Religious iconography piles into road traffic accident in John W. Sexton’s ‘On a Planet Similar to Ours, the Virgin Mary Says No’. The piece works well in its own terms, hatching feelings rather than thoughts. There’s no plot, no ethical dilemma, just dense prose-poetry and powerfully condensed flashes of consciousness.
‘The Olivia Reunion Party’ by Philip Raines and Harvey Welles is another story mixing depth psychology and social satire. The late Olivia’s sisters meet to celebrate her life and are soon knocking emotional lumps out of each other. Eventually, the true nature of the siblings is revealed as the authors carry out a quasi-Freudian, post-cubist examination of the vicissitudes of a short life in the glare of the media.
The final story is yet another dealing with issues of class and status. ‘Cinderella the Dirt Queen’, by H. Turnip Smith, takes liberties with the tales of Cinderella and Stephen King’s Carrie. A flawed but essentially decent white trash teen struggles to cope with the local rich-bitch prom queen, parental abuse and the elements. This dark tale, in which dirty realism collides with myth, is thoroughly true to its subject matter. Grim lives are set out in sharp detail, but we are left with the sense that even an apparently hopeless struggle can yield a future of possibility and hope.
Decade 1 is an anthology put together by an editor with a genuine relish for the short story and a faith in the scope of fantastic fiction to tackle a vast range of human experience, behaviour and emotion. Recommended.
LASER FODDER
TONY LEE
THE BRAND NEW TESTAMENT
SOLARIS
STALKER
11.22.63
IDENTICALS
TERRAHAWKS
A century and half after Huxley claimed that Darwin killed God (as recently depicted in Jon Amiel’s uneven Creation, 2009) the supreme being still exists, and according to Jaco Van Dormael’s comic fantasy THE BRAND NEW TESTAMENT (DVD, 8 August) is a reclusive sadist living in Brussels. After making the world he prompted generations of begats, but then focused on ‘universal annoyance’ so that – along with thousands of other laws – “there’s never just one hassle at a time”. Gifted with ESP and a telekinetic ability, God’s young daughter Ea sends time-of-death notes warning everyone of how much life they have left, and then she departs her family’s residence for the mortal world, to find six new apostles (including a sex maniac and a hitman!) and write a book of new gospels.
Belgium’s offering for this year’s Oscars, The Brand New Testament is packed with whimsical humour (like a singing ghost fish) that jostles with poetic imagery and acutely observed melancholy. Introspective characters talking to the camera provide a host of narrative links but breaking the fourth wall contrasts with more unique satire, as when the angry God pursues his daughter into the world – via launderette washing-machine portal that gives ‘birth’ to him. Farcical episodes present the daredevil antics of suicidal Kevin, who is using his ‘guaranteed’ 62 years of life for immortality stunts, entirely dependent upon lucky escapes or divine intervention. Shades of Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam are evident when Ea searches for proof of love, even if it’s between Catherine Deneuve and a circus gorilla.
When the magical uber-computer is finally restarted, sysadmin changes by the Almighty’s abandoned wife results in an absurdist utopia under flowery skies. Fans of Amelie will love this…or “God damn it!”
Perhaps it’s just me but I always thought Kris Kelvin sounded like a superhero’s name – a typically alliterative secret identity, so there’s a vaguely comic book influence in the otherwise sombre adaptation of Lem’s novel that makes Tarkovsky’s dramatisation of SOLARIS (DVD/Blu-ray, 8 August) somehow more palatable to fans of western SF.
There can be little doubt that Solaris is the best Russian SF film ever made. Sent from Earth to study a mysterious alien world, newly conscripted Kelvin arrives at an orbital station to discover that the existing crew are an oddly withdrawn and wholly secretive bunch. When Kelvin wakes up one day and finds his wife Hari beside him, it seems, at first, a normal enough situation, except for the fact that Kelvin remembers Hari killed herself back on Earth.
Is she an impostor? Hari’s ghost? A figment of his perturbed imagination, or a carbon-copy of the woman Kelvin knew, recreated by a cosmic intelligence inhabiting the apparently ‘living’ planet below – perhaps as a strange effort to communicate with the humans? Solaris is very long, and very slow moving, even by the Anglo-American standard of Kubrick’s 2001. But it remains a sublime picture that tackles the complex philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness, any criteria for sentience, and identity adrift in spacetime that formed major themes in New Wave SF.
