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.
Showing posts with label underground. Show all posts
Showing posts with label underground. Show all posts
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
BONUS BLOG -- 1975: A BOY AND HIS DOG
What’s it about?
Young drifter Don Johnson wanders through post-apocalyptic America with his telepathic dog, Blood. Johnson’s life is an alternating selfish quest for food and women, and he thinks nothing of killing and raping to get what he wants. Blood helps him along, but tries to interest him in a potentially better life in a legendary place called “over the hill” where people still farm and live in peace.
One night, Blood sniffs out a woman at a violent make-shift hobo camp. In pursuing her, Johnson has to fight or evade other marauding drifters like himself and frightening mutants called “screamers”. When the girl gives him the slip despite his persistence, he follows her to her home “down under” -- an underground colony of superficially civilized survivors who operate a fascist police state underneath a twisted and creepy veneer of down-home, apple-cheeked Americana.
Is it any good?
I like to classify and categorize things, so I have been secretly working under an unverified hypothesis that there is some monolithic category of “pre-STAR WARS” sci-fi movies and another of “post-STAR WARS” sci-fi movies. This is, of course, completely untrue. I would say that sci-fi movies in the 1950s may have largely followed a predictable formula (handsome scientist saves world), but even by the end of that decade there were a lot of film makers branching out into new territory.
But one thing I have noticed about the more serious-minded sci-fi movies of the pre-STAR WARS period is that they very often have an obvious allegorical quality to them. By that I mean that many of the movies don’t seem interested in probable or even possible futures -- instead, they are interested in TWILIGHT ZONE worlds that reflect back some aspect of our own society in refracted ways.
I would put movies such as PLANET OF THE APES (1968), SILENT RUNNING (1972), SOYLENT GREEN (1973) and LOGAN’S RUN (1976) in this category. And since those are some of my favorite movies of all time, I can honestly say that I don’t really mind the whole allegorical approach to sci-fi. In fact, allegorical stories are the quickest route to one of my favorite things about science fiction: grumpy satirical misanthropy.
In the case of A BOY AND HIS DOG, though, the descent into the satirical world of the underground Kansas is pretty darn disappointing. The post-apocalyptic surface world is so full of interesting things (and so unlike anything else on film prior to 1975) that the creepy version of middle America under the surface just felt ordinary and lifeless by comparison. It was also completely unexpected. Nothing in the first two-thirds of the movie made it obvious that this underground world even existed -- let alone that Don Johnson would spend the last half hour of the movie down there, separated from his dog.
A BOY AND HIS DOG is not the first post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie. But even the earlier movies that imagine a destroyed Earth -- like THE LAST MAN (1960) and THE OMEGA MAN (1971) -- don’t go much farther than overturned cars in their depiction of wreckage. THE WAR GAME (1965) and ZARDOZ (1974) add bombed-out buildings to the mix, but the survivors mostly just huddle in shell-shocked groups. PLANET OF THE APES (1968) and especially BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970) do go whole hog with the idea of world ravaged by nuclear war, but they take place thousands of years after the event in question, when modern civilization is an archaeological memory. BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1974) features a recently post-apocalyptic New York City, but stays mostly in the steam tunnels and basements. The closest thing I can think of is the Czechoslovakian THE END OF AUGUST AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE (1967). That movie is far more meditative, however, and the future is a severely underpopulated and woman-dominated one. (Which is pretty unique in itself, I might add.)
A BOY AND HIS DOG is the first movie I’m aware of that really takes pains to depict what life might be like for those who are forced to scrabble out a living from the ruins of a shattered world. But it was followed pretty quickly by DAMNATION ALLEY (1977), DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978), QUINTET (1979), ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981), THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981), and then a whole blossoming sub-genre. I think there’s not much doubt that THE ROAD WARRIOR was responsible for popularizing post-apocalyptic movies (and a whole dingy aesthetic that follow them to this day), but a whole lot of what you can see there was done first by A BOY AND HIS DOG.
