by Alex Kane
But what we lost with the film vastly outweighs this one small win. For instance, the drug culture of the sixties and seventies has been immortalized in a handful of films, ranging from Easy Rider (1969) to Terry Gilliam’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (’98), but the spiritual, exoticized component of hallucinogens and nineteen-sixties countercultural thought left its mark on the eventual David Lynch Dune only as a plot element. One can’t help but imagine the kind of acid-trip visuals Jodorowsky might have crafted with the help of sci-fi pioneers like Moebius and Dan O’Bannon at his side. Not to mention the soundtrack, which would’ve been provided by the inimitable space-rockers who called themselves the Pink Floyd.
While working on the picture together, according to an interview with the director in The Japan Times, Moebius and O’Bannon coauthored a comic called “The Long Tomorrow,” serialized in Heavy Metal, which later influenced writer William Gibson’s worldbuilding in the seminal novel Neuromancer, the design aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and the Imperial probe droid seen landing on Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back.
Ten of Sci-Fi Cinema’s Best-Kept Secrets
A Partial List of My Personal Favorites, with Brief Reviews
You’ve worked your way through Clone Wars, Knights of Sidonia, and Game of Thrones; you’ve watched all the Star Trek films again and again to the point of fatigue. The latestTransformers flick had you yawning and questioning your love of all things cosmic—and Guardians of the Galaxy hasn’t yet opened in theaters.
In these kinds of situations, what can you do? Well, it turns out that science fiction cinema is a vast and uneven terrain. Sometimes the best works slide out of memory or go unnoticed. Other movies, perhaps, don’t hit the right chord on a first viewing.
To help you out, I’ve compiled a list of ten personal favorites that I think you’re likely to enjoy. You may have heard of some or even most of them, but such is the nature of the science-fiction readership.
At the very least, I hope I’ll be able to convince you that most of these films are worth a second look.
1. Source Code (2011) is the kind of film I’m hoping for each time I go to the theater and pay my eight bucks—but I’m not surprised when, as all too often, a movie comes up short. Duncan Jones’s impressive sophomore outing is no such disappointment: it’s smart, tense, and manages to marry two seemingly disparate high-concept ideas into a single (mostly) cohesive whole. It will keep you guessing, as the cliché goes, but in a way that’s ultimately very satisfying. Don’t ask me for any spoilers; just go check it out. Great performances by Jake Gyllenhaal, Vera Farmiga, Michelle Monaghan, and Jeffrey Wright round off a flawed but faultlessly ambitious, must-see sci-fi thriller.
2. Director Michael Bay has perpetrated his fair share of failed attempts at telling a story on film, but 2005’s action-heavy biotech thriller The Island stands as a testament to his capabilities as a filmmaker. Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, scene-stealer Djimon Hounsou, and Sean Bean—in one of his greatest movie roles, The Fellowship of the Ringnotwithstanding—make for a balanced, believable cast struggling to navigate a near-future world where the obscenely rich can own adult clones of themselves for the purposes of harvesting organs and tissue, carrying fetuses to term, and otherwise serving as a living insurance policy. It’s a beautiful film, full of genuine hope, and is notable for being the first film co-written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.
3. If there’s one thing The Island did wrong—and I can hear the Bay-haters laughing all the way over here, so I’m going to have to ask you to please, please calm yourselves a moment—it’s the heavy borrowing from other, earlier dystopian films. Especially in terms of the white-heavy, sterile imagery straight out of George Lucas’s full-length directorial debut, THX 1138 (1971), a film I have mixed feelings about but which is nevertheless invaluable for its long-lasting impact on our greater cinematic landscape. Starring Robert Duvall, Maggie McOmie (who, according to IMDb, has acted onscreen only a handful of times since), and Donald Pleasence (perhaps best known as Dr. Loomis in John Carpenter’sHalloween), it’s a slow-moving, sparse allegory about surveillance and—equally relevant, these days—legislated reproduction. An exercise almost entirely in the art of visualstorytelling, THX 1138 foretells of Lucas’s incredible vision, and serves as a stark contrast to the loosely structured, fun-loving feel of his next film, American Graffiti (1973).
