INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014

by Andy Cox

  ASHENS (DVD/Blu-ray, 14 July). SF/Fantasy comedy adventure with nods to The Matrix, Lord of the Rings and The Goonies.

  THE DOUBLE (DVD/Blu-ray, 4 August). Richard Ayoade’s adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novella. (Theatrical release reviewed by Nick Lowe in issue #252.)

  STOP PRESS: HUNTING THE LEGEND release date postponed till 5 January 2015.

  MUTANT POPCORN

  NICK LOWE

  EDGE OF TOMORROW

  X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

  TARZAN

  GODZILLA

  MALEFICENT

  LEGENDS OF OZ: DOROTHY’S RETURN

  PATEMA INVERTED

  UPSIDE DOWN

  TRANSCENDENCE

  THE YOUNG AND PRODIGIOUS T.S. SPIVET

  Weren’t we just here? Did we already do this, or is this sense of déjà vu merely the anticipation of a familiar disappointment? Is this the reboot yet, or did we just forget that it never happened? Who is playing Quicksilver, and did he just pull down our pants or were they like that all the time? Has the eating itself already eaten itself? Is our Earth the one whose noösphere is ruled by a gigantic industrialised intellectual-property farm with a modest comics business attached as a loss-leader, where films make films out of films which become about their own recursiveness and the rebooting of narrative, and where the nervous question now is whether new intellectual property is worth the R&D, when old brands can be rebooted indefinitely until victory is achieved? Are we there yet, or did we crash and go back to the start?

  Such is the reboot-happy world of the modern blockbuster evoked by EDGE OF TOMORROW, which spent most of its production falling off a cliff, only to find itself thrillingly rescued mere inches from a nasty splat-landing. Director Doug Liman, whose previous sf film was the decidedly mixed delight Jumper, is notorious in the business for his hair-raisingly indie and improvisational ways with blockbuster budgets and productions, and in an industry governed by reason would be the very last person you’d want to trust with a tightly-wound time-twisting plot and a Tom Cruise tentpole budget on a property with zero punter recognition and a title capable of inducing an anterograde amnesiac state all by itself. To give an idea of the history of violence offscreen, the film’s first iteration was a 2010 Black List script by emerging writer Dante Harper, written as a spec for Warners from Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s (subsequently graphicised) novel All You Need Is Kill, about a teenage Japanese grunt in a war against alien invaders who accidentally steals their power of rebooting the day to play over and over till they win, and who teams up with a similarly-endowed American killing machine nicknamed the Full Metal Bitch for a game-inspired mashup of Starship Troopers with Groundhog Day (or possibly Source Code with 50 First Dates). But even without the Liman factor, the arrival of the distinctly non-teenage and, Last Samurai notwithstanding, not conspicuously Japanese Tom Cruise forced some fairly drastic changes to the property. The theatre of war was shunted from the Pacific to London and alien-occupied France, and the Bitch recast accordingly as Full Metal Emily Blunt; the graceless title was replaced by a completely forgettable one; and a series of replacement writers, bizarrely including Jerusalem playwright Jez Butterworth (still credited), did their best to appease the controlling Cruise and the mercurial Liman, who for his part drove producers to prescription abuse by tearing up the script six months before shooting. Eventually Cruise had a quiet word with his current go-to writer Chris McQuarrie, his helmsman on Jack Ryan and the new Mission Impossible, who triaged the script in the month before shooting without ever looking at the novel, and has now displaced the luckless Harper entirely from the credits.

