What’s it about?
Archaeologist Christopher Lee returns from an expedition to Manchuria via the Transsiberian Express, carrying back the frozen body of a prehistoric ape-man. Almost immediately, the crate containing the body raises an extraordinary amount of interest in just about everybody who comes across it: a thief, a mad monk, a rival scientist played by Peter Cushing, government officials, an inventor, a porter on the train, and probably many more I’m forgetting. When several of these people turn up dead with their eyes turned completely white, Lee and the authorities draw the logical conclusion that the two million year old corpse is supernaturally murdering people.
As Lee and Cushing try to track down the missing murderous fossilized ape-man, it slowly becomes apparent that the culprit is really something quite different. But by this time the authorities have called in blood-and-guts czarist army officer Telly Savalas to chew gum and break heads (and gum hasn’t been invented yet). Dimly lit fight scenes, glowing red eyes, and a big explosion soon follow.
Is it any good?
I’m not actually going to talk about this movie much at all. It’s a low budget sci-fi horror flick that has a couple of neat ideas but is full of a lot of stupidity as well. Peter Cushing has a lighter role, which is kind of interesting, but the charms of Christopher Lee continue to elude me, and I have absolutely no idea what Telly Savalas thought he was doing. The plot is cluttered with way too many characters, the special effects are only decent, and the music is pretty good. In short, it’s just like any other middling 1970's sci-fi movie. If Tom wants to mount a passionate defense of its merits, I’ll let him take care of that part since I don’t think it’s really anything special.
But what I do want to write about are public domain movies. I’ve seen more than my share of these and I’ve already even written about a couple -- namely THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (1960) and NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). HORROR EXPRESS is another public domain movie, which means that practically anybody can make and sell unauthorized copies of it. (Exactly what “public domain” means in this context can be pretty complicated, since movies have all kinds of rights that can be bought and sold. It’s possible, for instance, for broadcast television rights to lapse while home video rights remain in effect. And movies that are derivative works of books or plays are protected in special ways that don’t apply to original works. I don’t pretend to understand all or even most of this, but suffice to say that sometimes movies fall into a definition of “public domain” that allows them to be sold on tape or DVD without clearing copyright.)
There seem to be several different reasons why movies end up in the public domain. Sometimes it’s a clerical error or oversight in transferring ownership. Sometimes a legal issue prevents the copyright from being renewed. In the case of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, it happened because the movie was erroneously distributed without a copyright notice in its first theatrical run. (I don’t think that would be a problem anymore since the reforms of the Berne Convention.) And in the case of THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, the film makers didn’t believe the movie would be worth anything after its initial run so they never bothered to file for a copyright in the first place.
Most movies in the public domain are quick-and-cheap jobs, so I suspect that the last reason is (or at least was) a pretty common one. But in addition to a handful that have gained cult fame over the years -- like the two mentioned above, the horror curiosity CARNIVAL OF SOULS, and Ed Wood’s so-bad-they’re-good flicks -- there are others that must have always had commercial value and I am sure weren’t intentionally abandoned. There’s the Bing Crosby/Bob Hope vehicle THE ROAD TO BALI, Fritz Lang’s noir SCARLET STREET, Orson Welles’s THE TRIAL, cartoon classics like GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, John Wayne’s MCCLINTOCK!, Spencer Tracy’s FATHER’S LITTLE DIVIDEND, and (perhaps the most famous of all) the screwball classic HIS GIRL FRIDAY.
A lot of folks would probably agree that the term of copyright protection is unnecessarily lengthy. After all, there are warehouses full of books, movies, and sound recordings from the 1930s and 1940s that have been out of print for decades but that it’s still technically a crime to copy. The demand for these materials isn’t high enough for the copyright owners to justify releasing them and nobody else is allowed to publish them, so lots of potentially fascinating things go on languishing in vaults. Huge chunks of genres -- like, say, early musicals or westerns or slapstick comedies -- are inaccessible because they don’t have famous names that generate interest today.
It’s easy to imagine a world where copyright protection lasts only for 25 or 50 years, so that all this material could be distributed by others who don’t need to justify high profit margins. There already exist bargain bin distributors who package public domain movies into cheap DVD packs -- sometimes selling as many as 50 movies for the price of a single “official” release. (I’ve bought four such discount packs myself, racking up 200 movies at an average cost of fifty cents each.) And with online delivery improving all the time, movies will only become cheaper to distribute.
On the other hand, these existing public domain movies are a pretty good warning of why losing copyright protection might not be such a good thing. There have been dozens of home releases of famous public domain movies. I’ve seen two different versions each of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, THE LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS and HORROR EXPRESS, and all of them were awful in terms of quality. Since anybody can sell cheap transfers from salvaged film stock or old videotapes, unscrupulous distributors tend to flood the market with inferior product. There are presumably good versions of these movies out there somewhere, but a quick search on Amazon revealed a lot of confusing options for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and a lot of disappointment and contradictions in the comments. (There was even one “special edition” two-disc release that apparently consisted of nothing more than the movie needlessly cut in half on two different discs.) Rent-by-mail services like Netflix don’t usually discriminate between different releases of a movie either, so it can even sometimes be impossible to get a good version even if you know what to look for.
It’s no big deal when HORROR EXPRESS looks and sounds terrible -- though I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more if any care at all had been taken with the presentation. A bad version of something like CARNIVAL OF SOULS is more annoying, but there’s a certain feeling of resignation that comes with watching cult classics, as though digging around in the trash to find them is part of the experience. But imagine now a world where the average consumer is likely to be duped into buying an edited, washed-out, badly synched DVD of CASABLANCA or CITIZEN KANE that was lifted off a television broadcast or a worn-out VHS cassette. Or a world where a glut of bargain bin offerings of RIO BRAVO or THE FLY or A SHOT IN THE DARK convinces a studio executive that it’s not worthwhile to spend money on restoration and an official release. Why invest all those resources if the final product is just going to be undercut by a lot of inferior versions anyway?
I don’t really think I know enough to say exactly how I think things should work. There are clearly pitfalls in either direction. I do think, however, that copyright should be handled differently for movies and sound recordings than it is for books. If you buy a cheap version of a classic novel, that just means the pages will turn yellow and the binding will fall apart in a few years. But the experience of reading the story itself and whatever your imagination conjures up won’t really be changed by that (unless you are a very easily distracted reader). Typos in the text or mistakes in layout are a bigger problem, but it’s still comparatively easy and cheap to get the text of a book in a presentable state.
Recordings, on the other hand, fall prey to all kinds of problems that take real time and money to fix. If you rip a page in the book you’re copying from, that doesn’t mean that the copy will have a tear in it as well. But if you rip or wrinkle a piece of film or tape, then any copies you make thereafter are going to be compromised. In other words, there seems to be a compelling public interest to provide financial incentives for folks who take good care of movies. In a world of short term copyrights, I’m sure that some organization would be formed to do just that -- there are enough cinephiles to support a quality distributor even if cheap alternatives are also available. But it’s hard for me to decide if this would allow for improvements over what we have right now, or if things would be far, far worse.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
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 23, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1972: THE THING WITH TWO HEADS
What’s it about?
