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.
Showing posts with label other planets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label other planets. Show all posts
Monday, April 5, 2010
Thursday, March 11, 2010
1982: THE DARK CRYSTAL
What’s it about?
On “another world”, the conjunction of three suns results in the appearance of a mysterious powerful crystal and two new races -- the cruel and vulture-like Skeksis and the peaceful Mystics. After a thousand years, both races are dying out, but the Skeksis have succeeded in taking control of the world. A prophecy predicts that a Gelfling (an elf-like creature) will be the downfall of the Skeksis, so they have eradicated practically all of the race.
As the wisest of the Mystics lies on his deathbed, he sends the last of the Gelflings (or so he thinks) on a quest to find a missing shard of the crystal, which is in some fashion the key to defeating the Skeksis. Though he succeeds in finding the shard, he doesn’t know what to do with it, and soon the Skeksis are hunting him with a variety of fearsome monsters. The Gelfling’s journey takes him to many strange places in the world, but there is limited time in which to fulfill the prophecy.
Is it any good?
I didn’t really expect to end up writing about THE DARK CRYSTAL when I started watching it. I’d never seen it before, but it always sounded like a straight-up fantasy story with elves and crystals and sorcerers. And superficially that’s exactly what it is. But one of the big differences between this movies and other fantasy movies like THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981) or the SINBAD movies or LABYRINTH is that THE DARK CRYSTAL takes place on a world with no humans. In many ways, it might as well be an alien planet.
Like FANTASTIC PLANET (1973) or many of the planets in the STAR WARS movies, the world of THE DARK CRYSTAL has its own alien ecosystem. It’s not necessarily fully developed, but it is full of lots of strange creatures that don’t really have any traditional fantasy analogs. Instead, the world seems to be the product of imagination run amok -- just like a good alien planet should be.
Of course, there are limits to imagination. The world of THE DARK CRYSTAL still has forests and swamps and deserts. It has animals and plants and fish. Most of the creatures, in fact, seem to be based more on Earth animals than anything else. But one result of that is to make the creatures seem more “real” -- or at least as real as Muppets can feel. There’s no real sense that the ecosystem of the world “evolved” in any natural way, but familiar plant and animal shapes do lend a veneer of naturalness to the world, even if things are twisted all out of shape. And it’s worth noting that nothing looks exactly like an Earth animal.
There’s also not a whole lot of magic in THE DARK CRYSTAL. The crystal itself has some ill-defined powers that affect the world and its inhabitants, and there is the prophecy. But otherwise, things proceed more or less without any outright fantasy. Even these elements have a bit of logic behind them. There’s an old crone who uses a complicated piece of machinery to assist in figuring out her prophecies, for instance. And the Skeksis likewise use mechanical devices to focus the power of the crystal. The magical elements, in other words, don’t operate outside the logic of the world. They are inexplicable forces -- but forces that obey some natural laws of science nonetheless.
The other reason I decided to write about THE DARK CRYSTAL is that it’s a movie starring puppets. Like LABYRINTH, this is a Jim Henson movie through and through. But unlike that one, THE DARK CRYSTAL has no human actors at all. Every character is a Muppet of some sort -- either a hand puppet, a marionette, or a full-body puppet suit. (And possibly other kinds of puppets I couldn’t identify.)
There aren’t that many movies that have casts made up entirely of puppets. In fact, the only others I’ve watched for this blog are THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO (1966) and JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN (1969), both of which were created by British puppeteers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. There may be a few others I missed -- there’s at least one other THUNDERBIRDS movie anyway -- but it’s just not a common way to make a movie. Of course, puppet effects for specific monsters are fairly common -- Mothra and her offspring in MOTHRA (1961), the alien in ALIEN (1979), Yoda in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1981), E.T. in E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982) and countless others -- but its very rare that a movie relies solely on puppets to generate sympathy and excitement.
One reason for this is pretty clear from THE DARK CRYSTAL -- there’s a limit to what puppets can do and to how realistic they can be. The pace of the action in this movie is always hampered by the constraints of getting puppets to hit each other. And the faces of the puppets are often stiff and unemotional. Even some of the creatures (like the landstriders) are cooler in concept than they are in execution, and even in a relatively dark movie like this there are still Muppet-ish bits of comical character design that creep in.
I’m not really complaining though. There are always trade-offs when you use any kind of surrogates for human actors -- whether it’s cartoon animation, stop-motion animation, animal performers, computer graphics, or puppets. There is definitely a lot of artistry and craft in the puppets of THE DARK CRYSTAL. Even though none of them look much like the traditional Muppets, it’s still always obvious that the characters were designed by Jim Henson’s shop. There’s a clear and consistent aesthetic that ties everything together.
In the end, THE DARK CRYSTAL is yet another movie that’s not really science fiction. But its world is certainly believably alien in a way that most sci-fi alien worlds aren’t. The alien qualities of the characters are less well developed -- we don’t really see enough of any of the races’ cultures to get a taste of that. And the story and character arcs are all very much standard issue fantasy fare. But since I can’t really think of any other sci-fi movies that are set entirely on alien planets with no human characters at all, THE DARK CRYSTAL is probably as close as I’ll get to talking about that kind of story in this blog.
On “another world”, the conjunction of three suns results in the appearance of a mysterious powerful crystal and two new races -- the cruel and vulture-like Skeksis and the peaceful Mystics. After a thousand years, both races are dying out, but the Skeksis have succeeded in taking control of the world. A prophecy predicts that a Gelfling (an elf-like creature) will be the downfall of the Skeksis, so they have eradicated practically all of the race.
As the wisest of the Mystics lies on his deathbed, he sends the last of the Gelflings (or so he thinks) on a quest to find a missing shard of the crystal, which is in some fashion the key to defeating the Skeksis. Though he succeeds in finding the shard, he doesn’t know what to do with it, and soon the Skeksis are hunting him with a variety of fearsome monsters. The Gelfling’s journey takes him to many strange places in the world, but there is limited time in which to fulfill the prophecy.
Is it any good?
I didn’t really expect to end up writing about THE DARK CRYSTAL when I started watching it. I’d never seen it before, but it always sounded like a straight-up fantasy story with elves and crystals and sorcerers. And superficially that’s exactly what it is. But one of the big differences between this movies and other fantasy movies like THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981) or the SINBAD movies or LABYRINTH is that THE DARK CRYSTAL takes place on a world with no humans. In many ways, it might as well be an alien planet.
Like FANTASTIC PLANET (1973) or many of the planets in the STAR WARS movies, the world of THE DARK CRYSTAL has its own alien ecosystem. It’s not necessarily fully developed, but it is full of lots of strange creatures that don’t really have any traditional fantasy analogs. Instead, the world seems to be the product of imagination run amok -- just like a good alien planet should be.
Of course, there are limits to imagination. The world of THE DARK CRYSTAL still has forests and swamps and deserts. It has animals and plants and fish. Most of the creatures, in fact, seem to be based more on Earth animals than anything else. But one result of that is to make the creatures seem more “real” -- or at least as real as Muppets can feel. There’s no real sense that the ecosystem of the world “evolved” in any natural way, but familiar plant and animal shapes do lend a veneer of naturalness to the world, even if things are twisted all out of shape. And it’s worth noting that nothing looks exactly like an Earth animal.
There’s also not a whole lot of magic in THE DARK CRYSTAL. The crystal itself has some ill-defined powers that affect the world and its inhabitants, and there is the prophecy. But otherwise, things proceed more or less without any outright fantasy. Even these elements have a bit of logic behind them. There’s an old crone who uses a complicated piece of machinery to assist in figuring out her prophecies, for instance. And the Skeksis likewise use mechanical devices to focus the power of the crystal. The magical elements, in other words, don’t operate outside the logic of the world. They are inexplicable forces -- but forces that obey some natural laws of science nonetheless.
The other reason I decided to write about THE DARK CRYSTAL is that it’s a movie starring puppets. Like LABYRINTH, this is a Jim Henson movie through and through. But unlike that one, THE DARK CRYSTAL has no human actors at all. Every character is a Muppet of some sort -- either a hand puppet, a marionette, or a full-body puppet suit. (And possibly other kinds of puppets I couldn’t identify.)
There aren’t that many movies that have casts made up entirely of puppets. In fact, the only others I’ve watched for this blog are THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO (1966) and JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN (1969), both of which were created by British puppeteers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. There may be a few others I missed -- there’s at least one other THUNDERBIRDS movie anyway -- but it’s just not a common way to make a movie. Of course, puppet effects for specific monsters are fairly common -- Mothra and her offspring in MOTHRA (1961), the alien in ALIEN (1979), Yoda in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1981), E.T. in E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982) and countless others -- but its very rare that a movie relies solely on puppets to generate sympathy and excitement.
One reason for this is pretty clear from THE DARK CRYSTAL -- there’s a limit to what puppets can do and to how realistic they can be. The pace of the action in this movie is always hampered by the constraints of getting puppets to hit each other. And the faces of the puppets are often stiff and unemotional. Even some of the creatures (like the landstriders) are cooler in concept than they are in execution, and even in a relatively dark movie like this there are still Muppet-ish bits of comical character design that creep in.
I’m not really complaining though. There are always trade-offs when you use any kind of surrogates for human actors -- whether it’s cartoon animation, stop-motion animation, animal performers, computer graphics, or puppets. There is definitely a lot of artistry and craft in the puppets of THE DARK CRYSTAL. Even though none of them look much like the traditional Muppets, it’s still always obvious that the characters were designed by Jim Henson’s shop. There’s a clear and consistent aesthetic that ties everything together.
In the end, THE DARK CRYSTAL is yet another movie that’s not really science fiction. But its world is certainly believably alien in a way that most sci-fi alien worlds aren’t. The alien qualities of the characters are less well developed -- we don’t really see enough of any of the races’ cultures to get a taste of that. And the story and character arcs are all very much standard issue fantasy fare. But since I can’t really think of any other sci-fi movies that are set entirely on alien planets with no human characters at all, THE DARK CRYSTAL is probably as close as I’ll get to talking about that kind of story in this blog.
Thursday, March 4, 2010
1981: OUTLAND
What’s it about?
Two weeks after being assigned to a remote mining outpost on one of Saturn’s moons, space cop Sean Connery begins investigating a string of strange suicides when workers begin offing themselves in gruesome ways. Although there doesn’t seem to be any other explanation for the deaths, the outpost’s doctor soon reveals that the suicides (which everybody says are the kind of thing that “just happens” in deep space) have increased more than ten-fold over the past year.
When an experimental stimulant with deadly side effects turns up in the blood of one victim, Connery investigates the drug dealing underworld of the outpost. The trail leads him straight to the mine’s operator, Peter Boyle. But as Connery gets closer to the truth, his friends begin deserting him while Boyle calls in for reinforcements.
Is it any good?
I didn’t really expect to enjoy OUTLAND very much. Sean Connery is such a big superstar, that I figured any sci-fi movie where he played a space cop would be something I would have heard more about if it were even halfway enjoyable. I’m not really sure how to explain the lack of awareness around the movie since Wikipedia tells me that it’s been available on VHS and DVD for over ten years. But since OUTLAND is in fact at least halfway enjoyable, I can only conclude that this is a case of there being more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy, Horatio. It makes me wonder what else is out there that nobody has really talked about in ages.
I don’t want to oversell OUTLAND here -- it’s not exactly what I would call a lost gem. It does some of its broad strokes very well, but the details are often less than compelling. The relationship between Connery and most of the other characters -- his wife, the other marshals reporting to him, Peter Boyle’s mine boss -- are all pretty interesting. It’s repeatedly suggested that Connery has been given this assignment because he’s not really fit for any other duty. We never learn any details about his past to justify this, but we do get the sense that nobody thinks he’s that good of a cop.
In fact, Boyle’s drug smuggling operation relies heavily on the apathy or corruptibility of the marshals stationed at the mine. There are only a couple thousand people in the whole place, so secrets aren’t easy to keep. Boyle imports the stimulants to keep his workforce producing at maximum efficiency -- which nets him big bonuses from his bosses. The extravagant suicides (which mostly involve workers exposing themselves to the vacuum of space one way or another) are a side effect of the drug, and over the past year about sixty workers have taken their own lives as a result of the drug.
The other key to Boyle’s scheme is the willingness of his superiors to turn a blind eye to the shady source of his success. There’s a strong anti-corporate undercurrent in OUTLAND which is very similar to that in ALIEN (1979). Both movies imagine a future where labor and management are at odds with one another, and where management ultimately has the upper hand. Of course, once you’ve signed up for a tour of duty on a space freighter or a mine on a moon of Saturn, there’s not much you can do if you decide you’re getting a bum deal once you’re there. The reveal of the callousness of the corporation in OUTLAND didn’t make me nearly as queasy as the similar reveal in ALIEN, however. That’s probably because it’s impossible to imagine that anybody else besides the corporation is behind the mysterious deaths in OUTLAND right from the beginning. Connery thinks there’s something fishy going on from the start, and so immediately the corporation becomes the prime target of suspicion. In ALIEN, on the other hand, there's no reason to suspect the corporation is complicit until deep into the movie when the danger's been heightened significantly.
Once Connery gets on the scent, Boyle doesn’t do much to hide his guilt. Things quickly get violent as Boyle decides that the quickest way to solve the problem is just to eliminate the nosey marshal who isn’t playing along as expected. OUTLAND is often compared to HIGH NOON (1952), and this part of the movie is a big reason why. I was also reminded of 3:10 TO YUMA (1957), and I’m sure there are plenty of other westerns that would fit the pattern as well.