  To everyone’s relief and most people’s considerable surprise, the result is far from the apocalyptic planewreck that was on the cards, delivering instead a mostly tight, ingenious, and innovative update of the venerable Rogue Moon template for iterable action narrative where you keep getting blown to atoms and going again. In this final recurse of the film’s own reboot-camp hell, Cruise is a weaselly media general busted down to private when he attempts to extricate himself from humanity’s last doomed surge to retake France, only to have to hero up when he finds himself plunged into groundhog D-Day and dying a couple of hundred times while he learns his lesson. As he and we grow used to the beats of his day, the pace of the cycle quickens, the gaps in narrative become more casual, and at a crucial point the audience find themselves dropping behind the hero and increasingly tasked with filling the ellipses for themselves. It’s getting harder all the time to make Tom Cruise sf films, not least because merely putting him in a film has increasingly the effect of making it all about Scientology whether or not anyone intends it; but he’s rather good here, particularly while his character’s still being a craven self-serving dick, even if the excavation of his inner hero and Operating Thetan within by fast-forwarding through his lives has a little too much cultic resonance to pass entirely beneath the threshold of attention. The third act was concocted in haste, but its palpable sense of depleted invention is partly the result of unavoidable constraints: that Tom clearly has to lose the power and play the finale with real-world, one-shot, life-or-death stakes, and a final sacrifice payoff with a redemptive twist reward. The novel has a rather cooler, darker climax where the hero and heroine, who in this version are both time-looping, discover that the only way to thwart the alien prescience is for one of them to kill the other (at the end of a day which has finally managed to wind the complete loop from meet-cute to consummation into its span). But never in a thousand lifetimes were we going to get that.

  Edge’s script-rebooter Chris McQuarrie made his name on The Usual Suspects, which was also the film that propelled Bryan Singer to the X-Men franchise and changed the course of blockbuster history. Singer’s trumpeted homecoming to the series with X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST is in part an act of atonement for almost destroying the two biggest franchises in comics when he bailed on The Last Stand to make Superman Returns instead; and franchise veteran Simon Kinberg’s screenplay is a confident if cluttered reunion of old friends credited and pop-up, in a generously expanded version of Claremont’s twin-timelined tale of a future X-Man sent back into the younger version’s head to preempt the X-termination of mutantkind at the hands of the Sentinel killbots. It’s easily the most complex transformation yet of a major franchise universe, bending the series’ increasingly centrifugal spin-offs, prequels, and reboots back into a single continuity by folding the Fox franchise’s past and future (which, to complicate things further, are in internal continuity the other way around) back together so that a new future (or past) is born out of the Singer-Vaughn canon while Last Stand and the Wolverine films are erased from the memory of all but the hero and his mentor, who in this film are also the other way about. By a productive accident, the X-Men films have wound up extending their universe backwards and forwards in tandem, resulting in the only comics franchise whose history is laid out before us as a sixty-year whole; and the coexistence of original and reboot cast allows the continuing dramatisation of a complete generations-spanning allohistory of our own world from the Silver Age to the Age of Apocalypse, with Days’ end-credit tease extending the canon into gulfs of time deeper still.

  It’s not a film that’s particularly bothered with explaining its narrative conveniences – why walking through walls gives you the power to send consciousness through time, or how the resurrected Charlie Xavier managed to end up in an identical body (Kinberg and Brett Ratner have different definitive answers to this one) with identically non-working legs, or just how Raven’s DNA enables the Sentinels to anticipate and counter mutant powers like Edge of Tomorrow’s Mimics – while the passage of a decade since First Class with the story essentially on hold is a funny kind of homage to the First Class’s years of action, and the original cast feel a bit narratively boxed-in thanks to the deletion of their big-mission set piece to rescue Rogue from the Sentinel-occupied X-mansion. But if it’s an early certainty that the finale will involve gigantic battles in two timelines intercut and t
emporally intertwined, the middle of the film is refreshingly unpredictable after the original plot wraps up at the midpoint and the mission angles off unexpectedly elsewhere. By the end of the film, we’re deep into Abrams Star Trek space, rewinding slowly through the past of a reset canon future which may or may not have jumped both rails and shark. Next stop is a 1983-set Age of Apocalypse, which could easily be just that.

  The great-granddaddy of modern franchise branding makes his post-millennial return in the German-produced mocapimation TARZAN, with Kellan Lutz voicing and part-performing a new iteration of ERB’s iconic vine-swinger after sixteen years away from screens. This Tarzan for our time is no longer an English lord but an American energy baron, a scion of the new global aristocracy as the lost heir to multinational “Greystoke Energies”, his parents victims of a nefarious boardroom clash between conservation and exploitation of a lost meteorite deep in mountain-gorilla country. Fortunately plucky conservationist Jane Porter is on hand to draw Tarzan back to civilisation by the eternal power of ape-boy and hot teen in tropical kit. Tarzan find human girl unconscious! Tarzan take advantage! Tarzan abduct to mating dungeon cave! It’s fairly primitive stuff, but the thing it gets right is that Tarzan is a gift to the modern medium of motion-captured 3D, with some superb ape mummery under the choreography of the legendary Peter Elliott, who made his name as the lead suit performer in Greystoke. Of course it’ll be swiftly erased from memory and canon come David Yates’ live-action reboot, but those are the breaks.

