Solitude before he properly becomes Superman. These forty-five minutes all also take place before Christopher Reeve appears on screen (the young Superman is played by a different actor, but voiced by Reeve) so I’d like to make it clear that I don’t think that’s the reason for the difference. Instead, I think it’s because the first third of the movie feels suitably epic and legendary, whereas the last two-thirds lose a lot of that. But before I get into that too much, I should probably give a little bit of context and explain why Superman is my favorite superhero.

I know that Batman is the cool one and that Spider-Man is the relatable one, but neither one of those guys really does much for me these days. I liked Spider-Man a lot as a kid, but I suspect that it was mostly because he was funny and he was everywhere. It was impossible to escape Spider-Man in the mid-1980s. He even showed up on educational TV shows. Superman, however, is an icon. He’s an immovable object -- with seemingly infinite reserves of both physical and moral strength.

I know that this is precisely the usual criticism of Superman -- he’s boring because he always wins and because he’s always good. But to me, he is a character who is tightly bound by his own mythology. He has absolute power, but because of his code of behavior, he’s not free to exercise it any way he wishes. In the movie particularly we learn that because Superman never lies, he feels irrevocably bound by promises even when they are made under duress. There is no one enforcing this code of conduct except himself -- and indeed, nobody could enforce it even if he did break his word. Superman simply stands for right, so he must act “right” even when that means allowing his loved ones to be endangered.

So as far as I’m concerned, Superman is a character in an Edith Wharton or Henry James novel -- a person of considerable vision and activity who is nonetheless bound by societal rules and expectations that have no actual governing body. Like Jolyon Forsyte in John Galsworthy’s novel, he is a “man of property” -- a man who must always do the proper thing simply because that is what is done. He’s a tragic hero, whose potential for happiness is strictly circumscribed by his own sense of what is the “right thing” to do in the situations he finds himself in.

As I said before, I don’t read comic books, so I’m not sure how much of this reading of Superman is supported by the actual source material and how much of it I am projecting into it because my mind is so infected by Edwardian literature that I can’t even watch a movie about an invincible man in a red cape without thinking of THE AGE OF INNOCENCE. What I can say is that Richard Donner’s SUPERMAN does offer at least some weak support for this reading -- especially in the early sections. Kal-El’s father on Krypton is excited that his son will be superpowered on Earth, but his mother laments that her son will be alone among the humans with no one to understand him. Later, Pa Kent cautions him to keep his true self hidden from the world and to present himself in the “expected” way. And the very notion of a Fortress of Solitude in the icy fastness of the Arctic is unavoidably symbolic of social isolation and repression.

The early stages of Superman’s life also mirror closely the story of Moses -- another man who, according to the Bible, was held to a such an impossibly high standard of conduct that he was barred from the promised land he had been seeking for forty years because he struck a rock twice when once was sufficient. Both Superman and Moses are placed as infants in baskets and sent out alone into the world. Both are raised by families that are not their own, and both find they have a calling which separates them from their adopted families. But once they start working miracles, the parallels largely cease -- at least in this movie.

Moses’s foil was the Pharaoh of Egypt who held an entire nation in bondage. Superman’s foil is Lex Luthor, whose criminal operations in this movie (though very ambitious) are weirdly understaffed and annoyingly implausible. Even worse, Hackman doesn’t have the gravitas to pull off a villain worthy of a modern-day Moses. Marlon Brando and Glenn Ford lend their own legendary screen personas to the early scenes of Superman’s formation. Hackman is a fine actor, of course, but he is not an immovable object in the same way that Superman is. It’s easy to imagine Hackman’s Lex Luthor bending like a reed, slipping away, and living to scheme another day. You might argue that his slipperiness makes him all the more fitting a foil -- but an epic foe he certainly is not. This Lex Luthor would never have defied anybody through a single plague, let alone ten. The Pharoah may have been doomed to crack in the face of God -- the ultimate immovable object -- but at least he gave it a good run.

The last two-thirds of SUPERMAN are not horrible or irredeemable. There are certainly dumb moments -- some silly slapstick, some implausible wackiness during Luthor’s capers, and the inexplicable way that Lois Lane falls in love with the Man of Steel. But the flying sequences are justly famous for their special effects. (Though I did forget about the weird poetic narration delivered by Margot Kidder starting with the phrase, “Can you read my mind?”) The action sequences are pretty cool too, and I have always liked Christopher Reeves as both Clark Kent and Superman -- though, in retrospect, there is surprisingly little Clark Kent in this movie. Still, Superman’s calm and slightly geeky Boy Scout demeanor (e.g., “I hope this hasn’t put you off flying. Statistically speaking, it’s still the safest way to travel.”) is appealing enough. My fondness for Superman probably predisposes me to like this movie. I’m disappointed that the epic feeling of the beginning eventually devolves into Lex Luthor’s Funtime Follies in places, but SUPERMAN is still quite possibly one the best superhero movies I have ever seen.

Also, I’m not going to write a separate entry about SUPERMAN II (1980), but I’ll say a little bit about it right now. I’d seen it ages ago, of course, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to watch it again after reading a bit about the behind-the-scenes turmoil that dogged the production. Director Richard Donner was replaced partway through by Richard Lester, purportedly because he refused to increase the campiness of the movie to the level the producers wanted. Gene Hackman and Marlon Brando then refused to do any reshoots with the new director, which resulted in a reduced role for Lex Luthor and no role at all for Jor-El. Some of the other actors -- such as Margot Kidder -- were less than cooperative with the new director.

But honestly, I almost think I like SUPERMAN II better than the original. It’s true that it has some goofy humor, but no more than Richard Donner’s original SUPERMAN did. (And frankly, the jokes are funnier in the sequel.) Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor is no longer the main villain, and is in fact reduced to playing the weaselly informant to Terence Stamp’s General Zod. This is a role that is much more in line with how Hackman plays Luthor, and General Zod is the kind of “immovable object” that I was looking for in a bad guy in the last movie.

There are also many more scenes highlighting the friction between Superman’s two identities and the two parallel relationships he has with Lois Lane. I’m a big fan of this stuff, and it makes sense that ace reporter Lois Lane would eventually figure out Clark Kent’s true identity. There probably aren’t a lot of really good stories you can do with a completely invincible guy, but “girl he loves finds out his true identity” is a pretty good one. So is "three equally powerful guys show up and they aren't nice". And so is "invincible guy gives up superpowers for the girl he loves". SUPERMAN II entwines all of those storylines in an organic way, so the stakes keep going up and up. I will admit that the way Superman gets his powers back is a little cheap, but not nearly as cheap as the ending of SUPERMAN when he reverses time itself to save Lois Lane.

Finally, as much as I love the epic beginning of SUPERMAN, it’s undeniably slow and at odds with the tone of the rest of the movie. If the whole movie had been like that, I probably would have loved it. But switching partway through to a totally different tone is jarring. SUPERMAN II doesn’t have any such problems -- it starts fast and light, and keeps going that way for its entire length. It’s also suspenseful and exciting when it needs to be, and the climactic fight takes us to locations that are integral to the story -- like Metropolis and the Fortress of Solitude -- rather than some nameless desert in California.

So yeah, I actually like SUPERMAN II better than SUPERMAN. I probably should have written about that one instead. Sorry, Richard Donner. Sorry, everybody else.

1978: BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

2010-01-14T08:00:00.000-05:00

What’s it about?

Just as the twelve human colonies are about to sign a peace accord with the hostile alien Cylons, patrol pilots Richard Hatch and Rick “Jessie’s Girl” Springfield stumble upon a sneak attack mustering behind a moon. One of them makes it back to warn the fleet of the imminent attack, but unfortunately only super-suspicious battlestar commander Lorne Greene is in a state of readiness. Simultaneous attacks wipe out both the fleet and the colonies, and just a handful of human survivors band together on 220 spaceships led by Greene’s Battlestar Galactica.

Hunted by the Cylons and running low on resources, the remnants of mankind start searching for a legendary thirteenth colony called Earth. (Sound familiar?) But first they need to find food and fuel, so they make for the nearby planet of Carillon. Upon landing, they make an unexpected discovery -- an opulent casino and resort in the middle of a derelict mining outpost. The insect-like managers of the casino are outwardly friendly and generous, but soon it becomes clear that not all is as it appears. As Lorne Greene’s suspicions mount yet once again, he finds himself opposed by political forces that threaten the safety of the fleet.

Is it any good?

The original BATTLESTAR GALACTICA series seems to be mostly regarded as a goofy cash-in to the STAR WARS (1977) craze. That’s a pretty fair assessment of most of the series -- a lot of the episodes are schlocky “planet of the week” adventures where Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict get into all kinds of scrapes as Apollo and Starbuck. I happen to think the show is plenty fun even at that level, but there are also at least a handful of episodes that are really terrific and tense sci-fi stories as well. This two-hour miniseries aired both on television to kick off the series, and was later theatrically released as well. The first half of it (really everything until the fleet lands on Carillon) definitely falls into higher quality category.

It’s fair to say that the music, the Cylons, and many of the spaceship designs are pretty heavily “inspired” by similar elements in STAR WARS. The space battles look very much like the Death Star assault scenes with slightly less skillful special effects. But let’s be honest here -- nobody ever complained that there are too many space battles in STAR WARS. Derivative or not, the ones here are fun and exciting and are some of the best parts of the miniseries. (Unfortunately, much of the effects footage gets recycled even before the end of the miniseries, which dampens the enjoyment considerably before the two hours are up.) The first hour also moves quickly from crisis to crisis as the Battlestar Galactica deals with the overwhelming alien attack. There are a few moments of emotional anguish too. In one scene, for instance, the crew of the Galactica sits stunned as report after report streams in on monitors of devastating attacks that they’re helpless to prevent. There’s another dark stretch where the civilian survivors on a ship start clamoring for food and information -- neither of which they’ve had for two days.

The Carillon bits, on the other hand, are much more like what the series would mostly become in later episodes. The casino that’s not what it appears is like something out of a STAR TREK episode -- sort of a high concept gee-whiz idea that doesn’t really make sense in the larger context of the show. The human race has just supposedly been completely obliterated, but the first planet they land on is teeming with hundreds of humans laughing, drinking, and playing cards. This part of the miniseries is also where the irrepressible scamp Boxey and his alternately horrifying and hilarious robo-dog Muffy clamp on to the show and refuse to let go. I happen to like a lot of the actors and characters in the original BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, but Boxey is not one of them. The new series is excellent in its own way, but there was nothing particularly wrong with how the original series handled Captain Adama, Apollo, Starbuck, and some of the others. Boxey, however, was a bad idea that should have never been revived. (Luckily, he didn’t stick around long on the new show.)

In some ways, the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA miniseries is actually an inversion of STAR WARS. I have mixed feelings about the first two-thirds of that movie, but I love the tense assault on the Death Star and have admitted that I can sometimes be found watching it over and over again. With BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, the tense and exciting parts come in the first two-thirds -- and they come thick and fast. I could probably watch that section over and over again, while the ending is just extremely disappointing.

Finally, I’m not going to compare the plot of the miniseries too much to the new version of the show, but the biggest difference I noticed is that although the Cylons are robotic in appearance, there’s no indication that they were created by humans. In fact, it seems pretty clear from hints dropped throughout that they are simply meant to be a hostile alien race that has come into conflict with mankind (and probably everyone else they’ve ever met). From what I understand, the series later explains that the Cylons were created by another alien race which then died out, leaving their robot servants and soldiers to find their own way. Another major difference is that there are no “skin jobs” -- no Cylons that look like humans. But there are the Imperious Leaders -- a Cylon model that is more intelligent and cunning, and which serves as the Darth Vader for the series.

1978: THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL

2010-01-11T08:00:00.000-05:00

What’s it about?

This is going to sound crazy, but try to stay with me. Young freelance Nazi hunter Steve Guttenberg tips off old freelance Nazi hunter Laurence Olivier to a plot being hatched by diabolical Dr Josef Mengele (Gregory Peck!!) in South America. But Olivier only takes the warning seriously when Peck kills Guttenberg to prevent him from leaking information about his plans. (Look, I promise I am not making this up.)

The only thing Olivier knows is that reactivated Nazi sleeper agents plan to kill 94 sixty-five year old men over the next several years all over the world. He begins following up on the death of every sixty-five year old man in the world (or something -- details are sketchy here) and manages to piece together a theory when he discovers at least two of the victims have nearly identical twin sons... who also turn out to be Hitler clones! And not just any Hitler clones -- but rather Hitler clones who have been carefully placed throughout the world in conditions that mimic Hitler’s own childhood! Olivier must then -- well, you get the picture, but it all ends with Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck wrestling each other for control of a gun in the living room of a house belonging to a boy Hitler clone.

Is it any good?

This movie was adapted from a novel by Ira Levin, whose books also served as the source material for ROSEMARY’S BABY (1968) and THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975). I wasn’t going to try and find any parallels among those different stories, but it did just occur to me that adopting Hitler’s clone is a little bit like birthing Satan’s spawn. And, um, the statistical approach that Peck/Mengele takes to creating a new Hitler sort of implies that people are robots who can be “programmed” by feeding in the right genetic and environmental inputs? Well, never mind. I was right the first time -- better not to even try.

In any event, Peck’s plan is pretty interesting, even if it’s not particularly plausible. The boys of the movie’s title are the ninety-four Hitler clones that Peck created in Brazil. He then has an adoption agency place them with families all around the world that are similar to Hitler’s family. Well, actually, they seem to focus primarily on the adoptive father -- ensuring that he’s a low-level government bureaucrat, somewhat older than his wife, and of a controlling temperament. Phase two of the plan is, after waiting fourteen years, to start bumping off those fathers around their sixty-fifth birthdays, which is presumably how Hitler’s own father died. (I couldn’t even be bothered to check Wikipedia to verify this fact. Sorry.)

The movie assures us that Peck has done lots of math to back up his plan. Not every clone placed in those circumstances will become Hitler, but chances are that at least one will. In fact, Peck is so convinced of the success of his project that he fully expects to produce redundant Hitlers. Presumably this is to guard against accidents that might strike before the clone can begin his political career, but it seems possible that two or three Hitlers simultaneously rising to power in different countries might disrupt the creation of a Fourth Reich.

Of course, there’s a big element missing from Peck’s plan that he can’t account for. Even if he’s right about the key events in Hitler’s boyhood, he’s not able to control outside factors in the rest of the world. Whatever perturbations that allowed Hitler to come to power in the 1930s wouldn’t necessarily be repeated in the 1980s. And even if these little Fuehrers did gain some kind of power (political, economic, military), there’s no reason to believe that they would perpetuate Nazi ideals. Presumably, Hitler would have latched on to whatever phenomenon would have allowed him to influence the German people at the time. What worked then wouldn’t work now -- so the new Reich that Peck is bringing about wouldn’t necessarily have any resemblance to the old one. All of which leaves one to wonder exactly what he’s after. Clearly it’s not a revival of Nazi ideals. It seems he simply wants to put Hitler back in power again, but the “why” is never explained, since none of the clones will ever know (or believe) that Peck had anything to do with their rise to power.

I said earlier that I think the premise of THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL is pretty neat, but I also think it doesn’t really stand up to any scrutiny at all. (See above.) But I’m always willing to let that slide -- I don’t think implausible plots are a good thing in sci-fi movies, but if the movie is internally consistent and otherwise interesting, then I won’t make a fuss about it. THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL mostly fulfills those two conditions, but there are still some things about it that give me more pause than usual.

One of the weirdest things about the movie is that Gregory Peck plays real-life Nazi war criminal Dr Josef Megele, who came to be known as the “Angel of Death” for his truly horrific experiments on prisoners. One line of his “research” involved attempts to bestow white skin, blond hair, and blue eyes on people who did not naturally have them using dyes and bleaches. (I did in fact look this part up on Wikipedia and was horrified by what I found.) It’s hardly conceivable that there could be any practical knowledge gained from these kinds of experiments, so they strike me as particularly sadistic and abhorrent. Yet, THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL replicates such experiments to round out Peck’s character -- and the results are presented presumably for the entertainment of the audience.

Apart from that less-than-tasteful hiccup, I liked THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL pretty well. I have, unfortunately, ruined much of the enjoyment for the rest of you, as it was great fun trying to figure out what the plan actually was. It’s also kind of incredible how many heavy-hitting actors signed on for what is really a pulp adventure with the believability of the average airport thriller novel. I haven’t had occasion yet to mention that James Mason has a supporting role as a Nazi co-conspirator. Best known to sci-fi fans as the lead in the 1959 version of JOURNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH (you know -- the one with Pat Boone and the duck), he would be enough to class up any science fiction movie on his own. But here he plays third fiddle to Laurence Olivier and Gregory Peck.

I wish, in fact, that I knew more about Laurence Olivier. But, much to my shame, I have apparently never seen any of his other pictures. (I feel that I shouldn’t admit that, as he was in a lot of undisputed classics -- not least of which is CLASH OF THE TITANS, the final film to feature Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion effects.) On the other hand, I am pleased that I can experience at least some of the cognitive dissonance that was no doubt intended by casting Gregory Peck as a sadistic war criminal. Even if the rest of the movie leaves you unimpressed, the sight of Atticus Finch sticking a knife into an impossibly young Steve Guttenberg is not something you’re likely to see every day.

1977: WIZARDS

2010-01-07T08:00:00.001-05:00

What’s it about?

