by Alex Kane
Quite a bit, I’d argue. To wit:
When you’ve got a successful series going over the course of decades, it’s tough to maintain relevance and originality after early, major successes. Oftentimes an idea is examined to the point that it ceases to be interesting, and eventually you start repeating yourself.
Perhaps, as with the example of Scott’s Prometheus, it’s best to pack up your toolbox and go build something new, something bigger, rather than continuing to tinker with past successes. Audiences are hard to please as it is, let alone when they come into an experience with overly high expectations.
Tone, mood, and intensity should waver slightly over the course of a single film, but not within the scope of a four-installment series—movies, films, games, comics, whatever—unless there’s good reason to do so. You’ve gotta give us a glimmer of hope somewhere in all that unrelenting despair.
Having every character but your protagonist be a rapist-murderer, with whom the audience is supposed to sympathize, is risky as hell. Fincher can pull it off, I think . . . but after a film like Aliens, where Cameron established a clear divide between who and what is good and who the bad guys are—corporate slime-balls and aliens on one side, marines and civilians on the other—it’s hard to pull off a spectrum of gray, gray, gray.
Also, I can’t understate the importance of keeping primary characters—good, heroic characters as well as innocent children—alive unless the story absolutely demands that they be killed. I’m not spouting dogma here, but as novelist Alan Dean Foster opined of the film, the deaths of Corporal Hicks and Newt are obscene. Neither character deserved to die; both fought valiantly to survive the preceding film; and audiences loved them.
In Fincher’s world, as with our world, even the innocent are occasionally made to suffer. But in art, it’s also necessary to be aware from a creative standpoint what kind of reaction a character’s death will elicit from the audience.
In other words: Don’t kill everybody’s favorite character, unless you want to piss off your audience—or to try and make a profound point through martyrdom, which is rarely done well on the big screen. And please, for the love of all things sacred and Giger-esque, don’t have an on-screen autopsy performed on a ten-year-old girl in your film, bloody bone saws, exposed chest cavity, and all. Jeezus, that’s just gross.
The Fire Must Be Kept Burning
An Appreciation of Scott’s Prometheus
Last Saturday, I spent my morning on the couch with a debilitating migraine, wondering what karmic injustice I’d committed in order to deserve being so miserable on my weekend off. But like the glass-half-full seeker of silver linings that I am, I whipped out the Prometheus 4-Disc Collector’s Edition Blu-ray I’d gotten as a gift this past Christmas, and set to work watching . . . well, all of the included special features. Something like seven hours’ worth of making-of documentaries, featurettes, and commentaries.
I’m left feeling—even after a week’s worth of reflection—that those hours were not, in fact, ill-spent. Even after almost a year since the film’s theatrical release, I can’t help but maintain that Ridley Scott’s science-fictional reprise is, if flawed, also criminally underappreciated.
For my money, science fiction is little more than fantasy with an eye toward the future.
That’s why it’s so tremendously important in our culture, despite the various stigmas that still cling to its otherworldly exterior: it’s a myth for tomorrow. Quite often the difference between so-called “soft” and “hard” science fiction seems to be the difference between who’s willing to admit they’re faking it and who’s not.
That’s not to say there’s no value in scientific rigor within the literature of science fiction—just that the air of intellectual elitism on the part of certain hard SF advocates is a tad misplaced in its priorities, I’d argue.
In the realm of fantasy, set pieces like magic spells and secondary-world kingdoms, hobgoblins and dragons, are utterly taken for granted. The standard by which a fantasy novel’s judged is not the scope of known scientific fact but rather the degree to which the author crafts a sense of verisimilitude; it’s about not breaking the story’s individual “rules,” and just generally smoothing out the edges.
But what makes Prometheus worth a second look, in my opinion, is the way it comes together as a cohesive thematic and aesthetic whole after repeated viewings, and especially after you’ve seen the amount of work that went into crafting the audiovisual experience of the film’s faraway world.
