1984: 2010

What’s it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1984: DUNE

What’s it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1981: HEAVY METAL

What’s it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1980: FLASH GORDON

What’s it about?

New York Jets quarterback Flash Gordon and travel agent Dale Arden get drafted by rogue scientist Dr Zarkov to help stop an attack on Earth by intergalactic warlord Ming the Merciless (the latter played by Max Von Sydow). Arriving on the planet Mongo in Zarkov’s rocket, the three find themselves embroiled in complicated political infighting among Ming’s subjugated vassal tribes.

After being captured by Ming’s guards, all three suffer seemingly final fates -- Flash Gordon is slated to be executed, Zarkov to have his mind wiped and reprogrammed, and Dale Arden to become Ming’s personal concubine. Meanwhile, Earth’s moon is being shredded by Ming’s firepower and threatens to destroy the entire planet. Even after escaping from their several dangers, Flash and his friends must convince Ming’s vassals to quit fighting each other and team up against the merciless overlord they all serve.

Is it any good?

I have never had much interest in the old sci-fi serials of the 1930s, since they are for the most part obviously intended for children. From the little I’ve seen, they have a general lack of interest not only in anything to do with “science” but also apparently anything that resembles “fiction” as well. Characters have no personality, themes are nonexistent, and events happen merely because they provide convenient excuses to move from one episode to the next. On the other hand, they do also seem to have a lot of creativity and inventiveness when it comes to spectacle, peril, and suspense.

The 1980 film adaptation of FLASH GORDON apparently takes its basic plot from the comics and serials of the 1930s -- and luckily takes a lot of the creativity and whimsy as well. Like BARBARELLA (1968) it’s a Dino De Laurentiis production, and the similarities are instantly obvious. Both movies are campy, light-hearted, fast-paced, and full of brightly stylized special effects and production design. Watching FLASH GORDON is a bit like watching a big budget stage musical -- the artifice is all perfectly obvious and brightly lit, but the “fakeness” of everything doesn’t reduce the enjoyment you get from seeing it all so expertly choreographed.

Somehow I had never seen FLASH GORDON before -- I think I had expected it to be ossified under the production design, like an actor slathered in so many layers of make-up, masks, and costumes that he can no longer emote or move. In other words, I expected it to be like BATMAN AND ROBIN -- a movie where a misguided sense of production design overwhelmed everything else. But it turns out that FLASH GORDON is nothing like that at all. It’s great fun from start to finish, and even though it has its own distinctive style, the movie never lets the spectacle get in the way of the adventure for a second.

I don’t know a whole lot about Dino De Laurentiis, except that he has produced a slew of movies including BARBARELLA, the Jeff Bridges/Jessica Lange KING KONG (1976) remake, FLASH GORDON, CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982), DEAD ZONE (1983), DUNE (1984), the original Hannibal Lecter movie MANHUNTER (1986), EVIL DEAD 2 (1987) and ARMY OF DARKNESS (1993), and numerous other projects covering a wide range of genres.

Producers don’t often get a lot of credit for creative input. Directors and screenwriters are the ones who win Academy Awards and get most of the attention. And maybe most producers really don’t have a lot of creative input compared to the folks working for them. But there are certainly exceptions to this. George Lucas has had a great deal of creative input on many of the movies he’s credited primarily as producer -- not least of which are THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980) and RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983). Val Lewton at RKO and, to a lesser extent, Carl Laemmle, Jr., at Universal are the classic examples of creative producers in the horror world. And Charles Schneer and Ray Harryhausen were clearly at the driver’s wheel in most of the movies they produced.

I’d like to add Dino De Laurentiis to this list, but I just don’t know enough about the guy. I get the sense from BARBARELLA and FLASH GORDON that there is a clear line connecting the two -- a consistent creative personality that is propelling them both. If you like one of those movies, you should go and check out the other right away. They aren’t exactly the same, but they both hearken back to the same tradition and tap into the same spirit in a way that practically no other science fiction movie does. FLASH GORDON may have been released in 1980, but it seems to be the product of a world where movies like 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) or CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977) or STAR WARS (1977) or ALIEN (1979) never existed.

If anything, it chooses histrionics over naturalism, artifice over immersion, and self-awareness over seamless plotting. In that way, it’s a bit like PLANET OF THE APES (1968) or ZARDOZ (1974) or THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW (1975) or THE CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981). It’s a movie for people who like movies to look good -- not necessarily real. And for people who like movies that have stories that are exciting -- not necessarily believable.

I guess I’m probably not going to say very much about specifically about FLASH GORDON, but I don’t really know if anything I could say would really be very helpful. BARBARELLA and FLASH GORDON seem to comprise an entire alternate history of science fiction in cinema -- they exist outside of other contemporary influences. If you like sci-fi, and especially if you enjoy a good space opera from time to time, then you have no excuse not to watch one or the other. Go out and experience them. You may not like them, but I guarantee a different movie watching experience than almost anything else you’ll get from other movies of their times.

Also, Timothy Dalton is in FLASH GORDON and he is awesome.

1979: THE BLACK HOLE

What’s it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1979: STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE

What’s it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

1977: STAR WARS

What’s it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What else happened this year?

More entries to come! Stick around and find out!

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

What’s it about?

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

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

Is it any good?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1976: THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH

What’s it about?

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

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




Is it any good?

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

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

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




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

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

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

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




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

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

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




What else happened in 1976?

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

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

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

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.

1972: EOLOMEA

What’s it about?

After a spate of mysterious rocket disappearances, a scientist petitions for the cessation of all space travel until the problem is solved. Reluctantly, the council in charge of such things agrees, and those serving on distant space outposts are consequently temporarily stranded. Two such men in particular find themselves chafing under the travel ban -- one because he is yearning to head back to Earth and the other because his son is among those who are reported missing.