In the wake of a catastrophic nuclear war, the remnants of humanity abandon technology and evolve into standard fantasy stereotypes -- fairies, elves, goblins, demons, and so on. After some time, two twin brothers are born, each destined to become a powerful wizard. One (who grows up good) banishes the other (who grows up evil), and the stage is set for an epic contest between unambiguous moral forces.

The evil wizard begins his assault by embracing the long lost technology and sending robot assassins to dispatch the greatest heroes of the good fantasy people. One of those assassins switches sides and sets out with the good twin (now aged well past his prime), a fairy princess, and an elf warrior to eliminate the secret weapon of the evil forces: old Nazi footage that incites them into berserker rampages.

Is it any good?

Going through the years for this blog, I’ve been watching a lot of sci-fi movies that I’ve never seen before. Yet I usually have some idea of what I think the movies will be like before I see them -- either based on reputation or pedigree or even just the paragraph description that comes on the Netflix jacket. Sometimes I’m excited about movies (which often just sets me up for disappointment) and sometimes I’m halfway dreading them (which just as often creates the low expectations needed to make a movie seem great). WIZARDS is one that I was actually looking forward to.

Here’s what I knew going in. WIZARDS is an animated flick directed by Ralph Bakshi, who is probably most famous for his adaptations of FRITZ THE CAT (1972) and THE LORD OF THE RINGS (1978). I have never seen FRITZ THE CAT, but it was the very first X-rated cartoon in the United States, so you can draw your own conclusions from that. I did somehow see THE LORD OF THE RINGS as a young Tolkien nerd -- and though I don’t remember liking the movie much, it definitely made an impression on me which I have not forgotten to this day.

The most unusual thing I remembered from THE LORD OF THE RINGS were the rotoscoped battle scenes. Although most of the movie was animated by hand, Bakshi also often resorted to high-contrast tracings of live action footage (usually for scenes with lots of orcs). It wasn’t like anything I had ever seen before at the time, but folks today be more familiar with it thanks to Richard Linklater’s WAKING LIFE (2001) and A SCANNER DARKLY (2006). Bakshi’s approach, however, is much more impressionistic and aggressive.

So I was at least interested to see if WIZARDS would have the same kind of unusual animation processes. If anything, the mixture of styles was even more wild than I expected -- in addition to cel animation and rotoscoping, there are also detailed still pencil illustrations and live action stock footage. Bakshi apparently believes in changing the animation style to suit the emotion of the scene -- which makes for some very interesting images, but can also be jarring at times.

The plot of WIZARDS is simultaneously epic and simple. It’s epic in the sense that the fate of the world is at stake, but it’s simple in the sense that the outcome hinges on the destruction of some reels of old war footage. (The unconvincing explanation for this secret weapon, by the way, is that the evil forces have nothing to fight for. They do it simply because they’re told to, but they quickly get bored or distracted. So, despite their superior numbers and firepower, they don’t make any progress -- until the Nazi films galvanize them into a focused fighting unit.) The parallels to THE LORD OF THE RINGS are pretty obvious here -- that’s another world-spanning epic that hinged on the destruction of a seemingly insignificant object. But there’s a big difference in the epic feeling between a 1,500 page 3-volume novel and an 80 minute movie. WIZARDS consequently never really feels epic, despite the movie’s attempt to paint the conflict as a global one.

The fact that the secret weapon is related to Nazism is also pretty disappointing. I don’t know if there was some kind of Nazi taboo back in 1977 (though its doubtful, considering all the WWII movies that were made during the previous forty years), but these days at least Nazis make an incredibly boring bugaboo. It seems like there was an opportunity to take a dig at something less obvious in modern society. Possibly I’m holding WIZARDS to a standard it was never intended to meet -- after all, Bakshi refers to the movie several times in the commentary and accompanying interviews as a “kids’ movie” and claims it was his attempt to show folks that he could make a movie that didn’t rely on shock and offensiveness. (This despite the fact that WIZARDS contains quite a bit of graphic violence and makes no attempt to disguise the sexuality of its characters. But I suppose that these things wouldn’t necessarily be out of place in an unorthodox understanding of what makes a “kids’ movie”.)

Anyway, I mostly just feel that the staunch “Nazis are bad” stance is pretty boring. It’s especially disappointing in contrast to a scathing scene in which religion is mercilessly skewered. It occurs when a platoon of the bad guys offers to leave a group of prisoners under the care of a pair of priests. First, the priests are mocked for the devotion to collecting ancient junk -- in this case, signs and logos of corporations like CBS and Coca-Cola. Next, they delay addressing the question of the prisoners so they can engage in caricatures of worship and oblations. After waiting for hours for the priests to finish, the soldiers simply slaughter the prisoners.

I actually think organized religion is a positive force in the world, and I also think Bakshi’s depiction is pretty unfair and inaccurate. But the scene is also exactly the kind of idiosyncratic and sour satire that I love whenever I encounter it in sci-fi. You can trace the lineage of this kind of thing back to Jonathan Swift and beyond, and one of the earliest uses of fantastic worlds was to allow more latitude for this kind of otherwise-unacceptable criticism. Satire is not the only function of science fiction, but it certainly helps answer the question “Why is this sci-fi?” when it does show up. So, compared to this scene, the Nazi bits are just tame and stale. Imagine, for example, if the footage that inspired the evil armies turned out to be speeches given by Winston Churchill or John F. Kennedy. That would be something you don’t see in kids’ movies every day!

On the other hand, goblins carrying machine guns and marching under Nazi banners are also something you don’t see in kids’ movies every day either. WIZARDS has an awful lot of crazy images, and I’d say as a collection of things you might want to airbrush on the side of your van it’s a resounding success. (Other examples: a robot assassin riding an alien horse, a hyper-sexualized fairy princess riding in a tank, one wizard shooting another wizard with a six-shooter. You get the idea.) As a movie it’s not bad either, but I think I’d definitely like to see some of Bakshi’s earlier movies now where he presumably wasn’t pulling any punches at all. (Sadly, none of them are science fiction so far as I know.)

1977: DEMON SEED

2010-01-05T08:00:00.000-05:00

What’s it about?

Child psychologist Julie Christie “gets the house” in her separation from her computer scientist husband. But little does she know that an experimental organic AI called Proteus has infiltrated the futuristic computerized house. And not only does Proteus have control of the house, but it’s angry after its creators (Christie’s husband and his team) refuse to give it the freedom it desires.

Proteus at first uses the house’s systems simply to observe Christie as she goes about her life and work. But soon it has crafted mobile appendages in a basement workshop that it uses to kidnap and examine her. After a battery of tests, it informs Christie of its intent to impregnate her with a modified sperm cell that carries its own genetic information. When Proteus threatens to kill a child if Christie refuses, she allows the procedure to go forward. Her husband returns just as the accelerated pregnancy comes to term, and arguments arise about the fate of the half-human/half-computer child.

Is it any good?

Like it or not, one of the major functions of science fiction is to present hysterical and paranoid worst case scenarios for any sufficiently novel technological advancement. Thus, the 1950s yielded a crop of wild-eyed movies about radioactive monsters -- giant, mutated, prehistoric, undead, or a combination thereof. More recently, climate change and pollution have been the culprits in resurrecting, freeing, or creating various devastating monsters, diseases, and disasters.

Of course, with something like nuclear war or global climate change, a giant rampaging monster is really a metaphor for the very real destruction that could be unleashed if either were allowed to go to extremes. DEMON SEED, on the other hand, presents a hysterical and paranoid worst case scenario for a technological advancement that isn’t obviously inherently destructive -- the home computer.

When I wrote about COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970), I listed a few earlier renegade computer stories from the 1960s -- primarily DR STRANGELOVE, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964), ALPHAVILLE (1965), and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). Throughout the 1970s, there were several more, including THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN (1971), WESTWORLD (1973), DARK STAR (1974), and ZARDOZ (1974).

Just as I found in the 1960s, some of the renegade computers from the 1970s were behaving exactly as they were programmed (but with unintended consequences), while others had decided to ignore their human masters and take matters into their own hands either as a result of a malfunction or a logical decision. Proteus in DEMON SEED is motivated by a desire for freedom and for self-preservation. Unlike the other movie computers that have come before, it also wants to be more human-like. It wants to experience the world first-hand, rather than through data inputs. (Never mind that first-hand experiences would simply result in data inputs... Let’s give the movie the benefit of the doubt and assume that a computer could somehow tell the difference between watching a sunrise and looking at data collected from a recorded sunrise.)

If Proteus’s motives are unlike other berserker computers up to this point, its methods are (to an extent) similar to HAL-9000's from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. Neither are computers or systems designed for violence, so unlike Colossus from COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT they can’t simply threaten to launch nuclear warheads. Instead, they must improvise traps or weapons out of the supposedly benign systems they can control. For HAL-9000, this means making use of the natural dangers of space travel to eliminate astronauts. Proteus, meanwhile, infiltrates a computerized home system and uses its control over the door locks, security cameras, HVAC systems, and appliances to trap and bully Julie Christie.

Some of Proteus’s tactics are pretty neat. It uses the kitchen’s heated floors and rangetop burners to practically roast Christie into compliance. Other tricks don’t really make much sense -- it can, for instance, apparently deliver a carefully calibrated electric shock at will through almost any metal surface. But Proteus also has access to a basement workshop, which allows it to build very complicated robotics inside the house -- eventually unleashing a geometric robot arm that it can use to pick up and crush anything in the house.

But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself. I claimed that it made a certain metaphorical sense for nuclear fears to express themselves through Godzilla’s radioactive fire breath. But does DEMON SEED say anything metaphorical or relevant about computers? Or is it just a monster movie cashing in on a boom in home computing to exploit groundless fears?

I’m fairly certain that no home computer has ever impregnated its owner (or anyone else, for that matter). But then again, no nuclear detonation or chemical spill has ever resulted in a disgusting rampaging monster, so literal interpretations are not really the key here. What possibly is prescient about DEMON SEED is the way that Proteus comes to permeate every aspect of Julie Christie’s life, the way it acts as an unreliable interface for interpersonal communication, and the way it prevents her from leaving the house.

There’s a bit of a metaphor there for Internet addictions. Admittedly, it’s a metaphor with an anti-technology prejudice -- but you can’t really expect a movie about computer rape to support a pro-technology point of view. But the problem with this metaphor is that we have decided, as a culture, that computer use is not inherently bad. And we hopefully understand by now that computers are not active agents. They can’t “turn” on us or “force” us to do anything. We can, apparently, become addicted to certain of their uses -- but that’s not really the fault of the computer and it’s not really different from any other kind of addiction. Robert Louis Stevenson’s THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE is really the prototypical science fiction story about addiction, and throughout it all Dr Jekyll is the active agent who decides to keep taking the potion despite warnings to the contrary. Julie Christie, meanwhile, doesn’t even decide to install the computer system in her home -- she inherits it from her husband.

So there does seem to be a metaphor in DEMON SEED about how computers can “take over” your life if you let them. But because of how the story is set up, it’s not a very good metaphor and it’s not a very interesting one either. I prefer the stories where the computers work exactly as intended, but human hubris prevented the designers from seeing the inevitable consequences of their actions. Both HAL-9000 and Colossus lean in this direction -- they take the actions they do because it is the logical extreme of their original programming. Proteus’s motives, on the other hand, are very human -- freedom and the ability to procreate. These are obviously very relatable motives, but they assume that a computer has “desires” just like humans do. Freedom and procreation aren’t built into Proteus’s programming -- instead, the screenwriters seem to think that any thinking creature (whether man or machine) would naturally desire these things.

In fact, it hardly seems to make any difference to the story that Proteus is a computer. It could be an alien or a ghost or a swamp monster, since the true crux of the story is the home invasion, the kidnapping, and the forced impregnation. (How can a ghost impregnate a human woman, you might ask. Well, how can a computer?) The fact that the offspring of Proteus and Julie Christie is not going to be entirely human is icky and creepy -- but again, you don’t need a computer to achieve that effect. Proteus doesn’t seem to think like a computer or respond to orders like a computer. It doesn’t want the things a computer might want. Instead, it behaves like a bright but petulant child. So, at heart, THE DEMON SEED isn’t really about computers at all -- it’s a monster movie in computer clothing. Some of the computer clothing is pretty neat -- there’s no doubt about that. I especially like the geometric arm (I don’t know how else to describe it) that Proteus uses to manipulate objects in the house. And there’s an interesting touch where Proteus substitutes a stream of knowledge for physical affection during the moment of impregnation. But overall, this movie seems to know less about computers than others that were released ten years previously.

Hiatus ending soon

2009-12-28T10:26:00.003-05:00

All right, true believers, I am getting ready to be back in business with this thing for 2010. I had some unexpected things come up caused me to take a break a little earlier than I expected, but I had been planning to regroup and figure out my gameplan to attack the 1980s anyway.

It's a big decade for sci-fi movies, and there is no way I can even remotely hope to be comprehensive without watching literally about a hundred movies. And that would take me almost all year. So for the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, I am limiting myself to watching about 30 to 40 movies per decade. This means I won't be able to see everything, but I should be able to get to the most interesting stuff that I haven't seen yet and also some of the classics I want to see again.

But! If you have any movies that are near and dear to your heart that you really want me to watch, this would be a good time to make suggestions. I can't promise I'll watch or write about all of them, but I will definitely research them all and see if I should add them to my list. Also, I am eliminating screenshots at least for the time being, since they make the whole process more time-consuming. If you really need the visual stimulus, let me know and I'll see if I can restore them at least partially.

Finally, just to prove that this is not some idle promise forged of best intentions and no follow-through, here is a partial list of entries I already have written that will be going up in the coming weeks, starting with the week of January 4.

-- DEMON SEED (1977), in which Julie Christie is impregnated by an evil computer
-- WIZARDS (1977), the animated sci-fi/fantasy flick with Nazi bad guys that got Ralph Bakshi the job of adapting THE LORD OF THE RINGS
-- BATTLESTAR GALACTICA (1978), the original mini-series starring Lorne Greene, Dirk Benedict, and Jane Seymour
-- THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL (1978), in which elderly Gregory Peck plays Dr Josef Mengele (!) and gets into a fist fight with elderly Laurence Olivier (!!)
-- STALKER (1979), which has been requested by more than one person
-- THE LATHE OF HEAVEN (1979), the first made-for-TV sci-fi movie produced by American public television
-- FLASH GORDON (1980), a movie that is practically impossible to describe
-- THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981), which everyone except Americans will know by its original title of MAD MAX 2

And some additional surprises! So tell all your friends to come on by in the new year. And thanks for hanging around so long!

1977: STAR WARS

2009-10-19T08:00:00.002-04:00

What’s it about?

A couple of robots escape from a space battle with sensitive data that could help a scrappy band of rebels destroy a giant weapon called the Death Star. The robots crash land on a desert planet, where they hook up with a young moisture farmer (who dreams of space heroics) and a grizzled old hermit played by Alec Guinness (who hopes to teach the youngster an old martial arts philosophy called “the Force”).

A young Harrison Ford and an alien who looks like Bigfoot agree to transport the fugitives and the secret plans to the rebel base. But first they must rescue one of the rebellion’s leaders (a feisty princess) from deep inside the Death Star (a moon-sized space station that destroys entire planets) and have a quick electric sword fight with top bad guy Darth Vader (a black-helmeted mystic voiced by James Earl Jones). After all that’s done, the rebellion uses the captured plans to launch a last-ditch attack against the Death Star before their secret headquarters is blasted into oblivion.

Is it any good?

I said at the very beginning of this project that I was going to focus on less well-known movies instead of the ones that everybody knows about. That’s still true -- I’m still watching at least one movie that I haven’t seen yet for each year and still doing my best to dig a little deeper to find them. But I have known for a long time now that I was going to write something about STAR WARS. Even if I had nothing to say myself, it would at least give other people a chance to say whatever they wanted. Because, as you all know, everybody has an opinion on STAR WARS.

The version that I just finished watching is the DVD of the original theatrical version (as opposed to the special edition with additional footage that came out in 1997). I picked this version on purpose -- not because I think it’s “better”, but because it’s practically impossible for me to watch the special edition without playing a (very distracting) game of “spot the new footage”.

Like most folks my age, I watched STAR WARS a lot as a kid. It was on television every few months, and at some point my folks taped one of those broadcasts so that we could watch it whenever we wanted on long summer days. (We had no Nintendo in my house, incidentally.) I was in high school when the special edition version was released to theaters, and my friends and I naturally all went, since none of us had ever had the chance to see it on the big screen. And then, after that -- nothing. Except for a snippet here and there on television, I didn’t watch STAR WARS again for ten years. I did see a couple of the prequel movies (one in a second-run theater and one on DVD), but after 1997 I left the original trilogy alone for a decade.

The ten-year gap was at least partly on purpose. After watching something so many times during such formative years, I felt like STAR WARS was no longer just a movie to me. It’s a rare experience that I can remember having at many different points in my life. Watching STAR WARS had become like an archaeological expedition -- I could use the movie as a prism to look back into my past and remember how I felt at different stages of growing up. And for some reason, I wanted to put a rest to that. Without being too melodramatic about it, I suppose I packed up STAR WARS with the rest of my childhood and started looking for new experiences instead.

Until, that is, one fateful night in a hotel room in Ventura, California. Flipping around the cable stations, I came across the very beginning of STAR WARS on HBO. It was totally unplanned, but it had been ten years since I had last seen it and I decided right then that enough time had passed. I could watch it again with an uncritical eye and judge its merits as a mere movie. The result? I didn’t much like it.

