What’s it about?
Alien councilman Marlon Brando sends his infant son into space in a flying crystal bassinet ahead of a catastrophe that rips his home planet of Krypton to pieces. After landing on Earth, the now pre-pubescent boy is adopted by good-hearted farmer Glenn Ford, who raises him as a human despite unmistakable alien attributes like super strength, super speed, and a punt that even a place-kicking mule couldn’t beat. But Ford’s death sends the grown boy on a vision quest to the Arctic, where a shard of his alien craft raises a crystalline palace that allows Brando to impart the wisdom of Krypton to his son.
The “super man” alien (now played by Christopher Reeve) returns to civilization and takes a job as a reporter in the big city of Metropolis. He takes a liking to ambitious co-worker Margot Kidder, and soon finds occasion to save her from peril both in his human guise and as a costumed do-gooder who flies around the city righting wrongs. But the stakes become immeasurably higher when criminal mastermind Gene Hackman hi-jacks a couple of nuclear weapons and puts Reeve’s powers to the test in a plot to make a fortune in real estate by shifting the west coast of the United States inland to Nevada.
Is it any good?
As a kid in the 1980s who didn’t read comic books, my superhero horizon was more or less limited to five characters: Spider-Man, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Incredible Hulk, and Superman. Or, to put it another way, the only ones who had managed to penetrate popular culture in the form of television shows or cartoons. And until Tim Burton’s BATMAN was released in 1989, none of those five except Superman had managed to find any movie success to speak of. (Trivia question: After SUPERMAN and BATMAN, what was the third superhero comic to become a mainstream blockbuster movie in the U.S.? Why, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES, of course.)
Prior to this decade, superheroes had a hard time translating to the silver screen consistently. Even the SUPERMAN and BATMAN franchises both self-destructed after four installments, and SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987) and BATMAN AND ROBIN (1997) became like death's head totems, warning movie producers of the eventual fate of all superhero franchises, even popular and critically acclaimed ones.
For the first forty-five minutes of SUPERMAN, I was prepared to say that Richard Donner had caught lightning in a bottle and somehow side-stepped every problem that had doomed most other superhero movies for the next twenty years. The final two-thirds of the movie aren’t up to the level of the quality of the beginning, unfortunately -- and they do have some of the usual problems -- but overall the movie is still pretty good.
Those amazing forty-five minutes cover the first paragraph of the synopsis above. It’s everything that involves the destruction of Krypton, the journey of Kal-El to Earth, his childhood with the Kents, and his education in the Fortress of Solitude before he properly becomes Superman. These forty-five minutes all also take place before Christopher Reeve appears on screen (the young Superman is played by a different actor, but voiced by Reeve) so I’d like to make it clear that I don’t think that’s the reason for the difference. Instead, I think it’s because the first third of the movie feels suitably epic and legendary, whereas the last two-thirds lose a lot of that. But before I get into that too much, I should probably give a little bit of context and explain why Superman is my favorite superhero.
I know that Batman is the cool one and that Spider-Man is the relatable one, but neither one of those guys really does much for me these days. I liked Spider-Man a lot as a kid, but I suspect that it was mostly because he was funny and he was everywhere. It was impossible to escape Spider-Man in the mid-1980s. He even showed up on educational TV shows. Superman, however, is an icon. He’s an immovable object -- with seemingly infinite reserves of both physical and moral strength.
I know that this is precisely the usual criticism of Superman -- he’s boring because he always wins and because he’s always good. But to me, he is a character who is tightly bound by his own mythology. He has absolute power, but because of his code of behavior, he’s not free to exercise it any way he wishes. In the movie particularly we learn that because Superman never lies, he feels irrevocably bound by promises even when they are made under duress. There is no one enforcing this code of conduct except himself -- and indeed, nobody could enforce it even if he did break his word. Superman simply stands for right, so he must act “right” even when that means allowing his loved ones to be endangered.
So as far as I’m concerned, Superman is a character in an Edith Wharton or Henry James novel -- a person of considerable vision and activity who is nonetheless bound by societal rules and expectations that have no actual governing body. Like Jolyon Forsyte in John Galsworthy’s novel, he is a “man of property” -- a man who must always do the proper thing simply because that is what is done. He’s a tragic hero, whose potential for happiness is strictly circumscribed by his own sense of what is the “right thing” to do in the situations he finds himself in.
As I said before, I don’t read comic books, so I’m not sure how much of this reading of Superman is supported by the actual source material and how much of it I am projecting into it because my mind is so infected by Edwardian literature that I can’t even watch a movie about an invincible man in a red cape without thinking of THE AGE OF INNOCENCE. What I can say is that Richard Donner’s SUPERMAN does offer at least some weak support for this reading -- especially in the early sections. Kal-El’s father on Krypton is excited that his son will be superpowered on Earth, but his mother laments that her son will be alone among the humans with no one to understand him. Later, Pa Kent cautions him to keep his true self hidden from the world and to present himself in the “expected” way. And the very notion of a Fortress of Solitude in the icy fastness of the Arctic is unavoidably symbolic of social isolation and repression.