Sure, the script is shaky. The characters aren’t particularly believable a good deal of the time; Scott made a handful of decidedly bad calls in the editing room, like keeping Fifield’s transformation subtle rather than super-scary and cutting down on the final confrontation with the surviving Engineer; and the “purpose” behind much of the alien biology throughout the film has been diluted, likely as a result of Fox having too many hands in the pot: Jon Spaihts, Damon Lindelof . . . not to mention Scott’s own colossal ego.
According to what we’re shown in the pre-production and storytelling portions of the special features, the film began life as a straight-up prequel titled Alien: Genesis, which Spaihts wrote with a handful of broad suggestions from Scott. From this, the idea of the Space Jockey as the seeders of sentient life on Earth—even the specific term “Engineers”—emerged as a dominant plot concern for the film.
For practical reasons as well as philosophic ones, apparently, the Space Jockey was given an all-too-human face beneath its alien exoskeleton. And as a result, we’re led to question the motivations and history behind the biological weaponry that wreaks such unholy havoc on the crew of the Prometheus.
So of course there’s an element of disappointment, of being ultimately underwhelmed, in pretty much every review of the film you read. People want to understand everything; it’s why we have the literature of SF.
That’s why Stanley Kubrick’s monumental 2001: A Space Odyssey, while considered by many to be the greatest science-fiction motion picture of all time, still feels inferior alongside its companion novelization by the late, great Arthur C. Clarke, who offers more explicit gestures toward the monoliths’ intended purpose, as well as painting a very striking portrait of their alien creators in the space of a few paragraphs.
If we’re being far-sighted in our assessment, however, it’s worth noting that Blade Runner was upon in its initial release a massive financial flop, earning at the box office merely half its budget; and yet Scott reputedly regards the film as his most personal, most artful achievement—especially if we’re narrowing the sample to only his science fiction pictures. And its popularity as both a cult classic and filmmaking achievement continues to grow with every passing decade.
Scott mentions in the Blu-ray commentary that he intends to direct a sequel, which news and fan sites have referred to as Paradise (one of the post-Alien: Genesis working titles for Prometheus, if I recall correctly). This leads me to another key point: Without the context of a larger implied universe, without a sequel or two to bring closure about the Engineers’ true goals and beliefs, Prometheus will always feel like a promise unfulfilled.
Imagine, for a moment, if George Lucas’s 1977 version of Star Wars had earned little money in its first theatrical run. Would Darth Vader be the chilling, mythic character we see him as today if he hadn’t shone so brightly at the undeniable height of his complexity in The Empire Strikes Back? And furthermore, would the first Star Wars film feel like such a “classic” without the benefit of retrospect and its implications for the later, arguably more interesting installments in the trilogy? I’m not so sure.
Take the so-called “Special Edition” scene in Scott’s Alien (’79), for instance: We glimpse the goopy, horrific hive-making habits of the Xenomorph on display with Captain Dallas strung up, helpless and begging for a merciful death courtesy of Lieutenant Ripley’s flamethrower—but this scene is unnecessary and meaningless without the larger context provided by Cameron’s highly compete
nt sequel, Aliens (’86).
Blade Runner got away without the sequel treatment for so many years, sure, but that’s because it feels so utterly complete. The ending—Scott’s Director’s Cut ending, in particular—is poignant, puzzling, and appropriate. The script ignored elements of Dick’s novel, like Mercerism, World War Terminus, and the titular electric sheep . . . so we’re left with a film that fulfills every inch of its promise, and reveals something poetic and unexpected each time we revisit it. It’s a compelling visual story, for one, but it’s also thematically timeless.
Don’t you think Prometheus will be a hell of a lot better once some of these quibbles get explained? A director’s cut release is all but inevitable.
It would have been nice, I think, to see a younger Guy Pierce living out his wildest fantasies at age ninety-six, granted eternal youth through the interplay between cryonics and Scott’s notion of “cyber-sleep,” which didn’t ultimately make it into the film. It would have been perhaps more satisfying to know the purpose of the Engineers’ light-years-spanning biochemical warfare campaign, and the role Earth was to play in all of that mess. . . .