I liked parts of it, of course. I couldn’t deny that the assault on the Death Star was an amazing fifteen minutes of cinema, and some of the screwball chemistry between Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher was fun. But by and large, I was not impressed by the simple plot, flat characters, and borderline nonsensical events. I could see why Alec Guinness had asked George Lucas to kill him off. Yet, watching it again now, I can’t help but think I completely missed the point in that hotel room.

Of course, things are different now. For the past nine months, I have almost literally watched nothing else besides science fiction movies from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. A couple entries ago, I said that I had this secret hypothesis that science fiction could be divided into pre-STAR WARS and post-STAR WARS. I don’t really think that’s true anymore, but it is certainly true that there is nothing else prior to 1977 that looks or even feels even remotely like STAR WARS. George Lucas didn’t invent the space opera, but he made it look absolutely incredible.

One of the most interesting things about STAR WARS (in the context of the popular sci-fi flicks that came before it) is that it isn’t designed to make you think. It has no specific message or cautionary tale to deliver. George Lucas famously cribbed from Joseph Campbell’s work on the monomyth when he was working on the movie, but any “meaning” in the movie is vague and mushy. This is a big departure from movies like PLANET OF THE APES (1968) or 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) or A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) or even CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), where all the spectacle and circumstance seem crafted specifically to make you ponder the nature of humanity (or something equally heavy).

STAR WARS is entirely an adventure -- and it’s an adventure in a startling universe. The Mos Eisley cantina scene alone contains more surprising aliens than the rest of sci-fi cinema had managed to conjure up in the previous eighty years. The same holds true for the other details of the sci-fi world -- the giant skeleton of some extinct creature in the Tatooine desert, the glimpses of banthas being ridden by sand people, the brief allusions to the Galactic Senate by the Imperial brass, the battered and dirty ships of the rebellion, and so on.

STAR WARS is a movie that is just full of stuff -- much of it half-realized or barely mentioned. Even the concepts of Jedi knights and the Force itself are undeveloped here. I don’t think this is a bad thing though. Much of what I loved about STAR WARS as a kid were these tantalizing glimpses at a world beyond. It was a few years before I saw any of the sequels, and I know that I wanted to know more about everything in the world. (Most of all, I wanted to see more banthas.) In some ways, the sequels and the special editions ruin some of this feeling of wonder and excitement.

On the other hand, as I was watching this time, I was surprised how much my knowledge of the rest of the series gave more meaning to certain events. I found it very hard to identify anything redeeming about THE PHANTOM MENACE and ATTACK OF THE CLONES when I saw them (never saw REVENGE OF THE SITH), but I was aware this time that knowing what Obi Wan Kenobi was like back in his prime made his appearance here as an old man all that more meaningful. And his acquiescence to death at the hands of Darth Vader was something that never ever made any sense to me as a kid or teenager. It’s only in knowing what Obi Wan knows about the relationship between himself and Darth Vader, and between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, that it actually makes sense.

So STAR WARS is pretty well ruined for me as a movie, from a combination of individual factors, cultural factors, and George Lucas specific factors. From my point of view, we’ve all collaborated to turn a perfectly decent movie into... what exactly? Something more than a movie, I suppose, and something seemingly completely unique. Maybe generations from now or in countries somehow untouched by American culture, folks will think of STAR WARS as just another movie. But for me at least, I don’t think that kind of assessment is possible at all.

What else happened this year?

More entries to come! Stick around and find out!

BONUS BLOG -- 1976: IN THE DUST OF THE STARS

2009-10-15T08:00:00.001-04:00

What’s it about?

A space-faring civilization sends a rocket mission in response to a distress signal from an unexplored planet. Arriving several years after the signal was sent, the crew lands safely on a strange and seemingly peaceful planet, but only after some emergency maneuvers during landing. After attending a party thrown by the local leader, most of the crew is strangely in favor of just leaving and starting the years long journey back to their home.

The sole member of the crew who stayed home from the party begins to suspect that there are some mind control shenanigans at work. He takes a probe out to investigate, and luckily discovers a shaft leading down underground -- where it is quickly apparent that an entire race of people is enslaved. It was these slaves who sent the distress signal, but it seems unlikely the small crew of the rocket can help them much -- especially after one of them is captured and tortured by the oppressive surface dwellers.

Is it any good?

This is a pretty unremarkable sci-fi flick, so I wasn’t originally planning to write about it. But it was produced by a Soviet bloc country (the third one I’ve seen from East Germany so far) and that alone should be worth remarking on. So I figured there’d be no harm in doing a short write-up and trying to find something to talk about.

IN THE DUST OF THE STARS feels like an extended episode of STAR TREK. A rocket crew lands on a planet and encounters a mystery, some cajoling, some deception, some threats, a horrible secret, and then some violence. The movie isn’t all that long, and there are some weird interludes that feel like padding (such as a lengthy nude dance by one of the mentally blocked crew members), so it’s easy to imagine the whole thing cut down to forty-five minutes.

I’m always kind of confused when I run across sci-fi movies like this. I expect science fiction movies to be “big” in some way. The bigness is often literal -- giant monsters always give a feeling of grandeur to things. Or the bigness can simply be that the entire Earth is threatened by destruction, or that there is some appropriately expansive theme or spectacle playing out. Of course, there are plenty of small science fiction stories -- they don’t all have to be epic. But I suppose I feel like these kind of small mysteries are more “television sized” for some reason.

Part of the reason for the small feeling here is that the story is set in some completely made-up galaxy and Earth is never mentioned at all. Both the planet where the rocket comes from and the one where it lands are made-up sci-fi worlds. There’s no sense that any of this will ever affect the Earth at all -- and not even any sense that the races in question are related to or descended from Earth folks. (Everyone does look 100% human though.)

I’m sure that using completely fantastical settings was the safest way to make sci-fi in the Soviet bloc. Talking about real nations would mean following the party line (whatever it might be that day), but putting your action on some distant world with no relation to Earth would help isolate the film makers from any criticism or repercussions if they did want to say anything subversive. On the other hand, IN THE DUST OF THE STARS is not really subversive of anything at all. The anti-slavery message is one that works equally well in communist and western societies. (These aren’t metaphorical wage-slaves after all. They are just the normal chain gang kind that everybody objects to.) There’s some disapproval of decadent lifestyles as well, which hardly seems like it would be controversial on groundbreaking on either side of the Iron Curtain. The harmless clowning in IVAN VASIELIVICH: BACK TO THE FUTURE (1973) seems more likely to subvert the party than anything in this movie.

Things do get a bit “bigger” towards the end of the movie. The dilemma that the rocket crew finds themselves in is pretty interesting, though it’s not exactly spelled out. The crew consists of four women and two men, and obviously their numbers are not enough to do much against the entrenched aristocracy. The captain believes that they are honor-bound to stay and help the slaves resist their captors -- even though it will take many years (or generations) until they can be free again. The rest of the crew doesn’t believe they have any such obligation. This is a question worth wrestling over, and the movie doesn’t deliver any easy answers in the end.

There’s also a bit of appealing weirdness about the movie. The alien party is both futuristic and hedonistic -- the better to seduce the straight-arrow crew members, I suppose. And weird bits like the long nude dance I alluded to before actually add a bit of an off-balance feeling to the movie. So even though the plot could probably be compressed into television size, some of the atmosphere would probably be lost along the way. Still, if anybody is actually interested in Soviet bloc sci-fi movies, I would recommend THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE (1967), EOLOMEA (1972), and SOLYARIS (1972) before you even think about watching this one.

1976: THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH

2009-10-13T08:00:00.001-04:00

What’s it about?

Space alien David Bowie lands on Earth, files for nine lucrative patents, and becomes impossibly wealthy. His company, World Enterprises, makes futuristic consumer gadgets like self-developing film and metal balls that play music. But one day while traveling incognito, he faints on an elevator and ends up in a relationship with a hotel maid.

Meanwhile, college professor Rip Torn comes to work for World Enterprises on its new private space program. He begins to suspect that Bowie is not quite what he appears to be, and uses a hidden X-ray camera to determine that he’s not human. But just as Bowie is about to fly back to his family in outer space, the government starts hounding him for being too successful.

Is it any good?

I haven’t really decided whether I like David Bowie as an actor or not. He seems like the kind of guy you hire not so much for what he can do, but for who he is. (Kind of like Andre the Giant or Jenny McCarthy.) I don’t think he necessarily does a bad job as the alien visitor in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, but it seems pretty obvious that he was picked for the role at least partly because he’s a weird guy who had pretended to be an alien before in his albums and live performances. I can’t deny that David Bowie is a massively talented songwriter and musician -- but, look, there was a guy at my high school who told everybody for a year that he was a vampire, but that still doesn’t make him the right guy to play Dracula.

Then again, David Bowie is not really a problem in this movie. I can’t help wonder if another actor might have been better, but the alien we get is serviceable enough. The bigger problem is that so much of the movie is impossible to understand -- at least the first time through, but some of it is still obscure after more than one viewing. So much information is withheld for so long that a lot of interesting things just go by unnoticed.

The movie starts with Bowie’s arrival on Earth -- except we don’t see his spaceship or much of anything that suggests he’s any different from any drifter. He just starts out walking down a hill with no explanation of who he is, where he has come from, or why he is on Earth. And it’s quite a while into the movie before any of those questions are answered -- and one of the crucial ones (why he is there) never is at all.

I read the Walter Tevis novel that this movie is based on a couple of years ago, so I knew generally what to expect. I already knew, for instance, that when Bowie walks to a little town and sells a ring to a jeweler for twenty bucks that he is taking the first tiny step towards building up the seed money that he will use to found his corporate empire. But in the movie, there is no apparent reason for why we are watching such incredibly mundane things, and frankly the whole beginning is pretty boring as a result. The book, I should say, is not much better at this point at giving explanations. But at least there is some mystery about who the visitor is, and there is an awareness that he is somehow fundamentally different from everybody else. But since there’s no voiceover narration in the movie, we only get hints about that.

The same kind of problem persists throughout the movie. Characters are introduced (like Rip Torn’s college professor) with no indication of how they will fit into the story, so everything they do at first just seems meaningless. Once you know who they are and what role they play, it’s clear that there were key little details even in those early scenes that were providing information, but there was just not enough context to understand it. I’m sure that THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH is a much better movie the second time you see it -- or perhaps even the third or fourth. But there are parts that I’m not sure I would ever understand.

For instance, the government’s interest in Bowie is inexplicable. (At least, I think those characters represent the government. I can’t remember if they ever say who they are or not. If not, I suppose they might represent some competing business interest.) A couple of shady guys talk about how Bowie’s corporation is too innovative. Then they kidnap Bowie one hour before his spaceship is about to take off, throw some of his associates out of a high rise window, and lock Bowie up in a hotel where they perform medical tests on him. Why? Do they suspect he’s an alien? Do they just think his company is too successful? I don’t know.

And about that spaceship. In the novel, it’s explained clearly that the visitor was sent from his planet to Earth using the very last scraps of available fuel. The planet is dying and the inhabitants are completely out of energy and almost out of water. The visitor’s mission is to build up wealth on Earth (which they have learned about from television broadcasts), construct a spaceship, and return to his home planet with the means of salvation or escape. The visitor is on Earth in a last-ditch effort to save his race -- and that makes every moment of delay a matter of life and death.

None of this is explained in the movie, except for vague references to a “drought” on Bowie’s home planet and some brief shots of his family apparently dying. We know that Bowie is trying to get back to his planet, but so many key details are missing that it doesn’t seem to mean anything. Just following the movie itself, I would have guessed that Bowie is only trying to get back to his family -- presumably to die with them. Which of course raises the question of why he ever left in the first place.

As I said before, there are lots of neat things throughout the movie, but they are so subtle that they mostly just slip right by unnoticed. For instance, Bowie hires an actor who looks exactly like himself to play the father figure in his company’s commercials. The reason for this is that his wife watches the broadcasts on her planet, so she is able to see her husband in the commercials. We actually see this happen once, but at the time it just flew right over my head and I didn’t realize what the scene was supposed to be showing until I was skimming through the movie again to grab screenshots. There are also some just plain weird things that happen that are never explained either. At one point, a car that Bowie is riding in seems to travel back in time. Or, at least, he looks out the window and sees some folks from pioneer days and the folks from pioneer days look back in amazement at the car. But nobody else in the car is aware of it. What does it mean? Why does it happen? I have no idea. (Also, it’s just kind of dumb.)

The guy who directed this movie is Nicholas Roeg. He’s probably most famous for THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH and the artsy quasi-horror flick DON’T LOOK NOW (1973). (People of a certain age may also know him -- and possibly fear him -- from his 1990 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s THE WITCHES.) I didn’t really enjoy DON’T LOOK NOW all that much either when I saw it a few years ago. I don’t remember exactly what I didn’t like, but I think I had similar problems as the ones I have with THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH -- it’s just unnecessarily confusing and weird, boring in parts, emotionally distant, and occasionally ridiculous. I eventually read the Daphne du Maurier story that DON’T LOOK NOW is based on, and I enjoyed the written version pretty well. So I guess my advice is that if you are going to watch a Nicholas Roeg movie from the 1970s, read whatever it’s based on first and then just prepared to be kind of disappointed anyway. Then maybe try watching it a second time a few days later to see if you like it any better.

What else happened in 1976?

-- A man turns fugitive on his birthday to escape death in a society that kills anyone over thirty in the stone cold classic LOGAN'S RUN.
-- The East Germans return with another tale of communists in space in THE DUST OF THE STARS.
-- Yul Brynner also returns for a cameo in WESTWORLD's lesser known sequel, FUTUREWORLD.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1976...

In my opinion, LOGAN'S RUN is the only one from this year that's better than average. But it's also my opinion that it's one of the greatest science fiction flicks ever made.

BONUS BLOG -- 1975: A BOY AND HIS DOG

2009-10-08T08:00:00.001-04:00

What’s it about?

Young drifter Don Johnson wanders through post-apocalyptic America with his telepathic dog, Blood. Johnson’s life is an alternating selfish quest for food and women, and he thinks nothing of killing and raping to get what he wants. Blood helps him along, but tries to interest him in a potentially better life in a legendary place called “over the hill” where people still farm and live in peace.

One night, Blood sniffs out a woman at a violent make-shift hobo camp. In pursuing her, Johnson has to fight or evade other marauding drifters like himself and frightening mutants called “screamers”. When the girl gives him the slip despite his persistence, he follows her to her home “down under” -- an underground colony of superficially civilized survivors who operate a fascist police state underneath a twisted and creepy veneer of down-home, apple-cheeked Americana.

Is it any good?

I like to classify and categorize things, so I have been secretly working under an unverified hypothesis that there is some monolithic category of “pre-STAR WARS” sci-fi movies and another of “post-STAR WARS” sci-fi movies. This is, of course, completely untrue. I would say that sci-fi movies in the 1950s may have largely followed a predictable formula (handsome scientist saves world), but even by the end of that decade there were a lot of film makers branching out into new territory.

But one thing I have noticed about the more serious-minded sci-fi movies of the pre-STAR WARS period is that they very often have an obvious allegorical quality to them. By that I mean that many of the movies don’t seem interested in probable or even possible futures -- instead, they are interested in TWILIGHT ZONE worlds that reflect back some aspect of our own society in refracted ways.

I would put movies such as PLANET OF THE APES (1968), SILENT RUNNING (1972), SOYLENT GREEN (1973) and LOGAN’S RUN (1976) in this category. And since those are some of my favorite movies of all time, I can honestly say that I don’t really mind the whole allegorical approach to sci-fi. In fact, allegorical stories are the quickest route to one of my favorite things about science fiction: grumpy satirical misanthropy.

In the case of A BOY AND HIS DOG, though, the descent into the satirical world of the underground Kansas is pretty darn disappointing. The post-apocalyptic surface world is so full of interesting things (and so unlike anything else on film prior to 1975) that the creepy version of middle America under the surface just felt ordinary and lifeless by comparison. It was also completely unexpected. Nothing in the first two-thirds of the movie made it obvious that this underground world even existed -- let alone that Don Johnson would spend the last half hour of the movie down there, separated from his dog.

A BOY AND HIS DOG is not the first post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie. But even the earlier movies that imagine a destroyed Earth -- like THE LAST MAN (1960) and THE OMEGA MAN (1971) -- don’t go much farther than overturned cars in their depiction of wreckage. THE WAR GAME (1965) and ZARDOZ (1974) add bombed-out buildings to the mix, but the survivors mostly just huddle in shell-shocked groups. PLANET OF THE APES (1968) and especially BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970) do go whole hog with the idea of world ravaged by nuclear war, but they take place thousands of years after the event in question, when modern civilization is an archaeological memory. BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1974) features a recently post-apocalyptic New York City, but stays mostly in the steam tunnels and basements. The closest thing I can think of is the Czechoslovakian THE END OF AUGUST AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE (1967). That movie is far more meditative, however, and the future is a severely underpopulated and woman-dominated one. (Which is pretty unique in itself, I might add.)

A BOY AND HIS DOG is the first movie I’m aware of that really takes pains to depict what life might be like for those who are forced to scrabble out a living from the ruins of a shattered world. But it was followed pretty quickly by DAMNATION ALLEY (1977), DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978), QUINTET (1979), ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981), THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981), and then a whole blossoming sub-genre. I think there’s not much doubt that THE ROAD WARRIOR was responsible for popularizing post-apocalyptic movies (and a whole dingy aesthetic that follow them to this day), but a whole lot of what you can see there was done first by A BOY AND HIS DOG.

