1984: 2010

What’s it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1984: DUNE

What’s it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1983: WARGAMES

What’s it about?

After a military assessment reveals the unreliability of human officers in launching ICBMs, the U.S. government decides to install a computer system called WOPR to control the country’s nuclear arsenal. Later, high school computer whiz Matthew Broderick inadvertently hacks into WOPR while looking for secret information on upcoming computer games.

Broderick challenges WOPR to what he believes is a game called “Global Thermonuclear War” -- it’s actually a war simulation, but WOPR’s handling of it sends NORAD into nuclear alert and the brink of war. The incident ends with the government holding Broderick on espionage charges, but unaware that WOPR is continuing the game on its own. As the simulation gets closer and closer to outright war, the bewildered government prepares to retaliate against what appears to be an overwhelming Soviet strike.

Is it any good?

WARGAMES is probably not a movie that I would ordinarily write about in this blog. It’s not bad -- in fact I think it’s pretty good -- and it’s a pretty interesting step on the road from DR STRANGELOVE, OR HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964) to THE MATRIX (1999). (That’s the road of killer computers who can or do initiate Armageddon, natch.)

But I talked about all that stuff back when I wrote about COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT (1970), and I am not sure I have anything further to say about it. In fact, WARGAMES is a lot like a junior version of that movie, where everything is just a bit dumber and the main characters are a lot younger. There’s a certain amount of lowered expectations that comes with a movie featuring the handsome young stars of the 1980s (in this case, Ally Sheedy and Matthew Broderick, both near the starts of their careers), and taken in that context, WARGAMES is very good. But it’s also a dumbed-down version of the same man vs. computer Frankenstein story that’s been popping up in the movies since the 1960s. And taken in that context, WARGAMES has far more in common with John Carpenter’s supremely dumb DARK STAR (1974) than it does with Kubrick or Colossus.

I don’t really want to write a thousand words taking down WARGAMES since I think it’s a pretty enjoyable movie. But here are a couple of glaring annoyances. First, it’s never clearly explained what WOPR thinks it’s doing. Is it playing a game? Running a simulation? Actually trying to win a thermonuclear war? At various points in the movie it acts in different ways regarding the situation and is never consistent or rational about what it’s trying to achieve. There’s even a big countdown clock that WOPR brings online for no particular reason.

Second, the moral of the movie is summed up in WOPR’s ultimate assessment of global thermonuclear war: “The only winning move is not to play.” That’s all well and good, but WOPR goes through practically the entire movie acting as though it believes such a war could be won. It’s not until Matthew Broderick has WOPR play a few games of tic-tac-toe that the computer finally gets the concept of an unwinnable game. It’s just a too-pat ending -- the whiz kid who saves the day with an obvious observation that the grown-ups somehow didn’t think of.

I mentioned DARK STAR a few paragraphs up, and I don’t think I’ve talked about that movie yet. It was John Carpenter’s first film -- a sci-fi comedy about space madness and suicidal smart bombs made on a shoestring budget. It’s not a great movie. The low budget effects are alternately charming and boring, but the real problem is that the story is a mish-mash of plots stolen from better movies and books. The suicidal smart bomb -- a nuke which threatens to blow up an entire spaceship -- is a variation on HAL-9000, and the situation is eventually defused when one of the crewmen locks its circuits by posing a philosophical quandary so stupid that I don’t even remember what it was.

The similarity between that and WARGAMES is that the movie thinks it’s smarter than it really is. The story doesn’t reveal anything new about people or computers -- it just restates an obvious piece of wisdom which is already common knowledge, but robs it of any of the shades of grey that might make it interesting. When I wrote about THE WAR GAME (1965) -- a movie that highlighted the absurdity and hopelessness of nuclear war in very uncomfortable ways -- I said that I almost couldn’t believe after watching it that we managed to get out of the Cold War alive. WARGAMES has the opposite effect -- it argues so bluntly that nuclear war is such a bonehead move that it makes it seem like there was never any danger at all.