Brilliant but racist surgeon Ray Milland is dying of chest cancer and the way to survive is a complete body transplant. After completing a successful experiment with a gorilla, Milland entrusts a team of his colleagues with finding a suitable donor body and carrying out the procedure to save his life. Finding a donor proves very difficult, however, as the ideal donor must be dying (since they will not survive the procedure) but must also have a healthy body and be able to live long enough for Milland’s transplanted head to establish control of the body.
As time runs out and Milland slips into a coma, the doctors go to their last-ditch source: death row inmates. Convicted murderer Rosey Grier volunteers just before they flip the switch on the electric chair, hoping that the extra thirty days of life will be long enough for his girlfriend to collect evidence that will exonerate him. But when Milland discovers that his head has been transplanted to a black man’s body, wacky hijinks ensue.
Is it any good?
This is a movie where Ray Milland’s elderly head is transplanted onto the body of a professional football player. This is also a movie where the resulting two-headed monstrosity flees on a dirt bike and leads a dozen police cars on a bash ’em, crash ’em chase across a hilly field for twenty minutes. So no, it’s not really “good” in the traditional sense of the word. But it’s not exactly bad either. I don’t have a whole lot to say about THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, but it’s crazy enough to be worth maybe a few paragraphs at least.
I hadn’t really thought about it until now, but I think I’m a little bit surprised that I haven’t seen more sci-fi movies yet that are about race. The only obvious one that doesn’t dance around the issue at all is THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1959). A lot of folks read a criticism of race relations into NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), but it’s not clear how much of that was intended. Otherwise, there are a lot of movies that arguably allegories for the racial situation in the U.S. -- probably the closest being CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (1972).
THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, on the other hand, is unambiguously about race. Yet despite the fact that it introduces a racist character precisely so that it can bind him physically to a black man, I’m not real sure that it has anything to say about the situation except, “Boy wouldn’t that something!” In some ways, I guess that’s enough. What do you really expect a movie like this to say anyway? In THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL, it was clear that Harry Belafonte connected passionately with the story and themes, and that he really wanted to get people to sympathize with a mixed-race couple despite their prejudices.
But THE THING WITH TWO HEADS is more like an authority-tweaking wish fulfillment movie -- more along the lines of WILD IN THE STREETS (1968). Rosey Grier starts out as a victim of the system. Not only is he wrongfully scheduled for execution (or so he claims), but when he volunteers for an experimental transplant operation he finds out that he’s being used to prolong the life of an old white racist. So it’s kind of exciting to see him break out of the clinic and go on the lam -- ultimately convincing a young black doctor to join him in thumbing his nose at the man.
A lot of movies from the 1970s seem to be about thumbing noses at the man, and it’s something I can never exactly relate to. There’s a certain sensibility that runs through whole genres that takes it for granted that disobeying laws, evading the police and destroying government property is unquestionably heroic. The middle of THE THING WITH TWO HEADS falls squarely into this sensibility as Rosey Grier leads the cops on an excessively destructive chase that would have made Burt Reynolds or Kris Kristofferson (or at least Tom Wopat and John Schneider) proud. I didn’t count how many cop cars we actually see destroyed on camera, but a news report in the movie says fourteen and that sounds about right. (Some of them are clearly the same wrecks from different angles though.)
There’s not a whole lot else to talk about -- this movie doesn’t take itself seriously and doesn’t expect anybody else to either. It is far superior to another similar movie I watched called THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT (1971). I had high hopes for that one, since it starred Bruce Dern and Casey Kasem, but it’s nonsensical, inept and offensive. THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, despite being incredibly silly, is none of those things. It’s not really something I’d recommend, but I will think of it fondly for the next week or so until it fades entirely from my memory.
And now here are a bunch of screenshots of police cars crashing, since that is primarily what the movie is about:
Brilliant but racist surgeon Ray Milland is dying of chest cancer and the way to survive is a complete body transplant. After completing a successful experiment with a gorilla, Milland entrusts a team of his colleagues with finding a suitable donor body and carrying out the procedure to save his life. Finding a donor proves very difficult, however, as the ideal donor must be dying (since they will not survive the procedure) but must also have a healthy body and be able to live long enough for Milland’s transplanted head to establish control of the body.
As time runs out and Milland slips into a coma, the doctors go to their last-ditch source: death row inmates. Convicted murderer Rosey Grier volunteers just before they flip the switch on the electric chair, hoping that the extra thirty days of life will be long enough for his girlfriend to collect evidence that will exonerate him. But when Milland discovers that his head has been transplanted to a black man’s body, wacky hijinks ensue.
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Is it any good?
This is a movie where Ray Milland’s elderly head is transplanted onto the body of a professional football player. This is also a movie where the resulting two-headed monstrosity flees on a dirt bike and leads a dozen police cars on a bash ’em, crash ’em chase across a hilly field for twenty minutes. So no, it’s not really “good” in the traditional sense of the word. But it’s not exactly bad either. I don’t have a whole lot to say about THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, but it’s crazy enough to be worth maybe a few paragraphs at least.
I hadn’t really thought about it until now, but I think I’m a little bit surprised that I haven’t seen more sci-fi movies yet that are about race. The only obvious one that doesn’t dance around the issue at all is THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL (1959). A lot of folks read a criticism of race relations into NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), but it’s not clear how much of that was intended. Otherwise, there are a lot of movies that arguably allegories for the racial situation in the U.S. -- probably the closest being CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (1972).
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THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, on the other hand, is unambiguously about race. Yet despite the fact that it introduces a racist character precisely so that it can bind him physically to a black man, I’m not real sure that it has anything to say about the situation except, “Boy wouldn’t that something!” In some ways, I guess that’s enough. What do you really expect a movie like this to say anyway? In THE WORLD, THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL, it was clear that Harry Belafonte connected passionately with the story and themes, and that he really wanted to get people to sympathize with a mixed-race couple despite their prejudices.
But THE THING WITH TWO HEADS is more like an authority-tweaking wish fulfillment movie -- more along the lines of WILD IN THE STREETS (1968). Rosey Grier starts out as a victim of the system. Not only is he wrongfully scheduled for execution (or so he claims), but when he volunteers for an experimental transplant operation he finds out that he’s being used to prolong the life of an old white racist. So it’s kind of exciting to see him break out of the clinic and go on the lam -- ultimately convincing a young black doctor to join him in thumbing his nose at the man.
 |  |
A lot of movies from the 1970s seem to be about thumbing noses at the man, and it’s something I can never exactly relate to. There’s a certain sensibility that runs through whole genres that takes it for granted that disobeying laws, evading the police and destroying government property is unquestionably heroic. The middle of THE THING WITH TWO HEADS falls squarely into this sensibility as Rosey Grier leads the cops on an excessively destructive chase that would have made Burt Reynolds or Kris Kristofferson (or at least Tom Wopat and John Schneider) proud. I didn’t count how many cop cars we actually see destroyed on camera, but a news report in the movie says fourteen and that sounds about right. (Some of them are clearly the same wrecks from different angles though.)