What happens is that Connery decides he won’t roll over. Instead, he’ll stand up to the corrupt powers simply because it's the only way to prove to himself that he's not the useless, cowardly cop everybody thinks he is. So he refuses to back down even when it becomes clear that nobody else will stand with him. The most blatant reference (homage? rip off?) to HIGH NOON comes when Boyle calls for a couple of enforcers to come down on the next supply shuttle. Connery then spends the next several scenes in front of a giant clock counting down the arrival of the shuttle. It’s impossible to think of anything else besides HIGH NOON during this part of the movie, but it’s also a relatively short sequence, so suggestions that OUTLAND is simply “HIGH NOON in space” don’t really ring true to me. It's more like a space mystery/conspiracy thriller with HIGH NOON shoved in the middle.
In any event, this sequence is also one of several that I didn’t totally buy. Connery is supposed to be the supreme legal authority at the mine -- or at least the top cop. (It’s unclear who performs judicial functions, if anybody.) Yet he’s somehow powerless to stop the arrival of a shuttle that he knows is bringing two assassins to kill him. Somebody has to have the authority to shut down the space docks -- if Connery can't use probable cause to petition for that, then who can? And even if the shuttle did end up landing, it should be a trivial exercise to deny the bad guys access to the mine. All of the other marshals are afraid to stand up to the incoming goons. But they know exactly where and when they will be arriving, so three or four guys with space shotguns should be more than enough to keep them pinned down in the shuttle airlock. Connery, however, doesn’t even try any tactics like that. He just sits back and waits for them to enter the mine.
Another thing -- when Connery is asking the workers for help against the arrival of the assassins, one of them turns him down by saying, “You’re supposed to protect us.” Yet Connery is the only marshal in the past year who has even cared about the dangerous drugs being fed to the workers. He’s not trying to take down Boyle just out of some sense of manly obligation to justice -- he’s also protecting the lives and health of all the workers. In HIGH NOON and 3:10 TO YUMA, the townspeople all tell Gary Cooper and Van Heflin that the they (the townspeople) don't have any stake in the fight. But in OUTLAND, the fight very much is the fight of the workers -- it’s Connery who doesn’t really have a stake in the game except professional duty.
I’m not going to go on listing all the little flaws of OUTLAND. I will say that the movie has a 12 year old’s notion of what happens to people when they enter low pressure environments without proper protection. (Spoiler alert: They explode and make a bloody mess.) These scenes alone should qualify OUTLAND for midnight movie status. There are also space prostitutes, improbable fights in pressure suits, some poorly placed rifle shots in sensitive environments, and one of the worst child actors I have ever seen.
Those are the details, though. As I said at the beginning of this post, the broad strokes are interesting. Translating HIGH NOON to outer space could definitely make sense, even if OUTLAND doesn’t fully get there. Connery’s marshal is a pretty neat character, and it doesn’t hurt that he taps in liberally to the tradition of western tough guys. Boyle’s drug pushing scheme is a little cartoonish for my tastes, but here again the overall conflict between productivity and safety is worth exploring.
Back when I was writing about THE BLACK HOLE (1979), I said that part of me wanted to see that movie re-made while the other part of me was sure that any re-make would only be a bigger plate of hash than the movie we already have. With OUTLAND, on the other hand, I think the prospects for a re-make are much brighter. It would have to be handled gently, but it should be easy enough to take the working skeleton of the movie, strip away the parts that haven’t aged well, and beef up the bits that are more interesting. And since very little in the movie is iconic -- except perhaps the wide-screen space helmet designs -- there shouldn’t be much temptation to include anything silly just because people will expect it. (Note: IMDb informs me that an OUTLAND re-make is in fact in some stage of pre-production, which doesn't mean much except that somebody else thinks it's worth another go.)
OUTLAND’s director, Peter Hyams, has never been one of my favorites. I didn’t look up his filmography before I watched this movie, but I have it in front of me now. It’s probably saying everything I need to say that my “favorite” of Peter Hyams’s movies until I watched OUTLAND was probably the Jean Claude van Damme movie TIMECOP (1994). He also directed the surprisingly boring CAPRICORN ONE (1978), in which three astronauts (James Brolin, Sam Watterson, and O.J. Simpson -- wrap your head around that casting if you can) are forced to fake a landing on Mars. In any event, I haven’t made it a habit of pointing out directors I don’t like, but I’m going to be hearing from Peter Hyams again when I watch 2010 (1984). Hopefully it’ll be another in the vein of OUTLAND, and not any of his numerous bad movies.
Two weeks after being assigned to a remote mining outpost on one of Saturn’s moons, space cop Sean Connery begins investigating a string of strange suicides when workers begin offing themselves in gruesome ways. Although there doesn’t seem to be any other explanation for the deaths, the outpost’s doctor soon reveals that the suicides (which everybody says are the kind of thing that “just happens” in deep space) have increased more than ten-fold over the past year.
When an experimental stimulant with deadly side effects turns up in the blood of one victim, Connery investigates the drug dealing underworld of the outpost. The trail leads him straight to the mine’s operator, Peter Boyle. But as Connery gets closer to the truth, his friends begin deserting him while Boyle calls in for reinforcements.
Is it any good?
I didn’t really expect to enjoy OUTLAND very much. Sean Connery is such a big superstar, that I figured any sci-fi movie where he played a space cop would be something I would have heard more about if it were even halfway enjoyable. I’m not really sure how to explain the lack of awareness around the movie since Wikipedia tells me that it’s been available on VHS and DVD for over ten years. But since OUTLAND is in fact at least halfway enjoyable, I can only conclude that this is a case of there being more things in Heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy, Horatio. It makes me wonder what else is out there that nobody has really talked about in ages.
I don’t want to oversell OUTLAND here -- it’s not exactly what I would call a lost gem. It does some of its broad strokes very well, but the details are often less than compelling. The relationship between Connery and most of the other characters -- his wife, the other marshals reporting to him, Peter Boyle’s mine boss -- are all pretty interesting. It’s repeatedly suggested that Connery has been given this assignment because he’s not really fit for any other duty. We never learn any details about his past to justify this, but we do get the sense that nobody thinks he’s that good of a cop.
In fact, Boyle’s drug smuggling operation relies heavily on the apathy or corruptibility of the marshals stationed at the mine. There are only a couple thousand people in the whole place, so secrets aren’t easy to keep. Boyle imports the stimulants to keep his workforce producing at maximum efficiency -- which nets him big bonuses from his bosses. The extravagant suicides (which mostly involve workers exposing themselves to the vacuum of space one way or another) are a side effect of the drug, and over the past year about sixty workers have taken their own lives as a result of the drug.
The other key to Boyle’s scheme is the willingness of his superiors to turn a blind eye to the shady source of his success. There’s a strong anti-corporate undercurrent in OUTLAND which is very similar to that in ALIEN (1979). Both movies imagine a future where labor and management are at odds with one another, and where management ultimately has the upper hand. Of course, once you’ve signed up for a tour of duty on a space freighter or a mine on a moon of Saturn, there’s not much you can do if you decide you’re getting a bum deal once you’re there. The reveal of the callousness of the corporation in OUTLAND didn’t make me nearly as queasy as the similar reveal in ALIEN, however. That’s probably because it’s impossible to imagine that anybody else besides the corporation is behind the mysterious deaths in OUTLAND right from the beginning. Connery thinks there’s something fishy going on from the start, and so immediately the corporation becomes the prime target of suspicion. In ALIEN, on the other hand, there's no reason to suspect the corporation is complicit until deep into the movie when the danger's been heightened significantly.
Once Connery gets on the scent, Boyle doesn’t do much to hide his guilt. Things quickly get violent as Boyle decides that the quickest way to solve the problem is just to eliminate the nosey marshal who isn’t playing along as expected. OUTLAND is often compared to HIGH NOON (1952), and this part of the movie is a big reason why. I was also reminded of 3:10 TO YUMA (1957), and I’m sure there are plenty of other westerns that would fit the pattern as well.
What happens is that Connery decides he won’t roll over. Instead, he’ll stand up to the corrupt powers simply because it's the only way to prove to himself that he's not the useless, cowardly cop everybody thinks he is. So he refuses to back down even when it becomes clear that nobody else will stand with him. The most blatant reference (homage? rip off?) to HIGH NOON comes when Boyle calls for a couple of enforcers to come down on the next supply shuttle. Connery then spends the next several scenes in front of a giant clock counting down the arrival of the shuttle. It’s impossible to think of anything else besides HIGH NOON during this part of the movie, but it’s also a relatively short sequence, so suggestions that OUTLAND is simply “HIGH NOON in space” don’t really ring true to me. It's more like a space mystery/conspiracy thriller with HIGH NOON shoved in the middle.
In any event, this sequence is also one of several that I didn’t totally buy. Connery is supposed to be the supreme legal authority at the mine -- or at least the top cop. (It’s unclear who performs judicial functions, if anybody.) Yet he’s somehow powerless to stop the arrival of a shuttle that he knows is bringing two assassins to kill him. Somebody has to have the authority to shut down the space docks -- if Connery can't use probable cause to petition for that, then who can? And even if the shuttle did end up landing, it should be a trivial exercise to deny the bad guys access to the mine. All of the other marshals are afraid to stand up to the incoming goons. But they know exactly where and when they will be arriving, so three or four guys with space shotguns should be more than enough to keep them pinned down in the shuttle airlock. Connery, however, doesn’t even try any tactics like that. He just sits back and waits for them to enter the mine.
Another thing -- when Connery is asking the workers for help against the arrival of the assassins, one of them turns him down by saying, “You’re supposed to protect us.” Yet Connery is the only marshal in the past year who has even cared about the dangerous drugs being fed to the workers. He’s not trying to take down Boyle just out of some sense of manly obligation to justice -- he’s also protecting the lives and health of all the workers. In HIGH NOON and 3:10 TO YUMA, the townspeople all tell Gary Cooper and Van Heflin that the they (the townspeople) don't have any stake in the fight. But in OUTLAND, the fight very much is the fight of the workers -- it’s Connery who doesn’t really have a stake in the game except professional duty.
I’m not going to go on listing all the little flaws of OUTLAND. I will say that the movie has a 12 year old’s notion of what happens to people when they enter low pressure environments without proper protection. (Spoiler alert: They explode and make a bloody mess.) These scenes alone should qualify OUTLAND for midnight movie status. There are also space prostitutes, improbable fights in pressure suits, some poorly placed rifle shots in sensitive environments, and one of the worst child actors I have ever seen.
Those are the details, though. As I said at the beginning of this post, the broad strokes are interesting. Translating HIGH NOON to outer space could definitely make sense, even if OUTLAND doesn’t fully get there. Connery’s marshal is a pretty neat character, and it doesn’t hurt that he taps in liberally to the tradition of western tough guys. Boyle’s drug pushing scheme is a little cartoonish for my tastes, but here again the overall conflict between productivity and safety is worth exploring.
Back when I was writing about THE BLACK HOLE (1979), I said that part of me wanted to see that movie re-made while the other part of me was sure that any re-make would only be a bigger plate of hash than the movie we already have. With OUTLAND, on the other hand, I think the prospects for a re-make are much brighter. It would have to be handled gently, but it should be easy enough to take the working skeleton of the movie, strip away the parts that haven’t aged well, and beef up the bits that are more interesting. And since very little in the movie is iconic -- except perhaps the wide-screen space helmet designs -- there shouldn’t be much temptation to include anything silly just because people will expect it. (Note: IMDb informs me that an OUTLAND re-make is in fact in some stage of pre-production, which doesn't mean much except that somebody else thinks it's worth another go.)
OUTLAND’s director, Peter Hyams, has never been one of my favorites. I didn’t look up his filmography before I watched this movie, but I have it in front of me now. It’s probably saying everything I need to say that my “favorite” of Peter Hyams’s movies until I watched OUTLAND was probably the Jean Claude van Damme movie TIMECOP (1994). He also directed the surprisingly boring CAPRICORN ONE (1978), in which three astronauts (James Brolin, Sam Watterson, and O.J. Simpson -- wrap your head around that casting if you can) are forced to fake a landing on Mars. In any event, I haven’t made it a habit of pointing out directors I don’t like, but I’m going to be hearing from Peter Hyams again when I watch 2010 (1984). Hopefully it’ll be another in the vein of OUTLAND, and not any of his numerous bad movies.
Monday, January 18, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
1978: BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
What’s it about?
Just as the twelve human colonies are about to sign a peace accord with the hostile alien Cylons, patrol pilots Richard Hatch and Rick “Jessie’s Girl” Springfield stumble upon a sneak attack mustering behind a moon. One of them makes it back to warn the fleet of the imminent attack, but unfortunately only super-suspicious battlestar commander Lorne Greene is in a state of readiness. Simultaneous attacks wipe out both the fleet and the colonies, and just a handful of human survivors band together on 220 spaceships led by Greene’s Battlestar Galactica.
Hunted by the Cylons and running low on resources, the remnants of mankind start searching for a legendary thirteenth colony called Earth. (Sound familiar?) But first they need to find food and fuel, so they make for the nearby planet of Carillon. Upon landing, they make an unexpected discovery -- an opulent casino and resort in the middle of a derelict mining outpost. The insect-like managers of the casino are outwardly friendly and generous, but soon it becomes clear that not all is as it appears. As Lorne Greene’s suspicions mount yet once again, he finds himself opposed by political forces that threaten the safety of the fleet.
Is it any good?
The original BATTLESTAR GALACTICA series seems to be mostly regarded as a goofy cash-in to the STAR WARS (1977) craze. That’s a pretty fair assessment of most of the series -- a lot of the episodes are schlocky “planet of the week” adventures where Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict get into all kinds of scrapes as Apollo and Starbuck. I happen to think the show is plenty fun even at that level, but there are also at least a handful of episodes that are really terrific and tense sci-fi stories as well. This two-hour miniseries aired both on television to kick off the series, and was later theatrically released as well. The first half of it (really everything until the fleet lands on Carillon) definitely falls into higher quality category.