Still. The original Alien, for all its dramatic brilliance and classic atmosphere, got away with its fair share of hand-waving. Blade Runner went underrated for years. Given enough time, I foresee that Prometheus will stand alongside some of the great works of SF cinema as a troubling but artful achievement in the realm of cosmic nightmares.
Kubrick’s 2001 Vis-à-vis Clarke’s 2001
Space Odysseys, Silent Simulacrums, and the Advent of Posthuman Intelligence
Almost four years ago, from the time of this writing, I read a book that changed my life: Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: Space Odyssey. Up until that point, I’d read a handful of SF classics, like Dune, The War of the Worlds, and so forth—but mostly I was a reader of, well . . . arguably lesser books. Things like Star Wars tie-ins (more than I can count, but most of them entirely forgettable), ho-hum film novelizations, and what have you.
I also read a lot of mid- to late-career Stephen King, like The Green Mile, Different Seasons, et cetera. No criticism there; I still read and love King shamelessly. He’s a master of the craft, whom growing storytellers should study with earnest. And, of course, there was that sparse, strange, holy-shit-this-is-fucking-awesome book called Fight Club. Ahem.
But my freshman year of community college, long before I transferred to my present alma mater in my hometown of Monmouth, Illinois, I was assigned a Composition II paper in which I was to examine a novel of my choosing, from a list provided by the professor. There was one science fiction novel on the list, so I went with that one.
Clarke’s 2001 is nothing short of a treasure. It doesn’t get quite the level of acclaim that Rama or Childhood’s End gets, but I think it’s a damn fine read. The kind of book you never forget, and to which you always sort of aspire. As long as I’m alive, writing science fiction and pushing myself to get better at it, I think 2001 will be the book whose level of wonder, stimulation, and adventure I inevitably compare my work to. That’s not to say that there aren’t better-written, or more interesting books, but simply that the impression of that first transformative read will be hard to beat.
It’s like the maybe-arguable-fact that Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report are better films from a technical standpoint than The Empire Strikes Back and Ridley Scott’s Alien: Though it may be true, or have at least partial merit, my early experiences at the ages of seven (Empire) and, I think, eight years old (Alien) will remain forever crystallized as defining moments in my upbringing.
Which is why, perhaps unfairly, it’s always been hard for me to consider the possibility that Kubrick’s 2001 is even worth my time. I almost universally prefer original books to their film adaptations—Fincher’s brilliant but inferior Fight Club adaptation among them, admittedly—and so with a book like Clarke’s beloved novel, I thought that disappointment with the film was guaranteed.
(Final sidebar: I wrote this particular essay in 2012, making it the oldest chapter in the book. In the two years since I’ve come to suspect that Kubrick’s film—and Fincher’s Fight Club—are at least as good as their source material. Let this be a reminder to the reader that it’s okay to change your mind about things. The world would be a much better place if everyone realized this.)
Recently, though, I read a Facebook discussion led by author Robert J. Sawyer, who argues that the differences between the film and the novel are sufficient to view them as two entirely separate works, each with its own set of thematic concerns and moral subtext. More specifically, he views the Kubrick film as dealing with the evolution of humankind from its present, organic state to the level of artificial intelligence—therefore concluding that HAL-9000, or “Hal,” is the most important component of the mission.
This deviates significantly from the novel, I think, which seems to concern itself more so with the evolution of humankind from the level of sapience to, well, omnipotence. A level of intellect and influence unknowable, and incomprehensible, to the reader. (I watched the film 2010 several years after reading Clarke’s 2001, but have never read the three sequel novels. Perhaps Bowman’s transformation is explained differently than in the two film adaptations; I can’t say whether it is or not.)