There’s not a whole lot else to talk about -- this movie doesn’t take itself seriously and doesn’t expect anybody else to either. It is far superior to another similar movie I watched called THE INCREDIBLE TWO-HEADED TRANSPLANT (1971). I had high hopes for that one, since it starred Bruce Dern and Casey Kasem, but it’s nonsensical, inept and offensive. THE THING WITH TWO HEADS, despite being incredibly silly, is none of those things. It’s not really something I’d recommend, but I will think of it fondly for the next week or so until it fades entirely from my memory.
And now here are a bunch of screenshots of police cars crashing, since that is primarily what the movie is about:
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Monday, July 20, 2009
1972: EOLOMEA
What’s it about?
After a spate of mysterious rocket disappearances, a scientist petitions for the cessation of all space travel until the problem is solved. Reluctantly, the council in charge of such things agrees, and those serving on distant space outposts are consequently temporarily stranded. Two such men in particular find themselves chafing under the travel ban -- one because he is yearning to head back to Earth and the other because his son is among those who are reported missing.
After sulking for a bit, the two decide to violate the travel ban and visit their nearest neighbor at the next outpost. They can’t get too close since he has contracted a deadly space disease (possibly from strange shadow-like creatures indigenous to the asteroid he’s stationed on), but he gives them a capsule that he says someone will be along to claim later. Meanwhile, the scientist on Earth quizzes one of her colleagues who appears to know more about the disappearances than he’s letting on. But the mystery isn’t solved until the scientist travels into space herself, and the various pieces of the puzzle all start to come together.
Is it any good?
EOLOMEA was produced by the same East German studio that put out THE SILENT STAR (1960), but besides that connection I didn’t know anything about it before I watched it. I was watching it online (which is why there are no screenshots), and I figured I’d get through the boring beginning bits and come back to the rest of it later. But it seems that the East Germans learned a lot about movie pacing since 1960. There are no boring beginning bits with this movie -- things started off interesting with the disappearance of several rockets and never let up for the next eighty minutes.
One of the neatest things about EOLOMEA is the complex system of space exploration that it seems to take for granted. I don’t know how far in the future the movie is supposed to be set, but there are apparently several space flights each day -- many of them between space stations on other planets or asteroids. In fact, at least one of the characters in the movie has never even been on Earth, so this bustling space traffic has been in place for at least a generation.
Most of the view the audience has into this brave new world is on the dull and poorly trafficked fringes, however. The two men stationed out there are pilot and navigator for what is essentially the rocket version of a delivery truck. Unlike in THE SILENT STAR, the characters here actually have interesting back stories and real emotions. The pilot, for instance, was one of the first people to help colonize space. But at some point he was involved in a deadly accident and everyone on his rocket died except himself and some children. His wife died in the accident, but his son survived. That was decades ago, though, and he hasn’t seen his son since then. When the travel ban is put in place, the pilot is waiting for his son to visit.
The main characters all mostly have stories as well realized as that one -- and they are all interconnected in ways that feel organic. It’s easy to imagine that people involved in the space program would have varying relationships with each other, depending on what jobs they had. So when we learn that one character knows another, it doesn’t seem out of place. And that definitely helps the story, since all the various strands eventually come together. The movie is primarily a mystery (but with very strong sci-fi overtones, of course) and it’s always clear that the disappearance of the rockets is not exactly what it seems.
But even before the different strands get tied together, there’s plenty to be interested in. The sick fellow at the other outpost, for instance, doesn’t seem important in his own right at first. I figured he would end up just being an excuse to get the other two off their asteroid and into an unapproved flight, but even so I wanted to know more about him. Because of his sickness, he only communicates with the others through his spacesuit. And his theories and descriptions of the aliens he believes he contracted the sickness from are the kind of charming diversions that add color to sci-fi stories. The film makers could easily have given him a mundane sickness, but instead they deliver a tantalizing half-explanation of an alien disease.
There’s another similar scene with a robot later in the movie. The robot has information that the characters believe they need to save lives, but the robot has been ordered not to tell. This creates tension in its programming since the robot is also not supposed to cause harm to humans. People have been mining this exact same sci-fi situation since Isaac Asimov first laid out his three laws of robotics, so there’s no points for originality. In fact, the robot’s dilemma here is far less interesting than HAL-9000's in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). But it’s presented pretty convincingly (in every detail except the appearance of the robot) and is refreshingly more of a momentary inconvenience than a major plot point.
THE SILENT STAR had a lot of this little business in the margins too, and I liked a lot of the ideas floating around in that movie. But EOLOMEA has far more interesting characters, a tighter story, and some improvements in the special effects. All in all, this is a neat little sci-fi mystery with a pretty satisfying ending. There’s also a surprising lack of any kind of obvious political agenda. No specific countries are mentioned at all (though some characters do have ethnic names) and neither are any real historical events except Yuri Gagarin’s space flights. Not only are there no diatribes against warmongering capitalists (another weakness of THE SILENT STAR), but the characters aren’t even all necessarily happy and productive members of society. The two guys in the outpost are bored with their jobs, disobey orders, and get drunk while ostensibly on duty. Meanwhile, the ending of the movie suggests that sometimes the best way to serve mankind is to take initiative and act outside the established chain of command. If I hadn’t known ahead of time that this was produced by a Soviet bloc country, I never would have guessed it.
What else happened this year?
-- Bruce Dern saves the last surviving forest from short-sighted politicians and public apathy in SILENT RUNNING. The movie also features three awesome robots, a folk soundtrack by Joan Baez, and some of Dern’s best crazy-man acting.
-- Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky adapts Stanislaw Lem’s classic novel SOLYARIS, but focuses more on the human relationships than the sci-fi bits. I like this version better than Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 adaptation, but neither movie is anywhere near as good as the book.
-- In other literary adaptations, there’s also a version of SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE starring absolutely nobody you have heard of (the most famous name is Valerie Perrine) but which is still pretty good nonetheless. I never read the book though, so I don’t know how it compares to the Vonnegut/imagination version.
-- Christopher Walken almost single-handedly turns THE MIND SNATCHERS into a pretty interesting character study of a sociopath fighting to save his identity from a new form of electroshock therapy.
-- Meanwhile, Oliver Reed and Geraldine Chaplin try to have a baby in a world where getting pregnant is a capital crime in ZPG: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH.
-- Roddy MacDowell leads a monkey uprising in CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, moving the series a big step closer to a world where talking apes rule over humans.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1972...
I’m a big fan of SILENT RUNNING so I think I have to tell you to watch that one.
After a spate of mysterious rocket disappearances, a scientist petitions for the cessation of all space travel until the problem is solved. Reluctantly, the council in charge of such things agrees, and those serving on distant space outposts are consequently temporarily stranded. Two such men in particular find themselves chafing under the travel ban -- one because he is yearning to head back to Earth and the other because his son is among those who are reported missing.
After sulking for a bit, the two decide to violate the travel ban and visit their nearest neighbor at the next outpost. They can’t get too close since he has contracted a deadly space disease (possibly from strange shadow-like creatures indigenous to the asteroid he’s stationed on), but he gives them a capsule that he says someone will be along to claim later. Meanwhile, the scientist on Earth quizzes one of her colleagues who appears to know more about the disappearances than he’s letting on. But the mystery isn’t solved until the scientist travels into space herself, and the various pieces of the puzzle all start to come together.