The biggest disappointment about the shift in focus is that there is still so much of the post-apocalyptic surface world left unseen. Don Johnson spends much of his time in underpopulated wastelands, and though he does come into “town” for a little while, he doesn’t do anything there except go to the movies. The only people he interacts with are just as unpleasant as he is. In fact, the dog Blood is the only truly likeable character in the movie, and even he has his brutal moments. (Then again, he is a dog.)
I don’t want to give the impression that this is a bad movie. It’s not, and I enjoyed much of it quite a lot. But it definitely leaves many potentially interesting stones completely unturned -- which, I suppose, is why we have had many more post-apocalyptic movies since 1975.
Young drifter Don Johnson wanders through post-apocalyptic America with his telepathic dog, Blood. Johnson’s life is an alternating selfish quest for food and women, and he thinks nothing of killing and raping to get what he wants. Blood helps him along, but tries to interest him in a potentially better life in a legendary place called “over the hill” where people still farm and live in peace.
One night, Blood sniffs out a woman at a violent make-shift hobo camp. In pursuing her, Johnson has to fight or evade other marauding drifters like himself and frightening mutants called “screamers”. When the girl gives him the slip despite his persistence, he follows her to her home “down under” -- an underground colony of superficially civilized survivors who operate a fascist police state underneath a twisted and creepy veneer of down-home, apple-cheeked Americana.
 |  |
Is it any good?
I like to classify and categorize things, so I have been secretly working under an unverified hypothesis that there is some monolithic category of “pre-STAR WARS” sci-fi movies and another of “post-STAR WARS” sci-fi movies. This is, of course, completely untrue. I would say that sci-fi movies in the 1950s may have largely followed a predictable formula (handsome scientist saves world), but even by the end of that decade there were a lot of film makers branching out into new territory.
But one thing I have noticed about the more serious-minded sci-fi movies of the pre-STAR WARS period is that they very often have an obvious allegorical quality to them. By that I mean that many of the movies don’t seem interested in probable or even possible futures -- instead, they are interested in TWILIGHT ZONE worlds that reflect back some aspect of our own society in refracted ways.
I would put movies such as PLANET OF THE APES (1968), SILENT RUNNING (1972), SOYLENT GREEN (1973) and LOGAN’S RUN (1976) in this category. And since those are some of my favorite movies of all time, I can honestly say that I don’t really mind the whole allegorical approach to sci-fi. In fact, allegorical stories are the quickest route to one of my favorite things about science fiction: grumpy satirical misanthropy.
 |  |
In the case of A BOY AND HIS DOG, though, the descent into the satirical world of the underground Kansas is pretty darn disappointing. The post-apocalyptic surface world is so full of interesting things (and so unlike anything else on film prior to 1975) that the creepy version of middle America under the surface just felt ordinary and lifeless by comparison. It was also completely unexpected. Nothing in the first two-thirds of the movie made it obvious that this underground world even existed -- let alone that Don Johnson would spend the last half hour of the movie down there, separated from his dog.
A BOY AND HIS DOG is not the first post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie. But even the earlier movies that imagine a destroyed Earth -- like THE LAST MAN (1960) and THE OMEGA MAN (1971) -- don’t go much farther than overturned cars in their depiction of wreckage. THE WAR GAME (1965) and ZARDOZ (1974) add bombed-out buildings to the mix, but the survivors mostly just huddle in shell-shocked groups. PLANET OF THE APES (1968) and especially BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970) do go whole hog with the idea of world ravaged by nuclear war, but they take place thousands of years after the event in question, when modern civilization is an archaeological memory. BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (1974) features a recently post-apocalyptic New York City, but stays mostly in the steam tunnels and basements. The closest thing I can think of is the Czechoslovakian THE END OF AUGUST AUGUST AT THE HOTEL OZONE (1967). That movie is far more meditative, however, and the future is a severely underpopulated and woman-dominated one. (Which is pretty unique in itself, I might add.)
 |  |
A BOY AND HIS DOG is the first movie I’m aware of that really takes pains to depict what life might be like for those who are forced to scrabble out a living from the ruins of a shattered world. But it was followed pretty quickly by DAMNATION ALLEY (1977), DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978), QUINTET (1979), ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (1981), THE ROAD WARRIOR (1981), and then a whole blossoming sub-genre. I think there’s not much doubt that THE ROAD WARRIOR was responsible for popularizing post-apocalyptic movies (and a whole dingy aesthetic that follow them to this day), but a whole lot of what you can see there was done first by A BOY AND HIS DOG.
