Director:  Terry Gilliam

Cast:  Jonathan Pryce, Robert De Niro, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, Kim Greist, Jim Broadbent

Introduction     Plot Summary     Impressions     Wrap-up

My rating:  Class B (2/7, a hot white star).  Dense and complex, but leavened with a wry and quirky sense of humor, Brazil is an amazing visual and thematic accomplishment.

Introduction

Many of us have fond memories of Monty Python, an absurd British comedy television series structured as a sketch show but ably assisted by Terry Gilliam’s animations into a sort of stream-of-consciousness flow from sketch to sketch.  So I was expecting this film, directed by Terry Gilliam and featuring Michael Palin, one of the original members of the Monty Python troupe, to be funny and touching and absurd and somewhat disturbing, much like Gilliam’s first feature-length film Time Bandits.

I definitely got all of the above, but one thing this film is not, by any traditional approach, is science fiction (yes, yes, I’m linking to my own discussion of what science fiction is).  It is a dystopian satire, certainly, but it’s much more of a fantasy than it is a science fiction film, and my disappointment in that probably colored my reaction to the movie.

That said, it is a good movie, even if it isn’t really science fiction in my book.  It did extremely well in Europe, though the North American box office receipts were rather weak; like many of the films I’ve reviewed here, however, it achieved something of a cult favorite status in subsequent year.  Some of the poor box office take is a product of the acrimonious relationship between director and studio, and that definitely affected how the movie was publicized.

Gilliam filmed the story exactly the way he wanted it.  Universal Studios, however, felt that the film was, at 142 minutes, too long, and they wanted a happy ending for it.  Gilliam refused; Universal shelved the movie.  After a year, Gilliam took out a full page ad asking when it would be released.  Gilliam and Universal compromised, and Gilliam cut 11 minutes from the film, and added an ending sequence including white clouds in a blue sky and the reprise of the tune Aquarelo do Brazil, one of the film’s recurrent musical motifs.  You could write reams about how the dispute came about, but it’s fascinating to me that a film about how the modern world grinds down the individual using the tools of bureaucracy to stifle dreams and creativity was itself an apparent victim of the very process it depicts.

Plot (Contains Spoilers)

Short summary:  Boy doesn’t like his life.  Boy does like his dreams, though, in which he loves Girl.  Then Boy meets the real-world Girl, and everything goes horribly wrong.  Girl rejects Boy.  Boy takes new job to find out more about Girl.  Girl gets branded as a terrorist.  Boy uses his government position to save girl.  Government decides Boy is a terrorist.  Boy and Girl flee.  Boy is captured while Girl is killed.  Boy is tortured.  Boy goes insane.

Setup:  The lead character is Sam Lowry, a man who works as a government clerk in the Ministry of Information where he seems to be the only competent worker, and upon whom his supervisor relies to get things done and fix problems.  His mother is at least well-connected, and probably rich, and she wants more out of life for Sam than he does—she arranges promotions for him, attempts to ignite his ambition, and throws her friend’s daughter in his path.  Sam’s dream life, however, is anything but that of a lowly clerk in an oppressive and colorless society; he is a winged, armored warrior who flies to the rescue of a beautiful woman and battles monsters to save her.

Things begin to go wrong when the government goes after a suspected terrorist, Archibald “Harry” Tuttle.  Thanks to a fly in the typewriter, the government issues the orders for Archibald Buttle instead, and Buttle subsequently dies in the custody of the Department of Information Retrieval (at the hands of Lowry’s old friend Jack Lint, in fact).  Lowry decides to deliver the widow’s refund for the wrongful Department of Information Retrieval fees in person, and sees that her upstairs neighbor is Jill Layton, quite literally the woman of his dreams.  She wants nothing to do with him, and she pursues the issue of Buttle’s death in custody on her own.  Meanwhile Lowry comes in contact with the terrorist Tuttle, who is a renegade air conditioner repairman who fixes Lowry’s air conditioning without government sanction.  Lowry, stymied in his attempts to get information on Jill, prompts his mother to arrange a promotion to the Department of Information Retrieval, where he will be able to access the information on Jill Layton in the government’s archives.

At this point the stage is set, and the disaster is probably already evident to you as these disparate strands come together.  I haven’t mentioned some things which are important—Jack Lint, one of Lowry’s friends, works in Information Retrieval as a torturer, and the Department’s head is an old friend of Lowry’s father, for example.  Lowry’s mother is a vain and fashionable woman who undergoes plastic surgery the way some women buy shoes.  But you’ve got the basics, at any rate, so we can move on to my impressions.

Impressions

As I mentioned in the introduction, I came into this film expecting a standard science fiction film with some humor and some wry twists; what I got was an Orwellian (more on that in a bit) vision of a bureaucracy gone mad—and madness is, without question, a central issue in the film.  I’m not sure why this movie was on the list of the Top Fifty Science Fiction films of all time, to be honest—it’s not that it’s not a good film, but rather that it’s a dystopian vision of the now.  Dystopias have a long history in science fiction, and many people associate the word with science fiction.  But in my book, this film is much closer to fantasy—it’s even called a fantasy in many of the press releases and publicity material.  So the movie was, through no fault of it or Terry Gilliam, something of a disappointment to me.

However, viewed in its own right, the movie is a phenomenal piece of art.  By turns funny, touching, absurd (in both good and bad ways), and complex, the film is a really solid effort in Gilliam’s “Imagination Trilogy” (preceded by the excellent Time Bandits and followed by The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), in each of which Gilliam explores imagination versus reality in a different way, and from the viewpoint of a different age as well.

The visuals in the film are stunning.  Everything in Sam Lowry’s dream life is larger than life, colorful, and full of motion.  His office, on the other hand, and for that matter most of the places in the real world, are colorless, drab and utilitarian.  The only exception is his mother and her home, which are, much like Sam’s dreams, big (in a metaphorical sense—Katherine Helmond was certainly not big) and bold and a riot of color and style.  Jill, Sam’s dream girl, is a striking woman, even with her hair cut short, and when the real Jill turns out to be a rough and tough truck driver, even her vehicle is big and bold.

Brazil’s set design is definitely unique and idiosyncratic.  Sometimes described as “retro-futurism,” Gilliam has commented that he wanted the look of the film to capture the entire Twentieth Century compacted down to a single moment, and also to look like the 1980s as it might be imagined by someone in the 1940s.  As a result, visually the old and the new coexist peacefully, typewriters beside computer screens.  The bizarre juxtapositions create some of the movie’s absurd impressions and give the film a unique look and feel.

One of the more bizarre aspects of the visual nature of the film is the ductwork.  Nearly every scene, with the exception of those which take place in the Ministry of Information, includes exposed ductwork of various types.  There’s a “commercial” in the opening segment of the film for ducts which can be selected to suit any customer’s preference.  The ducts are not just a striking visual, though; they tie into the plot because it’s Lowry’s air conditioning unit, ducts and all, which malfunctions and brings him into contact with the suspected terrorist Archibald Tuttle.  Gilliam doesn’t put things in just for the look of them—the ducts may well be symbolic and are closely tied in to the advance of the plot.

It is worth noting that the Ministry of Information was filmed in an old grain mill; according to some sources, it is now an IKEA furniture store.  Make of that what you will, in light of the movie’s themes.

The music—a light and airy orchestral score—is wildly inappropriate for a tragedy, and yet it fits the themes and the tone of the film entirely too well.  Gilliam picked Aquarela Do Brazil, commonly known simply as Brazil in the English-speaking world, as his thematic leitmotif, but it was a good choice.  The song is upbeat, opening with a swelling sequence of horns, and then invoking a swift drum beat.  The composer, Ary Barroso, wanted “to free the samba away from the tragedies of life.”  Given the way the film turns out, using the song and indeed naming the film for it seems entirely fitting, after all.

The performers do a more than simply good job, and it’s hard to pick any as better than the others.  But Katherine Helmond brings her trademark insouciance, beauty and comic timing to her role as Sam Lowry’s mother.  She even manages to make a hat shaped like a boot look both good and natural.  Michael Palin is a standout as the joyful torturer who loves his work, and Robert De Niro brings a sort of everyman quality to his role as the renegade air conditioner repairman cum resistance fighter.  The ubiquitous Ian Holm also does a very nice job with his role as Lowry’s hapless supervisor in the Ministry of Information.  Jonathan Pryce, in the lead as Sam Lowry, really shines in all aspects of the role, from projecting quiet desparation and despair to at least the intention of action as well as bewilderment and confusion.

While in some ways the story is a simple one—and it really is a boy-meets-girl sort of story set against a backdrop of tyranical government bureaucracy, the intersection of the two plot lines inevitably leading to tragedy—it is not told in a simple way, and for that matter the thematic implications of the story are anything but simple and straight-forward.  There’s a lot going on in the background of the shots, for example, that advances the story.  A half-heard interview might contain critical information; a fleeting glimpse of a sign or poster might have a slogan that helps to set the tone and make the why of the events occurring on-screen sensible.  In other words, you have to pay attention and work to keep up.  I’m not saying that you’ll never realize that the Department of Information Retrieval is, among other things, government-sponsored and controlled torture and interrogation, as a point like that is too fundamental to the film to let the viewer miss it.  But you may not realize it at first, and it might be a considerable surprise when you get to the end of the film.  There is little doubt in my mind that this film would repay a second and third viewing.

Among the other themes in Brazil, there’s a strong thread of paranoia and over-heated response to terrorism which may strike a chord with modern viewers.  At the Ministry of Information, for example, there’s a sign on the wall which reads “Be safe:  Be suspicious.”  Or how about “Mind that parcel.  Eagle eyes can save a life.”  For anyone who’s ever spent time in an airport in the wake of September 11, 2001, that’s a chilling echo of the things you hear and see these days.  Then there’s two posters which evoke 1984 and Big Brother:  “Don’t suspect a friend, report him.”  I immediately thought of the TSA’s slogan “If you see something, say something.”  Gilliam wisely includes the terrorists’ explosions without explaining who is responsible; the ambiguity behind the terrorism actually seems to drive the plot forward.

