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.
Showing posts with label oppressive society. Show all posts
Showing posts with label oppressive society. Show all posts
Monday, March 22, 2010
Monday, March 15, 2010
1982: TRON
What’s it about?
After being bilked out of some lucrative intellectual property by a corporate bigwig, programmer Jeff Bridges sneaks back into his old office to find evidence of the theft. But while hacking the mainframe in search of proof, the Master Control Program -- an all-knowing sentient program that runs the company’s entire computer system (and then some) -- uses an experimental ray gun to trap Bridges inside the computer system itself.
Once inside, Bridges finds himself in a weird dystopian world patrolled by the Master Control Program’s jackbooted goons. But rather than put Bridges to death outright, he is instead forced to compete in a series of gladiatorial games against the personifications of renegade programs who refuse to renounce their belief in “the users” or submit to the Master Control Program. After escaping from one such game, Bridges sets out with a couple of free-thinking programs (including a digital warrior named Tron who was written specifically for the task) to take down the Master Control Program.
Is it any good?
Somehow I’ve never seen TRON before, so I knew from the start of this project that I’d certainly have to watch it. I’m not sure if it exactly counts as a classic, but if you tell folks that you’ve spent two years watching practically every science fiction movie worth seeing, then they’re going to expect that you’ve seen TRON. (Note: This blog will likely take me two years to finish, but one thing I’ve learned in the process is that it would take far longer than two years for me to watch every science fiction movie worth seeing.)
I’m not even sure what exactly I thought TRON was about before I saw it. I really ought to have written a little summary of my expectations before hand, but the truth is that I didn’t really think too much about what I’d be getting myself into. I knew it starred Jeff Bridges, and I knew it took place inside a computer, and I knew it involved something called “light cycles”. (I only knew this last fact because, many years ago, I used to spend hours playing an addictive freeware game called Tron Light Cycles against my brothers.)
I’ve spent many of this blog’s entries arguing why such-and-such fantasy movie really ought to be considered science fiction at heart. (Look no further than last week’s DARK CRYSTAL entry for an example.) So it’s with some hesitation that I find myself about to say that TRON is really a fantasy movie at heart. It’s not just that the insides of the computer as imagined by TRON bear no resemblance to the actual workings of a computer. But the explanation for computers that the movie comes up with is so primitive and so benighted that it boggles my mind. Let me try to explain what I mean.
When faced with the need to explain what goes on inside computers, the movie TRON tells us that there are little people inside that make them work. Again, a second time -- according to TRON, there are thousands of little people inside your computer right now, without whom the computer would no longer function. There’s a little man who runs your word processor, and a little man who runs your spreadsheet, and a little man who runs your solitaire game. This is the same explanation that ignorant and unsophisticated peoples came up with when they were confronted with inexplicable natural forces. There’s a big man who makes the lightning, a big man who makes the tides, and a big man who makes the west wind. That was all very well and good before the scientific method was invented, but we’ve moved considerably past that point by now. If THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981) is a fantasy because it relies on Zeus and Hera and the rest of the gods to explain the workings of the natural world, then TRON is just as much a fantasy because it relies on little men to explain the workings of a calculating engine.
I understand that the world of TRON is meant to represent the virtual world of digital space -- that is, that the little men of the movie are not meant to be literally living inside the physical space of the computer. Instead, they are supposed to live in the computer’s memory, and everything we see is a fanciful representation of what’s going on in the memory. I get that. The problem is that this explanation doesn’t really make any logical sense either. Why would the virtual representation of a computer program have visible circuitry on its bodysuit? Why would they need to travel from point to point as if they were traversing physical space (something that happens in this movie A LOT)? What happens to the functions that the programs were supposed to control when they are terminated? Why is there a separate program that controls the input/output functions of all other programs? And so on.
I don’t really want to get into every nuance of how TRON blows my mind with its illogic and incuriosity about the details of computer science. Suffice to say that the world itself only intermittently makes sense if you take it as a representation of actual technology. I could be way off base here (and please let me know if I am), but the world of TRON is a fantasy world dressed up in a circuit-spangled bodysuit.
I haven’t forgotten that when I was writing about STAR WARS (1977), I spent a lot of time arguing that fantasies can still be called science fiction so long as they look like science fiction. In the case of STAR WARS, this means that the robots and spaceships qualify it for sci-fi status, even though the mystical forces at work and the importance of “destiny” and the general lack of interest in actual science are strong marks against it. But robots and spaceships have been common features of science fiction movies since the early 1900s. George Lucas clearly wanted STAR WARS to look like a sci-fi flick, no matter what else was going on in the story and themes, and so he used easily recognizable visual shorthand. It’s sort of like how you only really need Monument Valley, a ten-gallon hat, and a hoss to make a western. It doesn’t matter what the story is about -- if you put it in the right setting with the right costumes and props, it’s going to look like a western even if it violates every traditional theme of the genre. (Exhibit A for the defense: there are actually a handful of “Soviet westerns”.)
But I’m not sure if bodysuits painted with glowing circuitry are any kind of recognizable visual shorthand for science fiction. It’s certainly shorthand for “computer stuff”, but is dressing magical computer men in circuit-inspired outfits really any different than giving Bacchus a crown of grape leaves and a double chin? TRON doesn’t want to look like a science fiction movie necessarily -- it just wants to look like a fantasy computer world.
I obviously don’t think that the makers of TRON really believe that computers are really run by little men inside them. But I also don’t think that the ancient Greeks honestly believed that the sun was a chariot driven across the sky. Myths were partly a way of “explaining” things that couldn’t really be fathomed by ancient people, but the stories were really ways of passing on shared ideals and culture. That’s why many myths are still affecting today, even in a post-Enlightenment world when we should all know better. The fact that a myth may have involved, say, Poseidon and Vulcan didn’t necessarily mean that it was supposed to be regarded as proto-scientific commentary on the ocean and volcanoes. Likewise, I don’t see the computery setting of TRON as suggesting that it has any kind of commentary on computers or computer science. It is concerned with intellectual property rights, which is pretty prescient, but there's nothing about the world inside the computer that makes it fundamentally different from the real world. The program world has jobs, religious faiths, government, military -- but these things aren't set up in any particularly computery way. They are just translations of human institutions into a computer setting.