It’s fair to say that the music, the Cylons, and many of the spaceship designs are pretty heavily “inspired” by similar elements in STAR WARS. The space battles look very much like the Death Star assault scenes with slightly less skillful special effects. But let’s be honest here -- nobody ever complained that there are too many space battles in STAR WARS. Derivative or not, the ones here are fun and exciting and are some of the best parts of the miniseries. (Unfortunately, much of the effects footage gets recycled even before the end of the miniseries, which dampens the enjoyment considerably before the two hours are up.) The first hour also moves quickly from crisis to crisis as the Battlestar Galactica deals with the overwhelming alien attack. There are a few moments of emotional anguish too. In one scene, for instance, the crew of the Galactica sits stunned as report after report streams in on monitors of devastating attacks that they’re helpless to prevent. There’s another dark stretch where the civilian survivors on a ship start clamoring for food and information -- neither of which they’ve had for two days.
The Carillon bits, on the other hand, are much more like what the series would mostly become in later episodes. The casino that’s not what it appears is like something out of a STAR TREK episode -- sort of a high concept gee-whiz idea that doesn’t really make sense in the larger context of the show. The human race has just supposedly been completely obliterated, but the first planet they land on is teeming with hundreds of humans laughing, drinking, and playing cards. This part of the miniseries is also where the irrepressible scamp Boxey and his alternately horrifying and hilarious robo-dog Muffy clamp on to the show and refuse to let go. I happen to like a lot of the actors and characters in the original BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, but Boxey is not one of them. The new series is excellent in its own way, but there was nothing particularly wrong with how the original series handled Captain Adama, Apollo, Starbuck, and some of the others. Boxey, however, was a bad idea that should have never been revived. (Luckily, he didn’t stick around long on the new show.)
In some ways, the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA miniseries is actually an inversion of STAR WARS. I have mixed feelings about the first two-thirds of that movie, but I love the tense assault on the Death Star and have admitted that I can sometimes be found watching it over and over again. With BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, the tense and exciting parts come in the first two-thirds -- and they come thick and fast. I could probably watch that section over and over again, while the ending is just extremely disappointing.
Finally, I’m not going to compare the plot of the miniseries too much to the new version of the show, but the biggest difference I noticed is that although the Cylons are robotic in appearance, there’s no indication that they were created by humans. In fact, it seems pretty clear from hints dropped throughout that they are simply meant to be a hostile alien race that has come into conflict with mankind (and probably everyone else they’ve ever met). From what I understand, the series later explains that the Cylons were created by another alien race which then died out, leaving their robot servants and soldiers to find their own way. Another major difference is that there are no “skin jobs” -- no Cylons that look like humans. But there are the Imperious Leaders -- a Cylon model that is more intelligent and cunning, and which serves as the Darth Vader for the series.
Just as the twelve human colonies are about to sign a peace accord with the hostile alien Cylons, patrol pilots Richard Hatch and Rick “Jessie’s Girl” Springfield stumble upon a sneak attack mustering behind a moon. One of them makes it back to warn the fleet of the imminent attack, but unfortunately only super-suspicious battlestar commander Lorne Greene is in a state of readiness. Simultaneous attacks wipe out both the fleet and the colonies, and just a handful of human survivors band together on 220 spaceships led by Greene’s Battlestar Galactica.
Hunted by the Cylons and running low on resources, the remnants of mankind start searching for a legendary thirteenth colony called Earth. (Sound familiar?) But first they need to find food and fuel, so they make for the nearby planet of Carillon. Upon landing, they make an unexpected discovery -- an opulent casino and resort in the middle of a derelict mining outpost. The insect-like managers of the casino are outwardly friendly and generous, but soon it becomes clear that not all is as it appears. As Lorne Greene’s suspicions mount yet once again, he finds himself opposed by political forces that threaten the safety of the fleet.
 |  |
Is it any good?
The original BATTLESTAR GALACTICA series seems to be mostly regarded as a goofy cash-in to the STAR WARS (1977) craze. That’s a pretty fair assessment of most of the series -- a lot of the episodes are schlocky “planet of the week” adventures where Richard Hatch and Dirk Benedict get into all kinds of scrapes as Apollo and Starbuck. I happen to think the show is plenty fun even at that level, but there are also at least a handful of episodes that are really terrific and tense sci-fi stories as well. This two-hour miniseries aired both on television to kick off the series, and was later theatrically released as well. The first half of it (really everything until the fleet lands on Carillon) definitely falls into higher quality category.
It’s fair to say that the music, the Cylons, and many of the spaceship designs are pretty heavily “inspired” by similar elements in STAR WARS. The space battles look very much like the Death Star assault scenes with slightly less skillful special effects. But let’s be honest here -- nobody ever complained that there are too many space battles in STAR WARS. Derivative or not, the ones here are fun and exciting and are some of the best parts of the miniseries. (Unfortunately, much of the effects footage gets recycled even before the end of the miniseries, which dampens the enjoyment considerably before the two hours are up.) The first hour also moves quickly from crisis to crisis as the Battlestar Galactica deals with the overwhelming alien attack. There are a few moments of emotional anguish too. In one scene, for instance, the crew of the Galactica sits stunned as report after report streams in on monitors of devastating attacks that they’re helpless to prevent. There’s another dark stretch where the civilian survivors on a ship start clamoring for food and information -- neither of which they’ve had for two days.
 |  |
The Carillon bits, on the other hand, are much more like what the series would mostly become in later episodes. The casino that’s not what it appears is like something out of a STAR TREK episode -- sort of a high concept gee-whiz idea that doesn’t really make sense in the larger context of the show. The human race has just supposedly been completely obliterated, but the first planet they land on is teeming with hundreds of humans laughing, drinking, and playing cards. This part of the miniseries is also where the irrepressible scamp Boxey and his alternately horrifying and hilarious robo-dog Muffy clamp on to the show and refuse to let go. I happen to like a lot of the actors and characters in the original BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, but Boxey is not one of them. The new series is excellent in its own way, but there was nothing particularly wrong with how the original series handled Captain Adama, Apollo, Starbuck, and some of the others. Boxey, however, was a bad idea that should have never been revived. (Luckily, he didn’t stick around long on the new show.)
In some ways, the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA miniseries is actually an inversion of STAR WARS. I have mixed feelings about the first two-thirds of that movie, but I love the tense assault on the Death Star and have admitted that I can sometimes be found watching it over and over again. With BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, the tense and exciting parts come in the first two-thirds -- and they come thick and fast. I could probably watch that section over and over again, while the ending is just extremely disappointing.
 |  |
Finally, I’m not going to compare the plot of the miniseries too much to the new version of the show, but the biggest difference I noticed is that although the Cylons are robotic in appearance, there’s no indication that they were created by humans. In fact, it seems pretty clear from hints dropped throughout that they are simply meant to be a hostile alien race that has come into conflict with mankind (and probably everyone else they’ve ever met). From what I understand, the series later explains that the Cylons were created by another alien race which then died out, leaving their robot servants and soldiers to find their own way. Another major difference is that there are no “skin jobs” -- no Cylons that look like humans. But there are the Imperious Leaders -- a Cylon model that is more intelligent and cunning, and which serves as the Darth Vader for the series.
 |  |
Monday, October 19, 2009
1977: STAR WARS
What’s it about?
A couple of robots escape from a space battle with sensitive data that could help a scrappy band of rebels destroy a giant weapon called the Death Star. The robots crash land on a desert planet, where they hook up with a young moisture farmer (who dreams of space heroics) and a grizzled old hermit played by Alec Guinness (who hopes to teach the youngster an old martial arts philosophy called “the Force”).
A young Harrison Ford and an alien who looks like Bigfoot agree to transport the fugitives and the secret plans to the rebel base. But first they must rescue one of the rebellion’s leaders (a feisty princess) from deep inside the Death Star (a moon-sized space station that destroys entire planets) and have a quick electric sword fight with top bad guy Darth Vader (a black-helmeted mystic voiced by James Earl Jones). After all that’s done, the rebellion uses the captured plans to launch a last-ditch attack against the Death Star before their secret headquarters is blasted into oblivion.
Is it any good?
I said at the very beginning of this project that I was going to focus on less well-known movies instead of the ones that everybody knows about. That’s still true -- I’m still watching at least one movie that I haven’t seen yet for each year and still doing my best to dig a little deeper to find them. But I have known for a long time now that I was going to write something about STAR WARS. Even if I had nothing to say myself, it would at least give other people a chance to say whatever they wanted. Because, as you all know, everybody has an opinion on STAR WARS.
The version that I just finished watching is the DVD of the original theatrical version (as opposed to the special edition with additional footage that came out in 1997). I picked this version on purpose -- not because I think it’s “better”, but because it’s practically impossible for me to watch the special edition without playing a (very distracting) game of “spot the new footage”.
Like most folks my age, I watched STAR WARS a lot as a kid. It was on television every few months, and at some point my folks taped one of those broadcasts so that we could watch it whenever we wanted on long summer days. (We had no Nintendo in my house, incidentally.) I was in high school when the special edition version was released to theaters, and my friends and I naturally all went, since none of us had ever had the chance to see it on the big screen. And then, after that -- nothing. Except for a snippet here and there on television, I didn’t watch STAR WARS again for ten years. I did see a couple of the prequel movies (one in a second-run theater and one on DVD), but after 1997 I left the original trilogy alone for a decade.
The ten-year gap was at least partly on purpose. After watching something so many times during such formative years, I felt like STAR WARS was no longer just a movie to me. It’s a rare experience that I can remember having at many different points in my life. Watching STAR WARS had become like an archaeological expedition -- I could use the movie as a prism to look back into my past and remember how I felt at different stages of growing up. And for some reason, I wanted to put a rest to that. Without being too melodramatic about it, I suppose I packed up STAR WARS with the rest of my childhood and started looking for new experiences instead.
Until, that is, one fateful night in a hotel room in Ventura, California. Flipping around the cable stations, I came across the very beginning of STAR WARS on HBO. It was totally unplanned, but it had been ten years since I had last seen it and I decided right then that enough time had passed. I could watch it again with an uncritical eye and judge its merits as a mere movie. The result? I didn’t much like it.
I liked parts of it, of course. I couldn’t deny that the assault on the Death Star was an amazing fifteen minutes of cinema, and some of the screwball chemistry between Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher was fun. But by and large, I was not impressed by the simple plot, flat characters, and borderline nonsensical events. I could see why Alec Guinness had asked George Lucas to kill him off. Yet, watching it again now, I can’t help but think I completely missed the point in that hotel room.
Of course, things are different now. For the past nine months, I have almost literally watched nothing else besides science fiction movies from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. A couple entries ago, I said that I had this secret hypothesis that science fiction could be divided into pre-STAR WARS and post-STAR WARS. I don’t really think that’s true anymore, but it is certainly true that there is nothing else prior to 1977 that looks or even feels even remotely like STAR WARS. George Lucas didn’t invent the space opera, but he made it look absolutely incredible.
One of the most interesting things about STAR WARS (in the context of the popular sci-fi flicks that came before it) is that it isn’t designed to make you think. It has no specific message or cautionary tale to deliver. George Lucas famously cribbed from Joseph Campbell’s work on the monomyth when he was working on the movie, but any “meaning” in the movie is vague and mushy. This is a big departure from movies like PLANET OF THE APES (1968) or 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) or A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) or even CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), where all the spectacle and circumstance seem crafted specifically to make you ponder the nature of humanity (or something equally heavy).
STAR WARS is entirely an adventure -- and it’s an adventure in a startling universe. The Mos Eisley cantina scene alone contains more surprising aliens than the rest of sci-fi cinema had managed to conjure up in the previous eighty years. The same holds true for the other details of the sci-fi world -- the giant skeleton of some extinct creature in the Tatooine desert, the glimpses of banthas being ridden by sand people, the brief allusions to the Galactic Senate by the Imperial brass, the battered and dirty ships of the rebellion, and so on.
STAR WARS is a movie that is just full of stuff -- much of it half-realized or barely mentioned. Even the concepts of Jedi knights and the Force itself are undeveloped here. I don’t think this is a bad thing though. Much of what I loved about STAR WARS as a kid were these tantalizing glimpses at a world beyond. It was a few years before I saw any of the sequels, and I know that I wanted to know more about everything in the world. (Most of all, I wanted to see more banthas.) In some ways, the sequels and the special editions ruin some of this feeling of wonder and excitement.
On the other hand, as I was watching this time, I was surprised how much my knowledge of the rest of the series gave more meaning to certain events. I found it very hard to identify anything redeeming about THE PHANTOM MENACE and ATTACK OF THE CLONES when I saw them (never saw REVENGE OF THE SITH), but I was aware this time that knowing what Obi Wan Kenobi was like back in his prime made his appearance here as an old man all that more meaningful. And his acquiescence to death at the hands of Darth Vader was something that never ever made any sense to me as a kid or teenager. It’s only in knowing what Obi Wan knows about the relationship between himself and Darth Vader, and between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, that it actually makes sense.
So STAR WARS is pretty well ruined for me as a movie, from a combination of individual factors, cultural factors, and George Lucas specific factors. From my point of view, we’ve all collaborated to turn a perfectly decent movie into... what exactly? Something more than a movie, I suppose, and something seemingly completely unique. Maybe generations from now or in countries somehow untouched by American culture, folks will think of STAR WARS as just another movie. But for me at least, I don’t think that kind of assessment is possible at all.
What else happened this year?
More entries to come! Stick around and find out!
A couple of robots escape from a space battle with sensitive data that could help a scrappy band of rebels destroy a giant weapon called the Death Star. The robots crash land on a desert planet, where they hook up with a young moisture farmer (who dreams of space heroics) and a grizzled old hermit played by Alec Guinness (who hopes to teach the youngster an old martial arts philosophy called “the Force”).