Another idea which may strike some viewers as chillingly prophetic is the government’s position that wrong-doers must pay for their own torture and incarceration.  In the hands of a government which seems less interested in fairness and more in the absolute letter of the law, and which regards wasting government time and paper as a crime worthy of torture, the point is perhaps less comically absurd than it is frightening.  One of the guards recommends to Lowry that he not resist too much, because it will destroy his credit rating….  This system is also why Lowry is in the Buttles’ apartment in the first place, as Buttle—wrongly arrested instead of Tuttle—was charged for his imprisonment and torture, and the government must give the money back to his widow since it isn’t entitled to it.

At least the government in Brazil is still a believer in truth, as the refund of Buttle’s funds suggests.  But Gilliam isn’t painting a picture of an evil government out to get its own citizens; he is instead showing a government and a society which is needlessly bureaucratic, and which grinds down the individual and crushes their dreams.  He uses Orwellian symbolism, certainly (he considered giving the film the title 1984-1/2 according to some sources), and the use of torture over a waste of paper and government time is clearly overkill—but in the end, the story is intended as a metaphor for Gilliam’s feeling that the modern world has a way of grinding the individual down and rendering him or her a mere cog in the machine.  And the only escape is fantasy….

At the end of the film, when Jack is torturing Sam, the tool in his hands is a very old-fashioned device indeed: it is inserted into the nose and pushed up into the brain, severing the frontal lobe.  In other words, it’s a tool for a frontal lobotomy.  Arguably, and in spite of my initial impression that Brazil is actually about Sam Lowry’s psychotic break from reality with tragic consequences for everyone around him, Lowry is completely sane—albeit taking great risks in the name of love and attaining his dreams—right up to the end of the film.  It is, instead, society itself which is insane.  That social insanity, of course, is why comic absurdities crop up throughout the movie.

Lowry’s insanity, and his visions of an escape from the torturers—including the renegade air conditioner repairman becoming a resistance fighter who winds up dissolving into a flurry of paperwork—is the closest thing Gilliam could give us to a happy ending.

Wrap-up

All in all, Brazil is a funny and yet sad and disturbing film.  I’m glad I watched it, and it was entertaining and thought-provoking.  Given a little time, I’ll probably watch it again to see what I missed and how time alters the meanings I take from the film.  That, I think, is some of the highest praise I can give a movie.

However…the movie’s place in the Top Fifty Science Fiction films is, to me at least, not quite right.  Okay—it’s a dystopia.  Dystopias are often science fiction.  And yet this film is a work of pure imagination without any real reference to scientific advances, scientific concepts, or science.  That isn’t a bad thing; it’s merely an issue of categorization, and it’s coming from a self-confessed science fiction geek who almost literally read his way through the public library’s science fiction card catalog entry.  So it’s a great movie, but it’s not a great science fiction movie.

Related articles

• Monty Python Reunion: John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Michael Palin And Terry Jones Join ‘Absolutely Anything’ (news.moviefone.com)

The Chronicles of Riddick is, of course, yet another detour off our roadmap of the Top 50 Science Fiction Films of All Time.  Still, it’s quite a bit of fun…

2004

Director:  David Twohy

Cast:  Vin Diesel, Colm Feore, Thandie Newton, Judi Dench, Karl Urban, Alexa Davalos, Linus Roache, Nick Chinlund, Keith David

Introduction     Plot Summary     Impressions     Wrap-up

My rating:  Class F (4/7, a hot white star).  As action movies go, this one has a lot going for it.  As science fiction movies go, it’s a little weak.  But it’s jaw-droppingly gorgeous, the action never stops, and some of the performers are better than merely good, which makes up for a relatively silly story.

Introduction

Okay, so you’ve got Vin Diesel, somewhere between $105 and $120 million dollars, and an idea for an epic science fiction story set in the same universe as the sleeper science fiction horror hit Pitch Black featuring the anti-hero from that movie.  Just for kicks, throw in some amazing actors with substantial theater chops like the incomparable Dame Judi Dench and the superlative Colm Feore, as well as fan favorites Karl Urban, Thandie Newton, and Keith David.

How could this possibly go wrong?

Go wrong it does, and it’s a gloriously stupid action film which makes the most of its settings from a visual perspective and ignores their potential for a thoughtful film.  It’s big, dumb, and violent, a celebration of man’s viciousness and his (and her) killer instincts, but it’s also a fun ride, and I enjoyed the movie.

It didn’t do so well at the box office, mind you.  It grossed about $57 million domestically, and given its costs, that isn’t good.  When the world-wide take is added in, it may have been a break-even sort of thing, but the DVD sales for the movie have been good—so good, in fact, that Twohy and Diesel are hot to make a sequel, and the film has spawned a game and an animated direct-to-DVD film.  On the other hand, critical response was almost uniformly negative.

As I mentioned in the side bar when I first decided to review this film, I consider it something of a must-see for science fiction fans, and I was stunned to learn that one of the Wretched Excess Crew hadn’t seen the movie.  It was Mark, in case you were wondering, who has a penchant for horror movies, better taste in movies than I’ll ever have, and a discerning, critical eye.  I was honestly expecting him to be partially stunned and partially enthralled, and that didn’t quite work out—he felt like it wasn’t dumb enough.  That reinforces my perception that this is a movie without any real redeeming features once you get past the action and the visuals.

I should mention that I watched and am reviewing the director’s cut, one of three versions of the film.  The director’s cut includes Riddick‘s visions of Furya, his homeworld, and a slightly different ending, as well as some moments with a female bounty hunter, which are not present in the theatrical or television releases (though the television release does have footage not included in the theatrical release).

Plot (Contains Spoilers)

Short summary:  A brutal culture of conquerors, the Necromongers, believe that they are destined to reach and live in the Underverse, “a constellation of dark new worlds,” and a place where, in the Necromonger religion—and perhaps in reality—death has no meaning.  The armies and armada of the Necromongers reach Helion Prime, a world which shares its sunlight with a cluster of other worlds in the system (no, I’m not sure what that means, either, and I’ve seen the movie—it seems to be more than an acknowledgement that the planets of the Helion system share the same sun), where one of the Elementals, a culture of calculating foreseers with either enhanced abilities or undetectable technology decide to intervene in the conflict to save themselves, since they believe that their world is next on the Necromonger assault plan.

That intervention takes the form of hiring a bounty hunter to capture Riddick, the last of the Furyans, and the person that the Elemental Aereon believes will be the one to kill the Lord Marshal and end the Necromonger threat.  The sprawling plot begins with Riddick’s capture of the bounty hunter Toombs and theft of his ship, and then proceeds to Helion, then to Crematoria, and finally back to Helion for a climactic finish.  Along the way we meet Lord Vaako, a Necromonger who longs for advancement and who is manipulated by his equally ambitious wife, as well as Kira, a girl who looked up to Riddick like a brother after their experiences in the previous film Pitch Black.  We also hear a bit of the backstory, learning that the current Lord Marshal led a brutal assault on Furya, attempting to kill each male Furyan, because a seer had prophesized that the Lord Marshal would be killed by a Furyan.

Impressions

Visually, there’s little like this movie in the annals of science fiction—and yet, at the same time, the gothic and overly-ornamented style of the film does call to mind both the Di Laurentis-Lynch Dune film and the SyFy Channel’s miniseries of the same name—though I might have called those films baroque as opposed to gothic.  The dark metal buildings are decorated with ornate statues, and everywhere you look, there’s another surprising aspect to the buildings, the ships, the costuming—most of it centered on the Necromonger craft and armor.  That said, the planets each have their own style as well, from the somewhat austere forms of the Helion cities to the frozen wastes of B.V.6 to the alternately frozen and then burning landscape of Crematoria.  It’s obvious that they spent a lot of money trying to get the look of the film right, and they succeeded admirably.  It’s a gorgeous film.

The effects are, in general, pretty good, and they’re woven into the film seamlessly.  Almost every ”wow” moment feels like it belongs there, and wasn’t just put there to look good or impressive—though the story was clearly distorted to fit those things in, a point I’ll return to later in the review.  About the only failure anywhere in the effects category comes on the prison world of Crematoria, where there are some prison dog-things, or possibly tiger-things, which look very, very fake.  I found the shimmer in the air under moving ships interesting, and truly enjoyed the sunrise on Crematoria and the visualization of the soul which shows up near the beginning and the end of the film.

The music is probably supposed to sound inspiring, and it has a certain sweeping grandeur, but it also has a been-there-done-that aspect to it; it’s just another orchestral science fiction theme, as it were, and not one by John Williams.  It is dark, and it does convey a martial tone, though, so it gets the job done without being particularly memorable.

Before I address the performances, it’s probably necessary that I mention the dialogue.  Frankly, it’s terrible.  Consider this one:

Dame Vaako:     I’ve always wondered, can an air Elemental fly? Now do me a favor. Calculate the odds of you getting off this planet alive… and now cut them in half.
Aereon:  No, we can’t fly. But we do glide very well.

Or this:

Riddick:  You said it’s all circling the drain, the whole universe. Right?
Imam:  That’s right.
Riddick:  Had to end sometime.

Or this:

Riddick:  Been a long time since I smelled beautiful.

So…you might be getting the impression that I’m not impressed by the script and the dialogue.  You’re right, and that has an impact on the performers—it’s tough for an actor to sell drivel like this.  And as a result, only Judi Dench’s character Aereon really shines, though to be fair Dench’s should-be-patented no-nonsense clipped delivery—oh so very upper crust British, thank you very much—works perfectly with her character.  But as for the rest of the performers…well, they do the best they can with what they’ve got, with few standouts in the group.

