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: 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!