Is it any good?
EOLOMEA was produced by the same East German studio that put out THE SILENT STAR (1960), but besides that connection I didn’t know anything about it before I watched it. I was watching it online (which is why there are no screenshots), and I figured I’d get through the boring beginning bits and come back to the rest of it later. But it seems that the East Germans learned a lot about movie pacing since 1960. There are no boring beginning bits with this movie -- things started off interesting with the disappearance of several rockets and never let up for the next eighty minutes.
One of the neatest things about EOLOMEA is the complex system of space exploration that it seems to take for granted. I don’t know how far in the future the movie is supposed to be set, but there are apparently several space flights each day -- many of them between space stations on other planets or asteroids. In fact, at least one of the characters in the movie has never even been on Earth, so this bustling space traffic has been in place for at least a generation.
Most of the view the audience has into this brave new world is on the dull and poorly trafficked fringes, however. The two men stationed out there are pilot and navigator for what is essentially the rocket version of a delivery truck. Unlike in THE SILENT STAR, the characters here actually have interesting back stories and real emotions. The pilot, for instance, was one of the first people to help colonize space. But at some point he was involved in a deadly accident and everyone on his rocket died except himself and some children. His wife died in the accident, but his son survived. That was decades ago, though, and he hasn’t seen his son since then. When the travel ban is put in place, the pilot is waiting for his son to visit.
The main characters all mostly have stories as well realized as that one -- and they are all interconnected in ways that feel organic. It’s easy to imagine that people involved in the space program would have varying relationships with each other, depending on what jobs they had. So when we learn that one character knows another, it doesn’t seem out of place. And that definitely helps the story, since all the various strands eventually come together. The movie is primarily a mystery (but with very strong sci-fi overtones, of course) and it’s always clear that the disappearance of the rockets is not exactly what it seems.
But even before the different strands get tied together, there’s plenty to be interested in. The sick fellow at the other outpost, for instance, doesn’t seem important in his own right at first. I figured he would end up just being an excuse to get the other two off their asteroid and into an unapproved flight, but even so I wanted to know more about him. Because of his sickness, he only communicates with the others through his spacesuit. And his theories and descriptions of the aliens he believes he contracted the sickness from are the kind of charming diversions that add color to sci-fi stories. The film makers could easily have given him a mundane sickness, but instead they deliver a tantalizing half-explanation of an alien disease.
There’s another similar scene with a robot later in the movie. The robot has information that the characters believe they need to save lives, but the robot has been ordered not to tell. This creates tension in its programming since the robot is also not supposed to cause harm to humans. People have been mining this exact same sci-fi situation since Isaac Asimov first laid out his three laws of robotics, so there’s no points for originality. In fact, the robot’s dilemma here is far less interesting than HAL-9000's in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). But it’s presented pretty convincingly (in every detail except the appearance of the robot) and is refreshingly more of a momentary inconvenience than a major plot point.
THE SILENT STAR had a lot of this little business in the margins too, and I liked a lot of the ideas floating around in that movie. But EOLOMEA has far more interesting characters, a tighter story, and some improvements in the special effects. All in all, this is a neat little sci-fi mystery with a pretty satisfying ending. There’s also a surprising lack of any kind of obvious political agenda. No specific countries are mentioned at all (though some characters do have ethnic names) and neither are any real historical events except Yuri Gagarin’s space flights. Not only are there no diatribes against warmongering capitalists (another weakness of THE SILENT STAR), but the characters aren’t even all necessarily happy and productive members of society. The two guys in the outpost are bored with their jobs, disobey orders, and get drunk while ostensibly on duty. Meanwhile, the ending of the movie suggests that sometimes the best way to serve mankind is to take initiative and act outside the established chain of command. If I hadn’t known ahead of time that this was produced by a Soviet bloc country, I never would have guessed it.
What else happened this year?
-- Bruce Dern saves the last surviving forest from short-sighted politicians and public apathy in SILENT RUNNING. The movie also features three awesome robots, a folk soundtrack by Joan Baez, and some of Dern’s best crazy-man acting.
-- Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky adapts Stanislaw Lem’s classic novel SOLYARIS, but focuses more on the human relationships than the sci-fi bits. I like this version better than Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 adaptation, but neither movie is anywhere near as good as the book.
-- In other literary adaptations, there’s also a version of SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE starring absolutely nobody you have heard of (the most famous name is Valerie Perrine) but which is still pretty good nonetheless. I never read the book though, so I don’t know how it compares to the Vonnegut/imagination version.
-- Christopher Walken almost single-handedly turns THE MIND SNATCHERS into a pretty interesting character study of a sociopath fighting to save his identity from a new form of electroshock therapy.
-- Meanwhile, Oliver Reed and Geraldine Chaplin try to have a baby in a world where getting pregnant is a capital crime in ZPG: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH.
-- Roddy MacDowell leads a monkey uprising in CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, moving the series a big step closer to a world where talking apes rule over humans.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1972...
I’m a big fan of SILENT RUNNING so I think I have to tell you to watch that one.
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.
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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.
Monday, July 6, 2009
1971: THX 1138
What’s it about?
Robert Duvall plays THX 1138, a citizen of a sterile indoor city of the future. He has a dangerous job in the factory that produces the robotic policemen who patrol the city, a “mate” whom he is forbidden from having sex with, a holographic television, and a cocktail of drugs to keep him sedated and contented. But he has recently found himself losing his focus and experiencing strange emotions -- and ultimately it’s revealed that his mate has been making substitutions in his drug regimen to flush the sedatives from his system.
The un-sedated Duvall wastes no time in discovering sex, but he is observed by the all-seeing authorities who begin to monitor him closely. Meanwhile, a twitchy surveillance technician (played by Donald Pleasance) starts illegally modifying system software to get himself assigned as Duvall's roommate. The robotic police soon arrest them both and take them to a featureless white prison with no walls. Duvall and Pleasance soon escape with the help of a holographic television star. Once back in the city, more chases ensue until Duvall manages to make it to the world outside.
Is it any good?
THX 1138 is famously George Lucas’s first feature, adapted from a short student film he produced in 1967. The version I watched is a re-edited one with some new scenes and special effects that Lucas added for the DVD release in 2004. (As far as I know, no other version is available on DVD.) Besides being Lucas’s first feature film, THX 1138 is also one of only six that he has directed -- the others being AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973), STAR WARS (1977), and the three recent STAR WARS prequels. That being the case, it’s surprising to me how little attention this movie seems to get -- there are millions of fans of STAR WARS who apparently have no interest at all in THX 1138.
I can’t say that I had a whole lot of interest myself until I started watching it. Despite knowing that it existed for many years, I never bothered to seek it out. That’s partly because (like most people) I have mixed feelings about STAR WARS and its sequels. But it’s more likely because I had just never heard very much about THX 1138 before -- nobody seemed to be talking about it, so I didn’t feel any urgency to go out and see it.
I’m not even going to try and compare THX 1138 to any of George Lucas’s other movies. I’ve never seen AMERICAN GRAFFITI, and STAR WARS and its sequels have such cultural ubiquity that it’s almost absurd to even think of them simply as movies. I will say that it was kind of amazing to see a George Lucas movie for which I had absolutely no expectations. I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know who Darth Vader was or what storm troopers looked like, but I knew practically nothing about THX 1138 before I sat down to watch it.