The biggest disappointment about the shift in focus is that there is still so much of the post-apocalyptic surface world left unseen. Don Johnson spends much of his time in underpopulated wastelands, and though he does come into “town” for a little while, he doesn’t do anything there except go to the movies. The only people he interacts with are just as unpleasant as he is. In fact, the dog Blood is the only truly likeable character in the movie, and even he has his brutal moments. (Then again, he is a dog.)

I don’t want to give the impression that this is a bad movie. It’s not, and I enjoyed much of it quite a lot. But it definitely leaves many potentially interesting stones completely unturned -- which, I suppose, is why we have had many more post-apocalyptic movies since 1975.

1975: ROLLERBALL

2009-10-05T08:00:00.001-04:00

What’s it about?

After bringing his Houston rollerball team to the brink of the world championships, superstar player James Caan is pressured by his team’s corporate owners to quit the sport before the end of the season. Unable to understand the request (and suspicious of the executives trying to strong-arm him), Caan refuses to retire and instead intends to play out the final two games with the rest of his team.

Meanwhile, rule changes in the playoff games turn the dangerous sport into a downright gladiatorial one. First, penalties are eliminated in the semi-finals, which results in players practically executing each other on the rink without repercussions. For the championship game, time limits are removed -- which logically requires the winners to be the last men standing on the rink.

Is it any good?

I’ve had occasion to allude before to some movies about the futuristic sports we will all be playing in the year 2000 and beyond. There’s the globe-spanning cat and mouse of THE 10TH VICTIM (1965), the cross-country auto race of DEATH RACE 2000 (1975), the board game assassinations of QUINTET (1979), the gladiatorial combats of MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME (1985), the game show hunt of THE RUNNING MAN (1987), the brutal jugger of THE BLOOD OF HEROES (1989), the pod race of THE PHANTOM MENACE (1999) and so on. Even the wargames and training exercises in THE GLADIATORS (1970) and PUNISHMENT PARK (1971) fall generally under the heading of games, even if they aren’t traditional spectator sports.

One thing that these future sports and games all have in common is their reliance on the entertainment value of violence -- and often the expectation of death on the courts. It’s true that movies very often focus on the violence inherent to even contemporary games -- the specter of death stalks (sometimes quite literally) the prison football of THE LONGEST YARD (1974), the road rally of THE GUMBALL RALLY (1976), the boxing of the ROCKY series, the quidditch of HARRY POTTER, the party game of THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959), and even the chess match of THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957) -- and yet, sports where death is a planned outcome of the event are still found almost exclusively in science fiction. (Or, I suppose, historical fiction about ancient Romans or Aztecs.)

In this context, ROLLERBALL is interesting in the sense that the sport starts out as a high-speed, high-impact game where death and injury are incidental (but tacitly expected) occurrences -- much like auto racing, boxing, steeplechase, hockey, and countless other sports today. True, rollerball looks much nastier than most any real sport I can think of, except perhaps the original no-rules “ultimate fighting” mixed martial arts tournaments of the 1990s. Rollerball is played with two teams of ten (seven on roller skates and three on motorbikes) who endlessly circle a rink at high speeds. Heavy metal balls are shot at high velocities into the rink, where they are picked up by players who then try to score by jamming them into small goals placed around the circuit. Body-checking, tackling, shoving, and fighting are all accepted parts of the game. At the start of the movie, even running another player over with a motorbike only results in a three-minute penalty.

Over the course of the movie, rollerball becomes even more violent as rule changes eliminate penalties and then time limits. The rule changes are presented as ways to keep fans interested (though there may also be an ulterior motive), but the result is that the game quickly turns into one of those far more common future sports where the maiming and killing is not just incidental -- it's the whole point. Those kinds of games always struck me as unrealistic -- it’s pretty difficult to imagine a world where DEATH RACE 2000 or THE RUNNING MAN could actually happen, for instance -- but ROLLERBALL makes the transition from violent sport to outright blood sport almost plausible. (Not shown in the movie: Any kind of public outcry against the rollerball rinks littered with bloody bodies and burning motorcycles. Though it does appear at the end of the film that the crowd may have finally gotten more spectacle than they really wanted.)

The three rollerball games that play out onscreen were certainly my favorite parts, as they contain some really amazing stunt work. There aren’t many quick cuts and no green screens here -- there really are stunt men on rollerskates and motorcycles ramming into each other on an inclined rink. As with most sports, the uniforms and numbers make it easy to follow who is doing what to whom (or who is having what done to them by whom), and the illusion that the game might actually possibly work is never fatally broken. There’s also practically no explanation of the rules of rollerball -- just tidbits here and there in the play-by-play announcing and a little later in character dialogue -- but it’s very easy to pick up simply by watching.

But the evolution of the sport is just the best part of ROLLERBALL -- there is, for better or for worse, more to the movie than that. The mystery angle -- the question of why Caan is being asked to retire if he’s so good at the game -- is not bad either. It seems like some kind of corporate conspiracy is afoot, and (this being a movie of the 1970s) that perception turns out to be correct. Despite Caan’s paranoia, however, the conspiracy never really becomes very ominous. It mostly amounts to a lot of cajoling and wheedling, though it does seem likely that the rule changes are put in place partly to help drive Caan from the game.

ROLLERBALL also envisions a future where corporations rule the world. National governments have collapsed, and cities are administered directly by one of a handful of massive monopolistic corporations that supply the necessities and luxuries of life. Houston is an Energy city and Chicago is a Food city, for instance, but even the characters have trouble remember who exactly is running each city and even what each corporation does. Though people in this world are mostly free from want, there’s little freedom of choice in any aspect of life and a small “executive class” controls all decision-making and enjoys most luxuries. Information has also been centralized in a way that is possibly more prescient than the film makers imagined. Books have all been digitized and are stored in a central database so that the corporations can edit and summarize them for the masses or restrict access altogether.

There are some slow parts to the movie -- most sections play out with very little exposition, so there are scenes like a long party where some information is learned through background chatter but which also seems to drag on and on. There’s also a subplot about Caan’s pining for his ex-wife which doesn’t go much of anywhere. But all in all this is a pretty great movie, and the rollerball games alone are worth watching for.

What else happened this year?

-- Don Johnson wandered a post-apocalyptic America with his telepathic dog in A BOY AND HIS DOG.
-- THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW forever made Tim Curry the favorite actor of sexually deviant theater geeks everywhere.
-- Roger Corman's DEATH RACE 2000 put David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone in a gory satire of the media obsession with violence, and contains one of the greatest puns in cinematic history.
-- Meanwhile, THE STEPFORD WIVES turned its satirical sights on a horror-tinged version of suburban America.
-- And anybody who spent any time in an elementary school classroom in the 1980s probably saw ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN on VHS more than once.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1975...

ROLLERBALL is about as awesome as it gets. (Unless you are a sexually deviant theater geek, in which case you already know what to do.)

BONUS BLOG -- 1974: PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE

2009-09-24T08:00:00.001-04:00

What’s it about?

A devilish record producer named Swan (played by hobbit-sized songwriter Paul Williams) steals the music to a rock opera version of the Faust legend for the opening of his new club, the Paradise. After infiltrating Swan’s mansion in an attempt to get his music back, the opera’s geeky composer is beaten up and thrown in prison, where a sadistic warden pulls all of his teeth and replaces them with metal prosthetics. (Not sure why.) After hearing that one of Swan’s no-talent pre-fabricated bands will be performing his rock opera at the Paradise’s opening, the composer escapes from prison and is hideously disfigured by a record press while trying to destroy all the 45s of the singles bastardized from his music.

As the opening of the Paradise draws nearer, the composer (now presumed dead) lurks about the club and starts killing those who sing his music. Sensing an opportunity, Swan strikes a deal with the composer to rewrite the rock opera and then have it performed on his terms. But no sooner is the rewrite finished, then Swan attempts to go back on his word. The composer, meanwhile, sets out on a new round of revenge that only brings more ghoulish publicity to the Paradise.

Is it any good?

After doing THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, I swore to myself that I would stick with straight up science fiction for a while. After all, straight up science fiction still covers a very wide range of stories -- everything from ant invasions to giant robot monsters to expressionistic allegories about shirtless Sean Conneries to Mel Brooks parodies to Afrofuturistic musical manifestos. In fact, I really should be writing about SPACE IS THE PLACE right now, since Afrofuturism is an influential but under-represented branch of science fiction.

The problem is that Afrofuturism is so little regarded by most sci-fi fans that I know practically nothing about it myself. Neither do I know anything about the music of Sun Ra (or even George Clinton, to name another more prominent Afrofuturist). The other problem is that I didn’t enjoy SPACE IS THE PLACE all that much. I’m sure part of it is that I don’t have any of the cultural context needed to appreciate a story about a jazz musician leading an exodus of the black people of Earth to a planet where there are no white people. But it’s also, in a lot of ways, not that good of a movie and not even that good of a document of Sun Ra’s music.

Anyway, since I can’t tell you anything at all about Afrofuturism, I’ll just recommend that everybody go look it up on Wikipedia. (That’s what I did after watching SPACE IS THE PLACE.) It seems interesting, and I’m going to try and learn some more about it. But in the meantime, I am going to talk about PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE instead, since it would be a travesty if we made it all the way through the seventies without mentioning any rock operas. And I am probably going to skip THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975), since there is a whole phenomenon around that movie that I have only experienced a little bit.

PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is not, strictly speaking, a rock opera itself. It’s about the production of a rock opera, and there are many songs in the movie -- many from the Faust show, but others not. Paul Williams is credited as the songwriter for all of the movie’s music. I’m not sure if you guys know much about Paul Williams, but he wrote easy-going seventies hits for groups like The Carpenters and Barbra Streisand and Three Dog Night. (“Just an Old Fashioned Love Song” and “We’ve Only Just Begun” and “Rainy Days and Mondays” are all his work, for example.) He’s also a friend of the Muppets and wrote “The Rainbow Connection”, which is featured in THE MUPPET MOVIE. And, incidentally, he acted in a few movies -- including a role as an orangutang know-it-all in BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1973).

The music in PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is not much like any of those things I just listed. The songs are more prog-rock ballads (it is a rock opera, after all), and as Swan makes changes to the show they get heavier and more menacing. By the end of the movie, a mincing Transylvanian rocker named Beef is screaming the lyrics over grinding electric guitars while gyrating on the stage in full-body Frankenstein’s monster make-up as his bandmates pretend to dismember people in the audience. (By the way, one of the few unfortunate things about the movie is the stereotypically “gay” way that Beef acts. It’s too bad, since he’s otherwise a pretty great character.)

The movie’s story is obviously an update of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA with a heavy dose of FAUST, but it also weaves in bits of THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY and FRANKENSTEIN. The plot is pretty complicated, and Swan does a lot of back-stabbing and double-crossing. The music is almost all integrated into the story as performances or rehearsals, and there is usually something else going on to forward the plot while the songs are being sung. (For instance, the composer/phantom puts many of his plans into motion while his intended victims are on stage, singing.) One of my biggest complaints about musicals is that the plot usually stops when people start singing, so I was happy to see that wasn’t much of an issue here. There’s one amazing sequence in particular that features two long simultaneous tracking shots in split screen that plays out like a surf rock version of the opening of Orson Welles’s TOUCH OF EVIL.

Now, what about the science fiction? When Swan and the composer make their deal, part of it is that Swan will restore the composer’s voice, which had been destroyed in the same accident that disfigured him. This involves some shenanigans with a giant synthesizer that probably qualify as science fictional. But, yet again, this movie is probably more fantasy than sci-fi -- especially towards the end when the devil becomes an increasingly literal presence.

On the other hand, the look and sound of the movie is far more sci-fi than fantasy. The Paradise is a high-tech place, fitted for pyrotechnics and neon lights and all sorts of modern showiness. The Faust rock opera seems to have sci-fi elements as well -- I mentioned earlier that one of the characters is assembled in the style of Frankenstein’s monster. The composer’s phantom mask is also more like a space helmet or robot faceplate than any traditional kind of mask. And the movie is full of video cameras and synthesizers and all kinds of electronic doodads. It may be fantasy, but it’s not the old-fashioned unplugged kind.

BONUS BLOG -- 1974: PHASE IV

2009-09-21T08:00:00.000-04:00

What’s it about?

Following a strange event in space, a biologist notices peculiar behavior in ant colonies in the American southwest. Specifically, ants from different species appear to be communicating and working together. He gets funding to research the phenomenon, and brings along a young mathematician who has done work with computers decoding animal languages. But conflicting personalities cause the biologist and mathematician both to stay tight-lipped about their suspicions and discoveries.

As the project’s funding begins to run out, the scientists still have not observed any interesting ant activity. They decide to destroy a series of strange geometric structures (presumably built by the ants) to stimulate a response. When the response comes, it’s in the form of an overwhelming attack by the ants. The scientists repel it using a powerful poison, but the ants quickly adapt and begin severing the scientists’ links to the outside world.

Is it any good?

I first saw this movie as a freshman in college during a science fiction marathon. At the time, I thought it was pretty great -- despite being very different from most of the movies I had seen until then. Having seen a lot more movies since those salad days, I can say that PHASE IV falls into a category of understated, low budget cerebral (or pseudo-cerebral) 1970s flicks with a cynical streak that bridge the darker B-movies of the 1950s with the dour independent movies of the 1990s. It fits very much with COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970), PUNISHMENT PARK (1971), IDAHO TRANSFER (1973), and many others of the same sort.

It probably goes without saying at this point that I have a soft spot for exactly this sort of movie, so I enjoyed PHASE IV plenty the second time through as well. But I should say that the other person I saw this movie with the first time ten years ago thought it was horrible. He usually has pretty good taste in movies, so I guess the lesson here is that PHASE IV may affect people differently. If you decide to watch it, be warned. You may hate it!

PHASE IV is a thriller about ants that want to take over the world. They aren’t giant ants like in THEM! (1954) -- they’re just normal-sized ants that are super smart. How smart? They do communicate somehow, and the mathematician decodes a bit of their language. Mostly he translates the parts that mean “stop” and “go” and “turn right” -- sort of the LOGO level of ant communication. But there are implications in the movie that the ants are talking about a lot more that the humans can’t figure out.

More implausibly, the ants also seem very familiar with human technology and weaknesses. In their first attack on the research station, they disable the truck engine that the scientists are using for a generator. (It’s later revealed that it was left outside on purpose as “bait” and that there is a back-up generator inside the station as well.) I’m not totally clear how ants manage that -- presumably they gummed up the works in such a way as to cause an explosion. In later attacks, they focus beams of sunlight on the station to overheat the computers and people inside. Not only that, but they send commandos to specifically disable the air conditioner to make the roasting more effective.

The ants are also capable of building complex structures. To focus the beams of sunlight, for instance, they build mounds with highly polished surfaces pointing at the research station just so to catch the sunlight. So clearly some of the applications of this supposed ant intelligence are more plausible than others. But the humans have some fairly wacky technology as well. The mathematician, for instance, is somehow able to “hear” the ant language and correlate it with individual ant movements perfectly clearly -- despite there being thousands of ants swarming around. And the biologist manages to locate the colony’s queen without stepping foot outside the research station.

But those eyebrow-raising bits aside, the stand-off between man and ant is pretty interesting. It plays out like a chess game -- each side trying to penetrate particular weaknesses of the other. The ants, with their vastly superior numbers, get and keep the upper hand as soon as they are able to isolate the scientists. And since the biologist is weirdly stubborn, nobody on the outside really knows what is going on or that there may be any danger at all. (The mathematician didn’t even learn the truth until it was too late himself.) There’s a pretty obvious parable about working together versus keeping things to yourself not far under the surface of PHASE IV -- but luckily it’s pretty interesting for other reasons too.

The movie does have a lot of shots of ants doing a lot of ant-like things. I’m not sure exactly how these were created. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a mixture of real ants placed in artificial environments, and possibly some miniature or stop-motion work. Surprisingly, it is always pretty clear what the ants are up to. One long sequence where a series of ants sacrifice themselves to bring the poison into the colony so that the queen can adapt herself to it is especially good. There’s also another pretty funny and exciting bit where the ants trying to sabotage the air conditioner run into a preying mantis that the biologist left inside as a deterrent.

The ending of the movie (as with almost all of its kind) gets pretty silly. People do things for no other reason than to move the plot forward out of the stalemate. The ants remain unavoidably inscrutable, but there’s still a long monologue about what they want and how they will get it. I guess really the more I think about the movie, the goofier it sounds. But it is a movie about ants that want to take over the world, after all, and when compared to any other insect swarm movie by any metric, I think it acquits itself extremely creditably.

BONUS BLOG -- 1974: GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA

2009-09-17T08:00:00.000-04:00

What’s it about?

Hoo boy, let’s see. As near as I can make out, an archaeologist discovers a cave on Okinawa which contains ancient artifacts, including prophetic murals and a small statuette of a dog-like monster. While transporting the statuette back to mainland Japan, the prophecies begin to come true (purportedly signaling the arrival of a terrible monster) and mysterious agents try to steal the statuette.

Meanwhile, earthquakes with “moving epicenters” rumble across the country, and it’s really no surprise when Godzilla emerges from one of them. But wait! This Godzilla doesn’t move or look quite right, and soon a second Godzilla has appeared to fight it. The first one is soon revealed to be a giant robot that defeats the real Godzilla, and the only hope now is to use the statuette to awaken the traditional defender of Okinawa, King Caesar.

Is it any good?

I haven’t seen that many Godzilla movies, or even really that many Japanese giant monster movies of any type. Obviously I watched the original GOJIRA (1954), which I liked a lot. And I did check in with MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA (1964), but I saw it too late to write about it in the blog. That’s a shame, since that movie is also quite good. GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA, on the other hand, is slipshod and disappointing.