The early stages of Superman’s life also mirror closely the story of Moses -- another man who, according to the Bible, was held to a such an impossibly high standard of conduct that he was barred from the promised land he had been seeking for forty years because he struck a rock twice when once was sufficient. Both Superman and Moses are placed as infants in baskets and sent out alone into the world. Both are raised by families that are not their own, and both find they have a calling which separates them from their adopted families. But once they start working miracles, the parallels largely cease -- at least in this movie.
Moses’s foil was the Pharaoh of Egypt who held an entire nation in bondage. Superman’s foil is Lex Luthor, whose criminal operations in this movie (though very ambitious) are weirdly understaffed and annoyingly implausible. Even worse, Hackman doesn’t have the gravitas to pull off a villain worthy of a modern-day Moses. Marlon Brando and Glenn Ford lend their own legendary screen personas to the early scenes of Superman’s formation. Hackman is a fine actor, of course, but he is not an immovable object in the same way that Superman is. It’s easy to imagine Hackman’s Lex Luthor bending like a reed, slipping away, and living to scheme another day. You might argue that his slipperiness makes him all the more fitting a foil -- but an epic foe he certainly is not. This Lex Luthor would never have defied anybody through a single plague, let alone ten. The Pharoah may have been doomed to crack in the face of God -- the ultimate immovable object -- but at least he gave it a good run.
The last two-thirds of SUPERMAN are not horrible or irredeemable. There are certainly dumb moments -- some silly slapstick, some implausible wackiness during Luthor’s capers, and the inexplicable way that Lois Lane falls in love with the Man of Steel. But the flying sequences are justly famous for their special effects. (Though I did forget about the weird poetic narration delivered by Margot Kidder starting with the phrase, “Can you read my mind?”) The action sequences are pretty cool too, and I have always liked Christopher Reeves as both Clark Kent and Superman -- though, in retrospect, there is surprisingly little Clark Kent in this movie. Still, Superman’s calm and slightly geeky Boy Scout demeanor (e.g., “I hope this hasn’t put you off flying. Statistically speaking, it’s still the safest way to travel.”) is appealing enough. My fondness for Superman probably predisposes me to like this movie. I’m disappointed that the epic feeling of the beginning eventually devolves into Lex Luthor’s Funtime Follies in places, but SUPERMAN is still quite possibly one the best superhero movies I have ever seen.
Also, I’m not going to write a separate entry about SUPERMAN II (1980), but I’ll say a little bit about it right now. I’d seen it ages ago, of course, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to watch it again after reading a bit about the behind-the-scenes turmoil that dogged the production. Director Richard Donner was replaced partway through by Richard Lester, purportedly because he refused to increase the campiness of the movie to the level the producers wanted. Gene Hackman and Marlon Brando then refused to do any reshoots with the new director, which resulted in a reduced role for Lex Luthor and no role at all for Jor-El. Some of the other actors -- such as Margot Kidder -- were less than cooperative with the new director.
But honestly, I almost think I like SUPERMAN II better than the original. It’s true that it has some goofy humor, but no more than Richard Donner’s original SUPERMAN did. (And frankly, the jokes are funnier in the sequel.) Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor is no longer the main villain, and is in fact reduced to playing the weaselly informant to Terence Stamp’s General Zod. This is a role that is much more in line with how Hackman plays Luthor, and General Zod is the kind of “immovable object” that I was looking for in a bad guy in the last movie.
There are also many more scenes highlighting the friction between Superman’s two identities and the two parallel relationships he has with Lois Lane. I’m a big fan of this stuff, and it makes sense that ace reporter Lois Lane would eventually figure out Clark Kent’s true identity. There probably aren’t a lot of really good stories you can do with a completely invincible guy, but “girl he loves finds out his true identity” is a pretty good one. So is "three equally powerful guys show up and they aren't nice". And so is "invincible guy gives up superpowers for the girl he loves". SUPERMAN II entwines all of those storylines in an organic way, so the stakes keep going up and up. I will admit that the way Superman gets his powers back is a little cheap, but not nearly as cheap as the ending of SUPERMAN when he reverses time itself to save Lois Lane.
Finally, as much as I love the epic beginning of SUPERMAN, it’s undeniably slow and at odds with the tone of the rest of the movie. If the whole movie had been like that, I probably would have loved it. But switching partway through to a totally different tone is jarring. SUPERMAN II doesn’t have any such problems -- it starts fast and light, and keeps going that way for its entire length. It’s also suspenseful and exciting when it needs to be, and the climactic fight takes us to locations that are integral to the story -- like Metropolis and the Fortress of Solitude -- rather than some nameless desert in California.
So yeah, I actually like SUPERMAN II better than SUPERMAN. I probably should have written about that one instead. Sorry, Richard Donner. Sorry, everybody else.
Showing posts with label time travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label time travel. Show all posts
Monday, January 18, 2010
Thursday, September 3, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1973: IVAN VASILIEVICH: BACK TO THE FUTURE
What’s it about?
A Soviet scientist working on a time machine in his apartment gets in trouble with his local party representative when he keeps tripping the fuses in the building. While demonstrating his time machine to the official, he temporarily opens up the wall to the next apartment, where a burglar is in the middle of a raid. Immediately seeing the practical application of such a machine to the burglary industry, the thief joins the two others for a real test.