A young Harrison Ford and an alien who looks like Bigfoot agree to transport the fugitives and the secret plans to the rebel base. But first they must rescue one of the rebellion’s leaders (a feisty princess) from deep inside the Death Star (a moon-sized space station that destroys entire planets) and have a quick electric sword fight with top bad guy Darth Vader (a black-helmeted mystic voiced by James Earl Jones). After all that’s done, the rebellion uses the captured plans to launch a last-ditch attack against the Death Star before their secret headquarters is blasted into oblivion.
Is it any good?
I said at the very beginning of this project that I was going to focus on less well-known movies instead of the ones that everybody knows about. That’s still true -- I’m still watching at least one movie that I haven’t seen yet for each year and still doing my best to dig a little deeper to find them. But I have known for a long time now that I was going to write something about STAR WARS. Even if I had nothing to say myself, it would at least give other people a chance to say whatever they wanted. Because, as you all know, everybody has an opinion on STAR WARS.
The version that I just finished watching is the DVD of the original theatrical version (as opposed to the special edition with additional footage that came out in 1997). I picked this version on purpose -- not because I think it’s “better”, but because it’s practically impossible for me to watch the special edition without playing a (very distracting) game of “spot the new footage”.
Like most folks my age, I watched STAR WARS a lot as a kid. It was on television every few months, and at some point my folks taped one of those broadcasts so that we could watch it whenever we wanted on long summer days. (We had no Nintendo in my house, incidentally.) I was in high school when the special edition version was released to theaters, and my friends and I naturally all went, since none of us had ever had the chance to see it on the big screen. And then, after that -- nothing. Except for a snippet here and there on television, I didn’t watch STAR WARS again for ten years. I did see a couple of the prequel movies (one in a second-run theater and one on DVD), but after 1997 I left the original trilogy alone for a decade.
The ten-year gap was at least partly on purpose. After watching something so many times during such formative years, I felt like STAR WARS was no longer just a movie to me. It’s a rare experience that I can remember having at many different points in my life. Watching STAR WARS had become like an archaeological expedition -- I could use the movie as a prism to look back into my past and remember how I felt at different stages of growing up. And for some reason, I wanted to put a rest to that. Without being too melodramatic about it, I suppose I packed up STAR WARS with the rest of my childhood and started looking for new experiences instead.
Until, that is, one fateful night in a hotel room in Ventura, California. Flipping around the cable stations, I came across the very beginning of STAR WARS on HBO. It was totally unplanned, but it had been ten years since I had last seen it and I decided right then that enough time had passed. I could watch it again with an uncritical eye and judge its merits as a mere movie. The result? I didn’t much like it.
I liked parts of it, of course. I couldn’t deny that the assault on the Death Star was an amazing fifteen minutes of cinema, and some of the screwball chemistry between Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher was fun. But by and large, I was not impressed by the simple plot, flat characters, and borderline nonsensical events. I could see why Alec Guinness had asked George Lucas to kill him off. Yet, watching it again now, I can’t help but think I completely missed the point in that hotel room.
Of course, things are different now. For the past nine months, I have almost literally watched nothing else besides science fiction movies from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. A couple entries ago, I said that I had this secret hypothesis that science fiction could be divided into pre-STAR WARS and post-STAR WARS. I don’t really think that’s true anymore, but it is certainly true that there is nothing else prior to 1977 that looks or even feels even remotely like STAR WARS. George Lucas didn’t invent the space opera, but he made it look absolutely incredible.
One of the most interesting things about STAR WARS (in the context of the popular sci-fi flicks that came before it) is that it isn’t designed to make you think. It has no specific message or cautionary tale to deliver. George Lucas famously cribbed from Joseph Campbell’s work on the monomyth when he was working on the movie, but any “meaning” in the movie is vague and mushy. This is a big departure from movies like PLANET OF THE APES (1968) or 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) or A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) or even CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977), where all the spectacle and circumstance seem crafted specifically to make you ponder the nature of humanity (or something equally heavy).
STAR WARS is entirely an adventure -- and it’s an adventure in a startling universe. The Mos Eisley cantina scene alone contains more surprising aliens than the rest of sci-fi cinema had managed to conjure up in the previous eighty years. The same holds true for the other details of the sci-fi world -- the giant skeleton of some extinct creature in the Tatooine desert, the glimpses of banthas being ridden by sand people, the brief allusions to the Galactic Senate by the Imperial brass, the battered and dirty ships of the rebellion, and so on.
STAR WARS is a movie that is just full of stuff -- much of it half-realized or barely mentioned. Even the concepts of Jedi knights and the Force itself are undeveloped here. I don’t think this is a bad thing though. Much of what I loved about STAR WARS as a kid were these tantalizing glimpses at a world beyond. It was a few years before I saw any of the sequels, and I know that I wanted to know more about everything in the world. (Most of all, I wanted to see more banthas.) In some ways, the sequels and the special editions ruin some of this feeling of wonder and excitement.
On the other hand, as I was watching this time, I was surprised how much my knowledge of the rest of the series gave more meaning to certain events. I found it very hard to identify anything redeeming about THE PHANTOM MENACE and ATTACK OF THE CLONES when I saw them (never saw REVENGE OF THE SITH), but I was aware this time that knowing what Obi Wan Kenobi was like back in his prime made his appearance here as an old man all that more meaningful. And his acquiescence to death at the hands of Darth Vader was something that never ever made any sense to me as a kid or teenager. It’s only in knowing what Obi Wan knows about the relationship between himself and Darth Vader, and between Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, that it actually makes sense.
So STAR WARS is pretty well ruined for me as a movie, from a combination of individual factors, cultural factors, and George Lucas specific factors. From my point of view, we’ve all collaborated to turn a perfectly decent movie into... what exactly? Something more than a movie, I suppose, and something seemingly completely unique. Maybe generations from now or in countries somehow untouched by American culture, folks will think of STAR WARS as just another movie. But for me at least, I don’t think that kind of assessment is possible at all.
What else happened this year?
More entries to come! Stick around and find out!
Thursday, October 15, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1976: IN THE DUST OF THE STARS
What’s it about?
A space-faring civilization sends a rocket mission in response to a distress signal from an unexplored planet. Arriving several years after the signal was sent, the crew lands safely on a strange and seemingly peaceful planet, but only after some emergency maneuvers during landing. After attending a party thrown by the local leader, most of the crew is strangely in favor of just leaving and starting the years long journey back to their home.
The sole member of the crew who stayed home from the party begins to suspect that there are some mind control shenanigans at work. He takes a probe out to investigate, and luckily discovers a shaft leading down underground -- where it is quickly apparent that an entire race of people is enslaved. It was these slaves who sent the distress signal, but it seems unlikely the small crew of the rocket can help them much -- especially after one of them is captured and tortured by the oppressive surface dwellers.
Is it any good?
This is a pretty unremarkable sci-fi flick, so I wasn’t originally planning to write about it. But it was produced by a Soviet bloc country (the third one I’ve seen from East Germany so far) and that alone should be worth remarking on. So I figured there’d be no harm in doing a short write-up and trying to find something to talk about.
IN THE DUST OF THE STARS feels like an extended episode of STAR TREK. A rocket crew lands on a planet and encounters a mystery, some cajoling, some deception, some threats, a horrible secret, and then some violence. The movie isn’t all that long, and there are some weird interludes that feel like padding (such as a lengthy nude dance by one of the mentally blocked crew members), so it’s easy to imagine the whole thing cut down to forty-five minutes.
I’m always kind of confused when I run across sci-fi movies like this. I expect science fiction movies to be “big” in some way. The bigness is often literal -- giant monsters always give a feeling of grandeur to things. Or the bigness can simply be that the entire Earth is threatened by destruction, or that there is some appropriately expansive theme or spectacle playing out. Of course, there are plenty of small science fiction stories -- they don’t all have to be epic. But I suppose I feel like these kind of small mysteries are more “television sized” for some reason.
Part of the reason for the small feeling here is that the story is set in some completely made-up galaxy and Earth is never mentioned at all. Both the planet where the rocket comes from and the one where it lands are made-up sci-fi worlds. There’s no sense that any of this will ever affect the Earth at all -- and not even any sense that the races in question are related to or descended from Earth folks. (Everyone does look 100% human though.)
I’m sure that using completely fantastical settings was the safest way to make sci-fi in the Soviet bloc. Talking about real nations would mean following the party line (whatever it might be that day), but putting your action on some distant world with no relation to Earth would help isolate the film makers from any criticism or repercussions if they did want to say anything subversive. On the other hand, IN THE DUST OF THE STARS is not really subversive of anything at all. The anti-slavery message is one that works equally well in communist and western societies. (These aren’t metaphorical wage-slaves after all. They are just the normal chain gang kind that everybody objects to.) There’s some disapproval of decadent lifestyles as well, which hardly seems like it would be controversial on groundbreaking on either side of the Iron Curtain. The harmless clowning in IVAN VASIELIVICH: BACK TO THE FUTURE (1973) seems more likely to subvert the party than anything in this movie.
Things do get a bit “bigger” towards the end of the movie. The dilemma that the rocket crew finds themselves in is pretty interesting, though it’s not exactly spelled out. The crew consists of four women and two men, and obviously their numbers are not enough to do much against the entrenched aristocracy. The captain believes that they are honor-bound to stay and help the slaves resist their captors -- even though it will take many years (or generations) until they can be free again. The rest of the crew doesn’t believe they have any such obligation. This is a question worth wrestling over, and the movie doesn’t deliver any easy answers in the end.
There’s also a bit of appealing weirdness about the movie. The alien party is both futuristic and hedonistic -- the better to seduce the straight-arrow crew members, I suppose. And weird bits like the long nude dance I alluded to before actually add a bit of an off-balance feeling to the movie. So even though the plot could probably be compressed into television size, some of the atmosphere would probably be lost along the way. Still, if anybody is actually interested in Soviet bloc sci-fi movies, I would recommend THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE (1967), EOLOMEA (1972), and SOLYARIS (1972) before you even think about watching this one.
A space-faring civilization sends a rocket mission in response to a distress signal from an unexplored planet. Arriving several years after the signal was sent, the crew lands safely on a strange and seemingly peaceful planet, but only after some emergency maneuvers during landing. After attending a party thrown by the local leader, most of the crew is strangely in favor of just leaving and starting the years long journey back to their home.
The sole member of the crew who stayed home from the party begins to suspect that there are some mind control shenanigans at work. He takes a probe out to investigate, and luckily discovers a shaft leading down underground -- where it is quickly apparent that an entire race of people is enslaved. It was these slaves who sent the distress signal, but it seems unlikely the small crew of the rocket can help them much -- especially after one of them is captured and tortured by the oppressive surface dwellers.
Is it any good?
This is a pretty unremarkable sci-fi flick, so I wasn’t originally planning to write about it. But it was produced by a Soviet bloc country (the third one I’ve seen from East Germany so far) and that alone should be worth remarking on. So I figured there’d be no harm in doing a short write-up and trying to find something to talk about.
IN THE DUST OF THE STARS feels like an extended episode of STAR TREK. A rocket crew lands on a planet and encounters a mystery, some cajoling, some deception, some threats, a horrible secret, and then some violence. The movie isn’t all that long, and there are some weird interludes that feel like padding (such as a lengthy nude dance by one of the mentally blocked crew members), so it’s easy to imagine the whole thing cut down to forty-five minutes.
I’m always kind of confused when I run across sci-fi movies like this. I expect science fiction movies to be “big” in some way. The bigness is often literal -- giant monsters always give a feeling of grandeur to things. Or the bigness can simply be that the entire Earth is threatened by destruction, or that there is some appropriately expansive theme or spectacle playing out. Of course, there are plenty of small science fiction stories -- they don’t all have to be epic. But I suppose I feel like these kind of small mysteries are more “television sized” for some reason.
Part of the reason for the small feeling here is that the story is set in some completely made-up galaxy and Earth is never mentioned at all. Both the planet where the rocket comes from and the one where it lands are made-up sci-fi worlds. There’s no sense that any of this will ever affect the Earth at all -- and not even any sense that the races in question are related to or descended from Earth folks. (Everyone does look 100% human though.)
I’m sure that using completely fantastical settings was the safest way to make sci-fi in the Soviet bloc. Talking about real nations would mean following the party line (whatever it might be that day), but putting your action on some distant world with no relation to Earth would help isolate the film makers from any criticism or repercussions if they did want to say anything subversive. On the other hand, IN THE DUST OF THE STARS is not really subversive of anything at all. The anti-slavery message is one that works equally well in communist and western societies. (These aren’t metaphorical wage-slaves after all. They are just the normal chain gang kind that everybody objects to.) There’s some disapproval of decadent lifestyles as well, which hardly seems like it would be controversial on groundbreaking on either side of the Iron Curtain. The harmless clowning in IVAN VASIELIVICH: BACK TO THE FUTURE (1973) seems more likely to subvert the party than anything in this movie.
Things do get a bit “bigger” towards the end of the movie. The dilemma that the rocket crew finds themselves in is pretty interesting, though it’s not exactly spelled out. The crew consists of four women and two men, and obviously their numbers are not enough to do much against the entrenched aristocracy. The captain believes that they are honor-bound to stay and help the slaves resist their captors -- even though it will take many years (or generations) until they can be free again. The rest of the crew doesn’t believe they have any such obligation. This is a question worth wrestling over, and the movie doesn’t deliver any easy answers in the end.
There’s also a bit of appealing weirdness about the movie. The alien party is both futuristic and hedonistic -- the better to seduce the straight-arrow crew members, I suppose. And weird bits like the long nude dance I alluded to before actually add a bit of an off-balance feeling to the movie. So even though the plot could probably be compressed into television size, some of the atmosphere would probably be lost along the way. Still, if anybody is actually interested in Soviet bloc sci-fi movies, I would recommend THE END OF AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE (1967), EOLOMEA (1972), and SOLYARIS (1972) before you even think about watching this one.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
1976: THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH
What’s it about?
Space alien David Bowie lands on Earth, files for nine lucrative patents, and becomes impossibly wealthy. His company, World Enterprises, makes futuristic consumer gadgets like self-developing film and metal balls that play music. But one day while traveling incognito, he faints on an elevator and ends up in a relationship with a hotel maid.
