Posts Tagged ‘science fiction’

John Carter

March 9, 2012

“John Carter,” the movie, has been in development for a hundred years. No wonder it’s such a tangle of time, space, and narrative point of view.

John Carter, the man, hails from Virginia, but he was in Arizona when he wound up on Mars. That was in 1868, but our tale, as unfurled in a 2012 film based on a 1912 story, begins in 1881. And he is its protagonist, although the account is relayed through his young nephew, who, with our disbelief kindly suspended, will grow up to become the prolific pulp fictioneer Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Meanwhile Burroughs’ swashbuckling sci-fi serial will grow up to become a movie by the director of “Wall-E,” with writing help from the author of “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” and starring the heartthrob from “Friday Night Lights.” If the result feels disorderly, not to mention derivative of “Star Wars” and “Avatar” and everything in between, well, that’s an irony given source material without which those movies might not have existed. And that’s just what a century’s worth of development will do.

Carter, played by Taylor Kitsch, is a former Confederate Army captain who finds himself teleported to the red planet, where lesser gravity lets him leap tall boulders, and toss them around, like a superhero. How he breathes and keeps warm is not explained, but we get the idea that actually there is an atmosphere on Mars, and it retains at least enough sunshine that a loincloth is all the outerwear one really needs.

Also, there are Martians. They aren’t little green men but big ones, tall and reedy, with four arms each and facial tusks. With their brute exoticism and clannish codes of honor, they exude an old colonialist’s idea of noble savagery, as quaintly outdated as the astronomical understanding that inspired their fictive world. But these folks are not the only residents of Barsoom, as Mars is known in the local parlance. In fact the place is all too crowded. It has humans, of sorts, as well, and the problems they bring.

Having tried to put America’s War Between the States behind him, Carter inadvertently catalyzes a war between Martian city states. Theirs is more of a swords-and-sandals affair, if Lynn Collins as the lusciously bikinied scientist-warrior princess is any indication, but our man seems up to it. And with a visual scheme so handsomely commensurate with fantasy artist Frank Frazetta’s eye-popping covers for Burroughs’ books, well, who wouldn’t be?

The princess’ father, an affably pudgy Ciarán Hinds, has arranged for her marriage to a blandly villainous Dominic West, who’s been terrorizing the planet with powers on loan from a meddling Mark Strong, the apparent alpha in a trio of lurking non-Martian aliens. From here things become more tangled.

It all seems rather a lot to handle for Pixar mainstay director Andrew Stanton, here making his live-action debut. Written by Stanton, his writing partner Mark Andrews, and superstar novelist Michael Chabon, himself a longtime Martian-adventure freak (see also “The McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales”), “John Carter” comes across as smart and sleek but also strangely subservient to its own rich legacy. It’s just not special enough.

Kitsch certainly has the right last name for this enterprise, and more or less the right cipher-like presence: a vessel into which 12-year-olds of all ages might project themselves. (Sometimes he seems like a poor man’s James Franco. But then, sometimes, so does James Franco.) His other co-stars include Willem Dafoe, Thomas Haden Church, and Bryan Cranston, variously obscured by fabricated pixels or facial hair. And if they too appear periodically to fade into the scenery, at least the scenery is exquisite.

Living up to reported uncertainty about whether it’ll become a trilogy, “John Carter” feels hurried and crammed. Of course that’s true to its source material too. Ultimately the movie, like the man, is lighter on its feet than expected. Never does it lack commitment to its own pulpy panache. You want to tease it for being so earnest, but there’s no time, and too much to take in, so instead you just keep the fistfuls of popcorn coming.

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The Thing

October 19, 2011

Strange visitor with assimilation challenge shakes up local status quo. We could be talking about “Footloose.” But instead it’s “The Thing,” another recently refreshed early ’80s movie memory. It’s a timelessly simple story: Researchers in Antarctica discover a hostile shapeshifting extraterrestrial in their midst — and hoo boy, does it ever know how to dance! No? Ok. For now, just seeming human can be creepy enough.