However, the real test of the time machine only results in chaos as the bumbling party official and the thief are stranded in the court of Ivan the Terrible, while the historical czar ends up in modern Moscow. The scientist must then race to fix the damaged machine to set things right before the displaced people are discovered and things get complicated. But then he wakes up and we learn it was all just a dream.
Is it any good?
This is another movie that I am not going to talk about too much specifically -- partly because it’s been a few weeks since I watched it and the details have mostly faded. But I did want to bring it up because it’s a Soviet flick, and I don’t think I’ve written about any of those yet. It’s also a Soviet comedy, which is something I don’t think I have ever seen before in my life.
I find that whenever I watch a movie from a communist country, I usually approach it with a different mindset than I do a movie from the west. I end up spending most of the running time playing “spot the propaganda” and searching for collectivist themes. But the more movies I see from Soviet bloc countries, the less I feel like that kind of thing is really as much of a defining feature of their cinema as I have been led to expect. (Led by whom? I’m not sure. Maybe it is purely my own prejudices that have made me think that way.)
This is not to say that IVAN VASILIEVICH seems subversive at all. It’s primarily a slapstick comedy, with lots of misunderstandings and switched identities and Benny Hill-style high speed chases through hallways. The characters are all very self-centered as well. Even the scientist (the ostensible protagonist) is largely a passive lump who is devoted entirely to his time machine. When his wife leaves him for a movie director at the beginning of the movie, she is offended at how philosophically he takes the news. Other characters covet expensive imported bourgeois goods from the west like tape recorders and leather jackets, and everyone disrespects and ignores the overly officious party representative.
That party official is also the one who falls most rapidly and deeply in love with the czarist world when they travel back in time -- no doubt largely because he is at first mistaken for the czar himself. Ivan the Terrible, meanwhile, actually seems fairly effective in the twentieth century as he applies his “might is right” philosophy to minor domestic situations. Of course, he shortly ends up being dragged off to an insane asylum, but he really is one of the more likeable characters in the movie.
And then, as I mentioned above, the scientist wakes up and we realize the entire movie has been a dream. His wife hasn’t left him, his time machine doesn’t work, and nobody has been stranded in the past or future. On the one hand, the it’s-all-a-dream ending is always a let down. On the other hand, the movie is so slight and goofy that there’s really no sense of loss at being robbed of a real ending. It’s an earlier Soviet version of BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989), and the enjoyment really comes more from the performances, the gags, and a couple of zany dance sequences than from the story itself.
A Soviet scientist working on a time machine in his apartment gets in trouble with his local party representative when he keeps tripping the fuses in the building. While demonstrating his time machine to the official, he temporarily opens up the wall to the next apartment, where a burglar is in the middle of a raid. Immediately seeing the practical application of such a machine to the burglary industry, the thief joins the two others for a real test.
However, the real test of the time machine only results in chaos as the bumbling party official and the thief are stranded in the court of Ivan the Terrible, while the historical czar ends up in modern Moscow. The scientist must then race to fix the damaged machine to set things right before the displaced people are discovered and things get complicated. But then he wakes up and we learn it was all just a dream.
Is it any good?
This is another movie that I am not going to talk about too much specifically -- partly because it’s been a few weeks since I watched it and the details have mostly faded. But I did want to bring it up because it’s a Soviet flick, and I don’t think I’ve written about any of those yet. It’s also a Soviet comedy, which is something I don’t think I have ever seen before in my life.
I find that whenever I watch a movie from a communist country, I usually approach it with a different mindset than I do a movie from the west. I end up spending most of the running time playing “spot the propaganda” and searching for collectivist themes. But the more movies I see from Soviet bloc countries, the less I feel like that kind of thing is really as much of a defining feature of their cinema as I have been led to expect. (Led by whom? I’m not sure. Maybe it is purely my own prejudices that have made me think that way.)
This is not to say that IVAN VASILIEVICH seems subversive at all. It’s primarily a slapstick comedy, with lots of misunderstandings and switched identities and Benny Hill-style high speed chases through hallways. The characters are all very self-centered as well. Even the scientist (the ostensible protagonist) is largely a passive lump who is devoted entirely to his time machine. When his wife leaves him for a movie director at the beginning of the movie, she is offended at how philosophically he takes the news. Other characters covet expensive imported bourgeois goods from the west like tape recorders and leather jackets, and everyone disrespects and ignores the overly officious party representative.
That party official is also the one who falls most rapidly and deeply in love with the czarist world when they travel back in time -- no doubt largely because he is at first mistaken for the czar himself. Ivan the Terrible, meanwhile, actually seems fairly effective in the twentieth century as he applies his “might is right” philosophy to minor domestic situations. Of course, he shortly ends up being dragged off to an insane asylum, but he really is one of the more likeable characters in the movie.
And then, as I mentioned above, the scientist wakes up and we realize the entire movie has been a dream. His wife hasn’t left him, his time machine doesn’t work, and nobody has been stranded in the past or future. On the one hand, the it’s-all-a-dream ending is always a let down. On the other hand, the movie is so slight and goofy that there’s really no sense of loss at being robbed of a real ending. It’s an earlier Soviet version of BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989), and the enjoyment really comes more from the performances, the gags, and a couple of zany dance sequences than from the story itself.