Meanwhile, college professor Rip Torn comes to work for World Enterprises on its new private space program. He begins to suspect that Bowie is not quite what he appears to be, and uses a hidden X-ray camera to determine that he’s not human. But just as Bowie is about to fly back to his family in outer space, the government starts hounding him for being too successful.
Is it any good?
I haven’t really decided whether I like David Bowie as an actor or not. He seems like the kind of guy you hire not so much for what he can do, but for who he is. (Kind of like Andre the Giant or Jenny McCarthy.) I don’t think he necessarily does a bad job as the alien visitor in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, but it seems pretty obvious that he was picked for the role at least partly because he’s a weird guy who had pretended to be an alien before in his albums and live performances. I can’t deny that David Bowie is a massively talented songwriter and musician -- but, look, there was a guy at my high school who told everybody for a year that he was a vampire, but that still doesn’t make him the right guy to play Dracula.
Then again, David Bowie is not really a problem in this movie. I can’t help wonder if another actor might have been better, but the alien we get is serviceable enough. The bigger problem is that so much of the movie is impossible to understand -- at least the first time through, but some of it is still obscure after more than one viewing. So much information is withheld for so long that a lot of interesting things just go by unnoticed.
The movie starts with Bowie’s arrival on Earth -- except we don’t see his spaceship or much of anything that suggests he’s any different from any drifter. He just starts out walking down a hill with no explanation of who he is, where he has come from, or why he is on Earth. And it’s quite a while into the movie before any of those questions are answered -- and one of the crucial ones (why he is there) never is at all.
I read the Walter Tevis novel that this movie is based on a couple of years ago, so I knew generally what to expect. I already knew, for instance, that when Bowie walks to a little town and sells a ring to a jeweler for twenty bucks that he is taking the first tiny step towards building up the seed money that he will use to found his corporate empire. But in the movie, there is no apparent reason for why we are watching such incredibly mundane things, and frankly the whole beginning is pretty boring as a result. The book, I should say, is not much better at this point at giving explanations. But at least there is some mystery about who the visitor is, and there is an awareness that he is somehow fundamentally different from everybody else. But since there’s no voiceover narration in the movie, we only get hints about that.
The same kind of problem persists throughout the movie. Characters are introduced (like Rip Torn’s college professor) with no indication of how they will fit into the story, so everything they do at first just seems meaningless. Once you know who they are and what role they play, it’s clear that there were key little details even in those early scenes that were providing information, but there was just not enough context to understand it. I’m sure that THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH is a much better movie the second time you see it -- or perhaps even the third or fourth. But there are parts that I’m not sure I would ever understand.
For instance, the government’s interest in Bowie is inexplicable. (At least, I think those characters represent the government. I can’t remember if they ever say who they are or not. If not, I suppose they might represent some competing business interest.) A couple of shady guys talk about how Bowie’s corporation is too innovative. Then they kidnap Bowie one hour before his spaceship is about to take off, throw some of his associates out of a high rise window, and lock Bowie up in a hotel where they perform medical tests on him. Why? Do they suspect he’s an alien? Do they just think his company is too successful? I don’t know.
And about that spaceship. In the novel, it’s explained clearly that the visitor was sent from his planet to Earth using the very last scraps of available fuel. The planet is dying and the inhabitants are completely out of energy and almost out of water. The visitor’s mission is to build up wealth on Earth (which they have learned about from television broadcasts), construct a spaceship, and return to his home planet with the means of salvation or escape. The visitor is on Earth in a last-ditch effort to save his race -- and that makes every moment of delay a matter of life and death.
None of this is explained in the movie, except for vague references to a “drought” on Bowie’s home planet and some brief shots of his family apparently dying. We know that Bowie is trying to get back to his planet, but so many key details are missing that it doesn’t seem to mean anything. Just following the movie itself, I would have guessed that Bowie is only trying to get back to his family -- presumably to die with them. Which of course raises the question of why he ever left in the first place.
As I said before, there are lots of neat things throughout the movie, but they are so subtle that they mostly just slip right by unnoticed. For instance, Bowie hires an actor who looks exactly like himself to play the father figure in his company’s commercials. The reason for this is that his wife watches the broadcasts on her planet, so she is able to see her husband in the commercials. We actually see this happen once, but at the time it just flew right over my head and I didn’t realize what the scene was supposed to be showing until I was skimming through the movie again to grab screenshots. There are also some just plain weird things that happen that are never explained either. At one point, a car that Bowie is riding in seems to travel back in time. Or, at least, he looks out the window and sees some folks from pioneer days and the folks from pioneer days look back in amazement at the car. But nobody else in the car is aware of it. What does it mean? Why does it happen? I have no idea. (Also, it’s just kind of dumb.)
The guy who directed this movie is Nicholas Roeg. He’s probably most famous for THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH and the artsy quasi-horror flick DON’T LOOK NOW (1973). (People of a certain age may also know him -- and possibly fear him -- from his 1990 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s THE WITCHES.) I didn’t really enjoy DON’T LOOK NOW all that much either when I saw it a few years ago. I don’t remember exactly what I didn’t like, but I think I had similar problems as the ones I have with THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH -- it’s just unnecessarily confusing and weird, boring in parts, emotionally distant, and occasionally ridiculous. I eventually read the Daphne du Maurier story that DON’T LOOK NOW is based on, and I enjoyed the written version pretty well. So I guess my advice is that if you are going to watch a Nicholas Roeg movie from the 1970s, read whatever it’s based on first and then just prepared to be kind of disappointed anyway. Then maybe try watching it a second time a few days later to see if you like it any better.
What else happened in 1976?
-- A man turns fugitive on his birthday to escape death in a society that kills anyone over thirty in the stone cold classic LOGAN'S RUN.
-- The East Germans return with another tale of communists in space in THE DUST OF THE STARS.
-- Yul Brynner also returns for a cameo in WESTWORLD's lesser known sequel, FUTUREWORLD.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1976...
In my opinion, LOGAN'S RUN is the only one from this year that's better than average. But it's also my opinion that it's one of the greatest science fiction flicks ever made.
Space alien David Bowie lands on Earth, files for nine lucrative patents, and becomes impossibly wealthy. His company, World Enterprises, makes futuristic consumer gadgets like self-developing film and metal balls that play music. But one day while traveling incognito, he faints on an elevator and ends up in a relationship with a hotel maid.
Meanwhile, college professor Rip Torn comes to work for World Enterprises on its new private space program. He begins to suspect that Bowie is not quite what he appears to be, and uses a hidden X-ray camera to determine that he’s not human. But just as Bowie is about to fly back to his family in outer space, the government starts hounding him for being too successful.
Is it any good?
I haven’t really decided whether I like David Bowie as an actor or not. He seems like the kind of guy you hire not so much for what he can do, but for who he is. (Kind of like Andre the Giant or Jenny McCarthy.) I don’t think he necessarily does a bad job as the alien visitor in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, but it seems pretty obvious that he was picked for the role at least partly because he’s a weird guy who had pretended to be an alien before in his albums and live performances. I can’t deny that David Bowie is a massively talented songwriter and musician -- but, look, there was a guy at my high school who told everybody for a year that he was a vampire, but that still doesn’t make him the right guy to play Dracula.
Then again, David Bowie is not really a problem in this movie. I can’t help wonder if another actor might have been better, but the alien we get is serviceable enough. The bigger problem is that so much of the movie is impossible to understand -- at least the first time through, but some of it is still obscure after more than one viewing. So much information is withheld for so long that a lot of interesting things just go by unnoticed.
The movie starts with Bowie’s arrival on Earth -- except we don’t see his spaceship or much of anything that suggests he’s any different from any drifter. He just starts out walking down a hill with no explanation of who he is, where he has come from, or why he is on Earth. And it’s quite a while into the movie before any of those questions are answered -- and one of the crucial ones (why he is there) never is at all.
I read the Walter Tevis novel that this movie is based on a couple of years ago, so I knew generally what to expect. I already knew, for instance, that when Bowie walks to a little town and sells a ring to a jeweler for twenty bucks that he is taking the first tiny step towards building up the seed money that he will use to found his corporate empire. But in the movie, there is no apparent reason for why we are watching such incredibly mundane things, and frankly the whole beginning is pretty boring as a result. The book, I should say, is not much better at this point at giving explanations. But at least there is some mystery about who the visitor is, and there is an awareness that he is somehow fundamentally different from everybody else. But since there’s no voiceover narration in the movie, we only get hints about that.
The same kind of problem persists throughout the movie. Characters are introduced (like Rip Torn’s college professor) with no indication of how they will fit into the story, so everything they do at first just seems meaningless. Once you know who they are and what role they play, it’s clear that there were key little details even in those early scenes that were providing information, but there was just not enough context to understand it. I’m sure that THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH is a much better movie the second time you see it -- or perhaps even the third or fourth. But there are parts that I’m not sure I would ever understand.
For instance, the government’s interest in Bowie is inexplicable. (At least, I think those characters represent the government. I can’t remember if they ever say who they are or not. If not, I suppose they might represent some competing business interest.) A couple of shady guys talk about how Bowie’s corporation is too innovative. Then they kidnap Bowie one hour before his spaceship is about to take off, throw some of his associates out of a high rise window, and lock Bowie up in a hotel where they perform medical tests on him. Why? Do they suspect he’s an alien? Do they just think his company is too successful? I don’t know.
And about that spaceship. In the novel, it’s explained clearly that the visitor was sent from his planet to Earth using the very last scraps of available fuel. The planet is dying and the inhabitants are completely out of energy and almost out of water. The visitor’s mission is to build up wealth on Earth (which they have learned about from television broadcasts), construct a spaceship, and return to his home planet with the means of salvation or escape. The visitor is on Earth in a last-ditch effort to save his race -- and that makes every moment of delay a matter of life and death.
None of this is explained in the movie, except for vague references to a “drought” on Bowie’s home planet and some brief shots of his family apparently dying. We know that Bowie is trying to get back to his planet, but so many key details are missing that it doesn’t seem to mean anything. Just following the movie itself, I would have guessed that Bowie is only trying to get back to his family -- presumably to die with them. Which of course raises the question of why he ever left in the first place.
As I said before, there are lots of neat things throughout the movie, but they are so subtle that they mostly just slip right by unnoticed. For instance, Bowie hires an actor who looks exactly like himself to play the father figure in his company’s commercials. The reason for this is that his wife watches the broadcasts on her planet, so she is able to see her husband in the commercials. We actually see this happen once, but at the time it just flew right over my head and I didn’t realize what the scene was supposed to be showing until I was skimming through the movie again to grab screenshots. There are also some just plain weird things that happen that are never explained either. At one point, a car that Bowie is riding in seems to travel back in time. Or, at least, he looks out the window and sees some folks from pioneer days and the folks from pioneer days look back in amazement at the car. But nobody else in the car is aware of it. What does it mean? Why does it happen? I have no idea. (Also, it’s just kind of dumb.)
The guy who directed this movie is Nicholas Roeg. He’s probably most famous for THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH and the artsy quasi-horror flick DON’T LOOK NOW (1973). (People of a certain age may also know him -- and possibly fear him -- from his 1990 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s THE WITCHES.) I didn’t really enjoy DON’T LOOK NOW all that much either when I saw it a few years ago. I don’t remember exactly what I didn’t like, but I think I had similar problems as the ones I have with THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH -- it’s just unnecessarily confusing and weird, boring in parts, emotionally distant, and occasionally ridiculous. I eventually read the Daphne du Maurier story that DON’T LOOK NOW is based on, and I enjoyed the written version pretty well. So I guess my advice is that if you are going to watch a Nicholas Roeg movie from the 1970s, read whatever it’s based on first and then just prepared to be kind of disappointed anyway. Then maybe try watching it a second time a few days later to see if you like it any better.
What else happened in 1976?
-- A man turns fugitive on his birthday to escape death in a society that kills anyone over thirty in the stone cold classic LOGAN'S RUN.
-- The East Germans return with another tale of communists in space in THE DUST OF THE STARS.
-- Yul Brynner also returns for a cameo in WESTWORLD's lesser known sequel, FUTUREWORLD.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1976...
In my opinion, LOGAN'S RUN is the only one from this year that's better than average. But it's also my opinion that it's one of the greatest science fiction flicks ever made.
Monday, August 31, 2009
1973: FANTASTIC PLANET
What’s it about?
On an alien planet, a race of blue-skinned, semi-reptilian giants called “Traags” treat tiny humans (or “Oms”) as both pets and pests. One young Traag girl in particular finds a wild Om baby whose mother has just been killed. The Traag girl takes the Om home as a pet, and he grows up as a tortured plaything. However, he is also able to listen in on the automatic lessons intended for the Traag girl, and so becomes a highly educated Om.
Eventually, the Om boy escapes and falls in with a colony of wild Oms living in a park. Their life is rough but tenable -- at least until the Traags recommence their regular program to cull the wild Om pests. While fighting back, the Oms kill one of the Traags, which only makes things worse. Led by the educated boy, the only hope for Om survival is to steal Traag rocket technology so they can escape the planet once and for all.
Is it any good?
Oddly, some of the most difficult movies to write about are the ones that are the most unique. FANTASTIC PLANET is the earliest animated sci-fi feature film that I’m aware of, but I have to assume that by 1973 that there were plenty of Saturday morning sci-fi cartoon shows. And, if nothing else, there were certainly Marvin the Martian and Duck Dodgers shorts. But as far as feature films go -- and feature films presumably for adults -- there seem to be hardly any before FANTASTIC PLANET.