Anyway, I’ve done much more complaining about TRON than I expected I would. I enjoyed it okay, though the story is really just a run-of-the-mill dystopian pastiche. It definitely had its moments -- the gladiatorial bits were probably my favorites, and I was impressed that some of the games that Jeff Bridges was forced to play actually look like they could be fun computer games. (In the case of the light cycles, I can attest that this is definitely true.) The special effects are neat, but the world they depict has no logical underpinnings. So everything feels flat and empty. And this is no FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966) where the characters go from lungs to heart to brain -- that is, to recognizable places that the audience might want to see. The only interesting "places" in TRON's computer world are an input/output tower and the nexus of the Master Control Program. But I don't know what an input/output tower is. Is it a program function? A piece of hardware? What keeps FANTASTIC VOYAGE interesting is that each destination depicts a real organ, and the nature of each results in distinct dangers and opportunities. In TRON, it all largely feels the same.
But look -- I’d be a hypocrite if I seriously asked you all to agree with me that TRON is a fantasy movie. It takes in place inside of a computer, and a computer is a science thing, so it’s science fiction -- no matter how else I might feel about it.
After being bilked out of some lucrative intellectual property by a corporate bigwig, programmer Jeff Bridges sneaks back into his old office to find evidence of the theft. But while hacking the mainframe in search of proof, the Master Control Program -- an all-knowing sentient program that runs the company’s entire computer system (and then some) -- uses an experimental ray gun to trap Bridges inside the computer system itself.
Once inside, Bridges finds himself in a weird dystopian world patrolled by the Master Control Program’s jackbooted goons. But rather than put Bridges to death outright, he is instead forced to compete in a series of gladiatorial games against the personifications of renegade programs who refuse to renounce their belief in “the users” or submit to the Master Control Program. After escaping from one such game, Bridges sets out with a couple of free-thinking programs (including a digital warrior named Tron who was written specifically for the task) to take down the Master Control Program.
Is it any good?
Somehow I’ve never seen TRON before, so I knew from the start of this project that I’d certainly have to watch it. I’m not sure if it exactly counts as a classic, but if you tell folks that you’ve spent two years watching practically every science fiction movie worth seeing, then they’re going to expect that you’ve seen TRON. (Note: This blog will likely take me two years to finish, but one thing I’ve learned in the process is that it would take far longer than two years for me to watch every science fiction movie worth seeing.)
I’m not even sure what exactly I thought TRON was about before I saw it. I really ought to have written a little summary of my expectations before hand, but the truth is that I didn’t really think too much about what I’d be getting myself into. I knew it starred Jeff Bridges, and I knew it took place inside a computer, and I knew it involved something called “light cycles”. (I only knew this last fact because, many years ago, I used to spend hours playing an addictive freeware game called Tron Light Cycles against my brothers.)
I’ve spent many of this blog’s entries arguing why such-and-such fantasy movie really ought to be considered science fiction at heart. (Look no further than last week’s DARK CRYSTAL entry for an example.) So it’s with some hesitation that I find myself about to say that TRON is really a fantasy movie at heart. It’s not just that the insides of the computer as imagined by TRON bear no resemblance to the actual workings of a computer. But the explanation for computers that the movie comes up with is so primitive and so benighted that it boggles my mind. Let me try to explain what I mean.
When faced with the need to explain what goes on inside computers, the movie TRON tells us that there are little people inside that make them work. Again, a second time -- according to TRON, there are thousands of little people inside your computer right now, without whom the computer would no longer function. There’s a little man who runs your word processor, and a little man who runs your spreadsheet, and a little man who runs your solitaire game. This is the same explanation that ignorant and unsophisticated peoples came up with when they were confronted with inexplicable natural forces. There’s a big man who makes the lightning, a big man who makes the tides, and a big man who makes the west wind. That was all very well and good before the scientific method was invented, but we’ve moved considerably past that point by now. If THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981) is a fantasy because it relies on Zeus and Hera and the rest of the gods to explain the workings of the natural world, then TRON is just as much a fantasy because it relies on little men to explain the workings of a calculating engine.
I understand that the world of TRON is meant to represent the virtual world of digital space -- that is, that the little men of the movie are not meant to be literally living inside the physical space of the computer. Instead, they are supposed to live in the computer’s memory, and everything we see is a fanciful representation of what’s going on in the memory. I get that. The problem is that this explanation doesn’t really make any logical sense either. Why would the virtual representation of a computer program have visible circuitry on its bodysuit? Why would they need to travel from point to point as if they were traversing physical space (something that happens in this movie A LOT)? What happens to the functions that the programs were supposed to control when they are terminated? Why is there a separate program that controls the input/output functions of all other programs? And so on.
I don’t really want to get into every nuance of how TRON blows my mind with its illogic and incuriosity about the details of computer science. Suffice to say that the world itself only intermittently makes sense if you take it as a representation of actual technology. I could be way off base here (and please let me know if I am), but the world of TRON is a fantasy world dressed up in a circuit-spangled bodysuit.
I haven’t forgotten that when I was writing about STAR WARS (1977), I spent a lot of time arguing that fantasies can still be called science fiction so long as they look like science fiction. In the case of STAR WARS, this means that the robots and spaceships qualify it for sci-fi status, even though the mystical forces at work and the importance of “destiny” and the general lack of interest in actual science are strong marks against it. But robots and spaceships have been common features of science fiction movies since the early 1900s. George Lucas clearly wanted STAR WARS to look like a sci-fi flick, no matter what else was going on in the story and themes, and so he used easily recognizable visual shorthand. It’s sort of like how you only really need Monument Valley, a ten-gallon hat, and a hoss to make a western. It doesn’t matter what the story is about -- if you put it in the right setting with the right costumes and props, it’s going to look like a western even if it violates every traditional theme of the genre. (Exhibit A for the defense: there are actually a handful of “Soviet westerns”.)