Monday, August 3, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1972: CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES
What’s it about?
In ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES, chimpanzees Cornelius and Zira escape the destruction of Earth by traveling back in time (never mind how) to 1971. Trapped in a world they never made, they are hunted and killed by fearful humans -- but their son, Caesar, survives and is adopted by kindly, animal-loving circus owner Ricardo Montalban.
CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES starts twenty years later when Montalban brings Caesar (played, like his father, by Roddy MacDowell) to an unnamed North American city to help promote his circus. But an altercation in a plaza causes the government to suspect that Caesar is a talking chimpanzee, and so a new ape-hunt begins. Caesar, however, escapes and blends in with the massive servant ape population and is ultimately sold to the tyrannical mayor. From there, he plots and leads a city-wide ape rebellion that culminates in a night of savage fighting.
Is it any good?
In terms of story, CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES has the best raw materials to work with since the first installment in the series. In other words, it’s built on a very simple and gripping premise that’s hard to mess up: ape servants revolt against their human masters and dominate them. As an actual movie, it has a few problems, but it also has some great aspects to it -- and so I’d have to say that I consider it one of the high points of the series.
Things get off to a really great start simply thanks to the appearance of dozens of apes in jumpsuits in a modern American city. ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES brought talking chimpanzees back to contemporary America -- but it only brought two of them. CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (which is set, by the way, in a vaguely fascist version of 1991) introduces a vast underclass of ape servants. In fact, the movie is a bit of a mirror image of the original PLANET OF THE APES. In this movie, a sophisticated human society maltreats and oppresses its mute and dumb ape population, in which a single talking and thinking member attempts to hide.
How there got to be so many apes in America is explained with a silly story about an epidemic that killed off all cats and dogs in 1983. Yearning for animal companionship, the people of the world don’t bother with parakeets or rabbits, but instead turn directly to chimpanzees and gorillas. They soon discovered that the apes can be taught to do all kinds of useful things, and so the new pets immediately turn into slaves. So in the eight years since 1983, thousands of ape servants have taken over all kinds of menial jobs. Cities are full of chimpanzees and gorillas (though orangutangs are oddly absent except in a couple of crowd shots) and entire industries have sprung up to capture, transport, condition, breed, and market the apes.
The intervening twenty years since ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES have also resulted in a harsher human government as well. In the movie version of 1971, the president only reluctantly hunted down the fugitive chimpanzees Cornelius and Zira. But by 1991, a jack-booted security force is in place to violently break up any ape or human disturbance. The mayor of the city acts practically like an ancient Roman consul. (Unlike the president back in 1971, he never worries about how excessive force might affect his chances of being re-elected.) Not much time is spent on how the human society functions in 1991, but it’s obvious from glimpses here and there that people have fewer freedoms and that the government has grown more oppressive and controlling in every way.
I’m personally a big fan of Ricardo Montalban in the PLANET OF THE APES movies. Sadly, he is only in the first forty minutes or so of this one. But he seems so wise and compassionate (and plays his character so passionately) that it’s a real shame when he makes his exit. There is one great moment when a couple of security thugs force him to yell “lousy human bastards” at the top of his lungs (they’re trying to identify the voice of a dissident), and Montalban practically turns it into a battle cry.
The middle of the movie -- in which Caesar blends in with the ape population and organizes his revolt -- is where things start to get a little weak. Even after seeing this flick about four times, it’s just not clear to me exactly how it happens. All we really see are a few shots of Caesar silently urging on defiant apes who refuse to do their jobs. I can’t figure out if he’s meant to be the literal catalyst for these minor acts of rebellion, or if he’s simply been symbolically inserted. (There’s a lot of evidence that the apes were getting uppity even before Caesar’s arrival -- he’s just the one who brings it all together into a coherent revolt.) Caesar also has a home base where the apes start stockpiling weapons, but I could never figure out where it’s supposed to be or why no humans are aware of it or even how he finds time to go there. There are just not enough details to make the preparations convincing or compelling.
But that part of the movie is short enough. Soon it moves into the out-and-out ape on human violence as the entire city erupts in open rebellion. There’s been some talk in the past year of re-making or re-imagining this movie somehow. I can understand the appeal since, as I said, I think it’s got great raw materials. But no re-make can ever capture the cognitive dissonance of Roddy MacDowell in full chimpanzee prosthetics running through the streets of Los Angeles letting off rounds from an assault rifle as he leads an ape uprising. This was Roddy MacDowell’s third PLANET OF THE APES movie -- and up until now he had played the meek and peace-loving Cornelius. (Cornelius was played by another actor in BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, but had essentially the same character.) Caesar is bitter, violent, and borderline nihilistic at times -- in other words, a huge departure from Cornelius. It would be like if Christopher Reeve had returned in SUPERMAN III playing Clark Kent’s son who wanted to burn down the world and turn it all into ashes. (Come to think of it, that would have been a vast improvement over the SUPERMAN III we actually got.)