Let’s talk about what I like about WARGAMES though. Matthew Broderick gets to play with lots of old fashioned computer equipment that looks neat and possibly authentic. (I have no idea really -- I was certainly not a hacker in 1983.) Outside of WOPR itself, computers in WARGAMES are the gatekeepers to easily manipulated systems with inadequate security and apparently no human checks and balances. Broderick changes his grades, hacks into servers, bypasses computer locks, and gets free long distance calling at a payphone. It’s a credit to the movie that I could always follow exactly what he was doing to break into these systems -- high tech crime seems positively low tech in WARGAMES and the feeling is that computers are tools that can be broken down and controlled by anybody who knows the tricks.

That’s an idea I like, and I really enjoyed all of Broderick’s shenanigans (even the ones that struck me as wildly implausible) for their MacGyver-ish charm. Of course, all of this makes it all the more perplexing why WOPR is such a different kind of computer and why it can’t be stopped even after the brass know what’s happening. (Perhaps there’s a cautionary tale in all of this about giving too much control to computers?) But I promised I was going to talk about good stuff.

I also really enjoyed the very beginning of the movie. In fact, it is probably my favorite part of the whole picture. Before Matthew Broderick or Ally Sheedy even show up, we meet two military officers who operate a missile silo somewhere in the U.S. They are given orders to launch their missiles and then are faced with the dilemma of whether they ought to follow the orders or not. They have no information about what’s going on outside -- only that the chain of command has ordered them to launch their nuclear missiles. They don’t know if it’s a first strike or a retaliation or (as it eventually turns out) a training exercise. I really love this part -- it’s such an unreal situation, like something out of a hypothetical morality question. Yet, it was (and is) potentially reality for thousands of folks who are stationed in these silos or on submarines. But then WARGAMES proper begins, and all such interesting moral dilemmas are intentionally wiped out by the introduction of WOPR.

1983: VIDEODROME

What’s it about?

Cable channel executive James Woods goes out looking for the next big thing in television -- something that will break barriers and shock viewers into massive ratings. He thinks he’s found it when he stumbles across a pirate broadcast of a show called “Videodrome”. The program has no content except for depictions of torture, mutilations, and murders which all take place in the same featureless room.

Woods, believing the program to be staged, attempts to find the creators so he can offer them a broadcast deal. The trail leads him first to renowned television prophet and personality Brian O’Blivion, and then deeper into a shadowy underworld. Meanwhile, Woods begins having powerful and disturbing hallucinations, which he eventually learns have been triggered by signals hidden in the Videodrome broadcasts. By the time he realizes he’s caught up in a weird conspiracy, it seems too late for Woods to save himself.

Is it any good?

I’ve been avoiding writing about David Cronenberg movies because -- well, just because. I watched both THE BROOD (1979) and SCANNERS (1981) back when I was covering the years they were released in, but couldn’t work up the enthusiasm to say a whole lot about them. I got pretty close with THE BROOD, since I was interested in how it used a “soft” science like psychology as the springboard for sci-fi speculations instead of a harder science like robotics or physical medicine or computer science. I also mentioned THE BROOD in my entry about ALTERED STATES (1980) when I talked about the mind-over-matter themes of that latter movie.

After watching a couple more David Cronenberg movies, it certainly seems like he keeps obsessively returning to those mind-over-matter themes. SCANNERS is about warring factions of folks with telepathic powers -- including the ability to link in to other peoples’ bodies and affect their bodily functions (sometimes with explosive consequences). Likewise, VIDEODROME is at least partly interested in how hallucinations can change subjective (and possibly objective) reality.