4. V for Vendetta (2006) is a film very much of its time—even more so, perhaps, than the Alan Moore graphic novel that inspired it. First-timer James McTeigue brings a seasoned veteran’s eye to this post-Matrix script by the Wachowskis, and performances by the likes of Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, and Stephen Fry make for one of the first defining pictures of the twenty-first century. A grim fact, one might say, but its imagery and resonances continue to pervade the public consciousness even eight years following its opening. The Guy Fawkes mask worn by the titular V, for instance, is immediately recognizable as the one worn by members of the worldwide hacktivist organization known as Anonymous. Whether you consider them cyberterrorists or vigilantes, the influence of the film’s message about fighting injustice is clear: “People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people.”
5. Rian Johnson’s a name that might sound familiar, even if you can’t say for sure where you’ve heard it. He was recently announced as the director for Star Wars Episodes VIII and IX, so there’s that—but he got his start doing an inventive neo-noir film called Brick, and later directed an episode of Breaking Bad, titled “Ozymandias.” You might remember it as being . . . well, probably the single greatest episode of television ever to air. But he also wrote and directed an arthouse action film called Looper (2012), about the ugly uses organized crime has found for time travel—namely, its application as an evidence-free, no-mess method of corpse disposal. The mechanics of this technology are left to the imagination, and it gets a little derivative in its willingness to bring 1950s sci-fi tropes like mutant telekinetics into the story, but mostly the film serves up some of the most memorable scenes of near-future crime in recent memory. Bruce Willis plays an older version of the exceptional Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s “Joe,” but Emily Blunt and child actor Pierce Gagnon each do their best to upstage the leads at every opportunity. This one’s a bit open to interpretation, which is fun.
6. Kathryn Bigelow’s done a handful of really exciting, gutsy films—Point Break, The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty—but you probably haven’t seen or even heard of the 1995 William Gibson pastiche Strange Days, starring Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, and Tom Sizemore, and penned by none other than James Cameron, who at that point was known mostly for his work on Aliens and the Terminator franchise. While the premise of using “SQUID” technology to record one’s perceptual experiences digitally is lifted directly from a number of earlier cyberpunk works, the film’s social commentary (the Rodney King Riots of ’92 are a loud-and-clear presence throughout Cameron’s script), along with some exceedingly clever camerawork, make for a memorable but harrowing blend of dystopian allegory and tech-noir.
7. Moon (2009)—a small-budget psycho-noir picture set on the lunar surface—is the first film from Source Code director Duncan Jones. There isn’t much to be said about the career-best performance by Sam Rockwell without revealing the plot’s key surprises, so suffice it to say, this isn’t one to be missed. Listen for Kevin Spacey as the somber voice of an artificial intelligence reminiscent of HAL-9000.
8. And here’s one I revisited just this morning: Richard Linklater’s 2006 adaptation of A Scanner Darkly, an acclaimed, semiautobiographical 1977 novel by Philip K. Dick. An understated tour de force for the Dazed and Confused director, the film boasts a talented cast that includes Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder, and Robert Downey Jr. Not to mention some groundbreaking rotoscoped visuals that give the film a trippy, comic-bookish aesthetic well suited for a film about substance abuse. It’s also an astute exploration of human psych
ology and paranoia in the age of mass surveillance.
9. Danny Boyle’s 2007 psychological thriller set in outer space, Sunshine, features early-career performances by Cillian Murphy (Batman Begins, Inception), Chris Evans (Captain America in Marvel’s The Avengers), Rose Byrne (Insidious, The Place Beyond the Pines), and Mark Strong (Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes, Zero Dark Thirty). A lot of criticism has been leveled at the film’s dark, disturbing ending sequences—but I’d argue that it works tremendously well as a horror film in addition to its initial science-fictional premise. Turns out that when the sun is growing dim and life on Earth is desperate to survive, whatever the cost, technical glitches and good old-fashioned fundamentalism will be there to toss a wrench in things.