Of course, cynicism and violence are nothing new to the PLANET OF THE APES series. When I was writing about BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, I alluded to the fact that the movies traditionally have very depressing endings. In the original, Charlton Heston finds out that the Earth has been devastated by nuclear war right before the credits roll. In an amazing act of one-up-manship, he manages to literally destroy the entire planet at the end of the second movie. ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES ends with Cornelius and Zira -- two beloved characters from all three movies -- brutally gunned down. And yet, despite all this, the first time I saw CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES I can safely say that the transformation of Roddy MacDowell into a violent revolutionary pretty well blew my mind.
My mind would have been even more blown if CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES still ended the way it was originally supposed to. The ape rebellion eventually carries the violence to the mayor’s command center. Caesar and his crew burst in with guns blazing and drag the mayor to the streets outside. Caesar then gives a rabble-rousing speech about the ascendency of apes and summarily denies a request for compassion and mercy from the movie’s only surviving sympathetic human character. Originally, the movie ended with the assembled apes beating the mayor to death with the butts of their rifles after the end of this speech while Caesar looked on approvingly. But for whatever reason (probably to get a PG rating) this was changed before the movie was released. Now, instead, Caesar goes on to make a second speech where he calls for apes to put aside their vengeance and to dominate mankind compassionately. In this version -- the final version that showed in theaters in 1972 and is on most home versions of the movie -- nobody is beaten to death. Despite the fact that we know from the first two movies that humans will end up dumb and primitive, hunted for sport by gorillas on horseback, this ending still seems to preserve a little glimmer of hope that things will be okay. (More on this later.)
In some ways, I prefer the original dark and cynical ending. It fits with the hopelessness of the earlier movies, and fits much more organically with the rest of the movie. The sudden switch in tone from rampaging bloodlust to even-tempered peacemaking still strikes me as totally jarring and unbelievable. (The editing on the new ending is also distracting in its horribleness. It’s obvious that lines are being dubbed and shots are being re-cut.) But I have come to believe that the new ending is not a complete disaster either.
One of the most interesting things about the PLANET OF THE APES series is how the overall storyline develops. There’s no hint in the original movie that any thought was given to continuing the story, and BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES ends in such a way that any additional movies should have been impossible. But the film makers kept finding new ways to keep the series going. As they did so, they began to include more and more information on how apes came to rule the world in the first place. Later movies then went on to dramatize much of what had only been talked about in earlier movies. But not exactly.
In ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES, Cornelius and Zira tell a story about the ape revolt that is similar to what happens in CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES -- but it differs in several key details. For one thing, the dates are moved up considerably -- before Cornelius and Zira arrived in 1971, the rebellion wasn’t scheduled for several hundred years. The leader of the rebellion is obviously then a different ape, rather than their son. Other events that are later shown in BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (the fifth and final installment) happen differently than they are described in earlier movies as well.
No doubt what really happened is that the film makers were making things up as they went along, and so they had to fudge a few facts when their old ideas no longer meshed with what they wanted to do with a particular sequel. But there is another, more interesting possibility too -- that Cornelius and Zira changed the timeline when they traveled to the past, accelerating some events and modifying others. BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES embraces this idea more fully, and by the end of that movie it no longer appears that the Earth is inevitably headed towards a world where humans are dominated by apes. Instead, it seems there is a chance for humans and apes to coexist and live together in relative peace.
This is important because if the future cannot be changed, there is a hard expiration date on the Earth only a thousand or so years down the road. If the events of the last three movies are just documenting the inexorable march towards the final battle between man and ape that destroys the Earth, then that is a very depressing story indeed. But as the subtle differences accumulate, that ending is more and more in question. The movies are then no longer simply counting down the doomsday clock -- instead, they are the story of how a handful of seemingly insignificant acts of mercy can change the entire course of history for the better. Caesar’s sparing of the mayor -- as out of place as it seems in the moment -- is the first act that points towards the possibility of redemption in the future.
Caesar knows the future history of the world as it was experienced by his parents, so it’s even possible that his change of heart is motivated somehow by this knowledge. The ending would have no doubt been far better if the film makers had decided to go down this path originally, rather than patching up a make-shift fix to appease the studio executives who were increasingly uncomfortable with the grim direction of the series. But despite the awful execution of the new ending, I think the way it changes the story is a very interesting and exciting and development in the series.
In ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES, chimpanzees Cornelius and Zira escape the destruction of Earth by traveling back in time (never mind how) to 1971. Trapped in a world they never made, they are hunted and killed by fearful humans -- but their son, Caesar, survives and is adopted by kindly, animal-loving circus owner Ricardo Montalban.
CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES starts twenty years later when Montalban brings Caesar (played, like his father, by Roddy MacDowell) to an unnamed North American city to help promote his circus. But an altercation in a plaza causes the government to suspect that Caesar is a talking chimpanzee, and so a new ape-hunt begins. Caesar, however, escapes and blends in with the massive servant ape population and is ultimately sold to the tyrannical mayor. From there, he plots and leads a city-wide ape rebellion that culminates in a night of savage fighting.
Is it any good?
In terms of story, CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES has the best raw materials to work with since the first installment in the series. In other words, it’s built on a very simple and gripping premise that’s hard to mess up: ape servants revolt against their human masters and dominate them. As an actual movie, it has a few problems, but it also has some great aspects to it -- and so I’d have to say that I consider it one of the high points of the series.