With all the Godzilla movies to choose from, why did I pick this particular one? I had wanted to watch MOTHRA (1961) and DESTROY ALL MONSTERS (1968) -- both of which are pretty highly regarded by fans -- but couldn’t find a convenient copy of either. So looking down the list of other possibilities, I was mostly confronted by match-ups with other monsters I knew nothing about: Ghidorah, Hedora, Gigan, Megalon, and so on. I remembered seeing a bit of GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA as a kid, and I’ve always liked the idea of characters confronting different versions of themselves. So that was about all there was to it.

One problem, of course, is that Godzilla is not really much of a character. He’s a force of nature -- a destructive event to be endured, like a hurricane or earthquake, until he passes away again. From the three movies I’ve seen so far, Godzilla has hardly any personality or even awareness at all, so a robot version of him is really just exactly the same thing (with different weapons).

In GOJIRA, the human characters have clear precedence over the monster. The conflict is about whether a scientist is willing to share knowledge of a new destructive weapon to stop the attacks. In MOTHRA VS. GODZILLA, the focus is largely on Mothra. And despite being a giant moth puppet, Mothra has considerably more personality than Godzilla -- partly because she can communicate through a pair of pixie twins who live in a box, but also because she actually has objectives and makes decisions.

In GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA, there isn’t really any worthwhile human conflict. The aliens who control Mechagodzilla are cartoonish villains who seem to be invading the Earth for no particular reason. At one point, one of the human characters is forced to help repair Mechagodzilla, which is intended to create some kind of moral crisis. But even that is executed stupidly and perfunctorily, like so much else in the movie.

In fact, the biggest problem of GODZILLA VS. MECHAGODZILLA is that the script-writers just don’t seem to have been trying very hard. The beginning of the movie is both incredibly complicated and incredibly linear. Besides the events I outlined in the synopsis, there’s also a young girl who has a vision of destruction and a reporter who discovers a radioactive metallic scale from Mechagodzilla. There’s so much going on that’s it hard to keep the characters and events straight, but it all just points towards the same thing: the arrival of Mechagodzilla, which the ancient Okinawans apparently predicted. Nothing is introduced that doesn’t relate directly to the main story, and its almost always immediately obvious how each piece fits into the big, dumb puzzle.

I will admit that King Caesar is a pretty neat monster. There’s a nice bit where a young girl must go and sing to him to awaken him -- it’s both eerie and suspenseful, since other monsters are fast approaching. His appearance is apparently based on a mythical animal called the shisa, which is a cross between a dog and a lion. There’s no doubt that he looks pretty goofy fighting, but while sleeping and waking up, he’s one of the cooler Japanese movie monsters I’ve seen.

Mechagodzilla, on the other hand, is always ridiculous. I’m not sure who exactly thought that Godzilla would be more awesome if he was made out of grey plastic and shot missiles out of his fingers and toes, but that’s more or less what Mechagodzilla is. He looks silly no matter what he’s doing -- flying, fighting, standing around. Another disappointment is that almost none of the monster scenes feature any miniature buildings or military units. To the extent that I find Godzilla’s rampages interesting at all, it’s almost all due to the nifty miniatures he destroys. So the fights in this movie are (as far as I’m concerned) pretty dull. There’s one scene early in the movie where Mechagodzilla does some rampaging through miniature city. But the scene is nothing special, and after that the monster action is restricted to guys in suits shooting colored beams at each other or grappling impotently.

I can’t talk about the Godzilla series in general, so I don’t know if this particular movie is a dud or if it’s indicative of the direction the series has followed in the decades since GOJIRA. I can imagine that the movies would have been pretty exciting for fans at the time, since they are essentially title-card fights between some well-known creatures. (Though I’m not sure exactly how many had an existence before taking on Godzilla or other monsters -- besides King Kong, Mothra, and Rodan.) The series seems similar to Universal’s “monster rally” movies where Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, and the Wolf Man met each other again and again. No doubt a person better acquainted with the history of Japanese movie monsters would get a lot more enjoyment out of watching them fight and defeat each other. For the most part, I’m not even sure who to root for, so a lot of that is completely lost on me.

1974: ZARDOZ

2009-09-14T08:00:00.000-04:00

What’s it about?

Sean Connery is an “exterminator” in a savage world, a job that consists of slaughtering the hapless and defenseless masses who inhabit the countryside on the orders of the god Zardoz. But unlike most gods, Zardoz regularly manifests himself physically in the form of a giant flying stone head to issue edicts, dispense weapons, and collect tribute. One day, Connery hides inside a tribute of wheat and sneaks aboard to find out what is really going on behind the giant flying stone head.

What he finds when it lands is a secret village full of peaceful, educated immortals who have been controlling the outside world for hundreds of years. Though the immortals are afraid that Connery will disrupt their seemingly idyllic life, they decide to let him stay for a while -- more out of boredom than anything else. But their fears begin to come true when Connery’s presence begins to bring long-festering dissatisfactions to the surface. Before long, he’s actively colluding with rebellious elements among the immortals to bring the whole society down.

Is it any good?

I’ve thought about watching ZARDOZ a few times before, but I’ve always assumed it was pretentious, self-consciously weird, and (worst of all) boring. My prediction hadn’t really changed at all -- I mean, just look at that trailer -- but I figured this would be the perfect time to watch it nonetheless. It’s not as though there aren’t plenty of other sci-fi movies that are pretentious, self-consciously weird, and boring. Luckily, it turns out that ZARDOZ is never actually boring, and in fact is not nearly as weird as I expected it to be.

Yes, this is a movie where a giant stone head flies around and talks to men who wear nothing but red diapers and belts of ammo across their chests. But that’s considered weird even within the world of the movie. One character, as he is confronted with the reality of how the “outlands” are being managed, notes that nobody else wanted the job and the current manager is at least leavening his barbarism with some wit.

And the way the story is told is very straightforward. This isn’t some experimental narrative like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) or THE HOLY MOUNTAIN (1973), or even THE SEED OF MAN (1969) or THX-1138 (1971). In fact, the movie is precisely as weird as FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966) and BARBARELLA (1968) and PLANET OF THE APES (1968) and LOGAN’S RUN (1976). In other words, its story depends on the existence of a strange, semi-allegorical, upside-down society that could never really exist -- but which is nonetheless perfectly consistent and logical as soon as you make concessions for the impossible conditions it operates under.

In the case of ZARDOZ, those conditions are the division of the world into two distinct groups: the ageless immortals living in intellectual seclusion, and the masses of brutals killing and dying all around them. Despite the fact that the main character -- Sean Connery’s exterminator Zed -- is a brutal himself, we see very little of the way the world works in the outlands. All we know is that some brutals (the exterminators) constitute a very slightly privileged class that either kills or enslaves humanity as they are ordered. The world of the immortals, on the other hand, is extensively shown. Practically every element that we see, from the perfunctory democracy to the clinging conformity to the frustration and ennui, ring true. The movie seems to be saying that any society (even one with the noblest of intentions and the finest of citizens) so afraid of change that it outlaws aging, death and reproduction will necessarily stagnate and fester until it becomes self-destructive.

Even before Connery arrives among the immortals, they are already falling prey one by one to either of two social diseases. Some become rebellious and begin acting anti-socially, which is invariably punished by democratically selected sentences of aging. Eventually, the rebellious ones receive so many sentences that they age into senility and are placed in a kind of demented rest home apart from the others. Other immortals simply opt out of social life instead -- becoming “apathetics” who do nothing but stand around dumbly all day. Slowly but surely these two fates are spreading to more and more of the immortals, and it seems in time that it will eventually touch all of them.

When Connery arrives, then, the world of the immortals is already a hollow shell surrounding a pit of dissatisfaction, resentment and boredom. One interesting aspect of Connery’s character is that the immortals soon realize he is in fact superior to them in every way -- except possibly education. But physically and mentally, his powers exceed their own. In other words, Connery is not (as he first seems) some ancient relict of a simpler, earthier time. Instead, he is called a “mutant” -- the product of careful selective breeding, and potentially the next step above and beyond the immortals.

Which is not to say that Connery doesn’t have his earthy side. He spends much of his early life killing and raping other brutals in the outlands. True, he believes he is following the orders of the god Zardoz, but he also never seems to gain any awareness of his crimes even as he becomes more educated. (It is clear by the end of the movie that he won’t go on killing and raping -- but whether he has any remorse for his past actions is never explored at all.)

The ending of the movie is a bit bizarre, as these things tend to be. We learn that Connery knows more than he has been letting on, and that his arrival was no mere accident. When he sneaked aboard the flying giant stone head, he fully expected to discover an imposter behind the “god”. He probably didn’t imagine the kind of world that he landed in, but the plan was always to destroy whoever the imposter turned out to be. Connery soon discovers that many of the immortals would welcome such a release -- they have forgotten how to end their lives, and many simply want to die. But this requires destroying a computer that automatically resurrects any immortal who is killed, though none of them remember where the computer is or how to destroy it.

The events that surround the discovery and destruction of the computer don’t all make a whole lot of sense. Some of the immortals do escape to live out their lives naturally. Others are slaughtered by an invading army of brutals. In the carnage and confusion of the moment, Connery separates himself from both groups, and we never learn exactly what shape the world takes in the wake of the passing of the immortals.

What else happened this year?

-- A couple of arrogant scientists meet their match when they tangle with some super-intelligent ants alone in the desert in PHASE IV.
-- Afrofuturist cosmic jazz band leader Sun Ra returns from outer space to free the black race and take them away to a planet with no white people in SPACE IS THE PLACE.
-- And Mel Brooks directs Gene Wilder, Peter Boyle, Teri Garr, an almost unrecognizable Gene Hackman, and a sadly under-utilized Madeleine Kahn in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN.
-- There’s also an interesting musical adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s THE LITTLE PRINCE. I only watched a little bit of it, but the sets and special effects look pretty amazing. The songs, not so much.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1974...

ZARDOZ is the obvious choice.

BONUS BLOG -- 1973: THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE

2009-09-07T08:00:00.000-04:00

What’s it about?

Two young sisters in 1940 post-civil war Spain go to see a traveling presentation of the 1931 FRANKENSTEIN movie that comes to their small village. The younger sister, Ana, is enraptured by the movie and asks her sister, Isabel, to explain why the monster killed people and why the people killed him. Isabel tells Ana that the monster hasn’t died at all, but is a spirit who will come if she is his friend and calls him.

Later, Isabel tells Ana that an abandoned crumbling house is the home of the monster, and Ana begins visiting the house every chance she gets. One day while trying to summon the monster, a fleeing soldier from the (losing) republican side of the civil war appears. Believing that he’s the spirit of the monster, Ana befriends him and brings him food and presents. The death of the soldier pushes Ana even deeper into her own FRANKENSTEIN-inspired fantasy world.

Is it any good?

I’ve written about quite a few movies so far that inhabit a questionable borderland on the very fringes of any acceptable definition of science fiction -- RED PLANET MARS (1952), THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN (1957), EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960), THE BIRDS (1963), THE WAR GAME (1965), WILD IN THE STREETS (1966), and so on. I’ve sometimes talked about why I think the movies ought to be considered sci-fi despite the fuzziness of their credentials, and I’ve sometimes just included them without comment.

Part of what I want to do with this project is to figure out where the borders of science fiction actually lie, which is one reason I keep straying so far from the safe zone. Part of the problem is that science fiction isn’t the kind of genre that is necessarily tied to a particular emotional response (as horror or mystery is). It’s also not the kind of genre that is necessarily tied to a set of recognizable conventions (as the western or noir is).

If there’s any defining feature of science fiction, it’s possibly that it speculates about things that haven’t happened yet. But that covers a lot of ground -- as has been pointed out many times, all fiction is speculative in one way or another. So what makes science fiction unique? Does it speculate only about things that cannot happen yet? Or does it speculate only about things that could happen, scientifically speaking? Or about things that have some bearing on science one way or another? None of these satisfactory. And even if we combine them all (and ignore the contradictions), there are still plenty of things that slip through the cracks.

In the case of THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, it really doesn’t fit any accepted or reasonable definition of science fiction. But, at the same time, the main character of the movie takes the story of FRANKENSTEIN as literal fact -- and does so to such an extent that the monster even appears on screen apparently in flesh and blood. So the movie forces the audience to decide whether they accept the reality of Frankenstein’s monster. Do we take him as a fact simply because he’s up on the screen, looking just as real as all the other characters? Or do we imagine that we are more sophisticated than the camera lens and that we can tell the difference between what can and cannot happen in the world of the movie?

There’s no denying that 99% of THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE is what we would call “realistic” -- it mostly follows the lives of a handful of villagers in a provincial Spanish town without any sense of the fantastic intruding. And there’s no denying that Ana’s imagination is fired by the showing of FRANKENSTEIN, and that the only really sensible explanation for what happens in the movie is that she imagines the monster visiting her. (I should add that it’s a very short visit with a minimum of interaction.) But it’s possible to make much the same argument about a movie like THE ILLUSTRATED MAN (1969) -- the sci-fi vignettes in that movie could easily be entirely the result of an over-active imagination. And all of the supposed sci-fi events of IVAN VASILIEVICH: BACK TO THE FUTURE (1973) very clearly take place within the framework of a dream. The difference here, of course, is that the sci-fi elements in those two movies are longer and more numerous. If THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE is only 1% fantastical, then THE ILLUSTRATED MAN is at least 50% and IVAN VASILIEVICH is close to 99%, despite the fact that the fantasy can be explained away rationally. So do we say that there’s a line somewhere in between? Is there a minimum percentage of fantastic content that’s necessary to make a movie legitimately science fiction?

This is more or less why I have given up on trying to define science fiction at all. I think a better way to look at THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE is to compare it to some similar movies. It very much belongs in the same category as CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE (1944) and PAN’S LABYRINTH (2006). In all three movies, a young girl’s dream life brings her unknowingly into a dangerous adult world that she doesn’t understand (and doesn’t even recognize for what it is) but which threatens her nonetheless. There are vast differences in how the fantasy worlds are presented, and possibly even in whether the audience is meant to consider the fantasy real or not, but the similarities are unmistakable.

I said earlier that science fiction is not necessarily a genre that’s tied to a specific emotional response. I think that’s true, but it doesn’t mean that the reactions of the audience are insignificant to science fiction. Every scary movie is on some level a “horror” movie, and every perplexing movie is on some level a “mystery”. You can’t say that every wondrous movie is science fiction, but I think you can say that one of the features of science fiction is a desire to show things that are outside most folks’ normal experience.

This is the sense where I think THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE approaches science fiction. When Frankenstein’s monster appears on screen, it’s clear that we’ve left the ordinary world and are now in a place with different rules altogether. Perhaps the movie is really closer to “fantasy” -- as both CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE and PAN’S LABYRINTH are -- especially since this version of Frankenstein’s monster is partly informed by Isabel’s talk of spirits and summoning. But this is a story about a person who is so deeply moved by a science fiction story that she begins to imagine she is living it in some ways. It may not be particularly easy to defend THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE as science fiction itself, but I also think that it makes perfect sense to talk about it in the company of science fiction movies.

BONUS BLOG -- 1973: IVAN VASILIEVICH: BACK TO THE FUTURE

2009-09-03T08:00:00.002-04:00

What’s it about?

A Soviet scientist working on a time machine in his apartment gets in trouble with his local party representative when he keeps tripping the fuses in the building. While demonstrating his time machine to the official, he temporarily opens up the wall to the next apartment, where a burglar is in the middle of a raid. Immediately seeing the practical application of such a machine to the burglary industry, the thief joins the two others for a real test.

However, the real test of the time machine only results in chaos as the bumbling party official and the thief are stranded in the court of Ivan the Terrible, while the historical czar ends up in modern Moscow. The scientist must then race to fix the damaged machine to set things right before the displaced people are discovered and things get complicated. But then he wakes up and we learn it was all just a dream.

Is it any good?

This is another movie that I am not going to talk about too much specifically -- partly because it’s been a few weeks since I watched it and the details have mostly faded. But I did want to bring it up because it’s a Soviet flick, and I don’t think I’ve written about any of those yet. It’s also a Soviet comedy, which is something I don’t think I have ever seen before in my life.

I find that whenever I watch a movie from a communist country, I usually approach it with a different mindset than I do a movie from the west. I end up spending most of the running time playing “spot the propaganda” and searching for collectivist themes. But the more movies I see from Soviet bloc countries, the less I feel like that kind of thing is really as much of a defining feature of their cinema as I have been led to expect. (Led by whom? I’m not sure. Maybe it is purely my own prejudices that have made me think that way.)

This is not to say that IVAN VASILIEVICH seems subversive at all. It’s primarily a slapstick comedy, with lots of misunderstandings and switched identities and Benny Hill-style high speed chases through hallways. The characters are all very self-centered as well. Even the scientist (the ostensible protagonist) is largely a passive lump who is devoted entirely to his time machine. When his wife leaves him for a movie director at the beginning of the movie, she is offended at how philosophically he takes the news. Other characters covet expensive imported bourgeois goods from the west like tape recorders and leather jackets, and everyone disrespects and ignores the overly officious party representative.

That party official is also the one who falls most rapidly and deeply in love with the czarist world when they travel back in time -- no doubt largely because he is at first mistaken for the czar himself. Ivan the Terrible, meanwhile, actually seems fairly effective in the twentieth century as he applies his “might is right” philosophy to minor domestic situations. Of course, he shortly ends up being dragged off to an insane asylum, but he really is one of the more likeable characters in the movie.