But I’m not sure if bodysuits painted with glowing circuitry are any kind of recognizable visual shorthand for science fiction. It’s certainly shorthand for “computer stuff”, but is dressing magical computer men in circuit-inspired outfits really any different than giving Bacchus a crown of grape leaves and a double chin? TRON doesn’t want to look like a science fiction movie necessarily -- it just wants to look like a fantasy computer world.
I obviously don’t think that the makers of TRON really believe that computers are really run by little men inside them. But I also don’t think that the ancient Greeks honestly believed that the sun was a chariot driven across the sky. Myths were partly a way of “explaining” things that couldn’t really be fathomed by ancient people, but the stories were really ways of passing on shared ideals and culture. That’s why many myths are still affecting today, even in a post-Enlightenment world when we should all know better. The fact that a myth may have involved, say, Poseidon and Vulcan didn’t necessarily mean that it was supposed to be regarded as proto-scientific commentary on the ocean and volcanoes. Likewise, I don’t see the computery setting of TRON as suggesting that it has any kind of commentary on computers or computer science. It is concerned with intellectual property rights, which is pretty prescient, but there's nothing about the world inside the computer that makes it fundamentally different from the real world. The program world has jobs, religious faiths, government, military -- but these things aren't set up in any particularly computery way. They are just translations of human institutions into a computer setting.
Anyway, I’ve done much more complaining about TRON than I expected I would. I enjoyed it okay, though the story is really just a run-of-the-mill dystopian pastiche. It definitely had its moments -- the gladiatorial bits were probably my favorites, and I was impressed that some of the games that Jeff Bridges was forced to play actually look like they could be fun computer games. (In the case of the light cycles, I can attest that this is definitely true.) The special effects are neat, but the world they depict has no logical underpinnings. So everything feels flat and empty. And this is no FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966) where the characters go from lungs to heart to brain -- that is, to recognizable places that the audience might want to see. The only interesting "places" in TRON's computer world are an input/output tower and the nexus of the Master Control Program. But I don't know what an input/output tower is. Is it a program function? A piece of hardware? What keeps FANTASTIC VOYAGE interesting is that each destination depicts a real organ, and the nature of each results in distinct dangers and opportunities. In TRON, it all largely feels the same.
But look -- I’d be a hypocrite if I seriously asked you all to agree with me that TRON is a fantasy movie. It takes in place inside of a computer, and a computer is a science thing, so it’s science fiction -- no matter how else I might feel about it.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
1982: THE DARK CRYSTAL
What’s it about?
On “another world”, the conjunction of three suns results in the appearance of a mysterious powerful crystal and two new races -- the cruel and vulture-like Skeksis and the peaceful Mystics. After a thousand years, both races are dying out, but the Skeksis have succeeded in taking control of the world. A prophecy predicts that a Gelfling (an elf-like creature) will be the downfall of the Skeksis, so they have eradicated practically all of the race.
As the wisest of the Mystics lies on his deathbed, he sends the last of the Gelflings (or so he thinks) on a quest to find a missing shard of the crystal, which is in some fashion the key to defeating the Skeksis. Though he succeeds in finding the shard, he doesn’t know what to do with it, and soon the Skeksis are hunting him with a variety of fearsome monsters. The Gelfling’s journey takes him to many strange places in the world, but there is limited time in which to fulfill the prophecy.
Is it any good?
I didn’t really expect to end up writing about THE DARK CRYSTAL when I started watching it. I’d never seen it before, but it always sounded like a straight-up fantasy story with elves and crystals and sorcerers. And superficially that’s exactly what it is. But one of the big differences between this movies and other fantasy movies like THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981) or the SINBAD movies or LABYRINTH is that THE DARK CRYSTAL takes place on a world with no humans. In many ways, it might as well be an alien planet.
Like FANTASTIC PLANET (1973) or many of the planets in the STAR WARS movies, the world of THE DARK CRYSTAL has its own alien ecosystem. It’s not necessarily fully developed, but it is full of lots of strange creatures that don’t really have any traditional fantasy analogs. Instead, the world seems to be the product of imagination run amok -- just like a good alien planet should be.
Of course, there are limits to imagination. The world of THE DARK CRYSTAL still has forests and swamps and deserts. It has animals and plants and fish. Most of the creatures, in fact, seem to be based more on Earth animals than anything else. But one result of that is to make the creatures seem more “real” -- or at least as real as Muppets can feel. There’s no real sense that the ecosystem of the world “evolved” in any natural way, but familiar plant and animal shapes do lend a veneer of naturalness to the world, even if things are twisted all out of shape. And it’s worth noting that nothing looks exactly like an Earth animal.
There’s also not a whole lot of magic in THE DARK CRYSTAL. The crystal itself has some ill-defined powers that affect the world and its inhabitants, and there is the prophecy. But otherwise, things proceed more or less without any outright fantasy. Even these elements have a bit of logic behind them. There’s an old crone who uses a complicated piece of machinery to assist in figuring out her prophecies, for instance. And the Skeksis likewise use mechanical devices to focus the power of the crystal. The magical elements, in other words, don’t operate outside the logic of the world. They are inexplicable forces -- but forces that obey some natural laws of science nonetheless.
The other reason I decided to write about THE DARK CRYSTAL is that it’s a movie starring puppets. Like LABYRINTH, this is a Jim Henson movie through and through. But unlike that one, THE DARK CRYSTAL has no human actors at all. Every character is a Muppet of some sort -- either a hand puppet, a marionette, or a full-body puppet suit. (And possibly other kinds of puppets I couldn’t identify.)