Things get off to a really great start simply thanks to the appearance of dozens of apes in jumpsuits in a modern American city. ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES brought talking chimpanzees back to contemporary America -- but it only brought two of them. CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES (which is set, by the way, in a vaguely fascist version of 1991) introduces a vast underclass of ape servants. In fact, the movie is a bit of a mirror image of the original PLANET OF THE APES. In this movie, a sophisticated human society maltreats and oppresses its mute and dumb ape population, in which a single talking and thinking member attempts to hide.
How there got to be so many apes in America is explained with a silly story about an epidemic that killed off all cats and dogs in 1983. Yearning for animal companionship, the people of the world don’t bother with parakeets or rabbits, but instead turn directly to chimpanzees and gorillas. They soon discovered that the apes can be taught to do all kinds of useful things, and so the new pets immediately turn into slaves. So in the eight years since 1983, thousands of ape servants have taken over all kinds of menial jobs. Cities are full of chimpanzees and gorillas (though orangutangs are oddly absent except in a couple of crowd shots) and entire industries have sprung up to capture, transport, condition, breed, and market the apes.
The intervening twenty years since ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES have also resulted in a harsher human government as well. In the movie version of 1971, the president only reluctantly hunted down the fugitive chimpanzees Cornelius and Zira. But by 1991, a jack-booted security force is in place to violently break up any ape or human disturbance. The mayor of the city acts practically like an ancient Roman consul. (Unlike the president back in 1971, he never worries about how excessive force might affect his chances of being re-elected.) Not much time is spent on how the human society functions in 1991, but it’s obvious from glimpses here and there that people have fewer freedoms and that the government has grown more oppressive and controlling in every way.
I’m personally a big fan of Ricardo Montalban in the PLANET OF THE APES movies. Sadly, he is only in the first forty minutes or so of this one. But he seems so wise and compassionate (and plays his character so passionately) that it’s a real shame when he makes his exit. There is one great moment when a couple of security thugs force him to yell “lousy human bastards” at the top of his lungs (they’re trying to identify the voice of a dissident), and Montalban practically turns it into a battle cry.
The middle of the movie -- in which Caesar blends in with the ape population and organizes his revolt -- is where things start to get a little weak. Even after seeing this flick about four times, it’s just not clear to me exactly how it happens. All we really see are a few shots of Caesar silently urging on defiant apes who refuse to do their jobs. I can’t figure out if he’s meant to be the literal catalyst for these minor acts of rebellion, or if he’s simply been symbolically inserted. (There’s a lot of evidence that the apes were getting uppity even before Caesar’s arrival -- he’s just the one who brings it all together into a coherent revolt.) Caesar also has a home base where the apes start stockpiling weapons, but I could never figure out where it’s supposed to be or why no humans are aware of it or even how he finds time to go there. There are just not enough details to make the preparations convincing or compelling.
But that part of the movie is short enough. Soon it moves into the out-and-out ape on human violence as the entire city erupts in open rebellion. There’s been some talk in the past year of re-making or re-imagining this movie somehow. I can understand the appeal since, as I said, I think it’s got great raw materials. But no re-make can ever capture the cognitive dissonance of Roddy MacDowell in full chimpanzee prosthetics running through the streets of Los Angeles letting off rounds from an assault rifle as he leads an ape uprising. This was Roddy MacDowell’s third PLANET OF THE APES movie -- and up until now he had played the meek and peace-loving Cornelius. (Cornelius was played by another actor in BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, but had essentially the same character.) Caesar is bitter, violent, and borderline nihilistic at times -- in other words, a huge departure from Cornelius. It would be like if Christopher Reeve had returned in SUPERMAN III playing Clark Kent’s son who wanted to burn down the world and turn it all into ashes. (Come to think of it, that would have been a vast improvement over the SUPERMAN III we actually got.)
Of course, cynicism and violence are nothing new to the PLANET OF THE APES series. When I was writing about BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, I alluded to the fact that the movies traditionally have very depressing endings. In the original, Charlton Heston finds out that the Earth has been devastated by nuclear war right before the credits roll. In an amazing act of one-up-manship, he manages to literally destroy the entire planet at the end of the second movie. ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES ends with Cornelius and Zira -- two beloved characters from all three movies -- brutally gunned down. And yet, despite all this, the first time I saw CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES I can safely say that the transformation of Roddy MacDowell into a violent revolutionary pretty well blew my mind.
My mind would have been even more blown if CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES still ended the way it was originally supposed to. The ape rebellion eventually carries the violence to the mayor’s command center. Caesar and his crew burst in with guns blazing and drag the mayor to the streets outside. Caesar then gives a rabble-rousing speech about the ascendency of apes and summarily denies a request for compassion and mercy from the movie’s only surviving sympathetic human character. Originally, the movie ended with the assembled apes beating the mayor to death with the butts of their rifles after the end of this speech while Caesar looked on approvingly. But for whatever reason (probably to get a PG rating) this was changed before the movie was released. Now, instead, Caesar goes on to make a second speech where he calls for apes to put aside their vengeance and to dominate mankind compassionately. In this version -- the final version that showed in theaters in 1972 and is on most home versions of the movie -- nobody is beaten to death. Despite the fact that we know from the first two movies that humans will end up dumb and primitive, hunted for sport by gorillas on horseback, this ending still seems to preserve a little glimmer of hope that things will be okay. (More on this later.)