  The most famous of all man-in-a-suit performances makes its own mocap debut in Gareth Edwards’ GODZILLA, which has seen the king of the monsters stomping back over the Pacific box office to remind the Fukushima generation who’s the daddy. With a keen eye for someone with the skillset to leverage a thrilling film from a terrible script and great actors wantonly miscast, Disney have now recruited Edwards to the biggest reboot of them all, the extended Star Wars franchise. It’s been a steep ramp up from the 3-man crew, scriptless shoot, and bedroom-made effects of his debut Monsters, but nobody could say he hasn’t earned his shot at the prize. This Godzilla has some big ideas about what a Gojira for our times needs to do: to speak to our age’s nuclear and environmental anxieties as his grandfather spoke to his; to go straight to universe, with Goji merely the apex predator and enforcer of harmony in an instant kaiju ecosystem whose lower denizens come Cloverfielding out of the ocean to trash our cities and shut down our grids till the boss comes to give them a talking-to. But the human drama is woeful, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s hurt-locker vet caught between jeopardised young family and an obsessed dad who papers his walls with cuttings saying things like NUCLEAR CRISIS GROWS to remind him the nuclear crisis is growing, while overqualified stars like Ken Watanabe and for some reason Sally Hawkins are crammed into cameos that push their powers of something-from-nothing to their limit. But the monster sequences are stunningly conceived and executed, often cutting away from straight-ahead kaiju-on-kaiju combat entirely in favour of more oblique and resonant shots of media reaction and aftershock, and carefully framing all the money shots with a foreground for scale. The showreel shot of the marines making the drop through the darkness and smoke to Ligeti’s Requiem is epic poetry of a peculiar and wonderful kind; and even the Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms steal a bit of romance and sympathy from the climax of Edwards’ own Monsters.

  Another misunderstood monster has a redemptive reboot in MALEFICENT, an ungainly revisionist live-action hash-up of Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty, the film whose lukewarm box-office appeal put the animated Disney fairytale to sleep for thirty years. Maleficent is old Disney rearing up in defence of its core values and fairytale crown jewels as its younger progeny threaten to ride off with the pick of the treasure. In contrast to Disney’s new star creator Jennifer Lee of Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen, Maleficent’s architect Linda Woolverton is old-Disney aristocracy: the writer who first took the gospel of the hero’s journey from Chris Vogler’s famous memo to the heart of Disney’s creation with The Lion King and Mulan, and would go on to lay the foundation stone of the company’s live-action revisionings with Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland. But Burton very sensibly turned Maleficent down, no doubt recognising an irreparably wonky concept that subsequent script-doctoring has proved unable to keep on its feet. In this incarnation, the ill-named fairy who lays the curse on the Princess Aurora isn’t born bad but just a victim of abuse at the hands of a treacherous childhood sweetheart. “He told her it was true love’s kiss, but it was not to be”; and sure enough once she grows into Angelina Jolie with scary wired Rick Baker cheekbones, he date-roofies her and hacks off her faerie wings, leaving Prince Hans looking a bit of an amateur beside him. True, she does do a bit of ill-advised cursing, but as soon as Princess Aurora grows into a wig-trailing Elle Fanning (who turns out to be completely at sea when called on to play wet and simpering) she repents and spends the rest of the film trying to undo what she has made, with results that might be more interesting if the defining twist hadn’t been preemptively stolen by Frozen, which somehow got studio permission to make off with the ending from under its rival’s nose. Clonkingly on-the-nose narration oversells the Bechdel credentials, only to undermine them by yet again erasing the mother from the screen and making it all about daddies and daughters, with even the inconvenient queen’s premature death happening offscreen on the cutting-room floor. Legendary production designer Robert Stromberg, who dressed Avatar, Alice, and Oz, is on more subdued visual form as director, and doesn’t seem terribly at ease with his actors. But people have gone to see it, so it’s a certainty that Disney will only be encouraged to further malfeasance.