Colm Feore doesn’t have much to work with, and that’s a shame, because he’s a very good actor and you don’t get to see his true potential in this movie.  Alexa Davalos does a remarkably good job—she gets to be mad at, and simultaneously hero-worship, Riddick, and she delivers one of the film’s few really solid performances.  Karl Urban turns in a nice performance, though his character, a sort of cut-rate Lord MacBeth, is not very well-drawn.  Thandie Newton, a beautiful woman who normally does a great job with her roles, struggles here in the part of the conniving, scheming Dame Vaako, at some points doing a creditable job and at others failing to deliver a convincing performance.  Finally, the hapless Toombs is portrayed by Nick Chinlund with a wry aplomb.  Strangely, he and Diesel exhibit a comfortableness with one another which comes through loud and clear on the screen, in spite of the fact that they’re enemies—it feels almost like they’re frenemies instead, or that under different circumstances they would get along quite well.

That just leaves Vin Diesel to consider.  The Riddick character is a cold-blooded killer who’s been chased around the universe and who always puts himself first.  That’s not much of a character, from an actor’s perspective.  He’s quick with a quip or a wry comment, and the character is rather intelligent—manipulating bounty hunters, for example, to get what he wants—as well as arrogant.  Diesel pulls off the intelligent and arrogant parts without much trouble, but doesn’t really come off as a cold-blooded killer who cares only about himself, which is not entirely his fault—Riddick is more properly an antihero than he is genuinely evil, at least in this film.  Diesel shines in the action sequences, and while a good portion of the movie calls for ridiculously superhuman performance from the Riddick character, Diesel makes you feel like that’s just the kind of stuff Riddick does all the time.

The film opens with an interesting premise, that the Necromongers are a race of evil conquerors, and that sometimes, in order to fight evil, you need “a different kind of evil”—that evil, of course, being the killer Riddick.  Riddick’s actions in the movie, however, are far from evil, especially when compared to those in the predecessor film Pitch Black.  We only see Riddick kill when he needs to defend himself or others, and not even for the sake of vengeance.  The primary motivation for him to journey to Helion Prime in the first place is to get a bounty taken off his head, and he leaves that world to ride to the rescue of Jack/Kira, one of the survivors from Pitch Black who engaged in hero worship of Riddick, and who is imprisoned on Crematoria.  He leaves Crematoria and goes back to Helion Prime, coincidentally bringing down the Necromonger Lord Marshal, to save Kira once again.  In other words, he’s not very evil.

I have called the movie a big dumb action movie, but that’s not entirely fair.  There’s a lot going on in the film.  You have the Necromongers on their quest to the Underverse, killing or converting all who stand in their way.  You have Aereon of the Elementals, who finds a way to aim Riddick squarely at the Necromongers, and who may be aware of the various connections Riddick has with the other players (she certainly knows that he’s one of the few remaining Furyans).  Riddick himself turns out to be quite the manipulator, basically conning the bounty hunter Toombs into taking him exactly where he wants to go.  Then there’s the ambitious Lord Vaako, who wants to be the next Lord Marshal, and his wife Dame Vaako, who isn’t above shoving the current Lord Marshal out of the way.  The only people in the film who are exactly what they appear to be and lack significant ulterior motives or craftiness are the other survivors of Pitch Black, Imam and Jack/Kyra.

I suspect it’s actually hard to keep track of everything that’s going on, as intense as the action tends to get, and realize that there’s a method to all of the ongoing madness, on the first viewing.

Thematically, it’s possible to load this movie up with all sorts of interpretations.  Are the Necromongers a corrupt version of the Catholic Church (possibly leading a crusade against the Muslims, a conclusion bolstered by the name of the character Imam)?  Is Riddick a Christ-figure, who comes back from the dead to take his place at the head of that church?  Is the message of the movie that it takes evil to destroy evil?  Or perhaps that in battling evil, we are doomed to become it?

I don’t feel like any of that’s actually in there.  I think that a good 90% of the film is there because it looked or sounded cool to the people who put it there.  Don’t get me wrong—film is a visual and auditory art form, and it can be character driven, so doing things because they look or sound cool or neat can be a good thing in movies.  The problem here is that the script and the story seem to have taken a back seat to the wow factor, and that distorted the picture.  There were things that simply didn’t need to be in the movie, or obscured the plotlines, but were probably in the movie for the look of the thing.  Some of those things were simply silly (death by teacup, for example).  To put it another way, “cool” is all very well and good when it flows naturally from the story, and not as valuable when it takes precedence over the story.

The other major problem with the film is its lack of emotional depth.  The protagonist, Riddick, doesn’t really care about stopping the Necromongers.  He does care about saving Jack/Kyra, but that really seems to be the only thing he cares about, and as an emotional hook, it shows up fairly late—the Necromongers have already landed on Helion Prime, and Aereon’s schemes (presumably assisted by the rulers of Helion Prime and by Imam, since they seem to be in the mess up to their eyebrows) have already drawn Riddick there before we learn of it.  The viewer’s major reason to care about Helion Prime at all—Imam, a man who loves his family, treats Riddick well and warmly, and reminds him of Jack’s existence—is killed off about thirty minutes into the film.  It’s as if the script goes out of its way to create emotional distance between the film and the viewer.

I will touch briefly on the science in this science fiction epic.  There is none.  There’s not even an attempt to put in the science, or even to make any of this seem believable.

Wrap-up

From the foregoing section, you might think I hated this movie, and yet I gave it a Class F rating.  Well, the fact of the matter is that in spite of all its flaws, I like this movie.  It’s fun.  It’s not deep, and it’s not symbolic, and you probably won’t form an intense emotional attachment to the events on-screen.  But the action is virtually non-stop, Vin Diesel seems to be a very likeable sort of guy, and the underlying universe, with its Necromongers and Elementals and Furyans and “holy half dead” and Underverses and whatnot, is interesting.  It’s a violent, brutal place full of schemers, mind you, and I’d hate to live there, but it’s an amazing place to watch.  At the end of the day, that’s what makes for a fun movie.

Related articles

• Vin Diesel Presents New Riddick Set Photo, Teases Plot Tidbit (filmophilia.com)
• Riddick is back! (geeksyndicate.wordpress.com)
• ‘Battlestar Galactica’s Katee Sackhoff joins ‘Riddick’ film (digitalspy.co.uk)
• Vin Diesel Reveals Riddick Concept Art (filmophilia.com)
• Latest Chronicles of Riddick Concept Art Cries Havoc and Lets Slip the Dogs of War (dreadcentral.com)

For reasons which aren’t entirely clear to me, I chose to begin with Star Trek: Voyager.  I could have started with the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, starring James Edward Olmos and Mary McDonnell, two sterling performers in a fantastic series which raised the bar for science fiction on television.  Or perhaps the underrated Babylon Five, a ground-breaking show with more than just a nod to E. E. “Doc” Smith‘s Lensman series, along with a superlatively drawn four-year long meta-story.  But I’d seen both of those much more recently…then there’s the excellent and ground-breaking Farscape, which features some amazing performers in Ben Browder and Claudia Black, along with an astonishing writing crew…but I was in the mood for something a little more traditional, and had very fond memories of Voyager, so I decided to spend a little time with Paramount’s only female captain and her mis-matched crew on their 70,000 light year journey home instead.

So why review it at all?  Why not just watch and enjoy?  It’s an old series which went off the air back in 2001 after a seven-year run, and I’m aware that anyone who wants to see it has probably already done so.  And yet…I loved this show when it was on the air, watching it without fail for seven years.  So it’s sort of an old friend, and I decided to go back to it and see how it held up.

Star Trek: Voyager occupies a fairly unique place in the Star Trek franchise, which consists of five television series along with a number of movies.  It was the first, and so far only, series to anchor an entire network, being one of the flagship shows of UPN, Paramount’s venture into network television.  It was also syndicated, though at one point UPN ended the syndication deal and fans outside of the UPN’s broadcast area lost access to the show…

Then Voyager, with both Starfleet and Maquis personnel on board, starts off on the 70,000 light year journey home.  They think it will take about seventy-five years.

The important characters:

• Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew), the captain of Voyager;
• Chakotay (Robert Beltran), a former Starfleet officer who resigned his commission to join the Maquis and defend his family, captain of the Maquis ship pulled into the Delta Quadrant, and First Officer on Voyager;
• Tuvok (Tim Russ), a Vulcan member of Starfleet with a long-standing relationship with Captain Janeway who infiltrates Chakotay’s Maquis crew for Starfleet, and after Voyager catches up to the Maquis ship, returns to Voyager as Chief Security Officer;
• Tom Paris (Robert Duncan McNeil), a disgraced son of a Starfleet admiral who was dishonorably discharged, joined the Maquis, and was captured, after which Janeway pulled him out of a penal colony in order to pilot Voyager on its mission to the Badlands;
• B’ellona Torres (Roxann Biggs-Dawson), a half-human half-Klingon hybrid member of the Maquis who struggles with anger issues and winds up serving as Voyager‘s Chief Engineer;
• Harry Kim (Garrett Wang), a Starfleet ensign who is assigned to Voyager for his first mission fresh out of Starfleet Academy;
• Neelix (Ethan Phillips), a Talaxian native to the Delta Quadrant who joins the group and serves as cook and unofficial morale officer;
• Kes (Jennifer Lien), Neelix’s main squeeze, an Ocampan girl with undeveloped telepathic powers who takes up medicine; and
• The Doctor (Robert Picardo), a holographic artificial personality originally intended as a temporary emergency medical officer.