There are really two sci-fi stories running in parallel in VIDEODROME, though they are unavoidably intertwined with each other. The first is Woods’s quest to find ever more shocking content for his cable channel. This leads him to seek out programs that feature sex, violence, gore, perversion, or (ideally) some combination of them all. To be honest, the sci-fi edge here is a distinction in degree rather than in kind -- and only by the slightest degree. The quest for shock value certainly isn’t new of itself, and the programs that Woods reviews don’t even necessarily seem more depraved than some that exist in the real world. In 1983, it wouldn’t have been so easy to distribute such things on a mainstream cable channel, but today the Internet has removed essentially all doubt that there’s an audience out there for even the most envelope-pushing or stomach-turning content.

The other sci-fi twist involves Videodrome’s ability to trigger hallucinations in those who watch it. If you look at that from a metaphorical point of view, it could be saying something about how watching violent or perverted content can warp a person’s view of reality. It also pretty clearly separates “those who watch” from “those who don’t” -- anybody who watches enough of the show will be easily recognizable by their raving insanity. When Woods finally meets the folks responsible for the shows, for instance, they ask him why on earth a person would want to watch a show like Videodrome. They’ve never seen it themselves -- if they had, they would have gone crazy too.

On a more surface level, the hallucinations are part of a plot to do something or other. To be honest, I’m not really clear what the makers of Videodrome were trying to accomplish. They don’t appear to be anarchists who are just intent on driving everyone crazy. Seemingly the hallucinations are controllable -- that is, the shadowy forces in control of Videodrome use Woods’s freak-outs to control his behavior, and at one point even get him to assassinate some people for them. (Though the logic behind the assassination is never clear either.) So potentially Videodrome could be a recruitment tool for insane assassins, but it’s such a blunt tool that it would be difficult to really manage the program. The movie doesn’t really spend much time developing that part of the plot either, which is probably just as well. As far as brainwashing assassins goes, I can’t really imagine that VIDEODROME would be able to top the audacity of similar plots in movies like THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962) and THE PARALLAX VIEW (1974).

David Cronenberg has a reputation as a guy who loves disturbing or gross images. I haven’t seen that many of his movies besides the ones I mentioned already, but I can see where folks might get that impression. THE BROOD isn’t particularly gross, but it does make use of some freaky child-like killers in creepy masks. They’re a bit too similar to the big gotcha from Nicholas Roeg’s DON’T LOOK NOW (1973) to be deeply disturbing, but there are a few frightening moments. These killers are also the physical manifestations of mental anguish, and one late scene where one is shown budding out of a woman’s body is pretty darn grotesque.

SCANNERS ups the gore considerably with its iconic exploding head. It’s an amazing special effect, and it still looks cool even when watching it happen frame by frame in slow motion. The climactic battle between the final two telepaths is a revolting splatterfest as well. When the fight’s over, we’ve seen ruptured blood vessels, burst eyeballs, and burning and melting flesh.

VIDEODROME takes things in a different, but no less unnerving direction. We never see the worst of the torture on the Videodrome program -- it’s still unpleasant, but it’s very brief and never particularly graphic. James Woods’s hallucinations, however, are extremely graphic, and they seem to have a recurring theme of combining organic flesh and technology. In one recurring bit, Woods’s appendix scar splits open, allowing access to his innards so videotapes or guns can be deposited inside his body (or, later in the movie, retrieved for use). There’s not a lot of blood and gore necessarily, but Cronenberg seems to hone in instantly on what makes people say “yuck”. I’ve got at least THE FLY (1986) and NAKED LUNCH (1991) upcoming from him as well, so I expect to be saying “yuck” many more times.

Ultimately, I don’t think that any of the three Cronenberg movies I’ve seen so far are that great. They all start out with very interesting premises, but then end up in pretty standard patterns. THE BROOD turns into a slasher flick in the second half, and both SCANNERS and VIDEODROME end up as conspiracy thrillers. The conspiracy part of VIDEODROME is especially half-baked -- as I said, I’m still not clear on what the objective of the conspiracy is, and I have no clue whatsoever why the bad guys went to all the trouble they did to rope in Woods. (A half-hearted answer is given to that second question, but it doesn’t really make any sense.) VIDEODROME looks better than either of the other two, and the special effects on the hallucinations are worth seeing. It’s kind of unpleasant at times, but it’s also fairly unique (at least in the early going). And James Woods is a great actor for this role. Based on all this, I’m really looking forward to seeing Jeff Goldblum in THE FLY. I could easily see that being the magic combination that makes a really great movie.