There aren’t that many movies that have casts made up entirely of puppets. In fact, the only others I’ve watched for this blog are THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO (1966) and JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN (1969), both of which were created by British puppeteers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. There may be a few others I missed -- there’s at least one other THUNDERBIRDS movie anyway -- but it’s just not a common way to make a movie. Of course, puppet effects for specific monsters are fairly common -- Mothra and her offspring in MOTHRA (1961), the alien in ALIEN (1979), Yoda in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1981), E.T. in E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982) and countless others -- but its very rare that a movie relies solely on puppets to generate sympathy and excitement.
One reason for this is pretty clear from THE DARK CRYSTAL -- there’s a limit to what puppets can do and to how realistic they can be. The pace of the action in this movie is always hampered by the constraints of getting puppets to hit each other. And the faces of the puppets are often stiff and unemotional. Even some of the creatures (like the landstriders) are cooler in concept than they are in execution, and even in a relatively dark movie like this there are still Muppet-ish bits of comical character design that creep in.
I’m not really complaining though. There are always trade-offs when you use any kind of surrogates for human actors -- whether it’s cartoon animation, stop-motion animation, animal performers, computer graphics, or puppets. There is definitely a lot of artistry and craft in the puppets of THE DARK CRYSTAL. Even though none of them look much like the traditional Muppets, it’s still always obvious that the characters were designed by Jim Henson’s shop. There’s a clear and consistent aesthetic that ties everything together.
In the end, THE DARK CRYSTAL is yet another movie that’s not really science fiction. But its world is certainly believably alien in a way that most sci-fi alien worlds aren’t. The alien qualities of the characters are less well developed -- we don’t really see enough of any of the races’ cultures to get a taste of that. And the story and character arcs are all very much standard issue fantasy fare. But since I can’t really think of any other sci-fi movies that are set entirely on alien planets with no human characters at all, THE DARK CRYSTAL is probably as close as I’ll get to talking about that kind of story in this blog.
On “another world”, the conjunction of three suns results in the appearance of a mysterious powerful crystal and two new races -- the cruel and vulture-like Skeksis and the peaceful Mystics. After a thousand years, both races are dying out, but the Skeksis have succeeded in taking control of the world. A prophecy predicts that a Gelfling (an elf-like creature) will be the downfall of the Skeksis, so they have eradicated practically all of the race.
As the wisest of the Mystics lies on his deathbed, he sends the last of the Gelflings (or so he thinks) on a quest to find a missing shard of the crystal, which is in some fashion the key to defeating the Skeksis. Though he succeeds in finding the shard, he doesn’t know what to do with it, and soon the Skeksis are hunting him with a variety of fearsome monsters. The Gelfling’s journey takes him to many strange places in the world, but there is limited time in which to fulfill the prophecy.
Is it any good?
I didn’t really expect to end up writing about THE DARK CRYSTAL when I started watching it. I’d never seen it before, but it always sounded like a straight-up fantasy story with elves and crystals and sorcerers. And superficially that’s exactly what it is. But one of the big differences between this movies and other fantasy movies like THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981) or the SINBAD movies or LABYRINTH is that THE DARK CRYSTAL takes place on a world with no humans. In many ways, it might as well be an alien planet.
Like FANTASTIC PLANET (1973) or many of the planets in the STAR WARS movies, the world of THE DARK CRYSTAL has its own alien ecosystem. It’s not necessarily fully developed, but it is full of lots of strange creatures that don’t really have any traditional fantasy analogs. Instead, the world seems to be the product of imagination run amok -- just like a good alien planet should be.
Of course, there are limits to imagination. The world of THE DARK CRYSTAL still has forests and swamps and deserts. It has animals and plants and fish. Most of the creatures, in fact, seem to be based more on Earth animals than anything else. But one result of that is to make the creatures seem more “real” -- or at least as real as Muppets can feel. There’s no real sense that the ecosystem of the world “evolved” in any natural way, but familiar plant and animal shapes do lend a veneer of naturalness to the world, even if things are twisted all out of shape. And it’s worth noting that nothing looks exactly like an Earth animal.
There’s also not a whole lot of magic in THE DARK CRYSTAL. The crystal itself has some ill-defined powers that affect the world and its inhabitants, and there is the prophecy. But otherwise, things proceed more or less without any outright fantasy. Even these elements have a bit of logic behind them. There’s an old crone who uses a complicated piece of machinery to assist in figuring out her prophecies, for instance. And the Skeksis likewise use mechanical devices to focus the power of the crystal. The magical elements, in other words, don’t operate outside the logic of the world. They are inexplicable forces -- but forces that obey some natural laws of science nonetheless.
The other reason I decided to write about THE DARK CRYSTAL is that it’s a movie starring puppets. Like LABYRINTH, this is a Jim Henson movie through and through. But unlike that one, THE DARK CRYSTAL has no human actors at all. Every character is a Muppet of some sort -- either a hand puppet, a marionette, or a full-body puppet suit. (And possibly other kinds of puppets I couldn’t identify.)
There aren’t that many movies that have casts made up entirely of puppets. In fact, the only others I’ve watched for this blog are THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO (1966) and JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN (1969), both of which were created by British puppeteers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. There may be a few others I missed -- there’s at least one other THUNDERBIRDS movie anyway -- but it’s just not a common way to make a movie. Of course, puppet effects for specific monsters are fairly common -- Mothra and her offspring in MOTHRA (1961), the alien in ALIEN (1979), Yoda in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1981), E.T. in E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982) and countless others -- but its very rare that a movie relies solely on puppets to generate sympathy and excitement.