Right from the start, it looked like Voyager was going to be a much more serious show with a harder edge than the sometimes-maligned, very optimistic Star Trek: The Next Generation, perhaps even an equal to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.  Look at the setup for a minute:  half the crew of Voyager are former terrorists who are on Voyager because it’s the only ride home after the events of the pilot.  Add in that Voyager’s security officer infiltrated the terrorist group, and that some of the terrorists wind up holding positions of authority on Voyager, passing over Starfleet personnel in the chain of command, and that Captain Janeway blew up the way home in order to protect a species which none of them knew or cared about, and which had only five or six years before they’d have to emerge from their protective caverns, and you’ve got the makings of some fairly serious conflict.  Oh, yes, and they have limited supplies and no way to conveniently get the things they need—including photon torpedos—as well as the fact that they’ve come in conflict with a species which is rather angry about their actions to date.

Somehow, though, a lot of that got muted or lessened in the first season.  It felt less like a desparate group of people with serious divisions in desparate circumstances, and more like a group of people in semi-bad circumstances who are determined to pull together and make things work.  I think that may be why I liked the show, upon reflection.  It retains the hopeful vision of Gene Roddenbury, that people can get along if they try, and they can take pleasure and explore along their journey.  It also captures the essence of the first series, with the exploration element being foremost, though in the context of a near-Utopian, perfect Federation.

To put it another way:  this show is not about a heroic journey in which the characters achieve heroic stature.  They already have it—they’re representatives of a near-perfect society in a near-perfect future.  You will see character development, as various characters confront both a hostile universe and elements of themselves, but you won’t see people struggling to do what’s right; this group knows what’s right, and is looking for the right way to do what’s right.  In some ways, that’s a bit of a weakness for a television show.

The first season had some pretty bad episodes, which seems to be the rule for series in general as they get into gear and figure out what the show’s about and what the characters and settings are capable of.  The low point is probably the first episode, Parallax, in which Voyager finds itself in a “quantum singularity.”  Only they don’t realize it and try to rescue themselves.  Sound confusing?  It was a mite silly, with Voyager somehow traveling outside the singularity while it was still inside it.  I didn’t understand it either, though there was some technobabble about a temporal distortion, and I suppose in the grand scheme of things this low point can’t touch, for example, DS9′s “Run Along Home” for sheer unadulterated stupidity.

In addition to the inevitable “anomaly in space” type episodes (Parallax, Time and Again, The Cloud, Eye of the Needle, Emanations, and Heroes and Demons), we also get to meet the Vidiians, a race of disease-ravaged folks who steal organs and skin to survive (Phage and Faces) as well as an “arc” episode in which a traitor is unmasked, with the potential for subsequent drama (State of Flux), an original series-like episode featuring brain vampires who want to eat the crew’s neural energy (Cathexis), and three Next Generation-like episodes (Ex Post Facto, Jetrel, and Learning Curve).  The stand out episode, from the vantage point of originality, is probably Prime Factors, a unique episode in which a concept like the Federation’s Prime Directive is used to justify not sharing a potential way of traveling 40,000 light years in a single hop with Voyager.  Cathexis successfully creates a paranoid environment as the crew is serially possessed by an entity that seems to be trying to stop the ship, all unaware that it’s Chakotay trying to save the ship.  The two Vidiian episodes are well done, and State of Flux is a good story in which we discover that Seska, a Maquis, is actually a Cardassian infiltrator who betrays the entire ship to the Kazon.  We know we’ll see Seska again…

Two of the episodes run right up against the Gilligan’s Island problem:  in both Prime Factors and Eye of the Needle, the crew is presented with a way of either getting home or cutting their journey time in half.  You know, right from the beginning, that it won’t work.  If it did, it would completely undercut the show’s basic premise and require a complete retooling of the show—or its ending.  In both cases, though, the writers handled those series-busting concepts intelligently, and the question was not whether the crew would find a way home, but rather how it would deal with the inevitable disappointment of the method not working.  In other words, the shows illustrate, in a bizarre meta sort of way, that it’s not the journey’s end that’s important, but the journey itself.

On the plus side, we get some nifty character development.  Captain Janeway emerges as a woman you don’t want to cross—she’s well aware of the capabilities of her ship, and almost arrogant about what’s right and wrong.  Though she’s a scientist by training, she’s definitely the captain of the ship, and she shows a willingness to shoot first if she believes the situation requires it.  Kes emerges as a compassionate, bright and burgeoning young woman with some serious intellectual, and perhaps telepathic, gifts.  Chakotay is another stand-out character, demonstrating an unswerving loyalty to Janeway, presumably initially founded on respect for a Starfleet officer who is trying to do what’s right instead of what’s convenient, as well as a deep understanding of the needs of his crew (both parts of it).

There is some fun stuff along the way, of course.  I love the fact that Kathryn Janeway is willing to go to great lengths to get more energy so she can get coffee.  Her relationship with Belanna Torres emerges quite nicely, with the two women—one a former scientist turned commander, the other a free-thinking engineer with a knack for problem solving, bond over the technical issues facing the ship.  And watching Torres split into her human and klingon selves due to some Vidiian medical know-how is great fun, as is the Doctor’s slow emergence, under Kes’ patient and compassionate urgings, as a real person.

All in all, the short first season satisfies.  It’s not great, but it is fun, I enjoyed watching it—though I’m looking forward to Season 2 with high hopes for the show getting into second gear.

Related articles

• Star Trek People Drinking Coffee (tor.com)
• Star Trek: The Next Generation Rewatch: “The Hunted” (tor.com)
• Star Trek: Voyager’s Damning Legacy As Evidenced By Teen Jeopardy (tor.com)
• Brannon Braga’s Biggest Regret About Star Trek: Voyager [Quote Of The Day] (io9.com)

Director John Carpenter

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Karen Allen

Introduction     Plot     Impressions     Wrap-Up

My rating: A qualified Class B (2/7, hot blue-white star), largely because, while the movie is well-scripted, directed and acted, I simply didn’t care for it.  It’s a good story, mind you, with very nice characters and a good mix of action and romance, and if you like that kind of thing, it’s really quite good.

Introduction

Starman is a very good movie, but I didn’t like it.  That makes it difficult for me to review it, fairly or otherwise.  I think I disliked the movie because of the story, which simply did not appeal to me, and not because of the execution…

I’m still trying to figure out why John Carpenter directed this movie.  Well, I suppose it’s actually sort of obvious:  after two fairly successful ’80s films (The Fog and Escape From New York) and the commercial failure The Thing, he took on Christine because it was the only thing available to him.  So, when the opportunity to show his versatility and do something different came along, how could he turn it down?  The studio, it is said, offered him the film because he could show strong emotion in the context of an action film—largely at the urging of the movie’s executive producer Michael Douglas.

Strangely enough, Columbia Pictures had a choice of two scripts:  Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and this one, which had Michael Douglas behind it.  Columbia opted for Starman, which turned out to lack the commercial oomph of E.T.

The film did well, grossing about $28 million, but it did cost about $24 million to make.  It also marked the last time that Carpenter had a commercial mainstream success—the big budget Big Trouble in Little China was also something of a failure at the box office.  It is worth noting that Jeff Bridges, who played the titular lead, was nominated for both an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for his performance in Starman.  It’s probably also worth noting that this movie spawned a television series starring Robert Hays, but that the television series lasted only one season.

Plot

Boy comes to Earth but his spaceship is shot down by the military.  Boy takes on the form of Girl’s dead husband.  Boy kidnaps Girl to drive him to the planned rendezvous site.  The military attempts to capture Boy along the way to the rendezvous.  Boy and Girl start to bond when Boy tells Girl he means her no harm.  Girl saves Boy from trouble.  Boy saves Girl from trouble.  Boy ditches Girl to keep her from harm.  Girl catches up with Boy and saves him again.  Boy and Girl make love.  Girl takes Boy to the rendezvous site.  Boy leaves Earth forever, but leaves Girl with a special gift.  The day is saved, and Girl is healed from her loss.

Impressions

Visually, the movie doesn’t offer us much, since it’s set on Earth and there’s little in the way of fantastic stuff—but what there is, is extraordinarily well done.  The alien space ship shows up at the beginning and the end, and it’s quite convincing, though at the outset I thought it was a planet with an icy set of almost rings and didn’t discover my mistake until the end, when it shows up at the rendezvous site and its scale becomes apparent.  The alien scout craft, in which the starman arrives, is good, and there’s some very nice footage of various military aircraft.  There’s also an explosion, which is nicely done, and presumably uses the chromakey technique as the Starman and the widow are in the foreground.  The least convincing effect, as the starman clones a body and grows it to maturity in minutes, isn’t all that bad, though it isn’t really all that believable, either.

The score was composed by Jack Nitzsche (it is one of only three films directed by Carpenter but not scored by him as well; Nitzsche gave us the score to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as well as the title theme for An Officer and a Gentleman), and it gets the job done.  A lot of people apparently really like it, though to me it sounds rather as if someone got their hands on a synthesizer and wanted to replicate church music.  You can hear it by clicking here.  It’s primarily electronic in nature, and prominantly features two themes associated with the two lead characters.  By the by, Karen Allen’s character Jenny Hayden and her husband sing the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to do is Dream” in a home movie, and that’s actually Bridges and Allen singing together, and doing a fine job as well.

Jeff Bridges gives an intriguing performance.  His Starman has to learn English, the ways of humanity, and even little things like how to walk and talk in a human body.  Bridges makes that process work, and even at the end of the film—only three days in a human body, remember—he still displays a lack of understanding of human nature, stilted language patterns, and the odd gait and bird-like movement patterns he displays throughout the film.  Of course, it’s worse at that point because his body, a cloned vehicle, is dying, and Allen even manages to convey that without much help from vocalizations.

Karen Allen also does a fine job, though her work may actually be more difficult than portraying an alien.  She’s got to believably depict a grieving widow who is confronted with a man who looks almost exactly like her dead husband.  Allen does a fine job, and her Jenny Hayden is a touchingly realistic wounded woman in a very strange situation.