1983: BORN IN FLAMES

What’s it about?

In the near future, the socialist party is elected into office in the United States, marking the beginning of a peaceful revolution. Ten years later, large segments of the population are dissatisfied with the government -- especially with work programs that are perceived as giving good jobs to some and meaningless jobs to others.

One group of dissidents is a self-styled “army” mostly composed of homosexual and minority women. When protesting doesn’t get results in curbing violence against women or marginalization in the workforce, radical elements in the army start to take more definitive action. When the government hits back -- apparently assassinating a prominent leader and burning two pirate radio stations -- the women turn to terrorist tactics to make themselves heard.

Is it any good?

I’ve already written about several “soft” sci-fi movies that speculate about changes in society rather than changes in technology -- for instance, PANIC IN YEAR ZERO! (1962), WILD IN THE STREETS (1968), and PUNISHMENT PARK (1971). One of the movies I didn’t write about was INVASION U.S.A. (1952), a piece of outright propaganda that makes the case that ignorance or apathy in ordinary citizens could result in a communist takeover of the United States.

The reason I bring up INVASION U.S.A. is that it’s seemingly an early example of a long string of “red scare” pictures that depicted the United States attacked or invaded or even conquered by Soviet forces. That type of movie had by no means vanished in the 1980s -- you need look no further than RED DAWN (1984) for proof of that. But BORN IN FLAMES is also evidence that it had become possible to take a somewhat more nuanced look at competing political systems as well.

BORN IN FLAMES is very similar in form and content to PUNISHMENT PARK, a pseudo-documentary movie in which counter-cultural types are systematically (and sadistically) hunted down by law enforcement officers in vast wilderness areas -- ostensibly for training purposes. Although the sympathies of the director clearly lie with the hippies, a series of drumhead tribunals ensure that the opposing establishment side gets ample chance to state its case. I loved the movie despite the bluntness and almost offensive extremity of its premise, and it’s still one of my favorites out of all the ones I’ve seen for this blog.

BORN IN FLAMES never purports to be a documentary itself, but it does take a fly-on-the-wall approach that feels similar to the style of PUNISHMENT PARK. But by making the establishment figures the representatives of an elected socialist government, it seemingly turns the politics of the other movie on its head. Seemingly, the same idealists who were pleading for peace, love and understanding in PUNISHMENT PARK are now the ones helming a failing socialist experiment and issuing assassination orders. But the connection isn’t really that clear. Neither of the movies are really about left vs. right. Instead, they are both about the corrupt establishment vs. the idealistic counter-culture, and by making the United States a socialist state, BORN IN FLAMES seemingly tries to demonstrate that it doesn’t really matter which side is in power if you’re the little guy.

The similarities between the two movies don’t stop there. They both show a counter-cultural movement that is obsessed with intellectual rhetoric -- these revolutionaries do much more talking than anything else. Likewise, both movies depict a counter-culture that’s split on whether action or violence is permissible -- a question that only results in even more endless debates. In some ways, BORN IN FLAMES is the more ambitious movie, as it follows the rise of an organic revolutionary movement in the wild. PUNISHMENT PARK, meanwhile, limits itself to the interactions between two clearly defined groups in an entirely artificial setting.