In some ways, I prefer the original dark and cynical ending. It fits with the hopelessness of the earlier movies, and fits much more organically with the rest of the movie. The sudden switch in tone from rampaging bloodlust to even-tempered peacemaking still strikes me as totally jarring and unbelievable. (The editing on the new ending is also distracting in its horribleness. It’s obvious that lines are being dubbed and shots are being re-cut.) But I have come to believe that the new ending is not a complete disaster either.
One of the most interesting things about the PLANET OF THE APES series is how the overall storyline develops. There’s no hint in the original movie that any thought was given to continuing the story, and BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES ends in such a way that any additional movies should have been impossible. But the film makers kept finding new ways to keep the series going. As they did so, they began to include more and more information on how apes came to rule the world in the first place. Later movies then went on to dramatize much of what had only been talked about in earlier movies. But not exactly.
In ESCAPE FROM THE PLANET OF THE APES, Cornelius and Zira tell a story about the ape revolt that is similar to what happens in CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES -- but it differs in several key details. For one thing, the dates are moved up considerably -- before Cornelius and Zira arrived in 1971, the rebellion wasn’t scheduled for several hundred years. The leader of the rebellion is obviously then a different ape, rather than their son. Other events that are later shown in BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (the fifth and final installment) happen differently than they are described in earlier movies as well.
No doubt what really happened is that the film makers were making things up as they went along, and so they had to fudge a few facts when their old ideas no longer meshed with what they wanted to do with a particular sequel. But there is another, more interesting possibility too -- that Cornelius and Zira changed the timeline when they traveled to the past, accelerating some events and modifying others. BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES embraces this idea more fully, and by the end of that movie it no longer appears that the Earth is inevitably headed towards a world where humans are dominated by apes. Instead, it seems there is a chance for humans and apes to coexist and live together in relative peace.
This is important because if the future cannot be changed, there is a hard expiration date on the Earth only a thousand or so years down the road. If the events of the last three movies are just documenting the inexorable march towards the final battle between man and ape that destroys the Earth, then that is a very depressing story indeed. But as the subtle differences accumulate, that ending is more and more in question. The movies are then no longer simply counting down the doomsday clock -- instead, they are the story of how a handful of seemingly insignificant acts of mercy can change the entire course of history for the better. Caesar’s sparing of the mayor -- as out of place as it seems in the moment -- is the first act that points towards the possibility of redemption in the future.
Caesar knows the future history of the world as it was experienced by his parents, so it’s even possible that his change of heart is motivated somehow by this knowledge. The ending would have no doubt been far better if the film makers had decided to go down this path originally, rather than patching up a make-shift fix to appease the studio executives who were increasingly uncomfortable with the grim direction of the series. But despite the awful execution of the new ending, I think the way it changes the story is a very interesting and exciting and development in the series.
Monday, April 13, 2009
1962: LA JETÉE
What’s it about?
A soldier in post-apocalyptic France is captured by the enemy and sent to a prison camp in dark catacombs under a city that appears to be Paris. In fact, all survivors of the war now live underground to escape the deadly radiation that permeates the surface of the Earth. Realizing that the irradiated world above no longer has the resources to support humanity, the enemy scientists begin work on a time travel program designed to cull necessary resources from the past and the future. Prisoners are used for the dangerous experiments -- and when it comes the French soldier’s turn, several subjects have already died or gone insane as a result of the experiments.
Sent successfully back in time, the soldier encounters a woman he remembers glimpsing once in his childhood. They strike up a friendship, and then a romance. The woman -- a memory of an almost forgotten pre-war world -- becomes a focal point for the soldier’s time traveling, and eventually he is able to visit the past almost at will. But no sooner does he realize this then the scientists fling him forward in time to beg help from humanity’s futuristic descendants. Knowing he will be executed after completing his mission, the soldier seeks a way to escape through time back to the days of his childhood and the woman he has grown to love.
Is it any good?
Only half an hour long, LA JETÉE is not a movie in the traditional sense. Instead, the story is told entirely through a montage of black and white still photographs combined with narration, music, and sound effects. As such, it’s very simple -- characters exist only as faces and short narrated descriptions. It’s less dramatic than even a radio play or a short story, and yet even stripped down to such bare essentials it is still very interesting indeed.
The short running time helps, of course. And even though the images themselves don’t move, they do change every few seconds. Paradoxically, this means that LA JETÉE often shows more of any particular scene that a typical motion picture does -- instead of cutting back and forth between two people exchanging dialogue during a two-minute scene, the photographs here can roam around and show the actors and environment from every possible angle. And each shot is carefully framed to communicate either information or emotion. Watching LA JETÉE isn’t like looking at photo stills or a storyboard for a movie -- it’s like paging through a book of carefully composed photographs.