Anyway, I finally took the time to watch the Kubrick film from start to finish—this morning, in fact—and found it enormously awesome. A stunning, enthralling work of cinema, with at least two or three killer scenes: the arrival of Heywood Floyd and the discovery of the lunar monolith; Hal’s death sequence, which I thought had some chilling dialogue; and certainly the haunting, almost silent simulacrum in which Bowman becomes the enigmatic Star-Child. It was solid enough to stand on its own, but ambiguous enough to demand that after four years of literary infidelity, I finally make a return to the fiction of Clarke, to whom I owe my appreciation of the genre as I know it today.
The Safest Place There Is
Revisiting Spielberg’s Minority Report
“The safest place there is. . . .”
It’s a dubious, quizzical line, delivered by Lois Smith near the end of her one unforgettable scene as the self-proclaimed mother of Precrime. Dubious because we’re talking about the reliability of the human mind; quizzical because it’s a Philip K. Dick adaptation. But it’s a line, I’d argue, which perfectly describes the experience of revisiting one’s most treasured big-screen story, especially in Blu-ray high definition.
Forgive my sentimentality, but it always feels a bit like coming home.
Let’s talk a bit about my all-time, personal favorite film: Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002). When I was maybe twelve or thirteen years old, I got my hands on the home DVD release of the second Star Wars prequel, Attack of the Clones—and I became obsessed utterly with the notion that I might have a future as a storyteller. Lucas’s six-film epic has throughout my life, again and again, shown me the beauty of grand, mythic worlds and the heroic beings who populate them.
Spielberg’s Minority Report hit me unexpectedly a few months later. I’d missed the film’s theatrical run, having wanted to see it but having neither a car nor driver’s license to get me there. So I used what money I could scrounge together, from mowing lawns and so forth, to buy the DVD.
Which suited me perfectly, since I belong to that rare breed of cinephile who is often content to watch and rewatch the same ten-odd films over and over, studying my favorites in hopes of gleaning some unseen meaning I’d missed earlier—finding new cinematic moments to admire, or new, unanswered questions to ponder. The newfound convenience of the disc format allowed me to rewind more easily and better examine the story, and that led me to pen my first-ever review, which appeared in my middle school’s student newspaper. I’d love to track down a copy.
Minority Report is one of those movies you can’t help but be impressed by the first time you see it. And, as evidenced by the live-tweeting I did during my most recent viewing of the p
icture on Blu-ray (storify.com/alexjkane/livetweeting-spielberg-s-minority-report), it holds up to the test of time like few science-fiction action flicks are capable of.
Its ideas feel fresh despite the age of its Philip K. Dick-penned source material (“The Minority Report,” first published in Fantastic Universe, 1956); the fictional technology presented throughout the film, with the single obvious exception of psychic phenomena, feels wholly real in a near-future context; and the philosophical concerns at the heart of its script are so vital and complex as to be truly timeless.
The film fits Tom Cruise like a tailored suit, in no small part due to the tightness of the script and its Dickian, awe-inspiring implications for the future of law enforcement. In Chief John Anderton we find a haunted man driven constantly by his tragic past even as the legal system he serves propels him toward a single confrontation, with a man he’s never met.
Am I getting ahead of myself? That’s always the problem with precognition; with focusing too much on the future, rather than the present.
The metaphysical, very Dickian hypothetical at the story’s center is that of the Precrime experiment, in which three brain-damaged oracles, born of the underground drug culture, suffer from nightmarish dreams of the future related to murder. Using these Precogs and their capability to predict future murders, law enforcement officers hunt and capture homicide perpetrators before the crime can take place, often—in trademark Spielberg style—with just seconds to spare.
So naturally the District of Columbia Precrime Division’s Police Chief, John Anderton (Cruise), is eventually declared the perp of a “brown-ball” (premeditated) crime, and forced to investigate the possibility that the “perfect system” he has fought for so passionately is, ultimately, fallible.
“But there’s a flaw,” Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) tells Anderton. “It’s human. It always is.”