Ray Bradbury’s fix-up novel The Martian Chronicles (1950, adapted for TV in 1980) featured stories also about an alien response to human visitors. Mars conjures a ghostly but reassuring fantasy, drawn from astronauts’ memories of familiar small-town USA, populated with lost loved ones. Both SF works inevitably shift from a kind of seduction to a confrontation with an uncanny otherness where tragedy looms close in their respective finales. Tarkovsky’s powerfully surrealistic vision and lack of good humour succeeds where the later TV version of Martian Chronicles ultimately failed. Sentimentalism was arguably its downfall, while the Tarkovsky and Lem combination proves to be just as magnificently imaginative as it is quietly brooding. In part, this is what ensures Solaris is greatly rewarding cinema that haunts viewers forever. Steven Soderbergh’s 2003 remake abandons the emotional poignancy and intellectual satire of Tarkovsky’s classic and settles for a romantic fantasy in a stylish milieu, with some cutting-edge visual effects.
Made in 1979, just seven years after Solaris, Tarkovsky’s STALKER (DVD/Blu-ray, 22 August) is an equally enigmatic and quite bizarre nightmare movie based on Roadside Picnic (first English edition, 1977) by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. I read this book when it was first published by Gollancz, and I have just read a newer translation (SF Masterworks edition, 2012). It’s a superbly concise novel of actionable ideas and it continues to impress half a lifetime later. As Le Guin’s foreword states, “it is a first contact story with a difference”. The aliens’ brief presence on Earth results in environmental damage, psychological contagion, and genetic mutation so the mystery is closer to the loony aesthetics of Quatermass than standard UFOlogy like CE3K. It’s the visitors’ apparent indifference to humankind that breaks away from traditional SF – as there’s no communication, no meeting of the minds whether hive, hyper- or over-mind. These aliens are unknowable and, perhaps, even less comprehensible to a lowly man than the purpose or meaning of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
In the zone of the aliens’ landing site, thunder causes blindness, ‘happy ghosts’ flitter about, prospecting ‘stalkers’ find perpetual batteries are valuable swag, ‘rattling napkins’ are simply inexplicable, and “virtue is no good”. I must admit, ‘the Zone’ left such an impression on me that I named a genre magazine and its subsequent website after it. The grim determination of Picnic’s roughneck antihero, Red Schuhart, recalls the survival traits of vengeful Gully Foyle in Bester’s The Stars My Destination.
With such a compelling story, it’s baffling that so little of the Picnic’s main plot survives in Tarkovsky’s version, although the Strugatskys wrote a screenplay draft. Of course, Stalker emerges from filmmaking traditions of a picture that is inspired by its source material rather than being a faithful adaptation. Here, the protagonist is not a smuggler but more like a guide, and Stalker makes telling references to the Stalker as a Chingachgook figure – from James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-stocking series (that includes The Last of the Mohicans). Leading a scientist and a writer from drab sepia normality into the full colour of Zone wastelands (like Dorothy’s trip into Oz world!), the pathfinder is often philosophical and yet a pitiable saint, just as prone to sensitive monologue and soul-wracked soliloquy as his secretive clients. The writer bemoans a constant torment from his “painful, shameful occupation”, while the professor s
eems more concerned with destruction. Unlike the novel, there are no ‘empties’, no Golden Sphere, and the supposed prevalence of lethal traps in the Zone lack any gravitational effects. At the end, there’s a mythical room that grants wishes but obvious sci-fi demo remains strictly limited to an epilogue with telekinetic acts by the Stalker’s daughter.
There are sinister noises and creepy silences in this morbid atmosphere, while Tarkovsky ensures that scattered junk and haunted ruins are mesmerising even when confined to background scenery. Exquisite images of decay – whether natural or post-industrial – are similar to the uncanny beauty as presented in Lynch’s more profoundly surreal Eraserhead. So it’s quite tempting to wonder if, somewhere in the realms of the Zone’s weird possibilities, Henry and Mary and their mutant baby live nearby. A ‘trilogy’ of first-person shooter and survival horror videogames (2007–10) appears to have more to do with post-Chernobyl mutant hunts than the content or themes of the novel or the film, but Stalker games exploit an artisticult reputation. The Finnish micro-budget movie remake Zone (2012) has yet to get a UK release on DVD.