“The Thing” first came to us in 1938, as John W. Campbell’s novella “Who Goes There?” In 1951 it morphed into a Howard Hawks movie, “The Thing from Another World.” Then John Carpenter had a gory go at it in 1982. Nostalgia for the ’50s was big in the ’80s, more or less as nostalgia for the ’80s is now. So here is Dutch filmmaker Matthijs van Heijningen’s feature debut, which was known as “Untitled The Thing Prequel” for a while, until finally settling on “The Thing.”

It’s a prequel and a remake: a prequel because it ends — rather satisfyingly, if you’re into this kind of Thing — right where the Carpenter film began. A remake because it reiterates that film’s dramatic spur, the general if essential question: What happened with the Norwegians? This breaks down into a series of more specific questions:

How’d that bloody axe get stuck in wall?

This frozen dead man in the chair with his wrists and neck sliced open: why?

Is the big block of ice with the Thing-shaped hole what we think it is?

Oh, and about that freakish half-incinerated two-faced corpse outside: WHAT THE FUCK?!

We know the answers and watch anyway. Just as we did the first time. Perhaps “What brought The Thing to Antarctica in the first place?” would be a more interesting question, but only with the disclaimer, if voiced aloud in the presence of Hollywood studio executives, that it’s not actually interesting enough to need an answer.

The Norwegians, by the way, are another Antarctic research team, the alien’s unfortunate first contact. They’re not all actually Norwegian — Danish actor Ulrich Thomsen, for instance, plays the guy whose scientific dispassion borders on sociopathy — but do collectively exude a chic Nordic aura that enlivens the otherwise boring horror-shocker proceedings. Inevitably there are also some Americans, in particular Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a young paleontologist with enough presence of mind to navigate the ensuing paranoia, and Joel Edgerton, who is Australian but pretends to be American, as a brawny helicopter pilot. Auspiciously, they’re out of their element.

Van Heijningen honors Carpenter’s flair for wonderfully disgusting non-digital special effects and weirdly appealing peripheral character actors. If he seems less keen on narrative discretion, maybe that’s more the fault of screenwriter Eric Heisserer, a horror handyman whose toolbox also contains lots of shopworn borrowings from “Alien” and “Terminator” movies, but scarcely few new parts.

Of course, that’s the whole idea: the familiar rendered freaky yet again. Seize, digest, replicate, repeat.

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World on a Wire

July 22, 2011

He was young when he made it, but he was always young: Having died at 37 from overdoing drugs and work, he completed more films than years of life. And it is dated, but there is fresh delight in the correlation of datedness to its endurance: Not just because it has been unavailable all these years, accumulating mystique, but also for being so clearly ahead of its time to begin with.

It is “World on a Wire,” the rarely seen 1973 TV movie by New German Cinema mainstay Rainer Werner Fassbinder, newly restored, making the rounds in limited release, and worth catching even if you don’t think you have three and a half hours to spare. What makes you so sure it isn’t really a matter of time having you to spare?

Here’s what you should know. Derived from Daniel F. Galouye’s 1964 novel “Simulacron 3,” it involves a sinister corporate-controlled virtual-reality situation, with related metaphyiscal questions. In the filmmaker’s own words, “Perhaps another, larger world has made us as a virtual one? In this sense it deals with the old philosophical model, which here takes on a certain horror.”

It’s as you always suspected: The movies had a dystopian Euro-chic cyberworld rabbit hole long before “The Matrix,” and also a grubby sardonic preemptive rebuke to the moneyed hokum that was “Avatar.” Now at last, instead of the glum self-seriousness of “Blade Runner,” warmed over once again, we have the glum self-seriousness of Fassbinder, cryogenically frozen for a while but still so fresh!

Our hero here, played by Klaus Löwitsch, is a cybernetics engineer working on what he calls “the most exciting research project in the entire world,” not wrongly, but not quite comprehendingly either. With dubious help from a small array of blank-faced blondes (Mascha Rabben, svelte; Barbara Valentin, buxom), he finds himself negotiating the variously expressed sudden nonexistence of several colleagues.