The biggest disappointment about the shift in focus is that there is still so much of the post-apocalyptic surface world left unseen. Don Johnson spends much of his time in underpopulated wastelands, and though he does come into “town” for a little while, he doesn’t do anything there except go to the movies. The only people he interacts with are just as unpleasant as he is. In fact, the dog Blood is the only truly likeable character in the movie, and even he has his brutal moments. (Then again, he is a dog.)
I don’t want to give the impression that this is a bad movie. It’s not, and I enjoyed much of it quite a lot. But it definitely leaves many potentially interesting stones completely unturned -- which, I suppose, is why we have had many more post-apocalyptic movies since 1975.
 |  |
Monday, June 29, 2009
1970: BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES
What’s it about?
Astronaut James Franciscus arrives on the planet in question, hoping to find out what happened to the missing space expedition led by Charlton Heston from the first movie in the series. He soon discovers that he has traveled two thousand years into the future and has landed on a planet where talking apes rule over mute, primitive humans. While escaping from the ape city into the desert waste of the Forbidden Zone, Brent seeks refuge in a cave that turns out to be an entrance to the ancient ruins of the New York City subway system.
Making his way through the subway, Franciscus encounters a colony of psychic mutants who live underground and worship an atomic bomb with incredible destructive powers. (Say that ten times fast.) He is briefly reunited with Charlton Heston before an attacking ape army forces them to try and stop the mutants from detonating the atomic bomb.
Is it any good?
I wanted to write about PLANET OF THE APES back when I was doing 1968, but I’m glad now that I didn’t since it means I won’t end up repeating myself. And since most folks are already pretty familiar with the first movie in the series, it’s maybe a bit more fun to talk about this one instead. Not that it’s anywhere near as good as the original -- BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES was actually my least favorite of the series for a long time. (There are five ape movies in all, not counting Tim Burton’s 2001 remake.) These days I think it’s one of the best, but honestly there are things I like a heck of a lot about all of them.
One of the reasons I used to dislike BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is that the first half of the movie is really just a condensed and lower quality version of the original PLANET OF THE APES. The movie even starts with abbreviated versions of the scenes that end the first movie where Charlton Heston discovers that the planet of the apes was actually Earth all along. These scenes use the original footage from the first movie, but they are shortened and they aren’t nearly as effective as a result.
The rest of the first half follows James Franciscus as he rapidly picks up all the pieces he needs to figure out the mystery of the planet of the apes. The very first person he meets on the planet is Charlton Heston’s primitive girlfriend, Nova. She’s mute, but Franciscus recognizes the dogtags of the man he’s looking for, so he links up with her and they ride off in search of Charlton Heston. Next, he comes to the ape city where a gorilla general is publicly whipping up support for an attack on suspected human habitations in the Forbidden Zone. While in the city, Franciscus meets sympathetic chimps Zira (still played by Kim Hunter) and Cornelius (not Roddy MacDowell, alas), who give him aid and comfort before hustling him out the door. Zira later helps Franciscus escape from some gorillas who have captured him, and after that the first half ends with the discovery of the subway station that reveals the planet’s true origins.
I still don’t really like the beginning of the movie. The producers had naturally wanted Heston to star in BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, but he would only agree to appear in a cameo. (Besides a couple short scenes at the very start of the movie, he doesn’t show up until almost the end.) I have no problem with James Fransiscus -- he’s fine in THE VALLEY OF THE GWANGI, for instance -- but his Brent is no replacement for Charlton Heston’s cynical and independent Taylor. It doesn’t help that he looks a lot like Charlton Heston too.