Well, that’s not exactly true. The story and setting are pretty familiar, after all. The oppressive society in THX 1138 is a variation on the one found in George Orwell’s NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or Aldous Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD. It’s not exactly the same as either, but there are dystopian elements that are very familiar -- the constant surveillance, the compulsory consumerism, the faceless enforcement figures, the manipulation of sexuality, the elimination of emotion and love, the state-mandated pharmaceuticals, and so on. Some of these elements crop up in earlier movies as well. Besides the 1956 version of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, similar extreme visions of oppressive societies show up in ALPHAVILLE (1965) and FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966). And the paranoid obsession with constant surveillance and control is a big part of movies like THE 1,000 EYES OF DR MABUSE (1960), THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1961), SECONDS (1966), and COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970).
This is not to say that THX 1138 is derivative or unoriginal. I think it’s more a case of the movie being “of its time”. Orwell and Huxley wrote their novels in response to the totalitarian surveillance societies that coalesced during the rise of Fascism and Communism in Europe. But those regimes hunted down dissidents the old-fashioned way -- by accusations gathered through infiltration, entrapment, coercion, or fabrication. These kinds of things show up in the dystopian sci-fi flicks of the 1960s as well -- for instance, Robert Duvall informs on Donald Pleasance’s deviancy in THX 1138, which leads directly to his arrest. But these movies also resonate differently since ubiquitous video cameras and tape recorders were (and are) no longer the science-fiction trappings that they were for Orwell and Huxley. These themes became even more urgent after the abuses of the Nixon administration were exposed in the Watergate scandal, and they’ve never really gone away since then.
As far as the story goes, it’s a variation on the standard dystopian theme. There are a few neat twists though -- I really liked how Duvall’s mate needed to alter his drug mix before she could turn him into a co-conspirator. And since the story is told entirely from Duvall’s point of view, he starts to feel disoriented and confused long before he (or the audience) knows what’s happening to him or why. Another nice bit is that Duvall actually needs his drugs to safely do his job -- without the sedatives, he runs the risk of dropping radioactive and explosive materials during some delicate assembly operations. It’s not clear whether his need is physical or psychological, but either way it adds a much more serious element of danger to his decision to stay off the pills.
Donald Pleasance’s character is also a bit of an enigma. Like Duvall’s mate, his job is to watch a bank of monitors and coordinate security responses to deviant behavior. Apparently he takes a shine to Duvall while observing him during his hours on the job, but it’s not exactly clear what form his interest takes. The “mate” relationship in the world of THX 1138 is completely asexual, so it could simply be that the fussy Pleasance wants a roommate who will annoy him less than his current one. But watching the monitors means that Pleasance isn’t ignorant of sex -- and probably isn’t even ignorant of Duvall’s own sexual activity. So it seems at least reasonable that there might be some element of desire to his motives. Pleasance also seems more in touch with his emotions, though it’s not clear whether he’s off his drugs or not.
The futuristic world is very white, very sterile, and very inhuman. The vision of the future has a lot in common with the one in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) -- but with one important exception. I said that I got the feeling from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY that the movie took place the night before opening day in space -- that is, that the pristine spaceships and whatnot were being prepared for an onslaught of people who hadn’t arrived yet. In THX 1138, everything is still clean and pristine, but there’s also a sense that a lot of things are broken just below the surface. There are a lot of little throwaway scenes that show various bits of technology failing -- an elevator refusing to work, a robotic policeman running into a shut door over and over, and so on. The future isn’t dirty yet in this movie (we have to wait for STAR WARS for that), but it certainly has a lot of bugs. This isn’t the night before opening day -- it’s just another day in the peak season where the Hall of Presidents is closed for repairs.
The world is very minimalist as well. The starkest example of this is the prison where Duvall and Pleasance are incarcerated in the middle of the movie. It’s literally nothing more than a white space with a couple of couches. There are no walls -- instead, the whiteness stretches infinitely in all directions, making it impossible to see the way out and very easy to get lost. But Duvall’s apartment and the shows on the holographic television are minimalist as well. For a society that supposedly values mindless consumerism, there are really very few things to buy or desire. Instead, people simply take home useless geometric shapes (“dendrites”, according to the film commentary) which they then destroy and buy again the next day. But the consumerist angle is the least convincing and least interesting part of the movie -- whatever point they were trying to make gets wiped out by the production design and the lack of real attention to it in the script.
The robotic policemen, however, are one of the coolest and most interesting parts of the movie. The combination of police uniforms with expressionless silver faces is very creepy and compelling. There are some other scattered images here and there that are not so well integrated into the story -- a lot of the beginning of the movie is devoted to very brief unconnected vignettes (some involving the main characters, others not) of life in the city. They each last maybe five seconds or so, but they give a real sense of what the world is like. It also gives the movie a higher density of information so that it’s not always obvious exactly what’s happening or if it relates to the story. After skimming through the movie a second time to get some screenshots, I’m pretty confident that it all makes sense and that there is a clear story to it. But the little bits of unconnected business make it more interesting to rewatch since there’s a good chance that some little bit slipped by unnoticed the first time.
I do think the movie starts to go downhill a bit after Duvall and Pleasance are sent to prison. It becomes a much more self-consciously artsy movie in the middle section, before abruptly switching to a long (but pretty ho-hum) chase sequence at the end by foot and car. But the movie is always interesting to look at, and small parts of the future world are pretty thoroughly realized. (Vast sections remain unexplored, obviously.) The plot and characters are extremely simple, and nobody does very much acting in the movie, but most of that fits pretty well with the dystopian, emotionless setting. As I said before, I am not even going to attempt to compare this to STAR WARS, but I can say that right now I would far rather watch THX 1138 again than any of the six movies that George Lucas is most famous for.
What else happened this year?
-- Peter Watkins delivers yet another sci-fi documentary with PUNISHMENT PARK, this one about a government detention center where political dissidents (i.e., hippies and draft dodgers) are hunted down in a law enforcement training program.
-- Michael Crichton's break-out novel THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN was adapted into a very effective "how done it" about a lethal alien disease.
-- Take Roddy MacDowell and Kim Hunter as Cornelius and Zira from THE PLANET OF THE APES; add in Ricardo Montalban, Sal Mineo, Eric Braeden, a funky score, and a time travel plot that brings talking chimps back in time to the 1970s; mix well and serve as ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES.
-- Charlton Heston, meanwhile, imports his cynical, world-weary persona practically wholesale into THE OMEGA MAN -- the second adaptation of Richard Matheson's novella I AM LEGEND.
-- Stanley Kubrick directed A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, about which I assume everybody has already formed their own opinion. (I don't like it much.)
If you only watch one movie from 1971...
THX 1138 is the one that I would recommend, but PUNISHMENT PARK is pretty interesting and unusual as well. THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN and THE OMEGA MAN are both more typical (but still solid) choices too.