It also doesn’t help that the animation of FANTASTIC PLANET doesn’t look much like any other cartoons I’m familiar with. The prevailing style for at least the past seventy years has been dominated by the bright colors and clear lines of the Disney or Warner Bros. cartoons. There are exceptions, of course -- such as Terry Gilliam’s animation work for the various Monty Python projects around this same time. FANTASTIC PLANET, with its stiff compositions and pencil shading, is another.
The pace and structure of the movie doesn’t quite follow the sci-fi norm either. The movie is constructed out of many vignettes of varying importance -- many of them simply document the changing seasons (though they are very weird seasons) or other natural phenomenon on the alien planet. FANTASTIC PLANET has at times almost a neorealist feel to it -- as though it’s meandering through unremarkable incidents in unremarkable lives. This is a pretty unusual way to approach science fiction, though not necessarily totally unique. In retrospect, THE SEED OF MAN (1969) seemed to be doing a similar thing at times -- if I’d realized it at the time, I might have enjoyed that one more.
But FANTASTIC PLANET is not actually a neorealist movie. I’m not even sure that the philosophical underpinnings of neorealism can survive their application to animation or science fiction (let alone both together), and I can’t imagine that anybody involved with the movie was even trying to really do that. The episodic vignettes soon coalesce into a true story -- though only a small handful of characters are ever really developed.
Ultimately, FANTASTIC PLANET is more concerned with its dreamy, savage atmosphere than it is with anything else. The world it paints is one that is full of casual brutality and sudden danger -- at least for the diminutive Oms, both “wild” and “tame”. This is also one of those sci-fi stories which seems to have some kind of obvious message, but which also eludes any attempt at real allegory once you start trying to pin it down. Putting humans near the bottom of the food chain certainly inverts our usual expectations of how things should work, but the film doesn’t seem to be trying to say anything particular about that.
But whether this movie is good or not seems completely beside the point. It is totally distinctive, and is certainly worth seeing simply to have the experience. I can’t even say that it’s especially crazy shocking or anything like that. But I can say that the first and (until now) last time I saw any part of FANTASTIC PLANET was on a fuzzy independent UHF channel about fifteen years ago, and I remembered far more scenes and moments than I expected when I watched it again for this project. It may not have blown my teenaged mind, but it definitely burrowed deep inside and stuck there.
What else happened this year?
-- An unpopular low-level party official and Ivan the Terrible trade places in IVAN VASILIEVICH: BACK TO THE FUTURE, a Soviet time-travel farce.
-- THE HOLY MOUNTAIN is really more grotesque magical realism, but it has some hilarious satirical sci-fi bits in the middle.
-- George Romero takes a break from zombies to direct THE CRAZIES, in which a contaminant causes otherwise ordinary people to go crazy and start attacking their friends, family, and neighbors.
-- In IDAHO TRANSFER, a group of college kids accidentally discover time travel and then decide to colonize the not-so-distant future after they realize an ecological disaster is going to ravage the planet. Peter Fonda directs.
-- Michael Crichton directed WESTWORLD, in which Yul Brynner’s merciless cowboy robot goes berserk in a Wild West theme park and starts hunting the guests.
-- Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson star in the dystopian detective thriller SOYLENT GREEN. Even though everybody knows the twist already, it’s still an amazing flick.
-- SLEEPER is the only Woody Allen sci-fi movie that I’m aware of. Allen plays a twentieth century man unfrozen in the future who then disguises himself as a robot to get along, but he seems more interested in making it a silent movie-inspired farce than anything else.
-- BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES wraps up the series with a story about the early days of ape and human coexistence after the nuclear war that ravages Earth.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1973...
SOYLENT GREEN is far and away my favorite from this year, but FANTASTIC PLANET is well worth seeing as well.
On an alien planet, a race of blue-skinned, semi-reptilian giants called “Traags” treat tiny humans (or “Oms”) as both pets and pests. One young Traag girl in particular finds a wild Om baby whose mother has just been killed. The Traag girl takes the Om home as a pet, and he grows up as a tortured plaything. However, he is also able to listen in on the automatic lessons intended for the Traag girl, and so becomes a highly educated Om.
Eventually, the Om boy escapes and falls in with a colony of wild Oms living in a park. Their life is rough but tenable -- at least until the Traags recommence their regular program to cull the wild Om pests. While fighting back, the Oms kill one of the Traags, which only makes things worse. Led by the educated boy, the only hope for Om survival is to steal Traag rocket technology so they can escape the planet once and for all.
Is it any good?
Oddly, some of the most difficult movies to write about are the ones that are the most unique. FANTASTIC PLANET is the earliest animated sci-fi feature film that I’m aware of, but I have to assume that by 1973 that there were plenty of Saturday morning sci-fi cartoon shows. And, if nothing else, there were certainly Marvin the Martian and Duck Dodgers shorts. But as far as feature films go -- and feature films presumably for adults -- there seem to be hardly any before FANTASTIC PLANET.
It also doesn’t help that the animation of FANTASTIC PLANET doesn’t look much like any other cartoons I’m familiar with. The prevailing style for at least the past seventy years has been dominated by the bright colors and clear lines of the Disney or Warner Bros. cartoons. There are exceptions, of course -- such as Terry Gilliam’s animation work for the various Monty Python projects around this same time. FANTASTIC PLANET, with its stiff compositions and pencil shading, is another.
The pace and structure of the movie doesn’t quite follow the sci-fi norm either. The movie is constructed out of many vignettes of varying importance -- many of them simply document the changing seasons (though they are very weird seasons) or other natural phenomenon on the alien planet. FANTASTIC PLANET has at times almost a neorealist feel to it -- as though it’s meandering through unremarkable incidents in unremarkable lives. This is a pretty unusual way to approach science fiction, though not necessarily totally unique. In retrospect, THE SEED OF MAN (1969) seemed to be doing a similar thing at times -- if I’d realized it at the time, I might have enjoyed that one more.
But FANTASTIC PLANET is not actually a neorealist movie. I’m not even sure that the philosophical underpinnings of neorealism can survive their application to animation or science fiction (let alone both together), and I can’t imagine that anybody involved with the movie was even trying to really do that. The episodic vignettes soon coalesce into a true story -- though only a small handful of characters are ever really developed.
Ultimately, FANTASTIC PLANET is more concerned with its dreamy, savage atmosphere than it is with anything else. The world it paints is one that is full of casual brutality and sudden danger -- at least for the diminutive Oms, both “wild” and “tame”. This is also one of those sci-fi stories which seems to have some kind of obvious message, but which also eludes any attempt at real allegory once you start trying to pin it down. Putting humans near the bottom of the food chain certainly inverts our usual expectations of how things should work, but the film doesn’t seem to be trying to say anything particular about that.
But whether this movie is good or not seems completely beside the point. It is totally distinctive, and is certainly worth seeing simply to have the experience. I can’t even say that it’s especially crazy shocking or anything like that. But I can say that the first and (until now) last time I saw any part of FANTASTIC PLANET was on a fuzzy independent UHF channel about fifteen years ago, and I remembered far more scenes and moments than I expected when I watched it again for this project. It may not have blown my teenaged mind, but it definitely burrowed deep inside and stuck there.
What else happened this year?
-- An unpopular low-level party official and Ivan the Terrible trade places in IVAN VASILIEVICH: BACK TO THE FUTURE, a Soviet time-travel farce.
-- THE HOLY MOUNTAIN is really more grotesque magical realism, but it has some hilarious satirical sci-fi bits in the middle.
-- George Romero takes a break from zombies to direct THE CRAZIES, in which a contaminant causes otherwise ordinary people to go crazy and start attacking their friends, family, and neighbors.
-- In IDAHO TRANSFER, a group of college kids accidentally discover time travel and then decide to colonize the not-so-distant future after they realize an ecological disaster is going to ravage the planet. Peter Fonda directs.
-- Michael Crichton directed WESTWORLD, in which Yul Brynner’s merciless cowboy robot goes berserk in a Wild West theme park and starts hunting the guests.
-- Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson star in the dystopian detective thriller SOYLENT GREEN. Even though everybody knows the twist already, it’s still an amazing flick.
-- SLEEPER is the only Woody Allen sci-fi movie that I’m aware of. Allen plays a twentieth century man unfrozen in the future who then disguises himself as a robot to get along, but he seems more interested in making it a silent movie-inspired farce than anything else.
-- BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES wraps up the series with a story about the early days of ape and human coexistence after the nuclear war that ravages Earth.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1973...
SOYLENT GREEN is far and away my favorite from this year, but FANTASTIC PLANET is well worth seeing as well.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1969: DOPPELGÄNGER
What’s it about?
A probe sent to investigate solar activity accidentally discovers a new planet in the same orbit as Earth on the other side of the sun. The pan-European space agency that created the probe hits up NASA for a donation and uses the money to prepare a manned mission to the new planet. (Meanwhile, communist spies have infiltrated the agency and stolen sensitive data using high-tech eyeball cameras and -- actually, never mind. Turns out later none of that part is important at all.)
The two astronauts selected for the mission are for some reason put into a deep sleep for the three weeks that it will take to reach the new planet. When they’re revived, they discover they’re orbiting a habitable planet. But disaster strikes when they try to land on the surface, and as they escape from the wreckage of their spaceship it appears that they have somehow landed back on Earth. But not all is as it seems...
Is it any good?
DOPPELGÄNGER (aka, JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN) was produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. If you’re not familiar with the names (I wasn’t until very recently), they’re a husband-and-wife team who created a long string of distinctive British children’s sci-fi/adventure shows over six decades starting in the 1950s. They’re probably best known for the series they developed using the Supermarionation puppet process -- especially THUNDERBIRDS and CAPTAIN SCARLET AND THE MYSTERIONS -- but they were involved in nineteen different series in all.
I actually don’t really know much about anything the Andersons did. I did check out THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO back when I was doing 1966 movies, but otherwise the only thing I have to go on are dim twenty year-old memories of CAPTAIN SCARLET. So obviously I don’t know how whether DOPPELGÄNGER is representative of the rest of their work or if it’s an anomaly. It is a live-action movie, so there aren’t any puppets. But the special effects (especially the buildings and spaceships) seem to use a lot of the same miniature techniques from the THUNDERBIRDS movies. If anything, the effects in DOPPELGÄNGER are even better -- or at least more realistic.
The movie really has three parts -- the first of which is probably the weakest. The first half hour or so is concerned entirely with things like getting funding for the mission, political maneuvering in the European space agency and abroad, and security concerns about leaks of sensitive data. I always feel like I’m hurtling through a cultural wormhole whenever I watch British sci-fi movies, because they spend so much time on such mundane things. This can be either refreshing or frustrating depending on how it’s handled -- in DOPPELGÄNGER it’s mostly just a confusing digression. But one amusing note is how dependent the European space agency is on American funding -- even in a British-produced movie, they still have to go begging to NASA when they want to launch a mission. American sci-fi flicks almost never give a single thought to funding, and the few that do certainly don’t solve the problem by getting foreign investment. (Possible exception: CONTACT? I can’t remember who ends up footing the bill in that one.)
In any event, the funding and security concerns are finally wrapped up and put away so we never have to hear about them again. Instead, the movie shifts into one of those “training for the mission” modes that directors seem to think we all love so much. I would not complain at all if I never see another astronaut ride a rocket sled again (this is the third movie from the 1960s I’ve seen so far with such a sequence), but luckily there are other things going on during this part of the movie that are a lot more interesting. One of the two astronauts, for instance, is an American who was brought into the project to help get the funding. Though he’s a Neil Armstrong-like superstar, he has problems in his personal life. His wife belittles him by claiming that the radiation in space has sterilized him, and meanwhile the pretty head of security at the space agency is making eyes at him... It’s all pretty soapy, but it’s nice to see astronauts with more or less realistic problems and flaws.
Once the rocket finally takes off, the movie takes another turn since Earth-bound problems must necessarily be left behind. The two astronauts go into their narratively convenient (but otherwise inexplicable) three-week sleep. When they awake -- well, at this point I should warn that some big spoilers are coming. If you think you might want to watch this movie, I’d recommend stopping here since the ending is a Twilight Zone kind of thing that’s probably better if you don’t know much about it going in.
For the rest of you, when the astronauts awaken from their sleep, they’re in orbit around the new planet on the other side of the sun -- or so they think. But after crashlanding on the surface, they’re immediately picked up by an English-speaking rescue worker hanging from a helicopter. The British astronaut is badly wounded in the crash and more or less sits out the rest of the movie wrapped in bandages in an iron lung. The American, meanwhile, is transported back to the European space agency (in secrecy, natch) where we learn that he’s only been gone three weeks instead of the expected six that a round trip should have taken. The top brass naturally figure that the astronauts turned the rocket around for some reason, but the American insists they did no such thing.
The American goes home with his wife and more domestic scenes ensue -- but things only get weirder when he notices that everything in his house (including all writing and numbers) is reversed. It takes a little while, but the scientists finally decide that the planet on the other side of the sun is an exact mirror image of Earth. When Earth launched its rocket, the mirror planet launched one of its own with mirror images of the astronauts inside. So the three-week journey really was a one-way trip, and the astronaut really is on the new planet on the other side of the sun.
This is, I admit, kind of stupid. We’re supposed to believe that the astronaut didn’t see any writing until he got home and glanced at a cologne bottle in the mirror. (You’d think he’d at least be asked to sign a statement -- or an autograph.) Not to mention that we also have to believe that the astronauts somehow failed to notice that the planet they were orbiting looked like Earth with the continents flipped. But at the same time, it’s kind of neat. I like the overall idea of a mirror world, though sadly not much ever really happens with it. Everybody is confused at first and they make a big deal out of the three-week/six-week discrepancy, but then as soon as the astronaut discovers the world is backwards they pretty quickly accept what’s going on. To confirm the theory, they decide to send the astronaut back up to a part of the spacecraft that’s still orbiting Earth. I guess to see if it’s backwards? Unfortunately, they expect the polarity of electricity to be reversed (turns out it ain’t) so things end badly and all the evidence is destroyed and, well, I may as well just stop here.