One reason for this is pretty clear from THE DARK CRYSTAL -- there’s a limit to what puppets can do and to how realistic they can be. The pace of the action in this movie is always hampered by the constraints of getting puppets to hit each other. And the faces of the puppets are often stiff and unemotional. Even some of the creatures (like the landstriders) are cooler in concept than they are in execution, and even in a relatively dark movie like this there are still Muppet-ish bits of comical character design that creep in.
I’m not really complaining though. There are always trade-offs when you use any kind of surrogates for human actors -- whether it’s cartoon animation, stop-motion animation, animal performers, computer graphics, or puppets. There is definitely a lot of artistry and craft in the puppets of THE DARK CRYSTAL. Even though none of them look much like the traditional Muppets, it’s still always obvious that the characters were designed by Jim Henson’s shop. There’s a clear and consistent aesthetic that ties everything together.
In the end, THE DARK CRYSTAL is yet another movie that’s not really science fiction. But its world is certainly believably alien in a way that most sci-fi alien worlds aren’t. The alien qualities of the characters are less well developed -- we don’t really see enough of any of the races’ cultures to get a taste of that. And the story and character arcs are all very much standard issue fantasy fare. But since I can’t really think of any other sci-fi movies that are set entirely on alien planets with no human characters at all, THE DARK CRYSTAL is probably as close as I’ll get to talking about that kind of story in this blog.
Monday, March 8, 2010
1982: FORBIDDEN ZONE
What’s it about?
When Frenchy Hercules disappears through a door in her family home’s basement into the freakish Sixth Dimension, her young brother (played by an old vaudeville comedian) enlists their grandfather (a retired Jewish wrestler) to enter the portal and get her back. Meanwhile, Frenchy finds love with the King Fausto of the Sixth Dimension (played by Herve Villechaize).
But trouble arises when the jealous Queen Doris (played by Susan Tyrrell) gets word of her husband’s “peccadilloes”. Others soon find their way into the Sixth Dimension, and they encounter weirdos like a frog-headed butler, a constantly topless princess, and Satan himself (played by Danny Elfman). Numerous musical numbers featuring vintage big band recordings interrupt the proceedings with additional craziness.
Is it any good?
Heck if I know. I first saw this movie as an impressionable youngster while at a weeklong art camp at Miami University in Ohio. I was probably fifteen at the time, and I wandered over during a movie night to see what the college-aged camp counselors were watching. They had rented FORBIDDEN ZONE (and not for the first time, it seems). The movie left me confused, excited, and disturbed in equal measure -- but I admit primarily I was mesmerized by the constantly topless princess.
Like FANTASTIC PLANET (1973), this movie has continued to exist in my memory as a collage of strange, unconnected images. (Is it coincidence that they both prominently feature toplessness? Who can say?) Even though it’s practically impossible to defend it as science fiction (the journey to the Sixth Dimension is more THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS or THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE than it is, say, A WRINKLE IN TIME), I knew I would have to watch it again anyway just to see what it is really about. But even though I am less distracted now by naked breasts than I was as a teenager, I am still not sure I understand what it is really about.
A brief aside here. I watched this with my girlfriend, and we both agreed that the naked breasts in FORBIDDEN ZONE are incredibly distracting. It is impossible not to be entranced when they are onscreen -- the main difference between now and 1995 is that I didn’t spend the scenes without the breasts impatiently waiting for them to come back. But whenever they were there, it became very difficult to focus on anything else. In fact, the girlfriend believes that the quality of the breasts in the movie exceeds the quality of anything else it has to offer.
Something I didn’t know until after I watched FORBIDDEN ZONE again recently is that the movie was created primarily to capture on film some of the stage show of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. This is the band that evolved into Oingo Boingo in the early 1980s, but FORBIDDEN ZONE was a record of an earlier incarnation when they were a quasi-theatrical troupe obsessed with old songs and vaudeville acts. In some ways, it is exactly what I had hoped SPACE IS THE PLACE (1974) might be -- a document of an offbeat musical group. But Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist cosmic jazz is explicitly sci-fi in some ways, whereas The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo recontextualized historical curiosities into even weirder packages.
But like SPACE IS THE PLACE, the non-musical portions of FORBIDDEN ZONE dominate the movie, and that’s too bad. Some of the performers in the movie are members of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, and their imagination shines brightest when they are choreographing weird accompaniments to weird old songs. My favorite is a scene of absurd factory work set to “Pico and Sepulveda”. (Look up that song if you can -- it totally rules.) The scene includes a catchy curiosity from the 1940s, an amusing dance number, elements of both the distinctive production design and animation that pepper the movie, and an imaginative (and funny) interpretation of the song. It’s delightfully weird, but (unlike much of the movie) it doesn’t feel like it’s designed to be off-putting or bizarre for its own sake.
There are a few more moments like this in the movie, and it’s occasionally a trippy good time as a result of it. For example, there’s an otherwise totally unnecessary alphabet song inspired by the Three Stooges that still manages to incorporate some pretty cool early breakdancing. But too often, it’s more like weirdness without a point or weirdness that’s designed to offend. (There are some extremely uncomfortable blackface moments in FORBIDDEN ZONE, as well as several other ethnic caricatures, for instance.) It is clear that this movie is the product of a few imaginative folks who had nobody to tell them “no” -- and that is always kind of appealing, at least in theory. If I knew more about the kinds of things The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo were into in the late 1970s (like big band music, Max Fleischer cartoons, and vaudeville comedians), I would probably understand more of what they were trying to do. As it is, I can only make guesses -- and unless I want to do a lot of research, there’s no way for me to really find out whether their references are witty and well-informed, or if they are simply unnecessarily bizarre and occasionally offensive.
FORBIDDEN ZONE is also the kind of movie that couldn't exist without pop culture. It references almost entirely pop culture from the 1950s and earlier, but its still nonetheless very much what you might call a postmodern pastiche. A little bit of cabaret singing, a little bit of the Three Stooges, a little bit of greaser movies, a little bit of minstrel shows, a little bit of German expressionistic set design, and so on -- all mixed together in a chaotic stew.