“World on a Wire” is willfully dense, a noirish sci-fi puzzler with a hint of James Bond and occasional soap suds bubbling up from its glassy concourse into the air of grainy fluorescence. Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville” also was a model, for taking an available actual world to be plenty ominous and science-fiction-like as it is, and Fassbinder gets much power from the blunt, quaint aesthetic of ’70s-style futurism, with its plasticky furniture, its ties and sideburns of formidable width, its groping zooms.

He does well by his own usual style, too. It’s all so flatly lit and acted as to seem somehow invitingly morose. Supporting players don’t really support so much as lurk and pout. Quite often the whole ensemble seems like some vast, ambitiously arty punk band, having a (deadpan) laugh at the expense of the rest of us market-driven “identity units.”

Obviously alienated by his country’s post-fascist “economic miracle,” and accordingly hostile to West German complacency, Fassbinder took interest in oppression as both a topic and a practice. An imperious yet sensitive soul, he could make Hollywood genre deconstruction seem at once like seething and like picking lint. And so he recognized the potential of a liberatingly perfunctory plot — which is to say he knew things going in to this latent existential classic that the rest of us have since taken many movies to figure out. Wise beyond his years, and ours.

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Super 8

June 15, 2011

“From writer-director J.J. Abrams,” the poster says in big letters, “and producer Steven Spielberg,” in letters just as big. That marketing triumph of tag-team brand identity is the first thing people talk about, and the salient feature of “Super 8.”

Of course there is something smug and tedious about a doting homage to Spielberg bankrolled by Spielberg. That this sort of thing has been going on for a while now only compounds the tedium. But at least “Super 8” will generate no complaints about the producer misunderstanding or meddling with the writer-director’s “vision.” And although Abrams’ stolid pacing suggests he’s mistaken stiffness for crispness, he does not seem at all paralyzed by the anxiety of influence.

So here we have a summer movie like they used to make (except with special effects like they make now). The setting is an industrial Ohio town in the summer of 1979. The principal players are a group of young amateur moviemakers. They witness, and photograph, a spectacular train crash, and it changes their lives. They discover something that adults don’t understand — except for those adults who do understand, on account of having sinister motives. As we used to say: There’s doin’s a transpirin’!

The kids are good. They get through their perfunctory material with aplomb. The nuances of their hierarchy are well played. A couple of them don’t get enough to do, but that’s how it goes. Charles, the chubby one (Riley Griffiths), is the aspiring director. He knows from intrepid research that production values matter, and that story is important too. He is aware of the marketplace. But he is not our focus, for his friend Joe (Joel Courtney) is slimmer and more universally adorable, with more of an emotional connection to offer us. It’s a screenwriting-handbook-grade emotional connection, but it will do. Joe recently lost his mom, and there’s a girl he shyly likes, Alice (Elle Fanning), but also some bad blood between her father, a ne’er-do-well (Ron Eldard), and Joe’s father, the local deputy sheriff (Kyle Chandler).

Now, if you like seeing kids ride their bikes and pal around and get on each other’s nerves and get into mischief, “Super 8” scratches that itch. If you want more, like a raging space invader with advanced technology, be patient. And if you want more still, don’t push your luck. Was it not clear to you that this film’s first duty is to Spielberg, the original summer movie maestro and more or less the inventor of what we now know as wide release? Did you not see the poster?

The thing is: Even those of us who grew up on summer movies have had time to wonder what life was like before them, and what it might be like after them. Just as kids growing up now might soon wonder what movies can be about besides nostalgia for other movies. “Super 8” is so meticulously derivative that it seems to have hollowed itself out. Abrams can’t or won’t settle on which Spielberg film he’s imitating. (O.K., we know it’s not “Schindler’s List.”) He can’t or won’t go much further. Bogged down with genre freight, he lets the character stuff go. Like Charles, he is aware of the marketplace.

In light of Abrams’ own entertaining “Star Trek,” especially, “Super 8” might become an accidental defense of all the sequels, reboots and other extant-franchise expansions we’ve considered increasingly indefensible. With those, at least, we may presume a high standard for novelty, and the suspense of wondering what variation lies in store for our sacred, shopworn movie totems.