Kim Hunter and the not-Roddy-MacDowell who plays Cornelius don’t get much more than cameos either. The only character who gets as much screen time as Franciscus is Linda Harrison’s Nova. And sadly, she is pretty much the most boring major character in the whole series -- no doubt in large part because she can’t talk and so just stands around looking surprised or afraid.
But that’s enough about the first half of the movie. Once Franciscus enters the ruined New York subways, things quickly get pretty amazing. For one thing, the subway sets are nifty, and though watching Franciscus put together the truth about the planet of the apes doesn't have the same kick as it did in PLANET OF THE APES, it’s still a great scene. It’s deeper in these same subways that he encounters the colony of psychic mutant humans that the apes are hoping to hunt out and destroy.
The mutants are underground survivors of the nuclear war that laid waste to the Earth and allowed apes to become the dominant species. (The other surviving humans are the dumb, animal-like surface dwellers like Nova that the apes round up and slaughter in organized hunts.) They have psychic powers -- defending their home with frightening illusions and piercing sounds -- and worship a powerful atomic bomb capable of destroying all life on the planet. They also wear masks that hide their horribly disfigured mutant faces.
This seems like a good time for an aside about that atomic bomb worship. It’s not totally clear what BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is trying to say about religion with these scenes -- that is, if it’s really trying to say anything at all beyond throwing up the wildest images possible. Religion is sometimes portrayed in science fiction simply as rote ritual with no serious thoughtful underpinnings -- people just keep doing things because their ancestors did them, and on and on down through the generations. That’s not really my experience with religion, but it also doesn’t seem to be what BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is positing either. The mutants aren’t dumb -- they seem educated and intelligent. But they also seriously believe that the atomic bomb is their god, and they refer to it as a “holy bomb of peace”. So if I had to guess, I’d say that the portrayal of religion in the movie is not really about religion at all. If anything, it’s more a satire of how educated and intelligent people can somehow accept an absurd idea like “mutually assured destruction” as necessary for peace.
Franciscus is captured by the mutants and put into a prison cell with Heston, and they are both then compelled to fight to the death. (“We are a peaceful people,” says one of the mutants. “We don’t kill our enemies. We get our enemies to kill each other.”) But of course the two astronauts manage to escape that particular fate by working together -- that’s all as it should be. But the interesting thing about BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is what they end up escaping to.
By this time, the ape army has busted through the mutants’ psychic defenses and are pillaging the underground city, making their way to the cathedral where the atomic bomb is kept. Knowing their city is lost, the mutants are preparing to detonate the bomb. So Franciscus and Heston race to the cathedral and find the bomb almost entirely armed and gorillas everywhere. As they sneak towards the detonator to disarm it, they are both fatally shot by a hail of ape bullets. Franciscus in particular is pretty shockingly dispatched in a Bonnie-and-Clyde or Butch-Cassidy-and-the-Sundance-Kid type of excessive fusillade. As he’s sliding down the wall with blood pouring out of the bullet holes in his forehead, it suddenly becomes clear that the sharp cynicism of the original movie has just been lying dormant in the sequel, waiting to erupt at the worst possible time for the heroes.
Things only get darker from there, though, as Heston survives just long enough to crawl towards the detonator and finish setting off the bomb. The screen goes white and a narrator drily informs us that the third planet from the sun has been destroyed. It’s an incredible ending -- and especially incredible for the time. Charlton Heston’s sci-fi flicks (the other famous ones are THE OMEGA MAN and SOYLENT GREEN) always have a thick sour streak, but having the ostensible hero destroy the entire planet is taking things a bit beyond the pale. Reportedly, Heston suggested the ending himself -- largely because he thought it would ensure that there wouldn’t be any more sequels. (Spoiler: There are three more -- but none with Heston.) But it’s in keeping with the endings of almost all the other movies in the series. These are movies with grim and depressing endings (most of them) that don’t pull any punches (most of the time). I’ll be re-watching all of the movies as I go along through the seventies, and I expect I’ll write about at least one more so I’ll save the rest of that discussion for later. For now I’ll just say that BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is not nearly as good as the original, but it’s still pretty amazing in its own way and well worth seeing because of it.