Beyond the weirdness of the thing, FORBIDDEN ZONE is pretty impenetrable -- and I’m not even totally sure there is much to penetrate in the end. There is a plot of sort, but it’s not a very interesting one. (See the description above.) There are no actual characters -- just caricatures and stereotypes. Originally, the intention of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo was to present lost entertainments that were no longer being performed live -- in other words, to bring vaudeville and the cabarets to people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to experience them in a live setting. (And then to add a unique Oingo Boingo flair of weirdness.) FORBIDDEN ZONE isn’t a live performance, so it’s a valid question exactly what is the point of the movie. Why watch a recording of Danny Elfman singing a modified version of “Minnie the Moocher” when you could listen to a recording of Cab Calloway himself? If the references and songs were better curated -- if they were identified or explained in some way -- there might be a case for FORBIDDEN ZONE as an educational movie. But as it is, it’s a catalog of weird things that you will enjoy only so much as your sensibility is aligned with those of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.
Ultimately, FORBIDDEN ZONE is 73 minutes of your life that you will never get back. So whether it’s worth your time or not probably depends on how much you value 73 minutes of your life. It seems unlikely that most people would enjoy the entire movie -- though I have no doubt that those folks are out there. For me, I’d say there are ten or fifteen minutes of the movie that are a good time. Much of the rest is mostly just waiting for a funny joke, a neat bit of animation, a cool dance, or a catchy song, but there are also times when I got uncomfortable or annoyed. The movie’s too weird and unpredictable to ever be boring, but it’s also definitely not trying to be your friend. Look -- if you want to watch it, go ahead and watch it. If you’re not sure, skip it.
When Frenchy Hercules disappears through a door in her family home’s basement into the freakish Sixth Dimension, her young brother (played by an old vaudeville comedian) enlists their grandfather (a retired Jewish wrestler) to enter the portal and get her back. Meanwhile, Frenchy finds love with the King Fausto of the Sixth Dimension (played by Herve Villechaize).
But trouble arises when the jealous Queen Doris (played by Susan Tyrrell) gets word of her husband’s “peccadilloes”. Others soon find their way into the Sixth Dimension, and they encounter weirdos like a frog-headed butler, a constantly topless princess, and Satan himself (played by Danny Elfman). Numerous musical numbers featuring vintage big band recordings interrupt the proceedings with additional craziness.
Is it any good?
Heck if I know. I first saw this movie as an impressionable youngster while at a weeklong art camp at Miami University in Ohio. I was probably fifteen at the time, and I wandered over during a movie night to see what the college-aged camp counselors were watching. They had rented FORBIDDEN ZONE (and not for the first time, it seems). The movie left me confused, excited, and disturbed in equal measure -- but I admit primarily I was mesmerized by the constantly topless princess.
Like FANTASTIC PLANET (1973), this movie has continued to exist in my memory as a collage of strange, unconnected images. (Is it coincidence that they both prominently feature toplessness? Who can say?) Even though it’s practically impossible to defend it as science fiction (the journey to the Sixth Dimension is more THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS or THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE than it is, say, A WRINKLE IN TIME), I knew I would have to watch it again anyway just to see what it is really about. But even though I am less distracted now by naked breasts than I was as a teenager, I am still not sure I understand what it is really about.
A brief aside here. I watched this with my girlfriend, and we both agreed that the naked breasts in FORBIDDEN ZONE are incredibly distracting. It is impossible not to be entranced when they are onscreen -- the main difference between now and 1995 is that I didn’t spend the scenes without the breasts impatiently waiting for them to come back. But whenever they were there, it became very difficult to focus on anything else. In fact, the girlfriend believes that the quality of the breasts in the movie exceeds the quality of anything else it has to offer.
Something I didn’t know until after I watched FORBIDDEN ZONE again recently is that the movie was created primarily to capture on film some of the stage show of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. This is the band that evolved into Oingo Boingo in the early 1980s, but FORBIDDEN ZONE was a record of an earlier incarnation when they were a quasi-theatrical troupe obsessed with old songs and vaudeville acts. In some ways, it is exactly what I had hoped SPACE IS THE PLACE (1974) might be -- a document of an offbeat musical group. But Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist cosmic jazz is explicitly sci-fi in some ways, whereas The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo recontextualized historical curiosities into even weirder packages.
But like SPACE IS THE PLACE, the non-musical portions of FORBIDDEN ZONE dominate the movie, and that’s too bad. Some of the performers in the movie are members of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, and their imagination shines brightest when they are choreographing weird accompaniments to weird old songs. My favorite is a scene of absurd factory work set to “Pico and Sepulveda”. (Look up that song if you can -- it totally rules.) The scene includes a catchy curiosity from the 1940s, an amusing dance number, elements of both the distinctive production design and animation that pepper the movie, and an imaginative (and funny) interpretation of the song. It’s delightfully weird, but (unlike much of the movie) it doesn’t feel like it’s designed to be off-putting or bizarre for its own sake.
There are a few more moments like this in the movie, and it’s occasionally a trippy good time as a result of it. For example, there’s an otherwise totally unnecessary alphabet song inspired by the Three Stooges that still manages to incorporate some pretty cool early breakdancing. But too often, it’s more like weirdness without a point or weirdness that’s designed to offend. (There are some extremely uncomfortable blackface moments in FORBIDDEN ZONE, as well as several other ethnic caricatures, for instance.) It is clear that this movie is the product of a few imaginative folks who had nobody to tell them “no” -- and that is always kind of appealing, at least in theory. If I knew more about the kinds of things The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo were into in the late 1970s (like big band music, Max Fleischer cartoons, and vaudeville comedians), I would probably understand more of what they were trying to do. As it is, I can only make guesses -- and unless I want to do a lot of research, there’s no way for me to really find out whether their references are witty and well-informed, or if they are simply unnecessarily bizarre and occasionally offensive.
