1979: THE BLACK HOLE

What’s it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1979: STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE

What’s it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1979: THE LATHE OF HEAVEN

What’s it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1979: STALKER

What’s it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1978: SUPERMAN

What’s it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1978: BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

What’s it about?

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

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




Is it any good?

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

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




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

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




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

1978: THE BOYS FROM BRAZIL

What’s it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1977: WIZARDS

What’s it about?

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

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




Is it any good?

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

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

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




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

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

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




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

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

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

1977: DEMON SEED

What’s it about?

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

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




Is it any good?

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

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

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

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




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

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

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

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




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

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

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

1977: STAR WARS

What’s it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What else happened this year?

More entries to come! Stick around and find out!

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

What’s it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1976: THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH

What’s it about?

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

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




Is it any good?

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

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

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




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

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

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

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




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

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

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




What else happened in 1976?

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

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

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