What else happened this year?
-- The 1970s version of Skynet seizes control of the world's nuclear arsenal and starts issuing orders to world leaders in COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT.
-- Peter Watkins returns to his faux documentary style with far less interesting results in THE GLADIATORS, which follows a squad of young soldiers playing a deadly televised war game.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1970...
Pickings are pretty slim this year, but BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is pretty great. Or at least the second half is.
Astronaut James Franciscus arrives on the planet in question, hoping to find out what happened to the missing space expedition led by Charlton Heston from the first movie in the series. He soon discovers that he has traveled two thousand years into the future and has landed on a planet where talking apes rule over mute, primitive humans. While escaping from the ape city into the desert waste of the Forbidden Zone, Brent seeks refuge in a cave that turns out to be an entrance to the ancient ruins of the New York City subway system.
Making his way through the subway, Franciscus encounters a colony of psychic mutants who live underground and worship an atomic bomb with incredible destructive powers. (Say that ten times fast.) He is briefly reunited with Charlton Heston before an attacking ape army forces them to try and stop the mutants from detonating the atomic bomb.
Is it any good?
I wanted to write about PLANET OF THE APES back when I was doing 1968, but I’m glad now that I didn’t since it means I won’t end up repeating myself. And since most folks are already pretty familiar with the first movie in the series, it’s maybe a bit more fun to talk about this one instead. Not that it’s anywhere near as good as the original -- BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES was actually my least favorite of the series for a long time. (There are five ape movies in all, not counting Tim Burton’s 2001 remake.) These days I think it’s one of the best, but honestly there are things I like a heck of a lot about all of them.
One of the reasons I used to dislike BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is that the first half of the movie is really just a condensed and lower quality version of the original PLANET OF THE APES. The movie even starts with abbreviated versions of the scenes that end the first movie where Charlton Heston discovers that the planet of the apes was actually Earth all along. These scenes use the original footage from the first movie, but they are shortened and they aren’t nearly as effective as a result.
The rest of the first half follows James Franciscus as he rapidly picks up all the pieces he needs to figure out the mystery of the planet of the apes. The very first person he meets on the planet is Charlton Heston’s primitive girlfriend, Nova. She’s mute, but Franciscus recognizes the dogtags of the man he’s looking for, so he links up with her and they ride off in search of Charlton Heston. Next, he comes to the ape city where a gorilla general is publicly whipping up support for an attack on suspected human habitations in the Forbidden Zone. While in the city, Franciscus meets sympathetic chimps Zira (still played by Kim Hunter) and Cornelius (not Roddy MacDowell, alas), who give him aid and comfort before hustling him out the door. Zira later helps Franciscus escape from some gorillas who have captured him, and after that the first half ends with the discovery of the subway station that reveals the planet’s true origins.
I still don’t really like the beginning of the movie. The producers had naturally wanted Heston to star in BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES, but he would only agree to appear in a cameo. (Besides a couple short scenes at the very start of the movie, he doesn’t show up until almost the end.) I have no problem with James Fransiscus -- he’s fine in THE VALLEY OF THE GWANGI, for instance -- but his Brent is no replacement for Charlton Heston’s cynical and independent Taylor. It doesn’t help that he looks a lot like Charlton Heston too.
Kim Hunter and the not-Roddy-MacDowell who plays Cornelius don’t get much more than cameos either. The only character who gets as much screen time as Franciscus is Linda Harrison’s Nova. And sadly, she is pretty much the most boring major character in the whole series -- no doubt in large part because she can’t talk and so just stands around looking surprised or afraid.
But that’s enough about the first half of the movie. Once Franciscus enters the ruined New York subways, things quickly get pretty amazing. For one thing, the subway sets are nifty, and though watching Franciscus put together the truth about the planet of the apes doesn't have the same kick as it did in PLANET OF THE APES, it’s still a great scene. It’s deeper in these same subways that he encounters the colony of psychic mutant humans that the apes are hoping to hunt out and destroy.