FORBIDDEN ZONE is also the kind of movie that couldn't exist without pop culture. It references almost entirely pop culture from the 1950s and earlier, but its still nonetheless very much what you might call a postmodern pastiche. A little bit of cabaret singing, a little bit of the Three Stooges, a little bit of greaser movies, a little bit of minstrel shows, a little bit of German expressionistic set design, and so on -- all mixed together in a chaotic stew.
Beyond the weirdness of the thing, FORBIDDEN ZONE is pretty impenetrable -- and I’m not even totally sure there is much to penetrate in the end. There is a plot of sort, but it’s not a very interesting one. (See the description above.) There are no actual characters -- just caricatures and stereotypes. Originally, the intention of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo was to present lost entertainments that were no longer being performed live -- in other words, to bring vaudeville and the cabarets to people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to experience them in a live setting. (And then to add a unique Oingo Boingo flair of weirdness.) FORBIDDEN ZONE isn’t a live performance, so it’s a valid question exactly what is the point of the movie. Why watch a recording of Danny Elfman singing a modified version of “Minnie the Moocher” when you could listen to a recording of Cab Calloway himself? If the references and songs were better curated -- if they were identified or explained in some way -- there might be a case for FORBIDDEN ZONE as an educational movie. But as it is, it’s a catalog of weird things that you will enjoy only so much as your sensibility is aligned with those of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.
Ultimately, FORBIDDEN ZONE is 73 minutes of your life that you will never get back. So whether it’s worth your time or not probably depends on how much you value 73 minutes of your life. It seems unlikely that most people would enjoy the entire movie -- though I have no doubt that those folks are out there. For me, I’d say there are ten or fifteen minutes of the movie that are a good time. Much of the rest is mostly just waiting for a funny joke, a neat bit of animation, a cool dance, or a catchy song, but there are also times when I got uncomfortable or annoyed. The movie’s too weird and unpredictable to ever be boring, but it’s also definitely not trying to be your friend. Look -- if you want to watch it, go ahead and watch it. If you’re not sure, skip it.
Monday, March 1, 2010
1981: DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS
What’s it about?
A farmer raising highly venomous (and carnivorous and mobile) plants called triffids is stung by one and almost blinded. On the day his bandages are due to come off, he wakes up in the hospital to find that everyone else has gone blind due to radiation from lights seen in the sky the night before. The farmer -- whose sight was protected by the bandages -- sets out looking for others who can still see as well.
As he wanders through England, the farmer encounters many people trying to cope with the new epidemic of blindness. Some are trying to help the blind population survive, while others are taking advantage of the situation for personal gain, and still others are trying to stockpile supplies to ride out the inevitable violence, fires and disease that will soon follow. Meanwhile, the triffids -- which had been raised for a precious chemical they produce -- escape their farms and begin terrorizing the countryside.
Is it any good?
This version of DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS is a six-episode BBC miniseries. There was also an earlier version, a theatrical feature in 1962 that is widely derided as cheesy and ridiculous. (I haven’t seen that one myself, so I can’t comment directly.) Both versions are of course based on John Wyndham’s novel of the same name, which is one of those modern classics of sci-fi that everybody has heard of but probably nobody has read. (John Wyndham also, incidentally, wrote a novel called THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS, which has been adapted into film more than once under the title VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED.)
Having never read the novel myself, I’d always thought that DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS was about some kind of alien plant invasion. But in fact the triffids are implied to be either the discovery or the invention of Soviet scientists. The miniseries gives a bit of history of the triffids -- they appeared throughout the world, starting in South America, and quickly became both curiosity and nuisance. Wild growths were contained by fire teams, and soon only a few specimens with their stingers removed remained in gardens. But then it was discovered that triffids produced a chemical that increased the efficiency of fuel by 30% -- and extensive commercial farming commenced.
The weird lights that blind the human population of Earth aren’t part of an alien attack either -- they’re simply a natural phenomenon that nobody has seen before. It’s an interesting twist in an old type of story. The triffids aren’t actually launching a coordinated attack. Rather, they’re taking advantage of a weakness at the top of the food chain to break out of captivity and become the dominant species. With most humans blinded, they can easily hunt down food and evade destruction, and soon the rural areas of England are overrun with deadly triffids.
In the end, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS really focuses far more on the blindness than it does on the triffids. The triffids are there mostly to provide evolutionary pressure on humans -- to underline the fact that an epidemic of blindness wouldn’t just result in man-made chaos. In addition, it would be a chance for the rest of the natural world to get an upper hand on mankind again.
But the blindness is also an opportunity for all kinds of amateur survivalists to reform the world in whatever way they think is right for the new circumstances. For much of the miniseries, the protagonists are shuttled from group to group (sometimes forcibly), each with a different objective. They start with an organization of mostly sighted people that’s preparing to flee the cities for the countryside, leaving the blind folks to fend for themselves while they save what they can of civilization. Next, they are kidnapped by a group that handcuffs them to a set of blind people, forcing them to look after them. After escaping that, they find a country estate being run as a Christian commune, and then set up their own small family home for a while until they are found out by a neo-feudal paramilitary organization that wants to set them up as lords in vassal to a central authority.
This is not necessarily the most realistic part of the movie, since every group they fall in with is curiously well organized. There hardly seem to be any sighted people who are just hiding out and trying to get by -- everyone seems to have an agenda and a plan to resurrect the world from the ashes. But realism is not always the greatest virtue in science fiction, and there is ample opportunity for reminders that civilization isn’t always a force for good. It took thousands of years for the cultural and governmental organs of the world to evolve to the state they’re in today -- and hardly anybody would say we’ve got a perfect system even now. DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS shows some of the imperfect systems that could rise and fail in the wake of a catastrophic blow to law and order. And if it does show them in a neat, compressed timeline -- oh well.