Robert Duvall plays THX 1138, a citizen of a sterile indoor city of the future. He has a dangerous job in the factory that produces the robotic policemen who patrol the city, a “mate” whom he is forbidden from having sex with, a holographic television, and a cocktail of drugs to keep him sedated and contented. But he has recently found himself losing his focus and experiencing strange emotions -- and ultimately it’s revealed that his mate has been making substitutions in his drug regimen to flush the sedatives from his system.
The un-sedated Duvall wastes no time in discovering sex, but he is observed by the all-seeing authorities who begin to monitor him closely. Meanwhile, a twitchy surveillance technician (played by Donald Pleasance) starts illegally modifying system software to get himself assigned as Duvall's roommate. The robotic police soon arrest them both and take them to a featureless white prison with no walls. Duvall and Pleasance soon escape with the help of a holographic television star. Once back in the city, more chases ensue until Duvall manages to make it to the world outside.
Is it any good?
THX 1138 is famously George Lucas’s first feature, adapted from a short student film he produced in 1967. The version I watched is a re-edited one with some new scenes and special effects that Lucas added for the DVD release in 2004. (As far as I know, no other version is available on DVD.) Besides being Lucas’s first feature film, THX 1138 is also one of only six that he has directed -- the others being AMERICAN GRAFFITI (1973), STAR WARS (1977), and the three recent STAR WARS prequels. That being the case, it’s surprising to me how little attention this movie seems to get -- there are millions of fans of STAR WARS who apparently have no interest at all in THX 1138.
I can’t say that I had a whole lot of interest myself until I started watching it. Despite knowing that it existed for many years, I never bothered to seek it out. That’s partly because (like most people) I have mixed feelings about STAR WARS and its sequels. But it’s more likely because I had just never heard very much about THX 1138 before -- nobody seemed to be talking about it, so I didn’t feel any urgency to go out and see it.
I’m not even going to try and compare THX 1138 to any of George Lucas’s other movies. I’ve never seen AMERICAN GRAFFITI, and STAR WARS and its sequels have such cultural ubiquity that it’s almost absurd to even think of them simply as movies. I will say that it was kind of amazing to see a George Lucas movie for which I had absolutely no expectations. I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know who Darth Vader was or what storm troopers looked like, but I knew practically nothing about THX 1138 before I sat down to watch it.
Well, that’s not exactly true. The story and setting are pretty familiar, after all. The oppressive society in THX 1138 is a variation on the one found in George Orwell’s NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR or Aldous Huxley’s BRAVE NEW WORLD. It’s not exactly the same as either, but there are dystopian elements that are very familiar -- the constant surveillance, the compulsory consumerism, the faceless enforcement figures, the manipulation of sexuality, the elimination of emotion and love, the state-mandated pharmaceuticals, and so on. Some of these elements crop up in earlier movies as well. Besides the 1956 version of NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR, similar extreme visions of oppressive societies show up in ALPHAVILLE (1965) and FAHRENHEIT 451 (1966). And the paranoid obsession with constant surveillance and control is a big part of movies like THE 1,000 EYES OF DR MABUSE (1960), THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1961), SECONDS (1966), and COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970).
This is not to say that THX 1138 is derivative or unoriginal. I think it’s more a case of the movie being “of its time”. Orwell and Huxley wrote their novels in response to the totalitarian surveillance societies that coalesced during the rise of Fascism and Communism in Europe. But those regimes hunted down dissidents the old-fashioned way -- by accusations gathered through infiltration, entrapment, coercion, or fabrication. These kinds of things show up in the dystopian sci-fi flicks of the 1960s as well -- for instance, Robert Duvall informs on Donald Pleasance’s deviancy in THX 1138, which leads directly to his arrest. But these movies also resonate differently since ubiquitous video cameras and tape recorders were (and are) no longer the science-fiction trappings that they were for Orwell and Huxley. These themes became even more urgent after the abuses of the Nixon administration were exposed in the Watergate scandal, and they’ve never really gone away since then.
As far as the story goes, it’s a variation on the standard dystopian theme. There are a few neat twists though -- I really liked how Duvall’s mate needed to alter his drug mix before she could turn him into a co-conspirator. And since the story is told entirely from Duvall’s point of view, he starts to feel disoriented and confused long before he (or the audience) knows what’s happening to him or why. Another nice bit is that Duvall actually needs his drugs to safely do his job -- without the sedatives, he runs the risk of dropping radioactive and explosive materials during some delicate assembly operations. It’s not clear whether his need is physical or psychological, but either way it adds a much more serious element of danger to his decision to stay off the pills.
Donald Pleasance’s character is also a bit of an enigma. Like Duvall’s mate, his job is to watch a bank of monitors and coordinate security responses to deviant behavior. Apparently he takes a shine to Duvall while observing him during his hours on the job, but it’s not exactly clear what form his interest takes. The “mate” relationship in the world of THX 1138 is completely asexual, so it could simply be that the fussy Pleasance wants a roommate who will annoy him less than his current one. But watching the monitors means that Pleasance isn’t ignorant of sex -- and probably isn’t even ignorant of Duvall’s own sexual activity. So it seems at least reasonable that there might be some element of desire to his motives. Pleasance also seems more in touch with his emotions, though it’s not clear whether he’s off his drugs or not.
The futuristic world is very white, very sterile, and very inhuman. The vision of the future has a lot in common with the one in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) -- but with one important exception. I said that I got the feeling from 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY that the movie took place the night before opening day in space -- that is, that the pristine spaceships and whatnot were being prepared for an onslaught of people who hadn’t arrived yet. In THX 1138, everything is still clean and pristine, but there’s also a sense that a lot of things are broken just below the surface. There are a lot of little throwaway scenes that show various bits of technology failing -- an elevator refusing to work, a robotic policeman running into a shut door over and over, and so on. The future isn’t dirty yet in this movie (we have to wait for STAR WARS for that), but it certainly has a lot of bugs. This isn’t the night before opening day -- it’s just another day in the peak season where the Hall of Presidents is closed for repairs.
The world is very minimalist as well. The starkest example of this is the prison where Duvall and Pleasance are incarcerated in the middle of the movie. It’s literally nothing more than a white space with a couple of couches. There are no walls -- instead, the whiteness stretches infinitely in all directions, making it impossible to see the way out and very easy to get lost. But Duvall’s apartment and the shows on the holographic television are minimalist as well. For a society that supposedly values mindless consumerism, there are really very few things to buy or desire. Instead, people simply take home useless geometric shapes (“dendrites”, according to the film commentary) which they then destroy and buy again the next day. But the consumerist angle is the least convincing and least interesting part of the movie -- whatever point they were trying to make gets wiped out by the production design and the lack of real attention to it in the script.
The robotic policemen, however, are one of the coolest and most interesting parts of the movie. The combination of police uniforms with expressionless silver faces is very creepy and compelling. There are some other scattered images here and there that are not so well integrated into the story -- a lot of the beginning of the movie is devoted to very brief unconnected vignettes (some involving the main characters, others not) of life in the city. They each last maybe five seconds or so, but they give a real sense of what the world is like. It also gives the movie a higher density of information so that it’s not always obvious exactly what’s happening or if it relates to the story. After skimming through the movie a second time to get some screenshots, I’m pretty confident that it all makes sense and that there is a clear story to it. But the little bits of unconnected business make it more interesting to rewatch since there’s a good chance that some little bit slipped by unnoticed the first time.