In any event, DOPPELGÄNGER is not a bad a movie and I enjoyed it well enough. But except for a few isolated interesting elements, it’s pretty forgettable overall. One thing I haven’t mentioned much yet is that the special effects are really very good. Some of the vehicles and buildings are implausibly automated, but otherwise they are very cool. In particular, there’s a scene during the spaceflight where the sun rises over Earth that is truly something to see. The explosive ending -- in which flaming space wreckage lays waste to the space agency’s headquarters -- is pretty terrific as well.
A probe sent to investigate solar activity accidentally discovers a new planet in the same orbit as Earth on the other side of the sun. The pan-European space agency that created the probe hits up NASA for a donation and uses the money to prepare a manned mission to the new planet. (Meanwhile, communist spies have infiltrated the agency and stolen sensitive data using high-tech eyeball cameras and -- actually, never mind. Turns out later none of that part is important at all.)
The two astronauts selected for the mission are for some reason put into a deep sleep for the three weeks that it will take to reach the new planet. When they’re revived, they discover they’re orbiting a habitable planet. But disaster strikes when they try to land on the surface, and as they escape from the wreckage of their spaceship it appears that they have somehow landed back on Earth. But not all is as it seems...
Is it any good?
DOPPELGÄNGER (aka, JOURNEY TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE SUN) was produced by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson. If you’re not familiar with the names (I wasn’t until very recently), they’re a husband-and-wife team who created a long string of distinctive British children’s sci-fi/adventure shows over six decades starting in the 1950s. They’re probably best known for the series they developed using the Supermarionation puppet process -- especially THUNDERBIRDS and CAPTAIN SCARLET AND THE MYSTERIONS -- but they were involved in nineteen different series in all.
I actually don’t really know much about anything the Andersons did. I did check out THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO back when I was doing 1966 movies, but otherwise the only thing I have to go on are dim twenty year-old memories of CAPTAIN SCARLET. So obviously I don’t know how whether DOPPELGÄNGER is representative of the rest of their work or if it’s an anomaly. It is a live-action movie, so there aren’t any puppets. But the special effects (especially the buildings and spaceships) seem to use a lot of the same miniature techniques from the THUNDERBIRDS movies. If anything, the effects in DOPPELGÄNGER are even better -- or at least more realistic.
The movie really has three parts -- the first of which is probably the weakest. The first half hour or so is concerned entirely with things like getting funding for the mission, political maneuvering in the European space agency and abroad, and security concerns about leaks of sensitive data. I always feel like I’m hurtling through a cultural wormhole whenever I watch British sci-fi movies, because they spend so much time on such mundane things. This can be either refreshing or frustrating depending on how it’s handled -- in DOPPELGÄNGER it’s mostly just a confusing digression. But one amusing note is how dependent the European space agency is on American funding -- even in a British-produced movie, they still have to go begging to NASA when they want to launch a mission. American sci-fi flicks almost never give a single thought to funding, and the few that do certainly don’t solve the problem by getting foreign investment. (Possible exception: CONTACT? I can’t remember who ends up footing the bill in that one.)
In any event, the funding and security concerns are finally wrapped up and put away so we never have to hear about them again. Instead, the movie shifts into one of those “training for the mission” modes that directors seem to think we all love so much. I would not complain at all if I never see another astronaut ride a rocket sled again (this is the third movie from the 1960s I’ve seen so far with such a sequence), but luckily there are other things going on during this part of the movie that are a lot more interesting. One of the two astronauts, for instance, is an American who was brought into the project to help get the funding. Though he’s a Neil Armstrong-like superstar, he has problems in his personal life. His wife belittles him by claiming that the radiation in space has sterilized him, and meanwhile the pretty head of security at the space agency is making eyes at him... It’s all pretty soapy, but it’s nice to see astronauts with more or less realistic problems and flaws.
Once the rocket finally takes off, the movie takes another turn since Earth-bound problems must necessarily be left behind. The two astronauts go into their narratively convenient (but otherwise inexplicable) three-week sleep. When they awake -- well, at this point I should warn that some big spoilers are coming. If you think you might want to watch this movie, I’d recommend stopping here since the ending is a Twilight Zone kind of thing that’s probably better if you don’t know much about it going in.
For the rest of you, when the astronauts awaken from their sleep, they’re in orbit around the new planet on the other side of the sun -- or so they think. But after crashlanding on the surface, they’re immediately picked up by an English-speaking rescue worker hanging from a helicopter. The British astronaut is badly wounded in the crash and more or less sits out the rest of the movie wrapped in bandages in an iron lung. The American, meanwhile, is transported back to the European space agency (in secrecy, natch) where we learn that he’s only been gone three weeks instead of the expected six that a round trip should have taken. The top brass naturally figure that the astronauts turned the rocket around for some reason, but the American insists they did no such thing.
The American goes home with his wife and more domestic scenes ensue -- but things only get weirder when he notices that everything in his house (including all writing and numbers) is reversed. It takes a little while, but the scientists finally decide that the planet on the other side of the sun is an exact mirror image of Earth. When Earth launched its rocket, the mirror planet launched one of its own with mirror images of the astronauts inside. So the three-week journey really was a one-way trip, and the astronaut really is on the new planet on the other side of the sun.
This is, I admit, kind of stupid. We’re supposed to believe that the astronaut didn’t see any writing until he got home and glanced at a cologne bottle in the mirror. (You’d think he’d at least be asked to sign a statement -- or an autograph.) Not to mention that we also have to believe that the astronauts somehow failed to notice that the planet they were orbiting looked like Earth with the continents flipped. But at the same time, it’s kind of neat. I like the overall idea of a mirror world, though sadly not much ever really happens with it. Everybody is confused at first and they make a big deal out of the three-week/six-week discrepancy, but then as soon as the astronaut discovers the world is backwards they pretty quickly accept what’s going on. To confirm the theory, they decide to send the astronaut back up to a part of the spacecraft that’s still orbiting Earth. I guess to see if it’s backwards? Unfortunately, they expect the polarity of electricity to be reversed (turns out it ain’t) so things end badly and all the evidence is destroyed and, well, I may as well just stop here.
In any event, DOPPELGÄNGER is not a bad a movie and I enjoyed it well enough. But except for a few isolated interesting elements, it’s pretty forgettable overall. One thing I haven’t mentioned much yet is that the special effects are really very good. Some of the vehicles and buildings are implausibly automated, but otherwise they are very cool. In particular, there’s a scene during the spaceflight where the sun rises over Earth that is truly something to see. The explosive ending -- in which flaming space wreckage lays waste to the space agency’s headquarters -- is pretty terrific as well.
Monday, June 15, 2009
1969: THE ILLUSTRATED MAN
What’s it about?
A young Depression-era drifter encounters an irascible stranger played by Rod Steiger. They share a pot of coffee (and a couple of creepy death threats) and soon Steiger reveals that he’s covered in magical tattoos that come to life if they are stared at too long. They were put there by a mysterious woman who Steiger is now tramping in search of, and when he finds her, he’ll kill her.
Somehow not frightened off by this weird and threatening story, the young drifter hangs out a bit longer with the illustrated man. Over the course of a day, he sees three futuristic stories play out in the living tattoos. First, two concerned parents are worried when their children’s holographic playroom seems stuck on the same death-obsessed scene of African lions. Next, the survivors of a rocket crash make their way to shelter across the eternally rain-covered surface of Venus. And finally, two more parents are faced with a horrible choice when they learn the world is to end that night and they are expected to put their children out of their misery ahead of time.
Is it any good?
I didn’t really expect a whole lot from this movie for a number of reasons. Mostly, I think I was prejudiced because it’s an adaption of a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury. And much as I have enjoyed Bradbury’s stories (he was my favorite writer for years), there don’t seem to be a lot of high-quality adaptations of his books for some reason. Furthermore, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN isn’t a novel -- it’s a book of short stories with a very thin framing story about a tattooed man. So I knew this was going to be an anthology movie, and that usually isn’t a good sign.
But, as I have been learning time and time again during this project, lowered expectations are the greatest gift you can give to a lot of semi-obscure sci-fi flicks. It’s been years since I’ve read the book, so I don’t remember exactly how much frame story Bradbury lays out, but I don’t think it’s very much. I do remember that he pretty quickly abandons it after he sets up the premise. After a couple stories, there aren’t any more hobo interludes at all until the very end of the book.
The movie version, on the other hand, spends a lot of time on the frame story -- which I think was probably a good idea. Not only is there a lot of interaction between the two drifters (mostly Steiger being menacing or grumpy), but there are a couple flashback scenes that explain how Steiger got the tattoos in the first place. These parts of the movie feel a lot like a modern play, since there’s not much going on except two guys sitting around talking dramatically. I guess if you’re a big fan of naturalism in movies, it might put you off. But I usually kind dig that sort of stagey, stylistic approach (at least for a little while) since it usually means that the movie thinks it’s going to say something deep and eggheaded.
The three vignettes are also shorter and simpler than I thought they would be. The first two I remember very clearly as Bradbury’s stories, and I’m pretty sure the movie vignettes are more or less straight transcriptions of the plots, characters, and a lot of the dialogue. (I don’t remember the third one at all, but I have no reason to believe it’s any different.) A lot of Bradbury’s stories are kind of like campfire stories already -- very straightforward with nasty twists at the end -- so it’s pretty refreshing to see them up on screen without much embellishment. I think that’s part of the reason why this movie works for me -- the focus is more on beefing up the frame story than on trying to mess with the stories or to interlock them somehow. The vignettes are also far too short to get boring, and THE ILLUSTRATED MAN doesn’t even exactly feel like an anthology movie as a consequence.
Another thing that helps is that many of the same actors appear in all of the vignettes -- Steiger, the other drifter, and Claire Bloom play the main characters in all three of them. I don’t really know that there’s too much to be gotten out of this -- it’s not like the stories illuminate the characters in the frame story very much. But it does make the movie feel more cohesive, and is almost a Treehouse of Horror approach to the stories.
It’s not really clear whether the illustrated man is actually the victim of supernatural shenanigans as he claims, or if the young drifter is just impressionable enough that he imagines the pictures coming to life. Steiger seems to believe that the woman who illustrated him was from the distant future, which is how she was able to illustrate events that haven’t come to pass yet. (There’s also a blank spot on Steiger’s shoulder which he says will show folks how they will die if they stare into it.) But the real sci-fi parts of the movie are in the three vignettes. Bradbury once estimated that only a third of his stories are science fiction (another third being fantasy, and another third being neither), but all three of the vignettes here are set in sci-fi futures.
I don’t think I’m going to talk too much about the plots of the stories -- there’s not much point since they don’t really have a lot of bearing on the movie itself. But I will say they are pretty neat little stories. I liked the first two the best -- the Venus one is especially good in terms of sets and atmosphere. The first one has a pretty neat futuristic house too, but it’s one of those sterile and uncomfortable ones that nobody would actually want to live in. None of the vignettes have much character development and none of them are particularly satisfying on their own -- they’re too short for anything like that. But they are fine diversions as long as you are willing to float along with the movie.
The very ending of THE ILLUSTRATED MAN is perhaps inevitably where things start to get weird. First, there’s a long flashback of a very naked and very illustrated Rod Steiger wandering through an empty house as he looks for Claire Bloom, who has disappeared after putting the final tattoo on his body. Then the young drifter looks into the blank patch on the illustrated man’s back (I remember this happens in the book too) and sees an image of himself being throttled by the illustrated man. This leads directly to some struggling, some running, and an ambiguous ending. Steiger had been pretty creepy all along, so had he always planned to kill the young man? Or did knowledge of the future paradoxically precipitate a crisis that would otherwise have been avoided? Honestly, I don’t think it’s really worth trying to figure out the answer. I obviously enjoyed THE ILLUSTRATED MAN quite a bit -- more than I expected too, anyway -- but it’s more of a pleasure of the moment than the kind of thing you want to ponder after its done.
What else happened this year?
-- A journey to a newly discovered planet sharing Earth’s orbit (but on the exact opposite side of the sun) has an unexpected conclusion in DOPPELGÄNGER.
-- A couple of young Italians disagree over whether they ought to repopulate the world after a disaster in THE SEED OF MAN.
-- Ray Harryhausen just about perfects his dinosaur animations in the western THE VALLEY OF THE GWANGI, which results in amazing and unforgettable images like cowboys lassoing and bringing down an angry T-rex.
-- John Sturges directed MAROONED, in which three Apollo astronauts (played by Gene Hackman, Richard Crenna, and James Fransiscus) are marooned in orbit due to a technical fault. On the ground, NASA director Gregory Peck is forced to launch a dangerous rescue mission using an experimental spacecraft if they’re to be saved before they run out of oxygen.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1969...
Check out THE VALLEY OF THE GWANGI unless you’re sick of me recommending things based on Harryhausen special effects. In that case, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN is worth a look.
A young Depression-era drifter encounters an irascible stranger played by Rod Steiger. They share a pot of coffee (and a couple of creepy death threats) and soon Steiger reveals that he’s covered in magical tattoos that come to life if they are stared at too long. They were put there by a mysterious woman who Steiger is now tramping in search of, and when he finds her, he’ll kill her.
Somehow not frightened off by this weird and threatening story, the young drifter hangs out a bit longer with the illustrated man. Over the course of a day, he sees three futuristic stories play out in the living tattoos. First, two concerned parents are worried when their children’s holographic playroom seems stuck on the same death-obsessed scene of African lions. Next, the survivors of a rocket crash make their way to shelter across the eternally rain-covered surface of Venus. And finally, two more parents are faced with a horrible choice when they learn the world is to end that night and they are expected to put their children out of their misery ahead of time.
Is it any good?