10. I’ve saved my all-time favorite for last. Everybody knows and loves Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, adapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—and I’ve already mentioned A Scanner Darkly as another great big-screen example of Dick’s paranoid, metaphysical storytelling—but Steven Spielberg pulled out all the stops for 2002’s Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise, Samantha Morton, Max von Sydow, and Colin Farrell. When the drug addicts of the not-too-distant future begin giving birth to children who dream of real-life murders before they happen, law enforcement steps in to capitalize on the miracle. And while this may sound a bit far-fetched, it’s actually the film’s only Dickian conceit; everything else feels all too believable, and the all-around stellar performances from the cast serve to really sell it all. Thematically, it tackles questions of guilt and innocence, free will and determinism, and the transformative grief of child loss.
Comes the Dawn
An Apes Franchise Retrospective
Tim Burton’s reimagining of Planet of the Apes (2001) will always serve as a ready example of why Hollywood reboots are often as forgettable as they are unnecessary. This, in spite of all the love and artistry that went into making the film, is the extent of its legacy. Chalk it up to Mark Wahlberg’s wide-eyed performance, which in the larger context of his filmography makes The Happening look like a masterwork of cinema by comparison—or to the offensively absurd ending. Either way, you are unlikely to find anything redeeming whatsoever within the film’s tedious runtime.
These kinds of confused, played-too-safe efforts tend to earn a lot of money by catering to filmgoers’ nostalgia and then under-delivering on the promise of something worthy of the original source material; the movie industry has grown increasingly fond of this lucrative business model, frustrating though it may be.
At the heart of this half-century-old franchise lies a sort of bleak, post-Darwinian poetry: the notion that two distinct species of sufficiently advanced intelligence, however similar, cannot coexist on the same planet in the same moment. It’s the key cultural meme that permeates the pre-2011 Apes films: “The only good human is a dead human.” Owing as much to George Orwell’s Animal Farm as it does to the original ’63 Pierre Boulle novel, La Planète des singes, this conceit echoes the universal struggle between oppressed and oppressor—between those with vast, unthinking power and those who lack the capacity to overcome it.
Burton’s film seems a touch too preoccupied with the cutesy ironies that result from its central reversal, and as a result is rife with overtones of racialism, xenophobia, and even latent bestiality. (“No, I think I’ll stick with my chimps,” says one of Davidson’s coworkers aboard the Air Force space station in which the film’s clumsy opening sequence takes place, when asked whether she plans on ever getting an “actual boyfriend.”)
But what keeps us coming back to this mythology, I think, are the themes explored so richly in Rupert Wyatt’s inspired Rise of the Planet of the Apes (’11)—a starkly different kind of film, which manages at once to reintroduce the world to its larger, established franchise while also maintaining a sense of novelty and relevance to contemporary audiences. Through Caesar’s viewpoint, we are made to empathize with the apes like never before as they gradually make preparations to escape their abusive habitat and seek refuge and freedom in the wild.
Let’s not forget, of course, that Rise also presents the first hard-science explanation for the uplifting of common primates to a level of sentience comparable to that of the average human being. By exploring the human struggle alongside Caesar’s journey, we see that each side has its reasons for the distrust and that ultimately leads to the sort of mutual, militant hatred glimpsed in the series’s 1968 original, starring Charlton Heston, and its handful of lesser sequels.
Andy Serkis’s MoCap performance in this entry is arguably the best in the franchise’s long, venerable history. And James Franco, delivering a solid performance, lends heart and believability to scientist Will Rodman, who spends most of the film’s plot trying to reverse his father’s dementia by developing a viral compound to pinpoint and repair damaged tissue in the human brain, effectively curing Alzheimer’s Disease and other neurodegenerative disorders.