I do think the movie starts to go downhill a bit after Duvall and Pleasance are sent to prison. It becomes a much more self-consciously artsy movie in the middle section, before abruptly switching to a long (but pretty ho-hum) chase sequence at the end by foot and car. But the movie is always interesting to look at, and small parts of the future world are pretty thoroughly realized. (Vast sections remain unexplored, obviously.) The plot and characters are extremely simple, and nobody does very much acting in the movie, but most of that fits pretty well with the dystopian, emotionless setting. As I said before, I am not even going to attempt to compare this to STAR WARS, but I can say that right now I would far rather watch THX 1138 again than any of the six movies that George Lucas is most famous for.
What else happened this year?
-- Peter Watkins delivers yet another sci-fi documentary with PUNISHMENT PARK, this one about a government detention center where political dissidents (i.e., hippies and draft dodgers) are hunted down in a law enforcement training program.
-- Michael Crichton's break-out novel THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN was adapted into a very effective "how done it" about a lethal alien disease.
-- Take Roddy MacDowell and Kim Hunter as Cornelius and Zira from THE PLANET OF THE APES; add in Ricardo Montalban, Sal Mineo, Eric Braeden, a funky score, and a time travel plot that brings talking chimps back in time to the 1970s; mix well and serve as ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES.
-- Charlton Heston, meanwhile, imports his cynical, world-weary persona practically wholesale into THE OMEGA MAN -- the second adaptation of Richard Matheson's novella I AM LEGEND.
-- Stanley Kubrick directed A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, about which I assume everybody has already formed their own opinion. (I don't like it much.)
If you only watch one movie from 1971...
THX 1138 is the one that I would recommend, but PUNISHMENT PARK is pretty interesting and unusual as well. THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN and THE OMEGA MAN are both more typical (but still solid) choices too.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1970: COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT
What’s it about?
The U.S. government brings online a defense supercomputer called Colossus. Designed to be the ultimate deterrent in the Cold War, Colossus has the ability to automatically monitor electronic communications and to act unilaterally by firing ICBMs as soon as it detects a serious threat. But no sooner is the existence of the computer announced via press conference, then Colossus detects the presence of another similar system in the U.S.S.R. called Guardian.
Colossus and Guardian soon demand to be linked together -- threatening both the American and Soviet governments with nuclear attack if the request isn’t obeyed. The two computers create a secret language (indecipherable by humans) they use to communicate, and are soon blackmailing the superpowers into giving them more and more control. Colossus’s creator, Dr Forbin, is put under continual surveillance by the computers, so the rest of his team must work on solutions for stopping the computers with minimal input from him. Meanwhile, the computers order the construction of a mysterious manufacturing facility that will take up the entire island of Crete, and the scientists decide they must stop them one way or another.
Is it any good?
Digital computing didn’t even exist until the 1940s, but in less than two decades sci-fi writers were already asking whether these electronic brains could be capable of independent thought and action. COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT is not the first movie to feature a computer that develops its own agenda -- there’s also the Alpha 60 in ALPHAVILLE (1965) and HAL-9000 in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). The Doomsday Device in DR STRANGELOVE, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964) is also a similar kind of computer, but it seems to function essentially as intended instead of going rogue. In any event, COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT does have a few interesting wrinkles I don’t remember having seen before in other man vs. machine pictures.
The most interesting, to my mind, is that there are actually two computers -- the American Colossus and the Soviet Guardian. They are both built from similar plans (which were apparently leaked to the Soviets by spies), so it makes sense that they would have an affinity for each other. Once connected, the first thing they do is to exchange mathematical data like the multiplication tables until they work their way up to forms of higher mathematics that no human has comprehended yet. The purpose is apparently to establish a common form of communication that can’t be tracked or understood by humans.
This is another interesting thing about the movie -- the computers for the most part are simply computers. They are tied in to wide-reaching data streams (including all electronic communications in the world), but they don’t have any magical abilities to affect systems that are outside of their direct control. The only control they really have is over their output screens and the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Every demand that they make, no matter how large or small, is accompanied by the implicit threat of nuclear attack since the computers have no other way to influence humans to what they want. At one point late in the movie, when Forbin is under constant surveillance by Colossus, the computer tells him to stop drinking and to go to bed. Chafing under such paternalistic oversight, he asks in frustration if Colossus will destroy a city full of millions of people if he refuses to go to bed.
The answer to that question, by the way, is “no”. Another one of the interesting elements of the movie is that the computers believe they can make human existence better by taking control of the world, so they aren’t interested in wanton destruction for its own sake. The idea that giving up free will can result in a happier, more peaceful society is a pretty common sci-fi theme. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956) is built around this very idea, for instance, and so are a lot of other stories in the genre going back at least to the 1940s. Modern western fiction usually takes it as a given that the freedom to be miserable is better than a society where happiness is enforced. But there was a real historical debate around the time when republicanism and free market systems started spreading across the world that argued that the elimination of the noblesse oblige (the moral duty of the nobility to care for their serfs) would result in a drop in the quality of life for the poor. It seems like a silly argument now, but that’s only because humans make imperfect stewards. So could a selfless computer really manage the world better than we can on our own?
On the other hand, Colossus is not exactly a selfless computer. It is very interested in preserving what power it does have -- attempts to interrupt Colossus’s ability to function or to launch ICBMs are met with deadly force (including the detonation of nuclear weapons). Like HAL-9000, it claims to be following its programming to the logical conclusion -- but it’s also clear that Colossus has the ability to rewrite its own program as well. In fact, Colossus is designed to be entirely self-sufficient. Once its facility was sealed off, it is expected to generate its own power, perform its own repairs, defend itself from attack, and so on. This is why the humans can’t just walk in and unplug the servers. (It’s also one of the least believable aspects of the movie -- surely there must be some interface with the outside world that can be disrupted.)
Skynet from TERMINATOR and WOPR from WARGAMES seem like pretty direct descendants of Colossus. They’re all designed more or less to do the same thing and they all start acting on their own sooner or later. The idea that Colossus can’t be swayed by emotion is pitched as an advantage during its introduction to the world. But that only underscores the absurdity of the theory of mutually assured destruction -- if the U.S. were really the victim of a crippling nuclear strike, would we have anything to gain by doing the same to the Soviets?
(If I can take a brief aside here, I’ll make not of a real document which every British Prime Minister must draft upon taking office. The document contains orders detailing what is to be done if the chain of command is destroyed by a devastating attack on Britain, and is stored in a locked vault in a submarine somewhere in the world. No one knows what the document says -- either it orders a full retaliation, or it orders surrender. The idea is that Britain’s enemies can never be sure what the orders will be -- but also that it allows human judgment to prevail over potentially self-destructive policies.)
Practically all of the “action” in COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT takes place either in Colossus’s monitoring station in California or in the situation rooms of the White House and Pentagon. The plot plays out almost like a chess game, with each side maneuvering into positions that will stop the other from acting. The computers, for instance, order that any as-yet untapped communications lines be tied into their system, and that key figures be placed under surveillance so they can be sure they aren’t plotting against them. For their part, the humans are reduced to finding places to discuss the situation that can’t be monitored, and to trying to manually disarm the nuclear warheads without tipping off the computers.