The script is a very solid effort, with one or two minor problems.  For me, the question of how a woman can fall in love with an alien who has taken on the appearance of her dead husband and kidnapped her is central to the movie.  There are two key scenes which help to explain Jenny’s emotional journey.  The first is when the starman removes the clip from the pistol and demonstrates that he means Jenny no harm.  She’s aware that he has only three days to reach the rendevous site, and that if he isn’t recovered, he’ll die.  The second key to Jenny’s growing feelings is the starman’s resurrection or healing of a dead deer, an act of compassion that deeply moves Jenny.  It also foreshadows what he will do further down the line when Jenny herself is killed; the starman heals her and then abandons her so that she will not be in any further danger.

Jenny, of course, is in love by then, and furthermore knows that the starman is going to need her; she follows him and saves him from being captured—without her intervention, the starman’s lack of experience with humanity would almost certainly have seen him picked up at a roadblock.  That may be the point at which the starman begins to realize that there is a bond between the two.

The science behind the film is rather iffy.  It’s become something of a trope that aliens will possess near-magical powers—presumably it’s an application of Clarke’s law, that a sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic.  That said, the powers the starman deploys are nothing short of miraculous, and frankly stretch the bounds of credulity.  On the other hand, within the bounds of the film, those powers are self-consistent and do not truly destroy the willing suspension of disbelief.  Furthermore, they do seem to be the product of technology, since each requires the use of a small metal ball, which is consumed by the effect.  Indeed, each exercise of those miraculous powers is more or less required by the story…

Wrap-Up

As I’ve said, this is a pretty good movie.  It has all the elements of a solid, if slow-paced, action film, and the romance is very well-drawn.  Carpenter’s direction is spot on, and employs some of his signature technique to frame the story properly.  Even the ending—a doomed love that simply cannot last between two people from very different worlds—is well-done, with Jenny receiving a gift from the Starman that helps to assuage some of her regrets from the death of her husband.

That said, if you’re going into the film with the expectations that it will be a tense thriller, you’re going to be disappointed.  It is, first and foremost, a love story.  But if you like love stories and science fiction, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better outing than this one.

Other Blogs and Reviews

• The Lunchtime Movie Review
• Valient’s Vlogg
• Deja Review
• Musings of a Sci-Fi Fanatic
• The Daily Film Dose

Related articles

• Women Watching & Being Watched: The Gaze in John Carpenter’s Early Films (cashierdecinema.wordpress.com)

Director:  David Carson

Cast:  Angela Bettis, Patricia Clarkson, Rena Sofer, Kandyse McClure, Emilie de Ravin, Tobias Mehler, Katharine Isabelle, David Keith

Introduction     Plot     Impressions     Wrap-Up

My Rating:  Class A (hot white star).  I’m not generally fond of remakes, particularly when the original is as good as the first Carrie, but this movie does bring some new things to the table and it has a certain style all its own.  Plus the update from the seventies looks pretty good…

Introduction

Some people say that comparisons are odious.  I majored in English in college, though, and like most of us, I can’t resist a comparison—so when I caught the 2002 made-for-TV version of Carrie, I had to watch it, and I had to write a review comparing it to the fantastic 1976 Brian DePalma film, which I reviewed here.

Here’s how the thing came to be:  NBC executives were pleased with the success of The Dead Zone, a television series which ran from 2002 to 2007 starring Anthony Michael Hall about a man who awakens from a coma with psychic powers.  It began on UPN and moved to USA.  The series was loosely based on a 1979 Steven King novel which was made into a 1983 David Cronenberg film starring Christopher Walken.  Still with me?  Good.  Apparently someone thought that other Steven King properties involving psychic phenomena would also make a good series, and that someone thought of Carrie.

Thus did Carrie come to television, as a made-for-television movie intended as a pilot.  There was no real way that this could work out, was there?  I mean, if you know the original story at all, you know it’s a tragedy which ends with a whole lot of dead people, including Carrie.  So, as you can imagine, there had to be some changes, which at least makes for a very different kind of ride, and as it turns out, the film is worth watching in its own right.

Plot

I’ve already given the plot for this movie in my previous review, and this movie sticks fairly close to the plotline laid out in that film.  The differences are subtle, and primarily come from either this movie’s being slightly more faithful to the King novel or the use of a series of present-day interviews in a police station.

Carrie White is a high school outcast—a loner who doesn’t fit in and is mistreated by everyone at school.  To make matters worse, her mother is a religious fanatic.  And on top of that, Carrie is telekinetic, with the ability to move things with her mind.  When she gets her first period in the shower after P.E., she believes she’s dying and the other girls laugh at her.  One of the girls, Chris Hargenson, continues to torment Carrie, while another, Sue Snell, decides to try to help Carrie have a more normal life.  Carrie winds up going to the prom with Sue’s boyfriend, where Chris orchestrates a prank in which Carrie winds up drenched in pig’s blood.

Because Carrie is telekinetic and crazy, bad things wind up happening…

Impressions

This movie uses CGI instead of the split-screen technique of the 1976 film, and so it looks pretty good.  And since the movie was filmed in 2002, it doesn’t have the full-on seventies look of the first film.  Naturally, the music was updated as well.  In short, this doesn’t feel like a dated exercise, but instead as a contemporary movie.

By itself, of course, that’s little reason to remake a movie—though this movie was never intended as a simple remake, and I’ll get to that in a bit—and this movie does bring some new things to the table.  Narratively, the movie is a little closer to the novel, and the fact that it was filmed for TV means that some of the language, nudity and violence common in movies didn’t make it into this movie.

One of the things that struck me forcefully was that this movie is more nuanced in terms of characterizations than the DePalma film.  That’s not necessarily a good thing, since the archetypal nature of DePalma’s characters gives emotional power to the movie.  DePalma’s Sue is good, and Chris is evil; this Chris, in particular, is less evil and more real.  I think it’s because the focus in DePalma’s Carrie never wavers from Carrie herself; everything and everyone in the film moves around her, either acting on her or reacting to her.  In this movie, characters have their own motivations and actions independant of Carrie’s situation.

This characterization-rich script does take away some of the movie’s power, but it also gives the actors a chance to shine in ways that the DePalma film only gave to Sissy Spacek (as Carrie) and Piper Laurie (as Margaret, Carrie’s mother).  And on the whole, the actors rise to the challenge and do a fine job.  Emilie de Raven’s Chris is still a selfish, self-centered teenager, but she’s not as unremittingly evil.  Chris’ friend Norma is transformed into the bitchy-but-popular Tina, who is excellently portrayed by Katharine Isabelle as something more than Chris’ henchwoman.  Chelan Sommers’ Helen and Meghan Black’s Norma are wonderful as well, the former a slightly ditzy, but friendly ally for Carrie in her transformation, and the latter as an over-energetic, over-hyped student body president.  Tobias Mehler, who plays Tommy, has more to work with than Bill Katt, and this Tommy is a more active participant—and a more likeable person, with real and genuine emotions—in Carrie’s transformation.  Rena Sofer—one of those actresses who I always enjoy watching—also does a solid job with Miss Desjardins, the teacher who takes an interest in, and attempts to help, Carrie.

Angela Bettis’ Carrie is so very different from Sissy Spacek’s that it’s almost impossible to compare them.  For example, this Carrie understands exactly what is going on, and refuses to accept help past a certain point.  She’s still sweet, but she’s much less naive.  She’s also—and this is important—crazy.  Her telekinetic gifts may well spring from her unconscious mind, as she exercises them and doesn’t always realize what she’s done or remember it.  Patricia Clarkson plays Margaret White, and while the DePalma Margaret is a steely-eyed fanatic with a hard edge, this Margaret seems softer and less brutal.  Kandyse McClure brings a wonderfully human aspect to Sue Snell, and I really enjoyed her performance.

As I mentioned, this movie was intended to be a pilot for an ongoing series, and as a result there were substantial changes to the script.  One of those is the framing story, in which a detective (David Keith) interrogates the survivors of the Black Prom about Carrie White’s disappearance.  Naturally, you get a good idea about who does and doesn’t live, with one or two major surprises…

I’m going to reveal the biggest surprise of all:  Carrie survives the entire experience, but has no memory of anything.  Sue, who saw enough of the destruction to know exactly what happened, hides Carrie from the police and, at the end of the movie, drives her to Florida.  Given where the series probably intended to go, there was no other way to end the movie, and to my surprise, it didn’t feel like a cheat.  It actually worked, though not brilliantly, and that’s at least in part because all of the destruction took place while Carrie was in some kind of fugue state.  She simply didn’t remember the prom—or the destruction and death she wreaked on her way home—at all.

Was a series based on Carrie a good idea?  I’m of two minds on that point.  One description of the potential series described it as Carrie helping other people who have telekinetic powers—presumably learning to control and live with them.  That idea is, on its surface, laughable, especially given what Carrie herself does.  But the movie managed to sow some seeds of a fairly interesting potential series.  There’s Carrie herself, of course, with her out-of-control powers and the question of her moral responsibility.  There’s the potential for further havoc in her little episodes, a sort of ever-present danger.  But more importantly, I suspect that Sue Snell, Rita Desjardin, and a certain too-clever detective might very well have figured in the series as it progressed.

I won’t say that it’s a shame that the series never took place, but it at least had potential to be interesting.

Wrap-up

Given that there was no television series, of course, the only way to look at the movie is as a stand-alone entity.  And on that front, Carrie succeeds, though not as powerfully as the 1976 film.  Everything seems a little more muted, a little duller, a little less.  It’s still a good movie, mind you, but it can’t really stand alone against the DePalma version.

At least one commentator has said that if you read the novel first, you’ll like the TV movie better, while if you see the 1976 film first, you’ll prefer it.  I think I understand that, in that the TV movie is closer to the novel.  But as a piece of film-making, the 1976 DePalma film is simply stronger, more emotional and more hard-hitting.