Despite all that, I’m not sure that I would have found BORN IN FLAMES all that interesting on its own and without the context of other similar movies. The documentary style is fairly compelling, but the acting is not always that great and the characters are hard to keep track of sometimes. The depictions of urban blight in the early eighties are pretty riveting, but the frequent collages of unconnected images that separate vignettes make the movie feel pretentious and self-consciously artsy. I enjoyed thinking about it as an extension (or possibly inversion) of PUNISHMENT PARK, but it seems too slight and muddled to pack much of a punch on its own. I’m still a bit confused about what exactly I’m meant to take away from BORN IN FLAMES -- unless it’s the sense that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

The socialist government might also have been used to make the radicalized women more sympathetic, since it clearly couldn’t be intended to be a depiction of any actual American government. The women end the movie by hijacking news stations at gunpoint, and then ultimately by destroying the transmitter towers on the World Trade Center with explosives. (By the way, it’s really hard to watch people staging a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center without feeling some emotion colored by events that the movie could not have foreseen.) Just as CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (1972) concocted a vaguely fascist American government that could be toppled by the ape revolution, so too does BORN IN FLAMES offer a target that is arguably not representative of the America of the time.

But if this was an attempt to protect the film-makers from accusations of being anti-American, then I guess it’s a bit disappointing. PUNISHMENT PARK doesn’t pull any such punches -- and although the depiction of the establishment is unfair and cheap at times, there are at least broader metaphorical points that are impossible to miss. And it seems almost impossible that the producers of BORN IN FLAMES would be the sorts to chicken out of a fight. The director, after all, is a woman who enthusiastically calls herself “Lizzie Borden”, who featured revolutionary-minded punk music throughout the movie, and who didn’t flinch from putting a completely gratuitous close-up shot of an erect penis on the screen. In other words, it seems unlikely that such a provocateur would be concerned about hurting Ronald Reagan’s feelings.

But this is what I mean when I say the movie seems too slight and muddled. It seems to be saying too many things at once, and the confusion makes it both less sharp and easier to dismiss as an indulgent fantasy. It’s not a bad movie, but it’s certainly not going to be one that I think about much months from now.

1982: TRON

What’s it about?

After being bilked out of some lucrative intellectual property by a corporate bigwig, programmer Jeff Bridges sneaks back into his old office to find evidence of the theft. But while hacking the mainframe in search of proof, the Master Control Program -- an all-knowing sentient program that runs the company’s entire computer system (and then some) -- uses an experimental ray gun to trap Bridges inside the computer system itself.

Once inside, Bridges finds himself in a weird dystopian world patrolled by the Master Control Program’s jackbooted goons. But rather than put Bridges to death outright, he is instead forced to compete in a series of gladiatorial games against the personifications of renegade programs who refuse to renounce their belief in “the users” or submit to the Master Control Program. After escaping from one such game, Bridges sets out with a couple of free-thinking programs (including a digital warrior named Tron who was written specifically for the task) to take down the Master Control Program.

Is it any good?

Somehow I’ve never seen TRON before, so I knew from the start of this project that I’d certainly have to watch it. I’m not sure if it exactly counts as a classic, but if you tell folks that you’ve spent two years watching practically every science fiction movie worth seeing, then they’re going to expect that you’ve seen TRON. (Note: This blog will likely take me two years to finish, but one thing I’ve learned in the process is that it would take far longer than two years for me to watch every science fiction movie worth seeing.)

I’m not even sure what exactly I thought TRON was about before I saw it. I really ought to have written a little summary of my expectations before hand, but the truth is that I didn’t really think too much about what I’d be getting myself into. I knew it starred Jeff Bridges, and I knew it took place inside a computer, and I knew it involved something called “light cycles”. (I only knew this last fact because, many years ago, I used to spend hours playing an addictive freeware game called Tron Light Cycles against my brothers.)

I’ve spent many of this blog’s entries arguing why such-and-such fantasy movie really ought to be considered science fiction at heart. (Look no further than last week’s DARK CRYSTAL entry for an example.) So it’s with some hesitation that I find myself about to say that TRON is really a fantasy movie at heart. It’s not just that the insides of the computer as imagined by TRON bear no resemblance to the actual workings of a computer. But the explanation for computers that the movie comes up with is so primitive and so benighted that it boggles my mind. Let me try to explain what I mean.