And then, as I mentioned above, the scientist wakes up and we realize the entire movie has been a dream. His wife hasn’t left him, his time machine doesn’t work, and nobody has been stranded in the past or future. On the one hand, the it’s-all-a-dream ending is always a let down. On the other hand, the movie is so slight and goofy that there’s really no sense of loss at being robbed of a real ending. It’s an earlier Soviet version of BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989), and the enjoyment really comes more from the performances, the gags, and a couple of zany dance sequences than from the story itself.

1973: FANTASTIC PLANET

2009-08-31T08:00:00.002-04:00

What’s it about?

On an alien planet, a race of blue-skinned, semi-reptilian giants called “Traags” treat tiny humans (or “Oms”) as both pets and pests. One young Traag girl in particular finds a wild Om baby whose mother has just been killed. The Traag girl takes the Om home as a pet, and he grows up as a tortured plaything. However, he is also able to listen in on the automatic lessons intended for the Traag girl, and so becomes a highly educated Om.

Eventually, the Om boy escapes and falls in with a colony of wild Oms living in a park. Their life is rough but tenable -- at least until the Traags recommence their regular program to cull the wild Om pests. While fighting back, the Oms kill one of the Traags, which only makes things worse. Led by the educated boy, the only hope for Om survival is to steal Traag rocket technology so they can escape the planet once and for all.

Is it any good?

Oddly, some of the most difficult movies to write about are the ones that are the most unique. FANTASTIC PLANET is the earliest animated sci-fi feature film that I’m aware of, but I have to assume that by 1973 that there were plenty of Saturday morning sci-fi cartoon shows. And, if nothing else, there were certainly Marvin the Martian and Duck Dodgers shorts. But as far as feature films go -- and feature films presumably for adults -- there seem to be hardly any before FANTASTIC PLANET.

It also doesn’t help that the animation of FANTASTIC PLANET doesn’t look much like any other cartoons I’m familiar with. The prevailing style for at least the past seventy years has been dominated by the bright colors and clear lines of the Disney or Warner Bros. cartoons. There are exceptions, of course -- such as Terry Gilliam’s animation work for the various Monty Python projects around this same time. FANTASTIC PLANET, with its stiff compositions and pencil shading, is another.

The pace and structure of the movie doesn’t quite follow the sci-fi norm either. The movie is constructed out of many vignettes of varying importance -- many of them simply document the changing seasons (though they are very weird seasons) or other natural phenomenon on the alien planet. FANTASTIC PLANET has at times almost a neorealist feel to it -- as though it’s meandering through unremarkable incidents in unremarkable lives. This is a pretty unusual way to approach science fiction, though not necessarily totally unique. In retrospect, THE SEED OF MAN (1969) seemed to be doing a similar thing at times -- if I’d realized it at the time, I might have enjoyed that one more.

But FANTASTIC PLANET is not actually a neorealist movie. I’m not even sure that the philosophical underpinnings of neorealism can survive their application to animation or science fiction (let alone both together), and I can’t imagine that anybody involved with the movie was even trying to really do that. The episodic vignettes soon coalesce into a true story -- though only a small handful of characters are ever really developed.

Ultimately, FANTASTIC PLANET is more concerned with its dreamy, savage atmosphere than it is with anything else. The world it paints is one that is full of casual brutality and sudden danger -- at least for the diminutive Oms, both “wild” and “tame”. This is also one of those sci-fi stories which seems to have some kind of obvious message, but which also eludes any attempt at real allegory once you start trying to pin it down. Putting humans near the bottom of the food chain certainly inverts our usual expectations of how things should work, but the film doesn’t seem to be trying to say anything particular about that.

But whether this movie is good or not seems completely beside the point. It is totally distinctive, and is certainly worth seeing simply to have the experience. I can’t even say that it’s especially crazy shocking or anything like that. But I can say that the first and (until now) last time I saw any part of FANTASTIC PLANET was on a fuzzy independent UHF channel about fifteen years ago, and I remembered far more scenes and moments than I expected when I watched it again for this project. It may not have blown my teenaged mind, but it definitely burrowed deep inside and stuck there.

What else happened this year?

-- An unpopular low-level party official and Ivan the Terrible trade places in IVAN VASILIEVICH: BACK TO THE FUTURE, a Soviet time-travel farce.
-- THE HOLY MOUNTAIN is really more grotesque magical realism, but it has some hilarious satirical sci-fi bits in the middle.
-- George Romero takes a break from zombies to direct THE CRAZIES, in which a contaminant causes otherwise ordinary people to go crazy and start attacking their friends, family, and neighbors.
-- In IDAHO TRANSFER, a group of college kids accidentally discover time travel and then decide to colonize the not-so-distant future after they realize an ecological disaster is going to ravage the planet. Peter Fonda directs.
-- Michael Crichton directed WESTWORLD, in which Yul Brynner’s merciless cowboy robot goes berserk in a Wild West theme park and starts hunting the guests.
-- Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson star in the dystopian detective thriller SOYLENT GREEN. Even though everybody knows the twist already, it’s still an amazing flick.
-- SLEEPER is the only Woody Allen sci-fi movie that I’m aware of. Allen plays a twentieth century man unfrozen in the future who then disguises himself as a robot to get along, but he seems more interested in making it a silent movie-inspired farce than anything else.
-- BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES wraps up the series with a story about the early days of ape and human coexistence after the nuclear war that ravages Earth.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1973...

SOYLENT GREEN is far and away my favorite from this year, but FANTASTIC PLANET is well worth seeing as well.

BONUS BLOG -- 1972: HORROR EXPRESS

2009-08-06T08:00:00.000-04:00

What’s it about?

Archaeologist Christopher Lee returns from an expedition to Manchuria via the Transsiberian Express, carrying back the frozen body of a prehistoric ape-man. Almost immediately, the crate containing the body raises an extraordinary amount of interest in just about everybody who comes across it: a thief, a mad monk, a rival scientist played by Peter Cushing, government officials, an inventor, a porter on the train, and probably many more I’m forgetting. When several of these people turn up dead with their eyes turned completely white, Lee and the authorities draw the logical conclusion that the two million year old corpse is supernaturally murdering people.

As Lee and Cushing try to track down the missing murderous fossilized ape-man, it slowly becomes apparent that the culprit is really something quite different. But by this time the authorities have called in blood-and-guts czarist army officer Telly Savalas to chew gum and break heads (and gum hasn’t been invented yet). Dimly lit fight scenes, glowing red eyes, and a big explosion soon follow.

Is it any good?

I’m not actually going to talk about this movie much at all. It’s a low budget sci-fi horror flick that has a couple of neat ideas but is full of a lot of stupidity as well. Peter Cushing has a lighter role, which is kind of interesting, but the charms of Christopher Lee continue to elude me, and I have absolutely no idea what Telly Savalas thought he was doing. The plot is cluttered with way too many characters, the special effects are only decent, and the music is pretty good. In short, it’s just like any other middling 1970's sci-fi movie. If Tom wants to mount a passionate defense of its merits, I’ll let him take care of that part since I don’t think it’s really anything special.

But what I do want to write about are public domain movies. I’ve seen more than my share of these and I’ve already even written about a couple -- namely THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). HORROR EXPRESS is another public domain movie, which means that practically anybody can make and sell unauthorized copies of it. (Exactly what “public domain” means in this context can be pretty complicated, since movies have all kinds of rights that can be bought and sold. It’s possible, for instance, for broadcast television rights to lapse while home video rights remain in effect. And movies that are derivative works of books or plays are protected in special ways that don’t apply to original works. I don’t pretend to understand all or even most of this, but suffice to say that sometimes movies fall into a definition of “public domain” that allows them to be sold on tape or DVD without clearing copyright.)

There seem to be several different reasons why movies end up in the public domain. Sometimes it’s a clerical error or oversight in transferring ownership. Sometimes a legal issue prevents the copyright from being renewed. In the case of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, it happened because the movie was erroneously distributed without a copyright notice in its first theatrical run. (I don’t think that would be a problem anymore since the reforms of the Berne Convention.) And in the case of THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, the film makers didn’t believe the movie would be worth anything after its initial run so they never bothered to file for a copyright in the first place.

Most movies in the public domain are quick-and-cheap jobs, so I suspect that the last reason is (or at least was) a pretty common one. But in addition to a handful that have gained cult fame over the years -- like the two mentioned above, the horror curiosity CARNIVAL OF SOULS, and Ed Wood’s so-bad-they’re-good flicks -- there are others that must have always had commercial value and I am sure weren’t intentionally abandoned. There’s the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope vehicle THE ROAD TO BALI, Fritz Lang’s noir SCARLET STREET, Orson Welles’s THE TRIAL, cartoon classics like GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, John Wayne’s MCCLINTOCK!, Spencer Tracy’s FATHER’S LITTLE DIVIDEND, and (perhaps the most famous of all) the screwball classic HIS GIRL FRIDAY.

A lot of folks would probably agree that the term of copyright protection is unnecessarily lengthy. After all, there are warehouses full of books, movies, and sound recordings from the 1930s and 1940s that have been out of print for decades but that it’s still technically a crime to copy. The demand for these materials isn’t high enough for the copyright owners to justify releasing them and nobody else is allowed to publish them, so lots of potentially fascinating things go on languishing in vaults. Huge chunks of genres -- like, say, early musicals or westerns or slapstick comedies -- are inaccessible because they don’t have famous names that generate interest today.

It’s easy to imagine a world where copyright protection lasts only for 25 or 50 years, so that all this material could be distributed by others who don’t need to justify high profit margins. There already exist bargain bin distributors who package public domain movies into cheap DVD packs -- sometimes selling as many as 50 movies for the price of a single “official” release. (I’ve bought four such discount packs myself, racking up 200 movies at an average cost of fifty cents each.) And with online delivery improving all the time, movies will only become cheaper to distribute.

On the other hand, these existing public domain movies are a pretty good warning of why losing copyright protection might not be such a good thing. There have been dozens of home releases of famous public domain movies. I’ve seen two different versions each of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and HORROR EXPRESS, and all of them were awful in terms of quality. Since anybody can sell cheap transfers from salvaged film stock or old videotapes, unscrupulous distributors tend to flood the market with inferior product. There are presumably good versions of these movies out there somewhere, but a quick search on Amazon revealed a lot of confusing options for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and a lot of disappointment and contradictions in the comments. (There was even one “special edition” two-disc release that apparently consisted of nothing more than the movie needlessly cut in half on two different discs.) Rent-by-mail services like Netflix don’t usually discriminate between different releases of a movie either, so it can even sometimes be impossible to get a good version even if you know what to look for.

It’s no big deal when HORROR EXPRESS looks and sounds terrible -- though I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more if any care at all had been taken with the presentation. A bad version of something like CARNIVAL OF SOULS is more annoying, but there’s a certain feeling of resignation that comes with watching cult classics, as though digging around in the trash to find them is part of the experience. But imagine now a world where the average consumer is likely to be duped into buying an edited, washed-out, badly synched DVD of CASABLANCA or CITIZEN KANE that was lifted off a television broadcast or a worn-out VHS cassette. Or a world where a glut of bargain bin offerings of RIO BRAVO or THE FLY or A SHOT IN THE DARK convinces a studio executive that it’s not worthwhile to spend money on restoration and an official release. Why invest all those resources if the final product is just going to be undercut by a lot of inferior versions anyway?

I don’t really think I know enough to say exactly how I think things should work. There are clearly pitfalls in either direction. I do think, however, that copyright should be handled differently for movies and sound recordings than it is for books. If you buy a cheap version of a classic novel, that just means the pages will turn yellow and the binding will fall apart in a few years. But the experience of reading the story itself and whatever your imagination conjures up won’t really be changed by that (unless you are a very easily distracted reader). Typos in the text or mistakes in layout are a bigger problem, but it’s still comparatively easy and cheap to get the text of a book in a presentable state.

Recordings, on the other hand, fall prey to all kinds of problems that take real time and money to fix. If you rip a page in the book you’re copying from, that doesn’t mean that the copy will have a tear in it as well. But if you rip or wrinkle a piece of film or tape, then any copies you make thereafter are going to be compromised. In other words, there seems to be a compelling public interest to provide financial incentives for folks who take good care of movies. In a world of short term copyrights, I’m sure that some organization would be formed to do just that -- there are enough cinephiles to support a quality distributor even if cheap alternatives are also available. But it’s hard for me to decide if this would allow for improvements over what we have right now, or if things would be far, far worse.

BONUS BLOG -- 1972: CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

2009-08-03T08:00:00.000-04:00

What’s it about?

In ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES, chimpanzees Cornelius and Zira escape the destruction of Earth by traveling back in time (never mind how) to 1971. Trapped in a world they never made, they are hunted and killed by fearful humans -- but their son, Caesar, survives and is adopted by kindly, animal-loving circus owner Ricardo Montalban.

CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES starts twenty years later when Montalban brings Caesar (played, like his father, by Roddy MacDowell) to an unnamed North American city to help promote his circus. But an altercation in a plaza causes the government to suspect that Caesar is a talking chimpanzee, and so a new ape-hunt begins. Caesar, however, escapes and blends in with the massive servant ape population and is ultimately sold to the tyrannical mayor. From there, he plots and leads a city-wide ape rebellion that culminates in a night of savage fighting.

Is it any good?

In terms of story, CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES has the best raw materials to work with since the first installment in the series. In other words, it’s built on a very simple and gripping premise that’s hard to mess up: ape servants revolt against their human masters and dominate them. As an actual movie, it has a few problems, but it also has some great aspects to it -- and so I’d have to say that I consider it one of the high points of the series.

Things get off to a really great start simply thanks to the appearance of dozens of apes in jumpsuits in a modern American city. ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES brought talking chimpanzees back to contemporary America -- but it only brought two of them. CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (which is set, by the way, in a vaguely fascist version of 1991) introduces a vast underclass of ape servants. In fact, the movie is a bit of a mirror image of the original PLANET OF THE APES. In this movie, a sophisticated human society maltreats and oppresses its mute and dumb ape population, in which a single talking and thinking member attempts to hide.

How there got to be so many apes in America is explained with a silly story about an epidemic that killed off all cats and dogs in 1983. Yearning for animal companionship, the people of the world don’t bother with parakeets or rabbits, but instead turn directly to chimpanzees and gorillas. They soon discovered that the apes can be taught to do all kinds of useful things, and so the new pets immediately turn into slaves. So in the eight years since 1983, thousands of ape servants have taken over all kinds of menial jobs. Cities are full of chimpanzees and gorillas (though orangutangs are oddly absent except in a couple of crowd shots) and entire industries have sprung up to capture, transport, condition, breed, and market the apes.

The intervening twenty years since ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES have also resulted in a harsher human government as well. In the movie version of 1971, the president only reluctantly hunted down the fugitive chimpanzees Cornelius and Zira. But by 1991, a jack-booted security force is in place to violently break up any ape or human disturbance. The mayor of the city acts practically like an ancient Roman consul. (Unlike the president back in 1971, he never worries about how excessive force might affect his chances of being re-elected.) Not much time is spent on how the human society functions in 1991, but it’s obvious from glimpses here and there that people have fewer freedoms and that the government has grown more oppressive and controlling in every way.

I’m personally a big fan of Ricardo Montalban in the PLANET OF THE APES movies. Sadly, he is only in the first forty minutes or so of this one. But he seems so wise and compassionate (and plays his character so passionately) that it’s a real shame when he makes his exit. There is one great moment when a couple of security thugs force him to yell “lousy human bastards” at the top of his lungs (they’re trying to identify the voice of a dissident), and Montalban practically turns it into a battle cry.

The middle of the movie -- in which Caesar blends in with the ape population and organizes his revolt -- is where things start to get a little weak. Even after seeing this flick about four times, it’s just not clear to me exactly how it happens. All we really see are a few shots of Caesar silently urging on defiant apes who refuse to do their jobs. I can’t figure out if he’s meant to be the literal catalyst for these minor acts of rebellion, or if he’s simply been symbolically inserted. (There’s a lot of evidence that the apes were getting uppity even before Caesar’s arrival -- he’s just the one who brings it all together into a coherent revolt.) Caesar also has a home base where the apes start stockpiling weapons, but I could never figure out where it’s supposed to be or why no humans are aware of it or even how he finds time to go there. There are just not enough details to make the preparations convincing or compelling.

But that part of the movie is short enough. Soon it moves into the out-and-out ape on human violence as the entire city erupts in open rebellion. There’s been some talk in the past year of re-making or re-imagining this movie somehow. I can understand the appeal since, as I said, I think it’s got great raw materials. But no re-make can ever capture the cognitive dissonance of Roddy MacDowell in full chimpanzee prosthetics running through the streets of Los Angeles letting off rounds from an assault rifle as he leads an ape uprising. This was Roddy MacDowell’s third PLANET OF THE APES movie -- and up until now he had played the meek and peace-loving Cornelius. (Cornelius was played by another actor in BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, but had essentially the same character.) Caesar is bitter, violent, and borderline nihilistic at times -- in other words, a huge departure from Cornelius. It would be like if Christopher Reeve had returned in SUPERMAN III playing Clark Kent’s son who wanted to burn down the world and turn it all into ashes. (Come to think of it, that would have been a vast improvement over the SUPERMAN III we actually got.)