There’s little doubt that Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (’14), which opens later this week, will continue to deepen and complicate the human/simian dynamic introduced in Wyatt’s brilliant 2011 reboot. Having established that a manned mission to Mars on the eve of the ALZ-113, or “Simian Flu,” pandemic has gone awry (a headline in the San Francisco Chronicle reads, lost in space?), we can probably assume that this new timeline intends to leave at least some of the original series’s tentpole moments intact.
I think it’s also safe to say that we won’t likely see the Icarus spacecraft returning to Earth in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes; particularly if this new take on the mythology is intended to be a trilogy, that iconic moment ought to be kept in reserve for the third and final act. But!—I would anticipate, however, that Dawn has more than a few climactic surprises up its sleeve, given the amount of storytelling ground covered by its predecessor.
For instance, the trailers reveal a great deal of straightforward, armed combat between apes and humans following a few well-meaning individuals’ failed attempts at peacekeeping. It isn’t entirely out of the question to expect another apocalyptic moment like the Simian Flu outbreak, or even the nuclear holocaust that was so pivotal to earlier films in the franchise. While the first two Apes entries toyed with audiences’ cultural anxieties about the Bomb, I’d expect the next two Rise sequels to employ destruction on a global scale in keeping with the post-9/11 zeitgeist.
Perhaps near-future tech involved in climateering, which we’ve seen handled well in “cli-fi” technothriller novels but rarely on the big screen, will become weaponized by Caesar’s resistance as a last-ditch effort at survival. Or perhaps the film will explore new modes of urbanized living, given the dramatic shift toward a small, endangered human population, that more readily benefit the apes. It’d be quite nice to see arcology and green initiatives play a role in the Apes mythos, in light of changing ideas about climate change, Earth’s biosphere, modern apocalyptic realities, and neo-futurism.
Whatever path director Matt Reeves, along with screenwriter Mark Bomback and a truly phenomenal cast that includes Jason Clarke (Zero Dark Thirty) and Keri Russell (August Rush), ultimately chooses . . . well, it’s safe to say we’re likely to be spared another atrocity like Burton’s 2001 contribution, which I hesitate to dignify with its unearned, studio-given title. But that’s putting it all a bit too cynically. In truth, the franchise’s future has only brightened following the release of Rise of the Planet of the Apes three years back, and I look forward to seeing where Andy Serkis’s Caesar takes us.
Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
The Decade’s Best Sci-Fi Film Since Inception
As a species, making war is something we’ve gotten pretty good at. It stands to reason that, when the threat of extinction rears its head, talk of machine-guns and rocket launchers and C-4 will follow soon enough. It’s why the United States and its allies invade nations and topple dictatorships so routinely: We don’t like the possibility of another group controlling the resources we depend
on, or overstepping established territorial boundaries—as a country, we’ve killed for far less.
The idea that our world’s leaders might have questionable intentions when it comes to warfare is something that, while pretty incendiary as a matter of public discourse, has been examined in post-9/11 art and cinema with relative frequency. Films like Green Zone (2010, Greengrass) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012, Bigelow) set their sights on issues of falsified intelligence, torture, surveillance—and war as something governments and high-profit industries manufacture deliberately for monetary gain.
Science fiction has also taken a number of stabs at this sort of subject matter in the recent past, and most have come across as admirable in their ambitions, regardless of critical success: Star Trek Into Darkness (’13), A Scanner Darkly (’06), The Dark Knight (’08). There exists a pervasive understanding in this country that privacy is a thing of the recent past, handed over at will to powerful people ranging from Mark Zuckerberg to the more proactive members of the Bush administration. Films like Christopher Nolan’s have done a fine job of exploring this problem.
Never sacrificing the needs of the story at hand to make a political point, however, Matt Reeves achieves a new standard for complexity and nuance in contemporary SF cinema. One surprise standout character is Koba, an ape held captive and tortured by the very same Gen-Sys Laboratories researchers who created the Simian Flu and wiped out much of humanity in the previous film, Rise, several years earlier. A reluctant but helpful ally to Caesar in Rupert Wyatt’s 2011 entry, Koba’s tendencies for violence and deceit bubble to the surface in this tremendously successful, heartfelt sequel.