When faced with the need to explain what goes on inside computers, the movie TRON tells us that there are little people inside that make them work. Again, a second time -- according to TRON, there are thousands of little people inside your computer right now, without whom the computer would no longer function. There’s a little man who runs your word processor, and a little man who runs your spreadsheet, and a little man who runs your solitaire game. This is the same explanation that ignorant and unsophisticated peoples came up with when they were confronted with inexplicable natural forces. There’s a big man who makes the lightning, a big man who makes the tides, and a big man who makes the west wind. That was all very well and good before the scientific method was invented, but we’ve moved considerably past that point by now. If THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981) is a fantasy because it relies on Zeus and Hera and the rest of the gods to explain the workings of the natural world, then TRON is just as much a fantasy because it relies on little men to explain the workings of a calculating engine.

I understand that the world of TRON is meant to represent the virtual world of digital space -- that is, that the little men of the movie are not meant to be literally living inside the physical space of the computer. Instead, they are supposed to live in the computer’s memory, and everything we see is a fanciful representation of what’s going on in the memory. I get that. The problem is that this explanation doesn’t really make any logical sense either. Why would the virtual representation of a computer program have visible circuitry on its bodysuit? Why would they need to travel from point to point as if they were traversing physical space (something that happens in this movie A LOT)? What happens to the functions that the programs were supposed to control when they are terminated? Why is there a separate program that controls the input/output functions of all other programs? And so on.

I don’t really want to get into every nuance of how TRON blows my mind with its illogic and incuriosity about the details of computer science. Suffice to say that the world itself only intermittently makes sense if you take it as a representation of actual technology. I could be way off base here (and please let me know if I am), but the world of TRON is a fantasy world dressed up in a circuit-spangled bodysuit.

I haven’t forgotten that when I was writing about STAR WARS (1977), I spent a lot of time arguing that fantasies can still be called science fiction so long as they look like science fiction. In the case of STAR WARS, this means that the robots and spaceships qualify it for sci-fi status, even though the mystical forces at work and the importance of “destiny” and the general lack of interest in actual science are strong marks against it. But robots and spaceships have been common features of science fiction movies since the early 1900s. George Lucas clearly wanted STAR WARS to look like a sci-fi flick, no matter what else was going on in the story and themes, and so he used easily recognizable visual shorthand. It’s sort of like how you only really need Monument Valley, a ten-gallon hat, and a hoss to make a western. It doesn’t matter what the story is about -- if you put it in the right setting with the right costumes and props, it’s going to look like a western even if it violates every traditional theme of the genre. (Exhibit A for the defense: there are actually a handful of “Soviet westerns”.)

But I’m not sure if bodysuits painted with glowing circuitry are any kind of recognizable visual shorthand for science fiction. It’s certainly shorthand for “computer stuff”, but is dressing magical computer men in circuit-inspired outfits really any different than giving Bacchus a crown of grape leaves and a double chin? TRON doesn’t want to look like a science fiction movie necessarily -- it just wants to look like a fantasy computer world.

I obviously don’t think that the makers of TRON really believe that computers are really run by little men inside them. But I also don’t think that the ancient Greeks honestly believed that the sun was a chariot driven across the sky. Myths were partly a way of “explaining” things that couldn’t really be fathomed by ancient people, but the stories were really ways of passing on shared ideals and culture. That’s why many myths are still affecting today, even in a post-Enlightenment world when we should all know better. The fact that a myth may have involved, say, Poseidon and Vulcan didn’t necessarily mean that it was supposed to be regarded as proto-scientific commentary on the ocean and volcanoes. Likewise, I don’t see the computery setting of TRON as suggesting that it has any kind of commentary on computers or computer science. It is concerned with intellectual property rights, which is pretty prescient, but there's nothing about the world inside the computer that makes it fundamentally different from the real world. The program world has jobs, religious faiths, government, military -- but these things aren't set up in any particularly computery way. They are just translations of human institutions into a computer setting.