That said, if you like any of the performers, or just love the story, this one is worth a look.

Related articles

• Doctor Gash’s Tip of the Scalpel: A Tribute to Angela Bettis (dreadcentral.com)

On the movie front, opening weekend for the new Star Trek film (helmed by J. J. Abrams once again, if you’ll pardon the pun) will be May 17, 2013.  You can read more here.  I recall reading that filming will begin in January, though I can’t think where I saw that…

A first look at Ridley Scott‘s Prometheus, the prequel to the blockbuster Alien, is up and available here.

On the literary front…via Thoughts on the Passing Scene, a fascinating (though too big) graphic for navigating NPR’s top 100 fantasy and science fiction novels.  The list is a great one, well worth checking out.

Google, which uses interesting and topical doodles as artwork, has elected to use a doodle to honor Stanislav Lem‘s The Astronauts.  Check it out here.

Finally, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the passing of Anne McCaffrey, a true legend in the field of science fiction.  As one of the first women to write truly popular science fiction (along with Andre Norton and Ursula K. LeGuin, all of whom were named Grand Masters by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America), McCaffrey would occupy a special place in the genre even without having forged a unique place for herself.  Anne, you have provided a great deal of entertainment to me over the course of my lifetime, and the world is a darker place without you.  Check out some of the blogosphere’s reactions to the news:

• Gone But Never Forgotten
• EW’s Shelf Life
• SeattleRobin’s Tribute
• Putting the Life Back in Science Fiction
• The Undiscovered Author

Sadly, I became quite bored with WoW and found myself playing less and less this year.

Image by Colony of Gamers via Flickr

Fortunately for me, the good folks at Bioware and LucasArts have something I’m excited about:  Star Wars: The Old Republic.  It’s a massively multiplayer role playing game set in the Star Wars universe years (okay, 3500 years) before the events of the films.  It features a cold conflict between the Sith Empire and the Galactic Republic, which may or may not wind up erupting into open war.

Have I mentioned that I’m excited about the game?

It launches on December 20, though folks who pre-order their copies of the game will get early access, possibly up to five days early.  Since it doesn’t cost any more to buy it early, I’m already in, as is another member of the Wretched Excess Crew, Chris.

I was actually privileged to be in the weekend-long massive beta test—something I’ve kept very quiet about up to now.  The NDA (now lifted by the developers) is one reason for that; another is that this is the second beta test I’ve participated in, much to the consternation of my friends, none of whom have gotten such invitations.  Fortunately my gamer friends, including Chris, don’t actually read this blog, and therefore I’m safe in revealing it here.

During my weekend of access to the game, I played one of the evil Sith, and found that the storyline is fascinating and involves plenty of choices between good and evil, one of the things that should make the game more interesting.  The game also gives each player “companions” who will assist them in their adventures.  Finally, the gameplay seems fun enough.

I’m expecting this game to be a considerable drain on my time over the next six months or so, but it should be a lot of fun.

Oh…before I go, check out this cut scene, illustrating the conflict on Alderan between the forces of the Empire and the Republic, including an epic battle between a Jedi and a Sith Lord:

Related articles

• Get Star Wars: The Old Republic access 5 days early: here’s how (slashgear.com)
• Star Wars: The Old Republic NDA Lifted! (einskaldjir.wordpress.com)
• Star Wars Beta Reactions Roundup (mmomeltingpot.com)
• Star Wars: The Old Republic post-NDA interrogation (biobreak.wordpress.com)
• STAR WARS is here…AGAIN. (limpingonastar.com)
• Star Wars: The Old Republic lifts NDA, Bothan spies spared further deaths (massively.joystiq.com)
• Star Wars MMO Pricing Plan May Have “Some Twists” [Money] (kotaku.com)

1960

Director: Cyril Frankel

Cast: Patrick Allen, Gwen Watford, Felix Aylmer, Alison Leggatt

My rating:  Five Stars (an ordinary rating this time, because it’s not science fiction) for a movie which was simply ahead of its time.  This movie has it all: pedophilia, an attempted cover-up, a courtroom drama, and a terrifying chase.  It gets a little ham-handed toward the end, but then again, Hammer Films is showing us a monster, after all.

Introduction

This film—originally distributed in England as Never Take Sweets From A Stranger—is something of a departure for Hammer Film Productions, based on a play by Roger Garis called The Pony Trap.  It involves real monsters instead of imagined ones.  It was neither a box office nor a critical success, and garnered criticism for breaking a significant public taboo.  It came to public attention again in the 1990s when public interest in the Hammer Film Production catalog grew by leaps and bounds.  In 2010 it was incorporated into a DVD collection called Icons of Suspense…which also includes These Are The Damned…and here we are.

Synopsis

The film opens with two little girls playing on a swing.  One, Jean (Janina Faye) drops her purse, which contains her candy money, and the other little girl, Lucille, tells her friend that she knows where they can get candy for nothing.  The little girls set off toward a mansion where an old man—Clarence Olderberry, Sr. (Felix Aylmer), patriarch of the most powerful family in town—has been watching them with binoculars.

We also meet Jean’s parents, Peter (Patrick Allen) and Sally (Gwen Watford) Carter.  Peter has come to this Canadian town from his home in England to take a job as the school principal.  After meeting many of the important people in town, Peter and Sally return home, where little Jean’s grandmother (Alison Leggatt) is watching Jean.  And that’s when the Carters discover that the senior Olderberry gave the little girls candy to get them to take off their clothes and dance.

From there, the movie proceeds as you might expect: the powerful Olderberrys use their power to protect Clarence Sr., and to demonize the Carters.  The small town closes ranks against the Carters, who nevertheless proceed with a formal legal complaint leading to a trial.  The defense attorney brutally cross examines little Jean, who is both traumatized by the experience and made to look as if she’s untruthful.  The jury returns a verdict of not guilty.

The Carters decide to leave town, and the younger Olderberry, now magnanimous and wanting there to be no hint that he’s used his power in the town in an inappropriate manner, actually threatens Peter Carter with a lawsuit if he doesn’t stay in town.  Peter ignores him, but little Jean goes to meet her friend Lucille one last time, and Clarence Olderberry Sr. finds them in the woods.

A terrifying chase, as well as a frantic attempt to find the missing children, ensues.

Impressions

Director Cyril Frankel did an extraordinary job here.  The film is very well put together, and the parallel aspects of the plotline are woven together with real skill to enhance the tension of the movie.  His direction also gets the most out of his performers, who all do a fine job.

In some ways, Felix Aylmer is the strongest performer in the film.  He was a rather famous English actor who often played priests or clergymen.  Obviously, his performance here is quite different, and he conveys sickness and menace without ever saying a word.  The senior Olderberry is presented as something of a monster, in true Hammer Film style.  He shambles along, never hurrying, and clutches at his head as his mental illness reaches its terrible conclusion—and make no mistake, the senior Olderberry is presented as mentally ill.  But aside from the relatively ham-handed ending, Aylmer’s performance is a subtle and nuanced one.

The Carter adults—Patrick Allen, Gwen Watford and Alison Leggatt—all do a phenomenal job.  The junior Olderberry, played by Bill Nagy, is also amazing, and he actually presents a somewhat sympathetic character in spite of the fact that he’s the true monster in the film.  Finally, the two little girls, Janina Faye and Frances Green, are incredibly believable.  It’s rather hard to believe that little Janina Faye didn’t go on to become an effective performer, and she may have in her native England where her career lasted into the twenty-first century.

The film’s presentation of pedophilia is rather unexpected.  The senior Olderberry is mentally ill; he spent some time in a sanitarium, in fact, and many of the townsfolk are aware of the old man’s predilections.  It seems like the old man can’t quite help himself, and the pattern of his behavior is one of escalation—much like serial killers are perceived today.

If you accept the film’s treatment of pedophilia, the true monster in the film is the junior Olderberry.  He’s aware of his father’s—let’s call them circumstances—and chooses to protect him anyway.  In fact, when his father wants to leave the sanitarium, the junior Olderberry actually enables that, and may have wiped out his records as well.  Family loyalty is all well and good, but sometimes it can go too far.

The ending sequence, in which on the one hand the two little girls flee the old man, and on the other in which the police, accompanied by the junior Olderberry as well as Peter Carter, search for them in the woods, is as suspenseful and riveting as anything I’ve ever seen.  I was on the edge of my seat the entire way, and it truly caps off a well-made film.

Wrap-up

Well, I suppose we all know why I decided to include this entry in the blog, in spite of the fact that it’s not in any way relevant.  I’m talking, of course, about the allegations against coaches at Penn State and at Syracuse involving pedophilia which have rocked the sports world and generated intense public interest in the subject.  It’s probably the only reason I watched what, for me and I suspect for most of us, is a movie embodying a distasteful subject.

Am I glad I watched the movie?  No, not really.  It was amazing how angry it made me, and not so much at the senior Olderberry as at the younger one, as well as the townsfolk who closed ranks against the wrong stranger.

On the other hand, I’m from eastern North Carolina, and I remember the Little Rascals Daycare Center episode, one of the most infamous day care center sex abuse cases, rather well.  If you’re not familiar with it, in that case over ninety children—some after months of intensive therapy by only three therapists who handled all the children’s cases—accused seven adults of conduct ranging from sexual assault to satanist religious rites including sacrifice of babies to hot air balloon trips to being thrown into a school of sharks.  While some of the daycare center operators were convicted, those convictions were overturned on appeal (in part due to legal errors on the part of prosecutors) and ultimately none of the adults were convicted.  The consensus is that the range of allegations against the adults was absolutely impossible.

Sort of sobering, isn’t it?

Make no mistake, though, the movie doesn’t present the same sort of situation as the day care sex abuse hysteria cases.  But it’s worth remembering that not all accusations are true.