Of course, cynicism and violence are nothing new to the PLANET OF THE APES series. When I was writing about BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, I alluded to the fact that the movies traditionally have very depressing endings. In the original, Charlton Heston finds out that the Earth has been devastated by nuclear war right before the credits roll. In an amazing act of one-up-manship, he manages to literally destroy the entire planet at the end of the second movie. ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES ends with Cornelius and Zira -- two beloved characters from all three movies -- brutally gunned down. And yet, despite all this, the first time I saw CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES I can safely say that the transformation of Roddy MacDowell into a violent revolutionary pretty well blew my mind.

My mind would have been even more blown if CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES still ended the way it was originally supposed to. The ape rebellion eventually carries the violence to the mayor’s command center. Caesar and his crew burst in with guns blazing and drag the mayor to the streets outside. Caesar then gives a rabble-rousing speech about the ascendency of apes and summarily denies a request for compassion and mercy from the movie’s only surviving sympathetic human character. Originally, the movie ended with the assembled apes beating the mayor to death with the butts of their rifles after the end of this speech while Caesar looked on approvingly. But for whatever reason (probably to get a PG rating) this was changed before the movie was released. Now, instead, Caesar goes on to make a second speech where he calls for apes to put aside their vengeance and to dominate mankind compassionately. In this version -- the final version that showed in theaters in 1972 and is on most home versions of the movie -- nobody is beaten to death. Despite the fact that we know from the first two movies that humans will end up dumb and primitive, hunted for sport by gorillas on horseback, this ending still seems to preserve a little glimmer of hope that things will be okay. (More on this later.)

In some ways, I prefer the original dark and cynical ending. It fits with the hopelessness of the earlier movies, and fits much more organically with the rest of the movie. The sudden switch in tone from rampaging bloodlust to even-tempered peacemaking still strikes me as totally jarring and unbelievable. (The editing on the new ending is also distracting in its horribleness. It’s obvious that lines are being dubbed and shots are being re-cut.) But I have come to believe that the new ending is not a complete disaster either.

One of the most interesting things about the PLANET OF THE APES series is how the overall storyline develops. There’s no hint in the original movie that any thought was given to continuing the story, and BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES ends in such a way that any additional movies should have been impossible. But the film makers kept finding new ways to keep the series going. As they did so, they began to include more and more information on how apes came to rule the world in the first place. Later movies then went on to dramatize much of what had only been talked about in earlier movies. But not exactly.

In ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES, Cornelius and Zira tell a story about the ape revolt that is similar to what happens in CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES -- but it differs in several key details. For one thing, the dates are moved up considerably -- before Cornelius and Zira arrived in 1971, the rebellion wasn’t scheduled for several hundred years. The leader of the rebellion is obviously then a different ape, rather than their son. Other events that are later shown in BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (the fifth and final installment) happen differently than they are described in earlier movies as well.

No doubt what really happened is that the film makers were making things up as they went along, and so they had to fudge a few facts when their old ideas no longer meshed with what they wanted to do with a particular sequel. But there is another, more interesting possibility too -- that Cornelius and Zira changed the timeline when they traveled to the past, accelerating some events and modifying others. BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES embraces this idea more fully, and by the end of that movie it no longer appears that the Earth is inevitably headed towards a world where humans are dominated by apes. Instead, it seems there is a chance for humans and apes to coexist and live together in relative peace.

This is important because if the future cannot be changed, there is a hard expiration date on the Earth only a thousand or so years down the road. If the events of the last three movies are just documenting the inexorable march towards the final battle between man and ape that destroys the Earth, then that is a very depressing story indeed. But as the subtle differences accumulate, that ending is more and more in question. The movies are then no longer simply counting down the doomsday clock -- instead, they are the story of how a handful of seemingly insignificant acts of mercy can change the entire course of history for the better. Caesar’s sparing of the mayor -- as out of place as it seems in the moment -- is the first act that points towards the possibility of redemption in the future.

Caesar knows the future history of the world as it was experienced by his parents, so it’s even possible that his change of heart is motivated somehow by this knowledge. The ending would have no doubt been far better if the film makers had decided to go down this path originally, rather than patching up a make-shift fix to appease the studio executives who were increasingly uncomfortable with the grim direction of the series. But despite the awful execution of the new ending, I think the way it changes the story is a very interesting and exciting and development in the series.

BONUS BLOG -- 1972: THE THING WITH TWO HEADS

2009-07-23T08:00:00.000-04:00

What’s it about?

Brilliant but racist surgeon Ray Milland is dying of chest cancer and the way to survive is a complete body transplant. After completing a successful experiment with a gorilla, Milland entrusts a team of his colleagues with finding a suitable donor body and carrying out the procedure to save his life. Finding a donor proves very difficult, however, as the ideal donor must be dying (since they will not survive the procedure) but must also have a healthy body and be able to live long enough for Milland’s transplanted head to establish control of the body.

As time runs out and Milland slips into a coma, the doctors go to their last-ditch source: death row inmates. Convicted murderer Rosey Grier volunteers just before they flip the switch on the electric chair, hoping that the extra thirty days of life will be long enough for his girlfriend to collect evidence that will exonerate him. But when Milland discovers that his head has been transplanted to a black man’s body, wacky hijinks ensue.

Is it any good?

This is a movie where Ray Milland’s elderly head is transplanted onto the body of a professional football player. This is also a movie where the resulting two-headed monstrosity flees on a dirt bike and leads a dozen police cars on a bash ’em, crash ’em chase across a hilly field for twenty minutes. So no, it’s not really “good” in the traditional sense of the word. But it’s not exactly bad either. I don’t have a whole lot to say about THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, but it’s crazy enough to be worth maybe a few paragraphs at least.

I hadn’t really thought about it until now, but I think I’m a little bit surprised that I haven’t seen more sci-fi movies yet that are about race. The only obvious one that doesn’t dance around the issue at all is THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1959). A lot of folks read a criticism of race relations into NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), but it’s not clear how much of that was intended. Otherwise, there are a lot of movies that arguably allegories for the racial situation in the U.S. -- probably the closest being CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (1972).

THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, on the other hand, is unambiguously about race. Yet despite the fact that it introduces a racist character precisely so that it can bind him physically to a black man, I’m not real sure that it has anything to say about the situation except, “Boy wouldn’t that something!” In some ways, I guess that’s enough. What do you really expect a movie like this to say anyway? In THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL, it was clear that Harry Belafonte connected passionately with the story and themes, and that he really wanted to get people to sympathize with a mixed-race couple despite their prejudices.

But THE THING WITH TWO HEADS is more like an authority-tweaking wish fulfillment movie -- more along the lines of WILD IN THE STREETS (1968). Rosey Grier starts out as a victim of the system. Not only is he wrongfully scheduled for execution (or so he claims), but when he volunteers for an experimental transplant operation he finds out that he’s being used to prolong the life of an old white racist. So it’s kind of exciting to see him break out of the clinic and go on the lam -- ultimately convincing a young black doctor to join him in thumbing his nose at the man.

A lot of movies from the 1970s seem to be about thumbing noses at the man, and it’s something I can never exactly relate to. There’s a certain sensibility that runs through whole genres that takes it for granted that disobeying laws, evading the police and destroying government property is unquestionably heroic. The middle of THE THING WITH TWO HEADS falls squarely into this sensibility as Rosey Grier leads the cops on an excessively destructive chase that would have made Burt Reynolds or Kris Kristofferson (or at least Tom Wopat and John Schneider) proud. I didn’t count how many cop cars we actually see destroyed on camera, but a news report in the movie says fourteen and that sounds about right. (Some of them are clearly the same wrecks from different angles though.)

There’s not a whole lot else to talk about -- this movie doesn’t take itself seriously and doesn’t expect anybody else to either. It is far superior to another similar movie I watched called THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT (1971). I had high hopes for that one, since it starred Bruce Dern and Casey Kasem, but it’s nonsensical, inept and offensive. THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, despite being incredibly silly, is none of those things. It’s not really something I’d recommend, but I will think of it fondly for the next week or so until it fades entirely from my memory.

And now here are a bunch of screenshots of police cars crashing, since that is primarily what the movie is about:

1972: EOLOMEA

2009-07-20T08:00:00.001-04:00

What’s it about?

After a spate of mysterious rocket disappearances, a scientist petitions for the cessation of all space travel until the problem is solved. Reluctantly, the council in charge of such things agrees, and those serving on distant space outposts are consequently temporarily stranded. Two such men in particular find themselves chafing under the travel ban -- one because he is yearning to head back to Earth and the other because his son is among those who are reported missing.

After sulking for a bit, the two decide to violate the travel ban and visit their nearest neighbor at the next outpost. They can’t get too close since he has contracted a deadly space disease (possibly from strange shadow-like creatures indigenous to the asteroid he’s stationed on), but he gives them a capsule that he says someone will be along to claim later. Meanwhile, the scientist on Earth quizzes one of her colleagues who appears to know more about the disappearances than he’s letting on. But the mystery isn’t solved until the scientist travels into space herself, and the various pieces of the puzzle all start to come together.

Is it any good?

EOLOMEA was produced by the same East German studio that put out THE SILENT STAR (1960), but besides that connection I didn’t know anything about it before I watched it. I was watching it online (which is why there are no screenshots), and I figured I’d get through the boring beginning bits and come back to the rest of it later. But it seems that the East Germans learned a lot about movie pacing since 1960. There are no boring beginning bits with this movie -- things started off interesting with the disappearance of several rockets and never let up for the next eighty minutes.

One of the neatest things about EOLOMEA is the complex system of space exploration that it seems to take for granted. I don’t know how far in the future the movie is supposed to be set, but there are apparently several space flights each day -- many of them between space stations on other planets or asteroids. In fact, at least one of the characters in the movie has never even been on Earth, so this bustling space traffic has been in place for at least a generation.

Most of the view the audience has into this brave new world is on the dull and poorly trafficked fringes, however. The two men stationed out there are pilot and navigator for what is essentially the rocket version of a delivery truck. Unlike in THE SILENT STAR, the characters here actually have interesting back stories and real emotions. The pilot, for instance, was one of the first people to help colonize space. But at some point he was involved in a deadly accident and everyone on his rocket died except himself and some children. His wife died in the accident, but his son survived. That was decades ago, though, and he hasn’t seen his son since then. When the travel ban is put in place, the pilot is waiting for his son to visit.

The main characters all mostly have stories as well realized as that one -- and they are all interconnected in ways that feel organic. It’s easy to imagine that people involved in the space program would have varying relationships with each other, depending on what jobs they had. So when we learn that one character knows another, it doesn’t seem out of place. And that definitely helps the story, since all the various strands eventually come together. The movie is primarily a mystery (but with very strong sci-fi overtones, of course) and it’s always clear that the disappearance of the rockets is not exactly what it seems.

But even before the different strands get tied together, there’s plenty to be interested in. The sick fellow at the other outpost, for instance, doesn’t seem important in his own right at first. I figured he would end up just being an excuse to get the other two off their asteroid and into an unapproved flight, but even so I wanted to know more about him. Because of his sickness, he only communicates with the others through his spacesuit. And his theories and descriptions of the aliens he believes he contracted the sickness from are the kind of charming diversions that add color to sci-fi stories. The film makers could easily have given him a mundane sickness, but instead they deliver a tantalizing half-explanation of an alien disease.

There’s another similar scene with a robot later in the movie. The robot has information that the characters believe they need to save lives, but the robot has been ordered not to tell. This creates tension in its programming since the robot is also not supposed to cause harm to humans. People have been mining this exact same sci-fi situation since Isaac Asimov first laid out his three laws of robotics, so there’s no points for originality. In fact, the robot’s dilemma here is far less interesting than HAL-9000's in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). But it’s presented pretty convincingly (in every detail except the appearance of the robot) and is refreshingly more of a momentary inconvenience than a major plot point.

THE SILENT STAR had a lot of this little business in the margins too, and I liked a lot of the ideas floating around in that movie. But EOLOMEA has far more interesting characters, a tighter story, and some improvements in the special effects. All in all, this is a neat little sci-fi mystery with a pretty satisfying ending. There’s also a surprising lack of any kind of obvious political agenda. No specific countries are mentioned at all (though some characters do have ethnic names) and neither are any real historical events except Yuri Gagarin’s space flights. Not only are there no diatribes against warmongering capitalists (another weakness of THE SILENT STAR), but the characters aren’t even all necessarily happy and productive members of society. The two guys in the outpost are bored with their jobs, disobey orders, and get drunk while ostensibly on duty. Meanwhile, the ending of the movie suggests that sometimes the best way to serve mankind is to take initiative and act outside the established chain of command. If I hadn’t known ahead of time that this was produced by a Soviet bloc country, I never would have guessed it.

What else happened this year?

-- Bruce Dern saves the last surviving forest from short-sighted politicians and public apathy in SILENT RUNNING. The movie also features three awesome robots, a folk soundtrack by Joan Baez, and some of Dern’s best crazy-man acting.
-- Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky adapts Stanislaw Lem’s classic novel SOLYARIS, but focuses more on the human relationships than the sci-fi bits. I like this version better than Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 adaptation, but neither movie is anywhere near as good as the book.
-- In other literary adaptations, there’s also a version of SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE starring absolutely nobody you have heard of (the most famous name is Valerie Perrine) but which is still pretty good nonetheless. I never read the book though, so I don’t know how it compares to the Vonnegut/imagination version.
-- Christopher Walken almost single-handedly turns THE MIND SNATCHERS into a pretty interesting character study of a sociopath fighting to save his identity from a new form of electroshock therapy.
-- Meanwhile, Oliver Reed and Geraldine Chaplin try to have a baby in a world where getting pregnant is a capital crime in ZPG: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH.
-- Roddy MacDowell leads a monkey uprising in CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, moving the series a big step closer to a world where talking apes rule over humans.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1972...

I’m a big fan of SILENT RUNNING so I think I have to tell you to watch that one.

BONUS BLOG -- 1971: PUNISHMENT PARK

2009-07-09T08:00:00.002-04:00

What’s it about?

In an alternate version of early 1970s America, the government has taken to sentencing “political criminals” (i.e., hippies, dissidents, draft dodgers, and the like) to serving brief but brutal stints in newly designated punishment parks throughout the country. The park featured in this movie is a desert wasteland in southern California. Any prisoner sentenced there has three days to make it fifty miles across the desert with no food or water to a checkpoint. If they succeed, they can go free. But if they are “apprehended” by law enforcement officers (who use the parks as a training ground) then they are taken to prison to serve out whatever their original sentence would have been.

Except for waiting two hours to give the prisoners a head start, the law enforcement officers have no restrictions on how they can hunt down the fugitives. They use vehicles, radios, and weapons with live ammunition to aid in their pursuit. Though they claim they won’t use violence unless the prisoners resist when they are apprehended, none of the prisoners believe them. And when a group of prisoners fights back and succeeds in killing a deputy, the game turns even more deadly.

Is it any good?

This is another documentary-style sci-fi movie from British director Peter Watkins -- the third that I’ve watched for this blog. The first one I watched, THE WAR GAME (1965), ranks among the most riveting movies I have ever seen in my life. But the second one, THE GLADIATORS (1970), was dull and disappointing. So I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from PUNISHMENT PARK. Based on what I knew about the movie, it sounded like it was more along the lines of THE GLADIATORS, so I was almost steeling myself to be bored. The DVD I had also included an introduction from Peter Watkins which consisted largely of the director reading from several densely typewritten pages about how PUNISHMENT PARK has been unfairly ignored by everybody for twenty minutes. The omens, then, were not so good.

Luckily, the bad omens never panned out. One of the biggest differences between the other two Peter Watkins movies I had watched is that THE WAR GAME depicts events that could have very plausibly taken place (a nuclear war), whereas the subject of THE GLADIATORS are much more allegorical and detached (an isolated institute where countries fight out wars using small numbers of troops). At first, I figured PUNISHMENT PARK would fall on the allegorical and detached side of the line, but there’s a few interesting things about the movie that give it much more of a punch than expected.

To start with, the premise behind PUNISHMENT PARK is mostly well within the realm of believability. The dissidents are tried by a civilian tribunal that operates outside the traditional American justice system. The defendants are presumed guilty and although they have a chance to state their case, the arguments are more about philosophy and politics than they are about evidence. I’m not going to try and rate how close the United States has come to systems like these in its history (though this country has certainly had its dark spots), but drumhead trials with foregone conclusions are nothing new or even especially unusual in the history of the world.

The arguments that do come up during the trials are also absolutely real ones on both sides of the debate. The tribunal members show a surprising indulgence in letting the accused speak and in responding to them with their own arguments. (Though there is an awful of indignant shouting on both sides, and as soon as things seem to be going badly for the tribunal they have the defendants hauled out.) But supposedly these trials were all unscripted -- Peter Watkins let the actors come up with their own arguments and just let them play out. Some of the establishment types were even supposedly conservatives who genuinely opposed the hippie movement. But the effect is that the movie serves as an interesting document of countercultural and mainstream opinions of the early 1970s, and the inability of the two sides to find common ground in their interactions.

The actual hunt through the desert should probably be the movie’s Achilles heel, and honestly it isn’t very plausible. Whether you believe that it’s possible that the United States might start holding summary trials of its own citizens and sentencing them to prison without due process, the idea that there would also exist a systemic punishment plan that involved hunting prisoners across deserts is pretty absurd. But despite the absurdity, the situation acts as a pretty powerful allegory for the dilemma of the countercultural movement. On the one hand, they find themselves trapped in a game with arbitrary rules that are clearly stacked against them. But if they refuse to play the game, then they will simply be apprehended and sent to prison -- or possibly worse.