  LEGENDS OF OZ: DOROTHY’S RETURN is a complex derivative of Baumian intellectual property, a direct musical sequel to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz drawn not from the original cycle but from a 1989 novel by Frank’s grandson Roger S. Baum, part of the Baum estate’s extended Oz canon and thus a different universe again from the MGM/Warner and Disney variations of the Oz cinematic universe, each with its copyrighted likenesses and design elements. In its film version the plot has a lot of Woolverton’s Alice in Wonderland about it, as Dorothy suffers a further concussive episode and finds herself and Toto back in Oz years later (though only the next day in her own life) to face a darkness that has fallen upon the kingdom in her absence, while back home in Kansas the tornado victims face eviction and exploitation at the hands of predatory disaster-chasers that only Dorothy can thwart. The title suggests franchise aspirations, but they’ll be lucky; the budget seems to have gone on the songs rather than the animation, and the musical numbers are like watching Sims karaoke.

  Yasuhiro Yoshiura’s anime oddity PATEMA INVERTED has had a curious release pattern, restricted to a handful of kids-only weekend shows outside its festival screenings, but derives some ingenious twists of action, orientation, and serial conceptual breakthrough from its premise of a failed experiment that has reversed gravity for part of the planet and divided the survivors into mutually hostile domains. But when the intrepid princess Patema ventures out of Plato’s cave into the topsy-turvy world of her enemies, she strikes up a forbidden friendship that sets her on a path to the exposure of a series of secrets about her world and the truth about her missing father’s fate. The influence of Miyazaki’s Laputa is evident, and perhaps also of Naohisa Inoue’s Iblard art as featured in Whisper of the Heart; but Yoshiura’s film specialises in vertiginous inversions of orientation and perspective, which its plot ties to increasingly outré revelations about the experiment, its consequences and implications, and realises in an inventive cascade of artful upside-down stunts.

  Juan Solanas’ live-action version of the same conceit in Upside Down has also finally started to peep shyly out on the festival circuit, after a couple of years on the shelf and clearly no realistic prospect now of a wider UK theatrical release. This variation has Jim Sturgess’ and Kirsten Dunst’s star-crossed lovers inhabiting near-contiguous binary planets whose matter and inhabitants remain
(preposterously) constrained by their native gravity on one another’s worlds, so that Sturgess has to stuff his shoes and pockets with souvenirs from wealthy Up Top to go clumping round undetected on the ceiling to visit his quondam teen sweetheart who’s forgotten all about him since the head injury she sustained falling out of the sky. Full of ravishingly impossible greenscreened digital vistas, it’s one of those Euro-hashes that depend for their existence on continental funders’ inability to recognise a dead-on-its-legs script. The actors struggle, the dialogue squelches, and the plot emits the sound of a deflating bladder. But it does look lovely, bless it.

  A hardly less high-concept romance is the year’s big-budget sf flop TRANSCENDENCE, in which Rebecca Hall has to deal with her cybergenius husband turning into Skynet after he gets poloniumed by Kate Mara’s sinister patissière in a backfiring attempt to prevent the coming singularity. Johnny Depp’s performance is inevitably a bit Skyped-in, consisting as it does mostly of a digitally-distressed face playing a machine simulation of himself; but the plot escalates nicely through its levels, as what starts as a race to save Depp’s mind (as in Save control-S) by backing his consciousness up to the cloud becomes the beginning of something much bigger, with Depp taking control first of the internet and then of the nanofabric of matter itself, and Hall discovering that the downside of being married to God is that He can be really rather controlling. Another script that went through some odd changes in development, it’s eliminated the original love-triangle between Depp, Hall, and bestie/rival Paul Bettany, as well as an originally still more spectacular third-act apocalypse – the last presumably to preserve the intermittent side-mystery over whether the ghost in the machines was ever her husband at all or a sinister AI opportunistically mimicking a human identity for its own advantage. It’s unfortunate that the film’s found itself the poster-child for the riskiness of original narrative property in the blockbuster market – not just as its actual originality is fairly moot, the essential concept going back at least to Budrys’ Michaelmas, but because for all its fluffs it’s a film with a proper sf arc that changes up through conceptual gears in a way that Hollywood rarely has the patience or thoughtfulness to attempt.