In any event, it’s a powerful movie with an astonishing topical relevance.  The movie handles its subject with grace and delicacy, and it evokes strong reactions.  It’s quite good, so if you can get your hands on the movie and have any interest at all in the subject matter, watch it.

Other Takes on Never Take Candy From A Stranger

The Daily Film Dose’s review (though it gets some of the actors wrong)
A particularly well-written and considered review on MovieMorlocks
The Eccentric Cinema review
Believe it or not, a short but good review on Answers.com

Director:  Joseph Losey

Cast:  Macdonald Carey, Shirley Anne Field, Oliver Reed

Introduction     Plot Summary     Impressions     Wrap-up

My rating:  Class B (2/7, very hot blue-white star).  Hammer Films, the legendary British horror studio, does science fiction, and they throw in Oliver Reed, Macdonald Carey, a blacklisted American director, and a mix of avant-garde sculpture and jazz-rock.  How could this one go wrong?  It’s fun and well worth a look, though it’s also a tad slow and definitely a downer of a plot…

Introduction

Ah, Hammer Films.  No one who pays attention to the history of cinema can fail to give Hammer a special place, and the studio certainly earned it.  Its notable films include The Quatermass Experiment, The Curse of Frankenstein, the 1958 Dracula, The Mummy, and a host of sequels.  In other words, Hammer Films is a giant in the horror genre, and substantially influenced the cultural milieu.

So what happens when Hammer turns its attention to a serious science fiction story embodied in the novel The Children of Light?  And throws in, of all things, Macdonald Carey—the man who played patriarch Tom Horton on Days of Our Lives for over thirty years—and Oliver Reed—the burly, hard-drinking tough guy who starred in an unbelievable number of movies from the late 1950s into 1990?  And then, as if that wasn’t enough, selects a McCarthy-era blacklisted American to direct the project?  The result is an angry movie with a dual storyline which has three groups of characters colliding and interacting, as well as more than a little topical relevance.

People often comment on the movie as being somehow derivative of, or owing something to, Village of the Damned on the one hand and A Clockwork Orange on the other.  It would be a mistake to do either, as this movie is far more than a horror story about xenogenesis or social commentary about violence.  And of course the movie was filmed before Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange, and long before it was turned into a movie.

The movie was not without troubles, though.  It took two years before it was released in England, with nine minutes cut.  Politics may have been responsible for the delay and the cuts.  An additional two years elapsed before it debuted in the United States, and the film screened at that time had another ten minutes cut out of it—much of it the philosophy espoused by some of the characters.  The 2010 DVD release, however, restored the film to its former glory and delighted audiences, gaining a cult following.

The movie is not for everyone, mind you.  It’s slow, dark and somber, with disquieting themes.  It leaves the viewer with a lingering sensation that the bad guys win—though there aren’t many good guys in the movie, either.

Plot

Short summary:  Boy meets girl.  Girl gets boy mugged by her gang.  Girl comes back to boy.  Boy rescues girl from the gang.  Gang chases boy and girl.  Boy and girl wind up meeting a group of mysterious children who live underground in a secret research complex.  Gang leader finds them.  Boy decides to rescue the children from their situation.  The military recaptures the children, but permits boy and girl to leave.  The children are returned to their underground complex.  The day is decidedly not saved, though perhaps the best possible outcome for most characters is achieved.

Impressions

The film opens with a nifty little song called “Black Leather Rock,” and it really serves to illustrate some of the nicest things about the movie.  Don’t believe me?  Watch it for yourself:

Pounding drums…screaming saxophone…quaint sea-side English town…attractive young woman…you see what I mean by style?

Visually the film is marked by the extraordinary scenery of the village of Weymouth.  Weymouth is a real English town, located at the mouth of the Wey river (hence the name) on the southwest coast of England.  It’s a tourist resort, and has been for something on the order of two or three hundred years now.  The movie makes the most of the really quite stunning town, an amazing setting for such a dark film.  It also shows the forbidding cliffs and the cold English sea to advantage.

The movie also uses the character Freya’s art to help establish tone and mood, and the sculptures—real works of art by the English sculptress Elisabeth Frink, who lived near Weymouth for the last sixteen years of her life—are striking.  Frink was described in her obituary as having been interested in “the divine in Man.”  The sculptures in the movie, though, are rough and dark, with lines that convey pain and something quite different from the divine.  At least one critic noted that the figures reminded him of the victims of the atomic bomb blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which may well have been influenced by the ultimate nature of the children in the movie.

There’s one place where the movie falls a little flat visually, and it’s when Joan and Simon are on Simon’s boat.  Obviously done on a green screen instead of a real boat, the horizon’s motion doesn’t match that of the characters, and there is a visible edge to the characters against the background of the sea itself.  All things considered, it’s a rather minor detail, but it does serve to bring home the idea that Losey accomplished a striking vision with a rather small budget.

Musically, the film score can’t really hold a candle to the opening, but even “Black Leather Rock” would pale after a while.  The movie does something interesting, though:  after opening with a haunting flute-like song which segues into “Black Leather Rock” and uses a jazzy number when Freya arrives, the soundtrack drops the music altogether.  For the majority of the film, some eighty minutes or so, the movie relies on non-musical sound, dialogue and imagery to establish tone and mood, with very few exceptions.

The actors all turn in believable performances, and the developing relationship between Carey’s Simon Wells and Field’s Joan is fascinating in its own right.  Joan is in many ways the linch-pin of the film.  She’s a street kid—though one of the best-dressed gang members I’ve ever seen, and maybe that’s because it’s England in the 1960s—locked in a dysfunctional relationship with her brother King, the leader of the gang.  The whole situation comes about because Joan dares to attempt an escape from King’s domination, to reach for a normal life, and Simon is kind enough to try to rescue her.  While arguably one of the weaker performances, Field nevertheless delivers the goods, and her character really shines when she’s interacting with the children.

Carey’s Simon is in some ways a typical do-gooder.  A former insurance salesman who abandons his old life in the wake of a divorce, Simon stumbles across a damsel in distress and then upon nine children in distress.  Make no mistake—his original motivation regarding Joan is nothing if not selfish—but as soon as he sees her as a real person, he warms and takes up the role of knight-errant.  He’s got nothing and no one to stop him from trying to help the people he encounters, and he brings an intensity to the role which subtly drives the film forward.  Carey believably portrays a somewhat impulsive everyman who is bound and determined to do the right thing.

There is a distinctive lack of chemistry between Simon and Joan, by the way, but it feels like it’s a deliberate choice by director Losey.  This isn’t a match made in heaven; it’s a mismatch straight out of a much darker place, with no possible positive ending…

Reed does a very nice job as the jacketed (again, 1960s England) but thuggish King.  His character is in full command until he leaves his safe, comfortable world with his supporting gang members, and then—like a fish out of water—he seems to lose his way and merely follows Simon’s lead until he is confronted by something he knows: military police trying to capture him.  Then his selfish and criminal nature reasserts itself.  Reed plays the character’s turns quite well, and he’s believably nasty.

Viveca Lindfors, who plays the sculptress Freya Neilson, turns in a wonderfully eccentric performance.  The character is a Swedish artist, giving her an aura of mystery, but the character is a lot of fun to watch and Lindfors clearly pulls out all the stops and cranks the volume up to 11 on her performance.  She also gives one of the movie’s few glimpses of light in an otherwise rather depressing and pessimistic story.

Thematically, the movie is a bit of a wash.  It deals with, but provides no answers to, a couple of social ills.  Brace yourself, because it’s spoiler time, and it’s not very pretty.

First up, the problem of the delinquent “Black Leather” gang.  They’re violent and they reject the norms and laws of society.  The beating they dish out to Simon in the opening minutes of the film is brutal and senseless; they spend the stolen money in an arcade.  And it’s no accident that Bernard, the scientist running the secret project, is followed around by his own uniformed goons, or that the street gang marches in time and cadence:  the parallels between the street gang and the military are deliberate and are intended to demonstrate that the gang merely reflects society, as well as to tie the various themes together.  The street gang’s senseless violence also foreshadows the violence which will be meted out by Bernard and his cronies.

The relationship between King and Joan is even more disturbing.  King is a virgin who becomes insanely angry every time Joan looks at another man, or another man looks at her.  There’s something seriously wrong on the streets of Weymouth, and it appears to involve a repressed incestuous control-freak thing.  King’s brutality toward Simon is driven, in part, by his feelings for his sister.  The film doesn’t offer any full explanations for King’s oddities, and in some ways it’s a character quirk intended to drive the plot—it gives Joan a reason to fear King and to attempt to escape his control.

Bernard, the scientist who rules the top secret project, ardently believes that mankind and society are doomed.  His position is that mankind has weapons of terrible destructive power, and that sooner or later, accidentally or intentionally, we will use them, and thereby render the Earth an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland.  Freya—who rents a remote seaside cottage from him, and who seems to be his mistress or lover—espouses a much more hopeful view of the future (even though her sculptures are dark and foreboding).  Their contrasts—he authoritarian and establishment, she the opposite—are critically important to the movie.  Simon and Joan don’t express similar sentiments, but their actions suggest that they, too, are in the Freya camp.

One of the more interesting scenes in the movie takes place when King arrives at Freya’s cottage and studio in search of Simon and Joan.  Simon and Joan are gone by then, but Freya is back, and the two have a disturbing, near violent encounter.  King smashes one of Freya’s sculptures, and says he enjoyed doing it, but a tear runs down his face as he makes the statement.

The mystery of the children—who are cold to the touch, and kept in an underground complex—is gradually revealed: they are radioactive.  Spend too much time in their presence, and a normal person will die.  Bernard interacts with the children through two-way television cameras, and his staff only ventures into the children’s complex when dressed in haz-mat suits.  Bernard has a plan for these children, though, as they will repopulate the earth after the (to his way of thinking) inevitable nuclear war.  The children don’t know that, though, and they don’t even realize that they are dangerous.  Bernard consistently tells the children that he’ll explain everything when they’re older and they can understand it.