The extreme simplicity of the movie also gives the story a fable-like quality that doesn’t really feel like any other sci-fi movie that has come before. In some ways, it feels so startlingly different that it seems it must have sprung fully-formed from the mind of a visionary, rather than being the natural product of organic developments in the genre. But even though there may not be film antecedents to LA JETÉE (and I don’t know for sure there aren’t), there were certainly many sci-fi novels and stories in the 1950s and 1960s that formed the tradition it draws from. So, taken in the context of the other movies of the time, LA JETÉE is a reminder of how little of the genre’s possibilities had yet been explored on film even by 1962.
Though the post-apocalyptic catacombs and the future world are briefly depicted, it doesn’t seem that LA JETÉE is really interested in speculating on fantastic worlds. Instead, it lingers on the ordinary world of every-day modern Paris, which is what the time-traveling soldier sees as fantastic. The movie is a meditation -- it’s absorbed in its own premise and in no hurry to trade quiet contemplation for action or character or plot. The basic story was later used by Terry Gilliam as the basis for his movie 12 MONKEYS (1995), but watching LA JETÉE is a very different experience indeed.
What else happened this year?
-- John Frankenheimer’s THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE casts Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury in a paranoid conspiracy thriller about brainwashing, McCarthyism, communist plots, and political assassinations.
-- Actor Ray Milland took one of his few turns as director with the nuclear war thriller PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!
-- I can’t really in good conscience recommend THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN’T DIE to anybody, but it has a couple unforgettable scenes at the very end. HANDS OF A STRANGER, on the other hand, is less memorable but overall a better movie about the same kind of themes.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1962...
It might as well be LA JETÉE. It’s easier to watch than it sounds, but if you prefer something less experimental then go with THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE instead.
A soldier in post-apocalyptic France is captured by the enemy and sent to a prison camp in dark catacombs under a city that appears to be Paris. In fact, all survivors of the war now live underground to escape the deadly radiation that permeates the surface of the Earth. Realizing that the irradiated world above no longer has the resources to support humanity, the enemy scientists begin work on a time travel program designed to cull necessary resources from the past and the future. Prisoners are used for the dangerous experiments -- and when it comes the French soldier’s turn, several subjects have already died or gone insane as a result of the experiments.
Sent successfully back in time, the soldier encounters a woman he remembers glimpsing once in his childhood. They strike up a friendship, and then a romance. The woman -- a memory of an almost forgotten pre-war world -- becomes a focal point for the soldier’s time traveling, and eventually he is able to visit the past almost at will. But no sooner does he realize this then the scientists fling him forward in time to beg help from humanity’s futuristic descendants. Knowing he will be executed after completing his mission, the soldier seeks a way to escape through time back to the days of his childhood and the woman he has grown to love.
Is it any good?
Only half an hour long, LA JETÉE is not a movie in the traditional sense. Instead, the story is told entirely through a montage of black and white still photographs combined with narration, music, and sound effects. As such, it’s very simple -- characters exist only as faces and short narrated descriptions. It’s less dramatic than even a radio play or a short story, and yet even stripped down to such bare essentials it is still very interesting indeed.
The short running time helps, of course. And even though the images themselves don’t move, they do change every few seconds. Paradoxically, this means that LA JETÉE often shows more of any particular scene that a typical motion picture does -- instead of cutting back and forth between two people exchanging dialogue during a two-minute scene, the photographs here can roam around and show the actors and environment from every possible angle. And each shot is carefully framed to communicate either information or emotion. Watching LA JETÉE isn’t like looking at photo stills or a storyboard for a movie -- it’s like paging through a book of carefully composed photographs.
The extreme simplicity of the movie also gives the story a fable-like quality that doesn’t really feel like any other sci-fi movie that has come before. In some ways, it feels so startlingly different that it seems it must have sprung fully-formed from the mind of a visionary, rather than being the natural product of organic developments in the genre. But even though there may not be film antecedents to LA JETÉE (and I don’t know for sure there aren’t), there were certainly many sci-fi novels and stories in the 1950s and 1960s that formed the tradition it draws from. So, taken in the context of the other movies of the time, LA JETÉE is a reminder of how little of the genre’s possibilities had yet been explored on film even by 1962.
Though the post-apocalyptic catacombs and the future world are briefly depicted, it doesn’t seem that LA JETÉE is really interested in speculating on fantastic worlds. Instead, it lingers on the ordinary world of every-day modern Paris, which is what the time-traveling soldier sees as fantastic. The movie is a meditation -- it’s absorbed in its own premise and in no hurry to trade quiet contemplation for action or character or plot. The basic story was later used by Terry Gilliam as the basis for his movie 12 MONKEYS (1995), but watching LA JETÉE is a very different experience indeed.
What else happened this year?
-- John Frankenheimer’s THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE casts Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury in a paranoid conspiracy thriller about brainwashing, McCarthyism, communist plots, and political assassinations.
-- Actor Ray Milland took one of his few turns as director with the nuclear war thriller PANIC IN YEAR ZERO!
-- I can’t really in good conscience recommend THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN’T DIE to anybody, but it has a couple unforgettable scenes at the very end. HANDS OF A STRANGER, on the other hand, is less memorable but overall a better movie about the same kind of themes.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1962...
It might as well be LA JETÉE. It’s easier to watch than it sounds, but if you prefer something less experimental then go with THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE instead.
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