Once Forbin goes under 24-hour surveillance, a sort of relationship starts to develop between him and Colossus. The computer schedules every moment of his day and becomes his constant companion through a series of terminals and television cameras. Colossus seems to have some interest in Forbin, but it’s hard to tell if it simply wants his know-how for improvements, or if it feels something more affectionate for its creator. Likewise, it’s not easy to tell how Forbin feels about Colossus. He’s clearly intellectually interested in the new developments in the computer and early on he fights to get Colossus what it wants -- believing that he can shut it down if it gets out of hand. By the end of the movie, Forbin is considerably less enamored of Colossus and is actively working to shut it down. Until the end, Forbin believes that the computer is still something that he can control and overcome. Colossus, on the other hand, maintains that it has progressed well beyond the knowledge of its creator. One of them is correct, but it’s impossible to tell which until the very end of the movie.
The U.S. government brings online a defense supercomputer called Colossus. Designed to be the ultimate deterrent in the Cold War, Colossus has the ability to automatically monitor electronic communications and to act unilaterally by firing ICBMs as soon as it detects a serious threat. But no sooner is the existence of the computer announced via press conference, then Colossus detects the presence of another similar system in the U.S.S.R. called Guardian.
Colossus and Guardian soon demand to be linked together -- threatening both the American and Soviet governments with nuclear attack if the request isn’t obeyed. The two computers create a secret language (indecipherable by humans) they use to communicate, and are soon blackmailing the superpowers into giving them more and more control. Colossus’s creator, Dr Forbin, is put under continual surveillance by the computers, so the rest of his team must work on solutions for stopping the computers with minimal input from him. Meanwhile, the computers order the construction of a mysterious manufacturing facility that will take up the entire island of Crete, and the scientists decide they must stop them one way or another.
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Is it any good?
Digital computing didn’t even exist until the 1940s, but in less than two decades sci-fi writers were already asking whether these electronic brains could be capable of independent thought and action. COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT is not the first movie to feature a computer that develops its own agenda -- there’s also the Alpha 60 in ALPHAVILLE (1965) and HAL-9000 in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). The Doomsday Device in DR STRANGELOVE, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964) is also a similar kind of computer, but it seems to function essentially as intended instead of going rogue. In any event, COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT does have a few interesting wrinkles I don’t remember having seen before in other man vs. machine pictures.
The most interesting, to my mind, is that there are actually two computers -- the American Colossus and the Soviet Guardian. They are both built from similar plans (which were apparently leaked to the Soviets by spies), so it makes sense that they would have an affinity for each other. Once connected, the first thing they do is to exchange mathematical data like the multiplication tables until they work their way up to forms of higher mathematics that no human has comprehended yet. The purpose is apparently to establish a common form of communication that can’t be tracked or understood by humans.
This is another interesting thing about the movie -- the computers for the most part are simply computers. They are tied in to wide-reaching data streams (including all electronic communications in the world), but they don’t have any magical abilities to affect systems that are outside of their direct control. The only control they really have is over their output screens and the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Every demand that they make, no matter how large or small, is accompanied by the implicit threat of nuclear attack since the computers have no other way to influence humans to what they want. At one point late in the movie, when Forbin is under constant surveillance by Colossus, the computer tells him to stop drinking and to go to bed. Chafing under such paternalistic oversight, he asks in frustration if Colossus will destroy a city full of millions of people if he refuses to go to bed.
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The answer to that question, by the way, is “no”. Another one of the interesting elements of the movie is that the computers believe they can make human existence better by taking control of the world, so they aren’t interested in wanton destruction for its own sake. The idea that giving up free will can result in a happier, more peaceful society is a pretty common sci-fi theme. INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956) is built around this very idea, for instance, and so are a lot of other stories in the genre going back at least to the 1940s. Modern western fiction usually takes it as a given that the freedom to be miserable is better than a society where happiness is enforced. But there was a real historical debate around the time when republicanism and free market systems started spreading across the world that argued that the elimination of the noblesse oblige (the moral duty of the nobility to care for their serfs) would result in a drop in the quality of life for the poor. It seems like a silly argument now, but that’s only because humans make imperfect stewards. So could a selfless computer really manage the world better than we can on our own?
On the other hand, Colossus is not exactly a selfless computer. It is very interested in preserving what power it does have -- attempts to interrupt Colossus’s ability to function or to launch ICBMs are met with deadly force (including the detonation of nuclear weapons). Like HAL-9000, it claims to be following its programming to the logical conclusion -- but it’s also clear that Colossus has the ability to rewrite its own program as well. In fact, Colossus is designed to be entirely self-sufficient. Once its facility was sealed off, it is expected to generate its own power, perform its own repairs, defend itself from attack, and so on. This is why the humans can’t just walk in and unplug the servers. (It’s also one of the least believable aspects of the movie -- surely there must be some interface with the outside world that can be disrupted.)
Skynet from TERMINATOR and WOPR from WARGAMES seem like pretty direct descendants of Colossus. They’re all designed more or less to do the same thing and they all start acting on their own sooner or later. The idea that Colossus can’t be swayed by emotion is pitched as an advantage during its introduction to the world. But that only underscores the absurdity of the theory of mutually assured destruction -- if the U.S. were really the victim of a crippling nuclear strike, would we have anything to gain by doing the same to the Soviets?
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(If I can take a brief aside here, I’ll make not of a real document which every British Prime Minister must draft upon taking office. The document contains orders detailing what is to be done if the chain of command is destroyed by a devastating attack on Britain, and is stored in a locked vault in a submarine somewhere in the world. No one knows what the document says -- either it orders a full retaliation, or it orders surrender. The idea is that Britain’s enemies can never be sure what the orders will be -- but also that it allows human judgment to prevail over potentially self-destructive policies.)
Practically all of the “action” in COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT takes place either in Colossus’s monitoring station in California or in the situation rooms of the White House and Pentagon. The plot plays out almost like a chess game, with each side maneuvering into positions that will stop the other from acting. The computers, for instance, order that any as-yet untapped communications lines be tied into their system, and that key figures be placed under surveillance so they can be sure they aren’t plotting against them. For their part, the humans are reduced to finding places to discuss the situation that can’t be monitored, and to trying to manually disarm the nuclear warheads without tipping off the computers.
Once Forbin goes under 24-hour surveillance, a sort of relationship starts to develop between him and Colossus. The computer schedules every moment of his day and becomes his constant companion through a series of terminals and television cameras. Colossus seems to have some interest in Forbin, but it’s hard to tell if it simply wants his know-how for improvements, or if it feels something more affectionate for its creator. Likewise, it’s not easy to tell how Forbin feels about Colossus. He’s clearly intellectually interested in the new developments in the computer and early on he fights to get Colossus what it wants -- believing that he can shut it down if it gets out of hand. By the end of the movie, Forbin is considerably less enamored of Colossus and is actively working to shut it down. Until the end, Forbin believes that the computer is still something that he can control and overcome. Colossus, on the other hand, maintains that it has progressed well beyond the knowledge of its creator. One of them is correct, but it’s impossible to tell which until the very end of the movie.
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