On the other hand, Bernard admits to Freya that he would create more of the radioactive children if he could, as they are the only people who can survive “when the time comes.”  Bernard kills Freya to keep the secret, and permits the dying Simon and Joan to leave, knowing that they would soon die from radiation poisoning.

Bernard is driven by both his nihilistic viewpoint and, believe it or not, genuine kindness for the children.  He can’t cure them, so all he can do is to either kill them or to keep them away from the rest of humanity.  Secrecy is part of the children’s protection—though it’s also part of Bernard’s plan to save humanity.  It is the breach of that secrecy which leads to the tragic consequences of the film, and how the children learn that they are the damned of the film’s title.

Wrap-up

Complex and moving, These Are The Damned is a study in parallels and contrasts.  Its meanings are layered and I suspect that it would repay a second viewing with greater insight.  But it’s also a bleak and sad film which harnesses disturbing imagery which may haunt me for a while.  That said, it’s a powerful experience which actually improves as you think about the movie (I initially intended to rate the movie as a class F, but upgraded my rating the more I thought about the movie).  If you’re in the mood for something sad and thought-provoking, this little gem may be right up your alley.

If that’s not your cup of tea, this is one you might want to avoid…

Other Blog Entries and Reviews:

The Movie Projector review
1000 Misspent Hours review
Eccentric Cinema review
DVD Savant review
WTF Film review

Related articles

• Hammer Vault: exclusive new book preview (boingboing.net)

Director:  Duncan Jones

Cast:  Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey

Introduction     Plot Summary     Impressions     Wrap-up

My rating:  Class B (2/7, hot white star).  Originally written as a vehicle for Sam Rockwell, this movie transcends its roots with an intriguing mystery and an all-too-human story of a man alone on the far side of the moon at a mining base called Sarang.  Haunting and tragic, the movie is interesting whether you know the story or not, and it’s definitely worth a look.

***   Please consider yourself warned:  The trailer gives away some of the mystery!   ***

Introduction

This movie, originally written as a vehicle for Sam Rockwell, is also the feature directorial debut of Duncan Jones—who is also known as “Zowie Bowie,” from his middle name and his famous father’s (that’s David Bowie to those of you not in the know) stage name.  It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, and was subsequently released to select theaters in the United States and Britain.  No doubt about it, this movie is an artsy and ambitious one, though it feels like a feature film rather than an art film.

It’s also compelling and extraordinary, with a $5 million budget so it feels…well, like a real movie that someone spent time and energy putting together.  It grossed about $9.7 million, and was apparently never in wide release.  Not an art film, it is nevertheless not a traditional commercial movie.  It’s a psychodrama with some traces of action and adventure.

The movie is a thoughtful glimpse into a near-future which most of us would probably enjoy—as long as we didn’t know about the seamy underside of that future, which the movie slowly, carefully exposes to the viewer.  A large part of the trip is the nasty surprises on the way, so I’m going to warn you as we go when I’m providing information you wouldn’t have as you watch the movie.  Read the spoilers at your own risk!

Plot

Short summary (no spoilers):  Sam Bell is a lone astronaut and caretaker at the Sarang Lunar Base, located on the far side of the Moon.  The base is a largely automated mining facility which processes HE-3 from the lunar surface and sends it back to Earth.  There’s been some kind of acccident with the communication satellite, so Sam doesn’t have real time communication with Earth.  Sam has only the robot GERTY for company—GERTY is not a humanoid robot, but rather a near-future industrial sort of thing that can only travel on rails in the ceiling.  Sam’s starting to hallucinate, and suspects that his employer, the consortium LUNAR, is up to no good with only three weeks to go on his contract…

***  Spoilers Ahead!   ***

Sam sets out for one of the mining units to pick up a load of HE-3 in a lunar rover.  He hallucinates again, loses control of the rover, and hits and damages the mining unit.  Oh boy…that’s not good.

Sam wakes up in the infirmary, and GERTY tells him he’s had an accident.  His memory may return.

This was the point where I put the whole movie together and spent the rest of it knowing that everything going on was precisely as bad as I had anticipated.

***  More Spoilers!!   ***

Sam is informed that a rescue crew is coming and that he is not to leave the base.  Sam engineers an accident, though, so he can leave the base to inspect for micrometeroite impacts…and goes to the wrecked rover and mining unit, where he takes an injured, space-suited man out of the rover and back to the infirmary.

He’s just rescued an exact physical duplicate of himself.

And now you have the full information the trailer presents, and the rest of the movie is about what the heck is going on, the essential wierdness of two Sam Bells on the mining base.

Impressions

As has become my custom, I’ll start off with the visuals and sound, move to the acting, and only then deal with the script and themes and finally the science.  Unfortunately, that means that the second half of my impressions will have some spoilers—but I’ll try to warn you as they come along.

Visually, the film is a sort of sterile affair, as the surface of the moon is a stark black-and-white affair, and the moonbase is a sterile, if clean, industrial place with only a few homey touches (Sam’s recliner, his model of a town, and his bed alcove with its pictures).  That’s quite deliberate, and it feeds into Sam’s isolation and loneliness.

The music is good—it’s haunting, modern without being so tech-sounding it’s irritating, and it matches the visuals perfectly.

In many ways, this is the Sam Rockwell show.  There are other actors in the film, but for most of it, Rockwell has to carry the load by himself—not unlike a few other movies in the Top 50 list, and possibly an insight into how well science fiction themes and settings translate into stories about loneliness.  Rockwell does an amazing job and carries the film without any trouble.

***   Spoilers Begin   ***

What’s really interesting is that Rockwell manages, with the help of a good script, to portray the two Sam Bells as if they are different people.  And they are—one Sam has been awake and aware for nearly three years, isolated and with his body beginning to fail, and he’s had time to work on his anger issues.  The other Sam is new and fresh and without preconceptions—but brash and hot-tempered.  Their reactions to their situation are very different, and it’s clear that the second Sam hasn’t figured out everything that the first Sam does—though he doesn’t have all the clues, either…

The only other character who gets close to as much screen time as Sam is GERTY, the robot voiced by Kevin Spacey.  He sounds a lot like HAL from 2001, but couldn’t be more different: it seems his sole job is to make Sam’s time at Sarang easier—a programming choice that leads to trouble for LUNAR.  Spacey gives a carefully modulated performance which is considered and thoughtful, without actually creating a real persona.  That’s an achievement in and of itself, all things considered.

The script is very careful about how it doles out the mystery, and the revelations, doled out in a careful order and pace, hearken back to the science fiction movies of the 1950s.  Indeed, the script is very well-constructed; the first twist, that there are two Sams, comes very early.  The viewer won’t necessarily figure out what’s going on from that point, though the movie is honest enough for it to be possible.  Even if the viewer gets the full ramifications of the two Sams right off the bat, the movie is still fun, as you watch the two Sams slowly figure out what is actually going on.

There are lots of nice little touches in the film.  Ironically, Sarang is Korean for “love,” and the symbols which appear after “Sarang” all over the base are the Korean letters for the same word (the symbols are in hangul).  Given what LUNAR does to Sam, that’s a nicely ironic name for the base…Sam 1′s deterioration is heart-rending to watch.  It’s also viscerally disturbing:  he bleeds easily, has trouble staying in shape, looses teeth, and vomits blood.  For me, I knew Sam 1 was dying; his skin even has a pallor which Sam 2 lacks.

The science in the movie is absolutely dead on.  First, Sarang is on the far side of the moon.  The moon is tidally locked to the Earth, which means that its period of rotation and its orbit are equal—which in turn means that the moon keeps one side perpertually turned toward the Earth, and the other away.  Though the far side of the moon is fancifully referred to as the dark side of the moon, both sides do receive sunlight, and the movie gets that right.

HE-3 is another piece of science which the movie nailed.  Helium three, as it should be called, is an isotope of the element helium containing two protons, two electrons, and only one neutron (instead of the “standard” two neutrons).  The interesting thing about helium three is that it would make an excellent fuel for fusion reactions, since at least one of the possible fusion pathways would not emit high energy neutrons.  And that’s important because neutron emission—also known as neutron activation—is the only way that non-radioactive materials can become radioactive.  Neutron activation, as it turns out, causes lots of problems with fission reactors and, if we can get fusion reactors working, will be similarly problematic with them:  it renders the shielding, components, and everything else inside the reactor radioactive, and is a significant source of radioactive waste.  And guess where you can find a lot of helium three?  That’s right, on the surface of the moon, deposited there by the solar winds.

The last major element of the science in the movie is cloning, and there the movie does take some liberties.  It’s clear that we can’t yet clone people, but if we do successfully manage it, shortened lifespans should be a consequence (though we don’t fully understand the aging process, shortened telomeres, which are a consequence of cell division, will be a problem, and the cloned human will have telomeres of the same length as the original; they might even be something we could deliberately shorten as part of the process…).  The part where the movie takes liberties, of course, is in the implantation of memories; right now we have no idea how to do that, though with advances in medical technology it may become possible…

Wrap Up

This is not a fun movie, but it’s well worth watching if you’re in the mood for a thoughtful and thought-provoking science fiction movie.  Sam Rockwell’s performance is very good, and he really does make the movie.  But this cautionary tale about what we might do with advances in technology also shows us the darker side of human nature, something science fiction has always done well.  The story is ultimately a sad one, but it’s a lot of fun with an intriguing mystery which gets almost everything right.

Related articles

• Moon (scienceinthepub.co.uk)
• Retro Review: Moon (filmophilia.com)
• Movie Review: Moon – An Existential Sci-fi Thriller (blogcritics.org)
• Duncan Jones teases a Moon toy line, including a Sam Bell Action Figure (with removable teeth) [Moon] (io9.com)