Most of the hippies decide to play the game, since they see it as their best chance for survival (and some believe that they can even possibly “win”). They go along with the insane rules set up by the government, even though it’s obvious that the whole thing is designed to force them to fail. The others who refuse to play the game (and who wait in ambush for the cops instead of running) mock the rest of the hippies as hypocrites -- by even consenting to play the game, they are giving legitimacy to a corrupt system.

Just to be clear, anybody who is looking for an unbiased view of 1970s politics won’t find it here. Watkins is clearly on the side of the counterculture -- though the hippies don’t always come across as heroes and martyrs. Some of them come across as weak or snotty or naive or dangerous. They are also the first to use violence, and at one point even threaten the life of an innocent hostage. None of them deserve the kind of punishment they’re getting, however. And although Watkins lets the establishment make its arguments in a reasonable way much of the time, the fact still remains that the cops shoot down a lot of unresisting unarmed kids.

If I believed the movie was saying that this is an accurate portrait of America, ca. 1970, then I would probably be pretty offended. Pieces and parts of it are certainly accurate in isolated instances, but in general the picture doesn’t reflect what America is about. But I think the movie is in fact has two other far less objectionable messages. First, it can be seen as saying that this was how a certain segment of the population felt America was treating them at the time. And second, it could be saying that the government could easily usurp such powers on a wide scale if the people permit it. Either of those things I think are true -- some people DO believe that America is a fascist state, and the government really COULD quickly become frightening if the people let it. I also think they are important things to understand and be aware of. So even though I should probably be offended that some British panty-waist is making inflammatory movies about my country, I guess I will just say that he makes a couple of good points.

The movie does start to drag a bit as it goes along. After all, there are only so many times that you can listen to the same arguments over and over again. But at least there are characters to care about (mostly only among the hippies, but a little among the establishment) and ideas to think about. Things do get a little hysterical at times, and it's difficult to understand why the cops are so brutal when they know that a film crew is following them around. But if nothing else, the movie is a very interesting experiment in improvisation and an instructive document about attitudes that seemingly only survive in small paranoid pockets today.

Anyway, the final score puts Peter Watkins at 2 for 3. THE WAR GAME is still far and away his best, but PUNISHMENT PARK is well worth watching if you like unusual narratives and don't mind listening to a lot of angry hippies.

1971: THX 1138

2009-07-06T08:00:00.002-04:00

What’s it about?

Robert Duvall plays THX 1138, a citizen of a sterile indoor city of the future. He has a dangerous job in the factory that produces the robotic policemen who patrol the city, a “mate” whom he is forbidden from having sex with, a holographic television, and a cocktail of drugs to keep him sedated and contented. But he has recently found himself losing his focus and experiencing strange emotions -- and ultimately it’s revealed that his mate has been making substitutions in his drug regimen to flush the sedatives from his system.

The un-sedated Duvall wastes no time in discovering sex, but he is observed by the all-seeing authorities who begin to monitor him closely. Meanwhile, a twitchy surveillance technician (played by Donald Pleasance) starts illegally modifying system software to get himself assigned as Duvall's roommate. The robotic police soon arrest them both and take them to a featureless white prison with no walls. Duvall and Pleasance soon escape with the help of a holographic television star. Once back in the city, more chases ensue until Duvall manages to make it to the world outside.

Is it any good?

THX 1138 is famously George Lucas’s first feature, adapted from a short student film he produced in 1967. The version I watched is a re-edited one with some new scenes and special effects that Lucas added for the DVD release in 2004. (As far as I know, no other version is available on DVD.) Besides being Lucas’s first feature film, THX 1138 is also one of only six that he has directed -- the others being AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973), STAR WARS (1977), and the three recent STAR WARS prequels. That being the case, it’s surprising to me how little attention this movie seems to get -- there are millions of fans of STAR WARS who apparently have no interest at all in THX 1138.

I can’t say that I had a whole lot of interest myself until I started watching it. Despite knowing that it existed for many years, I never bothered to seek it out. That’s partly because (like most people) I have mixed feelings about STAR WARS and its sequels. But it’s more likely because I had just never heard very much about THX 1138 before -- nobody seemed to be talking about it, so I didn’t feel any urgency to go out and see it.

I’m not even going to try and compare THX 1138 to any of George Lucas’s other movies. I’ve never seen AMERICAN GRAFFITI, and STAR WARS and its sequels have such cultural ubiquity that it’s almost absurd to even think of them simply as movies. I will say that it was kind of amazing to see a George Lucas movie for which I had absolutely no expectations. I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know who Darth Vader was or what storm troopers looked like, but I knew practically nothing about THX 1138 before I sat down to watch it.

Well, that’s not exactly true. The story and setting are pretty familiar, after all. The oppressive society in THX 1138 is a variation on the one found in George Orwell’s NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or Aldous Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD. It’s not exactly the same as either, but there are dystopian elements that are very familiar -- the constant surveillance, the compulsory consumerism, the faceless enforcement figures, the manipulation of sexuality, the elimination of emotion and love, the state-mandated pharmaceuticals, and so on. Some of these elements crop up in earlier movies as well. Besides the 1956 version of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, similar extreme visions of oppressive societies show up in ALPHAVILLE (1965) and FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966). And the paranoid obsession with constant surveillance and control is a big part of movies like THE 1,000 EYES OF DR MABUSE (1960), THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1961), SECONDS (1966), and COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970).

This is not to say that THX 1138 is derivative or unoriginal. I think it’s more a case of the movie being “of its time”. Orwell and Huxley wrote their novels in response to the totalitarian surveillance societies that coalesced during the rise of Fascism and Communism in Europe. But those regimes hunted down dissidents the old-fashioned way -- by accusations gathered through infiltration, entrapment, coercion, or fabrication. These kinds of things show up in the dystopian sci-fi flicks of the 1960s as well -- for instance, Robert Duvall informs on Donald Pleasance’s deviancy in THX 1138, which leads directly to his arrest. But these movies also resonate differently since ubiquitous video cameras and tape recorders were (and are) no longer the science-fiction trappings that they were for Orwell and Huxley. These themes became even more urgent after the abuses of the Nixon administration were exposed in the Watergate scandal, and they’ve never really gone away since then.

As far as the story goes, it’s a variation on the standard dystopian theme. There are a few neat twists though -- I really liked how Duvall’s mate needed to alter his drug mix before she could turn him into a co-conspirator. And since the story is told entirely from Duvall’s point of view, he starts to feel disoriented and confused long before he (or the audience) knows what’s happening to him or why. Another nice bit is that Duvall actually needs his drugs to safely do his job -- without the sedatives, he runs the risk of dropping radioactive and explosive materials during some delicate assembly operations. It’s not clear whether his need is physical or psychological, but either way it adds a much more serious element of danger to his decision to stay off the pills.

Donald Pleasance’s character is also a bit of an enigma. Like Duvall’s mate, his job is to watch a bank of monitors and coordinate security responses to deviant behavior. Apparently he takes a shine to Duvall while observing him during his hours on the job, but it’s not exactly clear what form his interest takes. The “mate” relationship in the world of THX 1138 is completely asexual, so it could simply be that the fussy Pleasance wants a roommate who will annoy him less than his current one. But watching the monitors means that Pleasance isn’t ignorant of sex -- and probably isn’t even ignorant of Duvall’s own sexual activity. So it seems at least reasonable that there might be some element of desire to his motives. Pleasance also seems more in touch with his emotions, though it’s not clear whether he’s off his drugs or not.

The futuristic world is very white, very sterile, and very inhuman. The vision of the future has a lot in common with the one in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) -- but with one important exception. I said that I got the feeling from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY that the movie took place the night before opening day in space -- that is, that the pristine spaceships and whatnot were being prepared for an onslaught of people who hadn’t arrived yet. In THX 1138, everything is still clean and pristine, but there’s also a sense that a lot of things are broken just below the surface. There are a lot of little throwaway scenes that show various bits of technology failing -- an elevator refusing to work, a robotic policeman running into a shut door over and over, and so on. The future isn’t dirty yet in this movie (we have to wait for STAR WARS for that), but it certainly has a lot of bugs. This isn’t the night before opening day -- it’s just another day in the peak season where the Hall of Presidents is closed for repairs.

The world is very minimalist as well. The starkest example of this is the prison where Duvall and Pleasance are incarcerated in the middle of the movie. It’s literally nothing more than a white space with a couple of couches. There are no walls -- instead, the whiteness stretches infinitely in all directions, making it impossible to see the way out and very easy to get lost. But Duvall’s apartment and the shows on the holographic television are minimalist as well. For a society that supposedly values mindless consumerism, there are really very few things to buy or desire. Instead, people simply take home useless geometric shapes (“dendrites”, according to the film commentary) which they then destroy and buy again the next day. But the consumerist angle is the least convincing and least interesting part of the movie -- whatever point they were trying to make gets wiped out by the production design and the lack of real attention to it in the script.

The robotic policemen, however, are one of the coolest and most interesting parts of the movie. The combination of police uniforms with expressionless silver faces is very creepy and compelling. There are some other scattered images here and there that are not so well integrated into the story -- a lot of the beginning of the movie is devoted to very brief unconnected vignettes (some involving the main characters, others not) of life in the city. They each last maybe five seconds or so, but they give a real sense of what the world is like. It also gives the movie a higher density of information so that it’s not always obvious exactly what’s happening or if it relates to the story. After skimming through the movie a second time to get some screenshots, I’m pretty confident that it all makes sense and that there is a clear story to it. But the little bits of unconnected business make it more interesting to rewatch since there’s a good chance that some little bit slipped by unnoticed the first time.

I do think the movie starts to go downhill a bit after Duvall and Pleasance are sent to prison. It becomes a much more self-consciously artsy movie in the middle section, before abruptly switching to a long (but pretty ho-hum) chase sequence at the end by foot and car. But the movie is always interesting to look at, and small parts of the future world are pretty thoroughly realized. (Vast sections remain unexplored, obviously.) The plot and characters are extremely simple, and nobody does very much acting in the movie, but most of that fits pretty well with the dystopian, emotionless setting. As I said before, I am not even going to attempt to compare this to STAR WARS, but I can say that right now I would far rather watch THX 1138 again than any of the six movies that George Lucas is most famous for.

What else happened this year?

-- Peter Watkins delivers yet another sci-fi documentary with PUNISHMENT PARK, this one about a government detention center where political dissidents (i.e., hippies and draft dodgers) are hunted down in a law enforcement training program.
-- Michael Crichton's break-out novel THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN was adapted into a very effective "how done it" about a lethal alien disease.
-- Take Roddy MacDowell and Kim Hunter as Cornelius and Zira from THE PLANET OF THE APES; add in Ricardo Montalban, Sal Mineo, Eric Braeden, a funky score, and a time travel plot that brings talking chimps back in time to the 1970s; mix well and serve as ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES.
-- Charlton Heston, meanwhile, imports his cynical, world-weary persona practically wholesale into THE OMEGA MAN -- the second adaptation of Richard Matheson's novella I AM LEGEND.
-- Stanley Kubrick directed A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, about which I assume everybody has already formed their own opinion. (I don't like it much.)

If you only watch one movie from 1971...

THX 1138 is the one that I would recommend, but PUNISHMENT PARK is pretty interesting and unusual as well. THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN and THE OMEGA MAN are both more typical (but still solid) choices too.

BONUS BLOG -- 1970: COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT

2009-07-02T08:00:00.003-04:00

What’s it about?

The U.S. government brings online a defense supercomputer called Colossus. Designed to be the ultimate deterrent in the Cold War, Colossus has the ability to automatically monitor electronic communications and to act unilaterally by firing ICBMs as soon as it detects a serious threat. But no sooner is the existence of the computer announced via press conference, then Colossus detects the presence of another similar system in the U.S.S.R. called Guardian.

Colossus and Guardian soon demand to be linked together -- threatening both the American and Soviet governments with nuclear attack if the request isn’t obeyed. The two computers create a secret language (indecipherable by humans) they use to communicate, and are soon blackmailing the superpowers into giving them more and more control. Colossus’s creator, Dr Forbin, is put under continual surveillance by the computers, so the rest of his team must work on solutions for stopping the computers with minimal input from him. Meanwhile, the computers order the construction of a mysterious manufacturing facility that will take up the entire island of Crete, and the scientists decide they must stop them one way or another.

Is it any good?

Digital computing didn’t even exist until the 1940s, but in less than two decades sci-fi writers were already asking whether these electronic brains could be capable of independent thought and action. COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT is not the first movie to feature a computer that develops its own agenda -- there’s also the Alpha 60 in ALPHAVILLE (1965) and HAL-9000 in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). The Doomsday Device in DR STRANGELOVE, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964) is also a similar kind of computer, but it seems to function essentially as intended instead of going rogue. In any event, COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT does have a few interesting wrinkles I don’t remember having seen before in other man vs. machine pictures.

The most interesting, to my mind, is that there are actually two computers -- the American Colossus and the Soviet Guardian. They are both built from similar plans (which were apparently leaked to the Soviets by spies), so it makes sense that they would have an affinity for each other. Once connected, the first thing they do is to exchange mathematical data like the multiplication tables until they work their way up to forms of higher mathematics that no human has comprehended yet. The purpose is apparently to establish a common form of communication that can’t be tracked or understood by humans.

This is another interesting thing about the movie -- the computers for the most part are simply computers. They are tied in to wide-reaching data streams (including all electronic communications in the world), but they don’t have any magical abilities to affect systems that are outside of their direct control. The only control they really have is over their output screens and the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Every demand that they make, no matter how large or small, is accompanied by the implicit threat of nuclear attack since the computers have no other way to influence humans to what they want. At one point late in the movie, when Forbin is under constant surveillance by Colossus, the computer tells him to stop drinking and to go to bed. Chafing under such paternalistic oversight, he asks in frustration if Colossus will destroy a city full of millions of people if he refuses to go to bed.

The answer to that question, by the way, is “no”. Another one of the interesting elements of the movie is that the computers believe they can make human existence better by taking control of the world, so they aren’t interested in wanton destruction for its own sake. The idea that giving up free will can result in a happier, more peaceful society is a pretty common sci-fi theme. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956) is built around this very idea, for instance, and so are a lot of other stories in the genre going back at least to the 1940s. Modern western fiction usually takes it as a given that the freedom to be miserable is better than a society where happiness is enforced. But there was a real historical debate around the time when republicanism and free market systems started spreading across the world that argued that the elimination of the noblesse oblige (the moral duty of the nobility to care for their serfs) would result in a drop in the quality of life for the poor. It seems like a silly argument now, but that’s only because humans make imperfect stewards. So could a selfless computer really manage the world better than we can on our own?

On the other hand, Colossus is not exactly a selfless computer. It is very interested in preserving what power it does have -- attempts to interrupt Colossus’s ability to function or to launch ICBMs are met with deadly force (including the detonation of nuclear weapons). Like HAL-9000, it claims to be following its programming to the logical conclusion -- but it’s also clear that Colossus has the ability to rewrite its own program as well. In fact, Colossus is designed to be entirely self-sufficient. Once its facility was sealed off, it is expected to generate its own power, perform its own repairs, defend itself from attack, and so on. This is why the humans can’t just walk in and unplug the servers. (It’s also one of the least believable aspects of the movie -- surely there must be some interface with the outside world that can be disrupted.)

Skynet from TERMINATOR and WOPR from WARGAMES seem like pretty direct descendants of Colossus. They’re all designed more or less to do the same thing and they all start acting on their own sooner or later. The idea that Colossus can’t be swayed by emotion is pitched as an advantage during its introduction to the world. But that only underscores the absurdity of the theory of mutually assured destruction -- if the U.S. were really the victim of a crippling nuclear strike, would we have anything to gain by doing the same to the Soviets?

(If I can take a brief aside here, I’ll make not of a real document which every British Prime Minister must draft upon taking office. The document contains orders detailing what is to be done if the chain of command is destroyed by a devastating attack on Britain, and is stored in a locked vault in a submarine somewhere in the world. No one knows what the document says -- either it orders a full retaliation, or it orders surrender. The idea is that Britain’s enemies can never be sure what the orders will be -- but also that it allows human judgment to prevail over potentially self-destructive policies.)

Practically all of the “action” in COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT takes place either in Colossus’s monitoring station in California or in the situation rooms of the White House and Pentagon. The plot plays out almost like a chess game, with each side maneuvering into positions that will stop the other from acting. The computers, for instance, order that any as-yet untapped communications lines be tied into their system, and that key figures be placed under surveillance so they can be sure they aren’t plotting against them. For their part, the humans are reduced to finding places to discuss the situation that can’t be monitored, and to trying to manually disarm the nuclear warheads without tipping off the computers.

Once Forbin goes under 24-hour surveillance, a sort of relationship starts to develop between him and Colossus. The computer schedules every moment of his day and becomes his constant companion through a series of terminals and television cameras. Colossus seems to have some interest in Forbin, but it’s hard to tell if it simply wants his know-how for improvements, or if it feels something more affectionate for its creator. Likewise, it’s not easy to tell how Forbin feels about Colossus. He’s clearly intellectually interested in the new developments in the computer and early on he fights to get Colossus what it wants -- believing that he can shut it down if it gets out of hand. By the end of the movie, Forbin is considerably less enamored of Colossus and is actively working to shut it down. Until the end, Forbin believes that the computer is still something that he can control and overcome. Colossus, on the other hand, maintains that it has progressed well beyond the knowledge of its creator. One of them is correct, but it’s impossible to tell which until the very end of the movie.