Here there is no suspense. Obviously there is a monster, an alien. It gets revealed gradually, a revelation not really worth waiting for. It doesn’t hurt anyone who is positioned to matter. Its presence pushes feuding factions into detente, ties plot threads up or just ties them off. Although unimportant, it becomes all-important. It becomes the point, instead of the kids and their amateur moviemaking, which is too bad because Abrams was on to something there.

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Source Code

March 30, 2011

To the discerning connoisseur of sci-fi adventure thrillers, “Source Code” is a model of crafty speculation. Not the best model, but better at least than its current competition. (Yeah, thanks for nothing, “The Adjustment Bureau.”) To the discerning connoisseur’s date, assuming he can manage to find one, “Source Code” is merely a fast-moving Jake Gyllenhaal vehicle. Still not the worst thing in the world, right?

A young man, played by Gyllenhaal, awakens abruptly on a Chicago-bound commuter train. He’s not sure how he got here, or why the pretty stranger across from him, played by Michelle Monaghan, is acting so familiar and calling him by someone else’s name. He thinks he’s an Air Force pilot, fresh from a mission in Afghanistan. But he’s dressed like a civilian, and getting looked at like he’s nuts. Feeling testy and a little freaked out, he repairs to the restroom, and the mirror shows him someone else’s face.

Then he learns that there’s a bomb on the train. Then he learns that his mission is to find the bomber, who has an even more destructive agenda for the rest of the day. One problem, aside from the general existential conundrum, is that he doesn’t learn these important things until after the train bomb already has exploded and killed him and everyone else on board. Which affords us an opportunity to point out that in this time of Congressional agony over budget balancing and fiscal prudence, someone really ought to have another long look at the problem of military inefficiency.

But anyway, now our pilot somehow is alive again, fastened a tad too securely into the isolation chamber of a dark and unfamiliar cockpit, getting orders videoed in from a prim but sympathetic liaison officer played by Vera Farmiga. Not the worst thing in the world, right? Nor exactly the best. It turns out that he’s guinea pig number one in a secret experimental project allowing him to relive and manipulate the last eight minutes of another man’s life. Allowing, that is, and demanding: He has to keep doing it, as many times as it takes, in order to prevent the greater and as yet still impending attack. On the plus side, there is still, and always, that pretty stranger who’s been acting so familiar. But what kind of a (borrowed) life can you make with someone in eight perpetually doomed minutes?

This is not time travel, exactly. It’s more like surfing the collective electrochemical resonance. Or something. It all — or, as much of it as time allows — will be explained by a staidly mad scientist played by Jeffrey Wright, who maintains his straight face while gently munching on the minimal scenery, like an earnest little termite. Meanwhile Farmiga dignifies her similarly belabored material, Monaghan stays dutifully cute and functional, and Gyllenhaal parses it all with just enough sincerity.

In “Source Code,” ideas matter more than special effects, which must explain why the effects look so cheap. Not that the ideas seem terribly expensive either. But for screenwriter Ben Ripley, who launched his career with “Species III,” this certainly counts as progress. The director is Duncan Jones, famously the son of David Bowie and the maker of the arty little sci-fi marvel “Moon,” who seems still to be enjoying himself and his surplus of audience goodwill. Honestly, Jones’ sophomore effort is a lot less horrible than its own trailer makes it seem. In fact, maybe Source Code’s only real problem is the internal pressure of making good on the many particulars of its own potential: As soon as you realize you’re dealing with an improbably Hitchcockian hybrid of “Quantum Leap” and “Groundhog Day” made by the spawn of Bowie, you do start expecting more.

Then again, it’s probably on account of some de facto Bowie gene-pool steez that the shock of this movie’s unequivocal clunkiness does wear off so quickly. That, and the narcotically comforting presence of Gyllenhaal, first established as a puzzle-movie dreamboat hero ten years ago in “Donnie Darko.” As it turns out, even the less discerning connoisseur may be pleased to discover that mind-bending genre geekery and popcorn-munching sentimentalism can exist in simultaneous parallel realities. Thus does “Source Code” make a useful contribution to its field.

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