I didn’t really expect a whole lot from this movie for a number of reasons. Mostly, I think I was prejudiced because it’s an adaption of a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury. And much as I have enjoyed Bradbury’s stories (he was my favorite writer for years), there don’t seem to be a lot of high-quality adaptations of his books for some reason. Furthermore, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN isn’t a novel -- it’s a book of short stories with a very thin framing story about a tattooed man. So I knew this was going to be an anthology movie, and that usually isn’t a good sign.
But, as I have been learning time and time again during this project, lowered expectations are the greatest gift you can give to a lot of semi-obscure sci-fi flicks. It’s been years since I’ve read the book, so I don’t remember exactly how much frame story Bradbury lays out, but I don’t think it’s very much. I do remember that he pretty quickly abandons it after he sets up the premise. After a couple stories, there aren’t any more hobo interludes at all until the very end of the book.
The movie version, on the other hand, spends a lot of time on the frame story -- which I think was probably a good idea. Not only is there a lot of interaction between the two drifters (mostly Steiger being menacing or grumpy), but there are a couple flashback scenes that explain how Steiger got the tattoos in the first place. These parts of the movie feel a lot like a modern play, since there’s not much going on except two guys sitting around talking dramatically. I guess if you’re a big fan of naturalism in movies, it might put you off. But I usually kind dig that sort of stagey, stylistic approach (at least for a little while) since it usually means that the movie thinks it’s going to say something deep and eggheaded.
The three vignettes are also shorter and simpler than I thought they would be. The first two I remember very clearly as Bradbury’s stories, and I’m pretty sure the movie vignettes are more or less straight transcriptions of the plots, characters, and a lot of the dialogue. (I don’t remember the third one at all, but I have no reason to believe it’s any different.) A lot of Bradbury’s stories are kind of like campfire stories already -- very straightforward with nasty twists at the end -- so it’s pretty refreshing to see them up on screen without much embellishment. I think that’s part of the reason why this movie works for me -- the focus is more on beefing up the frame story than on trying to mess with the stories or to interlock them somehow. The vignettes are also far too short to get boring, and THE ILLUSTRATED MAN doesn’t even exactly feel like an anthology movie as a consequence.
Another thing that helps is that many of the same actors appear in all of the vignettes -- Steiger, the other drifter, and Claire Bloom play the main characters in all three of them. I don’t really know that there’s too much to be gotten out of this -- it’s not like the stories illuminate the characters in the frame story very much. But it does make the movie feel more cohesive, and is almost a Treehouse of Horror approach to the stories.
It’s not really clear whether the illustrated man is actually the victim of supernatural shenanigans as he claims, or if the young drifter is just impressionable enough that he imagines the pictures coming to life. Steiger seems to believe that the woman who illustrated him was from the distant future, which is how she was able to illustrate events that haven’t come to pass yet. (There’s also a blank spot on Steiger’s shoulder which he says will show folks how they will die if they stare into it.) But the real sci-fi parts of the movie are in the three vignettes. Bradbury once estimated that only a third of his stories are science fiction (another third being fantasy, and another third being neither), but all three of the vignettes here are set in sci-fi futures.
I don’t think I’m going to talk too much about the plots of the stories -- there’s not much point since they don’t really have a lot of bearing on the movie itself. But I will say they are pretty neat little stories. I liked the first two the best -- the Venus one is especially good in terms of sets and atmosphere. The first one has a pretty neat futuristic house too, but it’s one of those sterile and uncomfortable ones that nobody would actually want to live in. None of the vignettes have much character development and none of them are particularly satisfying on their own -- they’re too short for anything like that. But they are fine diversions as long as you are willing to float along with the movie.
The very ending of THE ILLUSTRATED MAN is perhaps inevitably where things start to get weird. First, there’s a long flashback of a very naked and very illustrated Rod Steiger wandering through an empty house as he looks for Claire Bloom, who has disappeared after putting the final tattoo on his body. Then the young drifter looks into the blank patch on the illustrated man’s back (I remember this happens in the book too) and sees an image of himself being throttled by the illustrated man. This leads directly to some struggling, some running, and an ambiguous ending. Steiger had been pretty creepy all along, so had he always planned to kill the young man? Or did knowledge of the future paradoxically precipitate a crisis that would otherwise have been avoided? Honestly, I don’t think it’s really worth trying to figure out the answer. I obviously enjoyed THE ILLUSTRATED MAN quite a bit -- more than I expected too, anyway -- but it’s more of a pleasure of the moment than the kind of thing you want to ponder after its done.
What else happened this year?
-- A journey to a newly discovered planet sharing Earth’s orbit (but on the exact opposite side of the sun) has an unexpected conclusion in DOPPELGÄNGER.
-- A couple of young Italians disagree over whether they ought to repopulate the world after a disaster in THE SEED OF MAN.
-- Ray Harryhausen just about perfects his dinosaur animations in the western THE VALLEY OF THE GWANGI, which results in amazing and unforgettable images like cowboys lassoing and bringing down an angry T-rex.
-- John Sturges directed MAROONED, in which three Apollo astronauts (played by Gene Hackman, Richard Crenna, and James Fransiscus) are marooned in orbit due to a technical fault. On the ground, NASA director Gregory Peck is forced to launch a dangerous rescue mission using an experimental spacecraft if they’re to be saved before they run out of oxygen.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1969...
Check out THE VALLEY OF THE GWANGI unless you’re sick of me recommending things based on Harryhausen special effects. In that case, THE ILLUSTRATED MAN is worth a look.
Monday, May 25, 2009
1968: BARBARELLA
What’s it about?
When an inventor in possession of a powerful weapon goes missing, the president of the world fears for the continuance of the universe-wide peace that has persisted for centuries. So he calls on Barbarella (played by Jane Fonda) who is in some mysterious way the person best equipped to deal with such a crisis. She sets off immediately for last known location of the missing inventor -- a backward and barbarous planet where violence and other evils still exist.
An accident forces Barbarella to land unexpectedly on the planet’s surface, where she is almost instantly captured by murderous feral children and given over as a sacrifice to their sharp-toothed mechanical dolls. After being rescued by a rugged and hairy mercenary, she sets off again to complete her mission and ends up deep underneath the city in a labyrinth where deviants (in this world, those who are not evil enough) are exiled. There she meets a blind angel who flies her to the city where further dangerous, trippy, and sexually suggestive adventures await. Eventually she must face off against the inventor and the sadistic woman who rules the city to stop the weapon from wreaking more destruction.
Is it any good?
From the very first scene of BARBARELLA -- in which Jane Fonda performs a zero-gravity striptease aboard her shag-carpeted spaceship -- it feels very much like a campy sci-fi spoof. But as I watched, I had a hard time putting my finger on what exactly the movie could possibly have been spoofing back in 1968. With only a handful of exceptions, sci-fi movies even in the late sixties were still very conservative, Earth-bound, and relatively unambitious with their speculations. Bizarre cultures on far-flung planets in unrecognizable futures just weren’t that common.
But then I remembered that there was also science fiction on television in the 1960s. Although it’s hard to imagine BARBARELLA emerging fully-formed from the giant insect, alien invasion, and lost civilization movies of the 1950s and 1960s, it makes far more sense in the context of shows like STAR TREK, LOST IN SPACE, DOCTOR WHO, or even THE PRISONER. In fact, it makes me wish I knew a lot more about those shows. There’s probably an earlier influence as well -- although I know even less about this kind of thing, it also seems likely that old movie serials like BUCK ROGERS, FLASH GORDON, and ROCKY JONES could have contributed to BARBARELLA’s genetic make-up.
All if this is a long way of saying that BARBARELLA is a feature-length version of the “planet of the week” style of science fiction. On her mission to retrieve the missing inventor and his weapon, Barbarella finds herself on a planet with a strange social structure, a couple of different alien races, pockets of bizarre subcultures, a dark secret that gives power to its authoritarian rulers, and otherworldly fashions and architecture. (By the way, have I mentioned yet that the inventor’s name is Durand-Durand -- the inspiration for a certain English rock band’s name.)
But the crazy alien world and its crazy alien society are not really the main appeal of BARBARELLA. If I’m honest, the main appeal is probably actually Jane Fonda. Before watching this movie, I wasn’t familiar with anything she’d been involved with (except for workout records and the fall of Saigon) so I had no idea what to expect from her. I still don’t know if she’s a great actor or not, but she is definitely great in this role. A lot of what she has to do is look good in space age clothes (or the lack thereof), and she definitely aces that part of the exam. As an aside, I should mention that despite the five-minute striptease that opens the movie and the several sexual encounters throughout, there is very little in the way of prurient thrills. All of the sex takes place entirely off screen (and very matter-of-factly, I might add) except for a long scene of pill-assisted futuristic coupling experienced entirely through the palms of the hand.
But even better than the ability to look good in a spacesuit, Jane Fonda also apparently has a hilarious arsenal of facial expressions to fit any occasion. The dialogue is all delivered very breezily and professionally, but it seemed to me that most of the real acting happened in facial expressions and body language. In fact, Marcel Marceau has a supporting role as some kind of gnome-like sage-cum-mechanic, and even a legendary mime can’t overtop Jane Fonda when it comes to reaction shots. Of course, how much you’ll enjoy all of this probably depends on how much patience you have for mugging.
Anyway, the kind of story that BARBARELLA is most similar to is probably something like THE WIZARD OF OZ or ALICE IN WONDERLAND. She’s a woman on an episodic adventure through a strange world full of stranger characters and customs. Despite the rampant sex, Barbarella even has a lot of the same un-self-conscious innocence as Dorothy and Alice -- she mostly takes things as they come, except when she doesn’t, and she doesn’t spend too much time thinking about why. It’s campy and lighthearted, but it’s also enjoyable and creative and sometimes pretty funny too.
What else happened this year?
Stick around and find out over the next week!
When an inventor in possession of a powerful weapon goes missing, the president of the world fears for the continuance of the universe-wide peace that has persisted for centuries. So he calls on Barbarella (played by Jane Fonda) who is in some mysterious way the person best equipped to deal with such a crisis. She sets off immediately for last known location of the missing inventor -- a backward and barbarous planet where violence and other evils still exist.
An accident forces Barbarella to land unexpectedly on the planet’s surface, where she is almost instantly captured by murderous feral children and given over as a sacrifice to their sharp-toothed mechanical dolls. After being rescued by a rugged and hairy mercenary, she sets off again to complete her mission and ends up deep underneath the city in a labyrinth where deviants (in this world, those who are not evil enough) are exiled. There she meets a blind angel who flies her to the city where further dangerous, trippy, and sexually suggestive adventures await. Eventually she must face off against the inventor and the sadistic woman who rules the city to stop the weapon from wreaking more destruction.
Is it any good?
From the very first scene of BARBARELLA -- in which Jane Fonda performs a zero-gravity striptease aboard her shag-carpeted spaceship -- it feels very much like a campy sci-fi spoof. But as I watched, I had a hard time putting my finger on what exactly the movie could possibly have been spoofing back in 1968. With only a handful of exceptions, sci-fi movies even in the late sixties were still very conservative, Earth-bound, and relatively unambitious with their speculations. Bizarre cultures on far-flung planets in unrecognizable futures just weren’t that common.
But then I remembered that there was also science fiction on television in the 1960s. Although it’s hard to imagine BARBARELLA emerging fully-formed from the giant insect, alien invasion, and lost civilization movies of the 1950s and 1960s, it makes far more sense in the context of shows like STAR TREK, LOST IN SPACE, DOCTOR WHO, or even THE PRISONER. In fact, it makes me wish I knew a lot more about those shows. There’s probably an earlier influence as well -- although I know even less about this kind of thing, it also seems likely that old movie serials like BUCK ROGERS, FLASH GORDON, and ROCKY JONES could have contributed to BARBARELLA’s genetic make-up.
All if this is a long way of saying that BARBARELLA is a feature-length version of the “planet of the week” style of science fiction. On her mission to retrieve the missing inventor and his weapon, Barbarella finds herself on a planet with a strange social structure, a couple of different alien races, pockets of bizarre subcultures, a dark secret that gives power to its authoritarian rulers, and otherworldly fashions and architecture. (By the way, have I mentioned yet that the inventor’s name is Durand-Durand -- the inspiration for a certain English rock band’s name.)
But the crazy alien world and its crazy alien society are not really the main appeal of BARBARELLA. If I’m honest, the main appeal is probably actually Jane Fonda. Before watching this movie, I wasn’t familiar with anything she’d been involved with (except for workout records and the fall of Saigon) so I had no idea what to expect from her. I still don’t know if she’s a great actor or not, but she is definitely great in this role. A lot of what she has to do is look good in space age clothes (or the lack thereof), and she definitely aces that part of the exam. As an aside, I should mention that despite the five-minute striptease that opens the movie and the several sexual encounters throughout, there is very little in the way of prurient thrills. All of the sex takes place entirely off screen (and very matter-of-factly, I might add) except for a long scene of pill-assisted futuristic coupling experienced entirely through the palms of the hand.
But even better than the ability to look good in a spacesuit, Jane Fonda also apparently has a hilarious arsenal of facial expressions to fit any occasion. The dialogue is all delivered very breezily and professionally, but it seemed to me that most of the real acting happened in facial expressions and body language. In fact, Marcel Marceau has a supporting role as some kind of gnome-like sage-cum-mechanic, and even a legendary mime can’t overtop Jane Fonda when it comes to reaction shots. Of course, how much you’ll enjoy all of this probably depends on how much patience you have for mugging.
Anyway, the kind of story that BARBARELLA is most similar to is probably something like THE WIZARD OF OZ or ALICE IN WONDERLAND. She’s a woman on an episodic adventure through a strange world full of stranger characters and customs. Despite the rampant sex, Barbarella even has a lot of the same un-self-conscious innocence as Dorothy and Alice -- she mostly takes things as they come, except when she doesn’t, and she doesn’t spend too much time thinking about why. It’s campy and lighthearted, but it’s also enjoyable and creative and sometimes pretty funny too.
What else happened this year?
Stick around and find out over the next week!
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