I realize that I haven’t said very much about triffids. As I mentioned earlier, that’s because the movie is really more about blindness than about killer plants. But there are killer plants. They mostly succeed in not being ridiculous, but mostly only because there’s relatively little seen of them. I’ve said it before -- plants aren’t really scary. Moving plants with venomous stingers are perhaps a bit scarier, but they are still just vegetables.
Overall, the special effects are decent and the acting is adequate. It’s obvious that this is a television miniseries and not a feature film. On the other hand, the script is very good, and there are a lot of ideas banging around to think about. In those respects, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS has a lot in common with PBS’s THE LATHE OF HEAVEN (1979) or with another BBC sci-fi miniseries, THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (1981). It’s smart sci-fi made by smart people, doing the best they can with limited means.
A farmer raising highly venomous (and carnivorous and mobile) plants called triffids is stung by one and almost blinded. On the day his bandages are due to come off, he wakes up in the hospital to find that everyone else has gone blind due to radiation from lights seen in the sky the night before. The farmer -- whose sight was protected by the bandages -- sets out looking for others who can still see as well.
As he wanders through England, the farmer encounters many people trying to cope with the new epidemic of blindness. Some are trying to help the blind population survive, while others are taking advantage of the situation for personal gain, and still others are trying to stockpile supplies to ride out the inevitable violence, fires and disease that will soon follow. Meanwhile, the triffids -- which had been raised for a precious chemical they produce -- escape their farms and begin terrorizing the countryside.
Is it any good?
This version of DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS is a six-episode BBC miniseries. There was also an earlier version, a theatrical feature in 1962 that is widely derided as cheesy and ridiculous. (I haven’t seen that one myself, so I can’t comment directly.) Both versions are of course based on John Wyndham’s novel of the same name, which is one of those modern classics of sci-fi that everybody has heard of but probably nobody has read. (John Wyndham also, incidentally, wrote a novel called THE MIDWICH CUCKOOS, which has been adapted into film more than once under the title VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED.)
Having never read the novel myself, I’d always thought that DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS was about some kind of alien plant invasion. But in fact the triffids are implied to be either the discovery or the invention of Soviet scientists. The miniseries gives a bit of history of the triffids -- they appeared throughout the world, starting in South America, and quickly became both curiosity and nuisance. Wild growths were contained by fire teams, and soon only a few specimens with their stingers removed remained in gardens. But then it was discovered that triffids produced a chemical that increased the efficiency of fuel by 30% -- and extensive commercial farming commenced.
The weird lights that blind the human population of Earth aren’t part of an alien attack either -- they’re simply a natural phenomenon that nobody has seen before. It’s an interesting twist in an old type of story. The triffids aren’t actually launching a coordinated attack. Rather, they’re taking advantage of a weakness at the top of the food chain to break out of captivity and become the dominant species. With most humans blinded, they can easily hunt down food and evade destruction, and soon the rural areas of England are overrun with deadly triffids.
In the end, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS really focuses far more on the blindness than it does on the triffids. The triffids are there mostly to provide evolutionary pressure on humans -- to underline the fact that an epidemic of blindness wouldn’t just result in man-made chaos. In addition, it would be a chance for the rest of the natural world to get an upper hand on mankind again.
But the blindness is also an opportunity for all kinds of amateur survivalists to reform the world in whatever way they think is right for the new circumstances. For much of the miniseries, the protagonists are shuttled from group to group (sometimes forcibly), each with a different objective. They start with an organization of mostly sighted people that’s preparing to flee the cities for the countryside, leaving the blind folks to fend for themselves while they save what they can of civilization. Next, they are kidnapped by a group that handcuffs them to a set of blind people, forcing them to look after them. After escaping that, they find a country estate being run as a Christian commune, and then set up their own small family home for a while until they are found out by a neo-feudal paramilitary organization that wants to set them up as lords in vassal to a central authority.
This is not necessarily the most realistic part of the movie, since every group they fall in with is curiously well organized. There hardly seem to be any sighted people who are just hiding out and trying to get by -- everyone seems to have an agenda and a plan to resurrect the world from the ashes. But realism is not always the greatest virtue in science fiction, and there is ample opportunity for reminders that civilization isn’t always a force for good. It took thousands of years for the cultural and governmental organs of the world to evolve to the state they’re in today -- and hardly anybody would say we’ve got a perfect system even now. DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS shows some of the imperfect systems that could rise and fail in the wake of a catastrophic blow to law and order. And if it does show them in a neat, compressed timeline -- oh well.
I realize that I haven’t said very much about triffids. As I mentioned earlier, that’s because the movie is really more about blindness than about killer plants. But there are killer plants. They mostly succeed in not being ridiculous, but mostly only because there’s relatively little seen of them. I’ve said it before -- plants aren’t really scary. Moving plants with venomous stingers are perhaps a bit scarier, but they are still just vegetables.
Overall, the special effects are decent and the acting is adequate. It’s obvious that this is a television miniseries and not a feature film. On the other hand, the script is very good, and there are a lot of ideas banging around to think about. In those respects, DAY OF THE TRIFFIDS has a lot in common with PBS’s THE LATHE OF HEAVEN (1979) or with another BBC sci-fi miniseries, THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (1981). It’s smart sci-fi made by smart people, doing the best they can with limited means.
Thursday, February 25, 2010
1981: THE ROAD WARRIOR
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.
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.
Monday, February 15, 2010
1980: FLASH GORDON
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.
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.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1976: IN THE DUST OF THE STARS
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.
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.
Monday, October 5, 2009
1975: ROLLERBALL
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.)
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.)
Monday, September 14, 2009
1974: ZARDOZ
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.
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.
Monday, August 31, 2009
1973: FANTASTIC PLANET
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.
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.
Monday, August 3, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1972: CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES
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.
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.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1971: PUNISHMENT PARK
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.
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.
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