After sulking for a bit, the two decide to violate the travel ban and visit their nearest neighbor at the next outpost. They can’t get too close since he has contracted a deadly space disease (possibly from strange shadow-like creatures indigenous to the asteroid he’s stationed on), but he gives them a capsule that he says someone will be along to claim later. Meanwhile, the scientist on Earth quizzes one of her colleagues who appears to know more about the disappearances than he’s letting on. But the mystery isn’t solved until the scientist travels into space herself, and the various pieces of the puzzle all start to come together.

Is it any good?

EOLOMEA was produced by the same East German studio that put out THE SILENT STAR (1960), but besides that connection I didn’t know anything about it before I watched it. I was watching it online (which is why there are no screenshots), and I figured I’d get through the boring beginning bits and come back to the rest of it later. But it seems that the East Germans learned a lot about movie pacing since 1960. There are no boring beginning bits with this movie -- things started off interesting with the disappearance of several rockets and never let up for the next eighty minutes.

One of the neatest things about EOLOMEA is the complex system of space exploration that it seems to take for granted. I don’t know how far in the future the movie is supposed to be set, but there are apparently several space flights each day -- many of them between space stations on other planets or asteroids. In fact, at least one of the characters in the movie has never even been on Earth, so this bustling space traffic has been in place for at least a generation.

Most of the view the audience has into this brave new world is on the dull and poorly trafficked fringes, however. The two men stationed out there are pilot and navigator for what is essentially the rocket version of a delivery truck. Unlike in THE SILENT STAR, the characters here actually have interesting back stories and real emotions. The pilot, for instance, was one of the first people to help colonize space. But at some point he was involved in a deadly accident and everyone on his rocket died except himself and some children. His wife died in the accident, but his son survived. That was decades ago, though, and he hasn’t seen his son since then. When the travel ban is put in place, the pilot is waiting for his son to visit.

The main characters all mostly have stories as well realized as that one -- and they are all interconnected in ways that feel organic. It’s easy to imagine that people involved in the space program would have varying relationships with each other, depending on what jobs they had. So when we learn that one character knows another, it doesn’t seem out of place. And that definitely helps the story, since all the various strands eventually come together. The movie is primarily a mystery (but with very strong sci-fi overtones, of course) and it’s always clear that the disappearance of the rockets is not exactly what it seems.

But even before the different strands get tied together, there’s plenty to be interested in. The sick fellow at the other outpost, for instance, doesn’t seem important in his own right at first. I figured he would end up just being an excuse to get the other two off their asteroid and into an unapproved flight, but even so I wanted to know more about him. Because of his sickness, he only communicates with the others through his spacesuit. And his theories and descriptions of the aliens he believes he contracted the sickness from are the kind of charming diversions that add color to sci-fi stories. The film makers could easily have given him a mundane sickness, but instead they deliver a tantalizing half-explanation of an alien disease.

There’s another similar scene with a robot later in the movie. The robot has information that the characters believe they need to save lives, but the robot has been ordered not to tell. This creates tension in its programming since the robot is also not supposed to cause harm to humans. People have been mining this exact same sci-fi situation since Isaac Asimov first laid out his three laws of robotics, so there’s no points for originality. In fact, the robot’s dilemma here is far less interesting than HAL-9000's in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968). But it’s presented pretty convincingly (in every detail except the appearance of the robot) and is refreshingly more of a momentary inconvenience than a major plot point.

THE SILENT STAR had a lot of this little business in the margins too, and I liked a lot of the ideas floating around in that movie. But EOLOMEA has far more interesting characters, a tighter story, and some improvements in the special effects. All in all, this is a neat little sci-fi mystery with a pretty satisfying ending. There’s also a surprising lack of any kind of obvious political agenda. No specific countries are mentioned at all (though some characters do have ethnic names) and neither are any real historical events except Yuri Gagarin’s space flights. Not only are there no diatribes against warmongering capitalists (another weakness of THE SILENT STAR), but the characters aren’t even all necessarily happy and productive members of society. The two guys in the outpost are bored with their jobs, disobey orders, and get drunk while ostensibly on duty. Meanwhile, the ending of the movie suggests that sometimes the best way to serve mankind is to take initiative and act outside the established chain of command. If I hadn’t known ahead of time that this was produced by a Soviet bloc country, I never would have guessed it.



What else happened this year?

-- Bruce Dern saves the last surviving forest from short-sighted politicians and public apathy in SILENT RUNNING. The movie also features three awesome robots, a folk soundtrack by Joan Baez, and some of Dern’s best crazy-man acting.
-- Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky adapts Stanislaw Lem’s classic novel SOLYARIS, but focuses more on the human relationships than the sci-fi bits. I like this version better than Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 adaptation, but neither movie is anywhere near as good as the book.
-- In other literary adaptations, there’s also a version of SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE starring absolutely nobody you have heard of (the most famous name is Valerie Perrine) but which is still pretty good nonetheless. I never read the book though, so I don’t know how it compares to the Vonnegut/imagination version.
-- Christopher Walken almost single-handedly turns THE MIND SNATCHERS into a pretty interesting character study of a sociopath fighting to save his identity from a new form of electroshock therapy.
-- Meanwhile, Oliver Reed and Geraldine Chaplin try to have a baby in a world where getting pregnant is a capital crime in ZPG: ZERO POPULATION GROWTH.
-- Roddy MacDowell leads a monkey uprising in CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, moving the series a big step closer to a world where talking apes rule over humans.

If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1972...

I’m a big fan of SILENT RUNNING so I think I have to tell you to watch that one.