Anyway, I’ve done much more complaining about TRON than I expected I would. I enjoyed it okay, though the story is really just a run-of-the-mill dystopian pastiche. It definitely had its moments -- the gladiatorial bits were probably my favorites, and I was impressed that some of the games that Jeff Bridges was forced to play actually look like they could be fun computer games. (In the case of the light cycles, I can attest that this is definitely true.) The special effects are neat, but the world they depict has no logical underpinnings. So everything feels flat and empty. And this is no FANTASTIC VOYAGE (1966) where the characters go from lungs to heart to brain -- that is, to recognizable places that the audience might want to see. The only interesting "places" in TRON's computer world are an input/output tower and the nexus of the Master Control Program. But I don't know what an input/output tower is. Is it a program function? A piece of hardware? What keeps FANTASTIC VOYAGE interesting is that each destination depicts a real organ, and the nature of each results in distinct dangers and opportunities. In TRON, it all largely feels the same.

But look -- I’d be a hypocrite if I seriously asked you all to agree with me that TRON is a fantasy movie. It takes in place inside of a computer, and a computer is a science thing, so it’s science fiction -- no matter how else I might feel about it.

1982: FORBIDDEN ZONE

What’s it about?

When Frenchy Hercules disappears through a door in her family home’s basement into the freakish Sixth Dimension, her young brother (played by an old vaudeville comedian) enlists their grandfather (a retired Jewish wrestler) to enter the portal and get her back. Meanwhile, Frenchy finds love with the King Fausto of the Sixth Dimension (played by Herve Villechaize).

But trouble arises when the jealous Queen Doris (played by Susan Tyrrell) gets word of her husband’s “peccadilloes”. Others soon find their way into the Sixth Dimension, and they encounter weirdos like a frog-headed butler, a constantly topless princess, and Satan himself (played by Danny Elfman). Numerous musical numbers featuring vintage big band recordings interrupt the proceedings with additional craziness.

Is it any good?

Heck if I know. I first saw this movie as an impressionable youngster while at a weeklong art camp at Miami University in Ohio. I was probably fifteen at the time, and I wandered over during a movie night to see what the college-aged camp counselors were watching. They had rented FORBIDDEN ZONE (and not for the first time, it seems). The movie left me confused, excited, and disturbed in equal measure -- but I admit primarily I was mesmerized by the constantly topless princess.

Like FANTASTIC PLANET (1973), this movie has continued to exist in my memory as a collage of strange, unconnected images. (Is it coincidence that they both prominently feature toplessness? Who can say?) Even though it’s practically impossible to defend it as science fiction (the journey to the Sixth Dimension is more THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS or THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE than it is, say, A WRINKLE IN TIME), I knew I would have to watch it again anyway just to see what it is really about. But even though I am less distracted now by naked breasts than I was as a teenager, I am still not sure I understand what it is really about.

A brief aside here. I watched this with my girlfriend, and we both agreed that the naked breasts in FORBIDDEN ZONE are incredibly distracting. It is impossible not to be entranced when they are onscreen -- the main difference between now and 1995 is that I didn’t spend the scenes without the breasts impatiently waiting for them to come back. But whenever they were there, it became very difficult to focus on anything else. In fact, the girlfriend believes that the quality of the breasts in the movie exceeds the quality of anything else it has to offer.

Something I didn’t know until after I watched FORBIDDEN ZONE again recently is that the movie was created primarily to capture on film some of the stage show of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo. This is the band that evolved into Oingo Boingo in the early 1980s, but FORBIDDEN ZONE was a record of an earlier incarnation when they were a quasi-theatrical troupe obsessed with old songs and vaudeville acts. In some ways, it is exactly what I had hoped SPACE IS THE PLACE (1974) might be -- a document of an offbeat musical group. But Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist cosmic jazz is explicitly sci-fi in some ways, whereas The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo recontextualized historical curiosities into even weirder packages.