The mutants are underground survivors of the nuclear war that laid waste to the Earth and allowed apes to become the dominant species. (The other surviving humans are the dumb, animal-like surface dwellers like Nova that the apes round up and slaughter in organized hunts.) They have psychic powers -- defending their home with frightening illusions and piercing sounds -- and worship a powerful atomic bomb capable of destroying all life on the planet. They also wear masks that hide their horribly disfigured mutant faces.
This seems like a good time for an aside about that atomic bomb worship. It’s not totally clear what BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is trying to say about religion with these scenes -- that is, if it’s really trying to say anything at all beyond throwing up the wildest images possible. Religion is sometimes portrayed in science fiction simply as rote ritual with no serious thoughtful underpinnings -- people just keep doing things because their ancestors did them, and on and on down through the generations. That’s not really my experience with religion, but it also doesn’t seem to be what BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is positing either. The mutants aren’t dumb -- they seem educated and intelligent. But they also seriously believe that the atomic bomb is their god, and they refer to it as a “holy bomb of peace”. So if I had to guess, I’d say that the portrayal of religion in the movie is not really about religion at all. If anything, it’s more a satire of how educated and intelligent people can somehow accept an absurd idea like “mutually assured destruction” as necessary for peace.
Franciscus is captured by the mutants and put into a prison cell with Heston, and they are both then compelled to fight to the death. (“We are a peaceful people,” says one of the mutants. “We don’t kill our enemies. We get our enemies to kill each other.”) But of course the two astronauts manage to escape that particular fate by working together -- that’s all as it should be. But the interesting thing about BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is what they end up escaping to.
By this time, the ape army has busted through the mutants’ psychic defenses and are pillaging the underground city, making their way to the cathedral where the atomic bomb is kept. Knowing their city is lost, the mutants are preparing to detonate the bomb. So Franciscus and Heston race to the cathedral and find the bomb almost entirely armed and gorillas everywhere. As they sneak towards the detonator to disarm it, they are both fatally shot by a hail of ape bullets. Franciscus in particular is pretty shockingly dispatched in a Bonnie-and-Clyde or Butch-Cassidy-and-the-Sundance-Kid type of excessive fusillade. As he’s sliding down the wall with blood pouring out of the bullet holes in his forehead, it suddenly becomes clear that the sharp cynicism of the original movie has just been lying dormant in the sequel, waiting to erupt at the worst possible time for the heroes.
Things only get darker from there, though, as Heston survives just long enough to crawl towards the detonator and finish setting off the bomb. The screen goes white and a narrator drily informs us that the third planet from the sun has been destroyed. It’s an incredible ending -- and especially incredible for the time. Charlton Heston’s sci-fi flicks (the other famous ones are THE OMEGA MAN and SOYLENT GREEN) always have a thick sour streak, but having the ostensible hero destroy the entire planet is taking things a bit beyond the pale. Reportedly, Heston suggested the ending himself -- largely because he thought it would ensure that there wouldn’t be any more sequels. (Spoiler: There are three more -- but none with Heston.) But it’s in keeping with the endings of almost all the other movies in the series. These are movies with grim and depressing endings (most of them) that don’t pull any punches (most of the time). I’ll be re-watching all of the movies as I go along through the seventies, and I expect I’ll write about at least one more so I’ll save the rest of that discussion for later. For now I’ll just say that BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is not nearly as good as the original, but it’s still pretty amazing in its own way and well worth seeing because of it.
What else happened this year?
-- The 1970s version of Skynet seizes control of the world's nuclear arsenal and starts issuing orders to world leaders in COLOSSUS: THE FORBIN PROJECT.
-- Peter Watkins returns to his faux documentary style with far less interesting results in THE GLADIATORS, which follows a squad of young soldiers playing a deadly televised war game.
If you only watch one sci-fi movie from 1970...
Pickings are pretty slim this year, but BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES is pretty great. Or at least the second half is.
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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