But like SPACE IS THE PLACE, the non-musical portions of FORBIDDEN ZONE dominate the movie, and that’s too bad. Some of the performers in the movie are members of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo, and their imagination shines brightest when they are choreographing weird accompaniments to weird old songs. My favorite is a scene of absurd factory work set to “Pico and Sepulveda”. (Look up that song if you can -- it totally rules.) The scene includes a catchy curiosity from the 1940s, an amusing dance number, elements of both the distinctive production design and animation that pepper the movie, and an imaginative (and funny) interpretation of the song. It’s delightfully weird, but (unlike much of the movie) it doesn’t feel like it’s designed to be off-putting or bizarre for its own sake.

There are a few more moments like this in the movie, and it’s occasionally a trippy good time as a result of it. For example, there’s an otherwise totally unnecessary alphabet song inspired by the Three Stooges that still manages to incorporate some pretty cool early breakdancing. But too often, it’s more like weirdness without a point or weirdness that’s designed to offend. (There are some extremely uncomfortable blackface moments in FORBIDDEN ZONE, as well as several other ethnic caricatures, for instance.) It is clear that this movie is the product of a few imaginative folks who had nobody to tell them “no” -- and that is always kind of appealing, at least in theory. If I knew more about the kinds of things The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo were into in the late 1970s (like big band music, Max Fleischer cartoons, and vaudeville comedians), I would probably understand more of what they were trying to do. As it is, I can only make guesses -- and unless I want to do a lot of research, there’s no way for me to really find out whether their references are witty and well-informed, or if they are simply unnecessarily bizarre and occasionally offensive.

FORBIDDEN ZONE is also the kind of movie that couldn't exist without pop culture. It references almost entirely pop culture from the 1950s and earlier, but its still nonetheless very much what you might call a postmodern pastiche. A little bit of cabaret singing, a little bit of the Three Stooges, a little bit of greaser movies, a little bit of minstrel shows, a little bit of German expressionistic set design, and so on -- all mixed together in a chaotic stew.

Beyond the weirdness of the thing, FORBIDDEN ZONE is pretty impenetrable -- and I’m not even totally sure there is much to penetrate in the end. There is a plot of sort, but it’s not a very interesting one. (See the description above.) There are no actual characters -- just caricatures and stereotypes. Originally, the intention of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo was to present lost entertainments that were no longer being performed live -- in other words, to bring vaudeville and the cabarets to people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to experience them in a live setting. (And then to add a unique Oingo Boingo flair of weirdness.) FORBIDDEN ZONE isn’t a live performance, so it’s a valid question exactly what is the point of the movie. Why watch a recording of Danny Elfman singing a modified version of “Minnie the Moocher” when you could listen to a recording of Cab Calloway himself? If the references and songs were better curated -- if they were identified or explained in some way -- there might be a case for FORBIDDEN ZONE as an educational movie. But as it is, it’s a catalog of weird things that you will enjoy only so much as your sensibility is aligned with those of The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.

Ultimately, FORBIDDEN ZONE is 73 minutes of your life that you will never get back. So whether it’s worth your time or not probably depends on how much you value 73 minutes of your life. It seems unlikely that most people would enjoy the entire movie -- though I have no doubt that those folks are out there. For me, I’d say there are ten or fifteen minutes of the movie that are a good time. Much of the rest is mostly just waiting for a funny joke, a neat bit of animation, a cool dance, or a catchy song, but there are also times when I got uncomfortable or annoyed. The movie’s too weird and unpredictable to ever be boring, but it’s also definitely not trying to be your friend. Look -- if you want to watch it, go ahead and watch it. If you’re not sure, skip it.

1981: HEAVY METAL

What’s it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1980: ALTERED STATES

What's it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.