A year before Oliver Stone’s “through the looking-glass” swot job JFK (1991), there was a season of cult films on TV in retro showcase Moviedrome. Alex Cox’s intro to The Parallax View (1974) noted that, although US cinema was making “a plethora” of pictures that dealt with the issues of the Vietnam War, there were very few efforts to address unsolved mysteries/unanswered questions about political assassination. Cox mentions agitprop docudrama Executive Action (1973) and superb conspiracy satire Winter Kills (1979), and drops hints at the curious fact that such rare movies are also rarely seen. It is tempting to read a tinfoil-hat plan into that alone as, unlike the extensive (to the saturation point of media overdose!) list of speculative and very successful pictures about UFOs, there are apparently some dark secrets that America prefers to keep, even from itself.
Shouldering aside Moviedrome, TV movie Running Against Time (1990) sees Robert Hays playing a time-travelling schoolteacher inadvertently blamed for killing Kennedy, while John Mackenzie’s crime thriller Ruby (1992) digs into JFK plots from Dallas club-owner Jack Ruby’s perspective as “the man who killed the man who killed the President”. Since then of course, POTUS assassination references have become so commonplace and increasingly throwaway that, in superhero movies, the Comedian (of Watchmen) is shown shooting from the grassy knoll while Magneto (from X-Men: Days of Future Past) claims he tried to save JFK, hence the apparently ‘magic’ bullet.
Tales about preventing JFK’s assassination are hardly new to SF. The Twilight Zone’s time-travel episode Profile in Silver (1986) has a 22nd century professor sent to 1963 to observe historical detail, but he intervenes and saves his famous ancestor – with unforeseeable consequences. Jumping to this century, Robert Dyke’s TimeQuest (2002) has an inventor create a divergent history. Here, JFK is not assassinated and ‘Camelot’ prospers in the 1960s, avoiding the Vietnam War and promoting peace with the USSR for joint American-Soviet missions to the Moon, establishing a lunar colony before the millennium, so that when Kennedy eventually dies in his eighties he can be buried off-world. Bruce Campbell appears in a satirical role as a renowned filmmaker (like the investigative Oliver Stone) who plans a documentary called ‘November 22nd 1963’.
Stephen King arrives very late to this cross-genre party of time-travel and JFK death-plots. His book 11/22/63 is adapted for TV as 11.22.63 (DVD, 15 August), and unfortunately overburdened with too many small-town, typical redneck, clichés from King’s oeuvre, comprising often-grossly sentimental baggage, and guff about all-too-familiar supernatural destiny. As we might expect, the primary focus, at first, is upon meticulously recreating details of the period setting, while exploring the 21st century everyman’s unease while adjusting to sociopolitical differences. James Franco is great value as lone hero Jake, confronting bizarre accidents that suggest a darkling force of time itself is working against his seemingly laudable aims. Long-winded as a mystery, lacking much atmosphere, and generally too slow in its development, the tired rehash of conspiracy plots we have already seen before means this short TV series offers very little interest as drama, genre or otherwise. A numbingly inevitable romance does not even bother with any Time Traveller’s Wife style disruption to a routinely soapy affair between Sadie (um, ‘say die’, eh?) and Jake.
In the grey areas between homage and rip-off there is a lot of clearly derivative stuff. Jake is an English teacher while David (in Running Against Time) was a history professor. Jake’s new 1963 love Sadie is endangered, just like David’s 1990s girlfriend Laura (Catherine Hicks, who was previously in two ‘time-travel’ movies in 1986!). But what else is news? “Everything you say is a lie!” Changing what has already happened becomes especially problematic when a time-traveller’s growing emotionally attached to what he knows is true about the past that he’s living through for the first time. Can Jake save JFK without having to kill Lee Harvey Oswald? Well, suffering a beating, a coma, and then waking up with amnesia about his mission does not help, for starters.
“There’s no stopping it!” After recent subgenre movies like the stylised Looper and the nightmarishly convoluted Predestination this wholesome tele-drama simply has nothing fresh to add to the existing catalogue of time-paradox tropes. Despite its few sympathetic characters, the flimsy romantic subplots (including one for Oswald!) just drag things out for eight episodes. With its rather pointless historical distortions and easily foreseeable twists – all for the sake of ‘creative licence’ – this version of JFK: RIP changes, but never quite confronts, the modern mythic motorcade of unreality in Dealey Plaza, and the damned evidence of Zapruder’s infamous amateur snuff movie. As always in such comfort-zone tales whatever happens “the country needs a hero” but will settle for “a good man”, while shovelling on the patented King schmaltz for a dreary (although supposedly feminist!) epilogue.
Nadia is kidnapped from the house she shares with boyfriend Slater, who finds one of the left-for-dead masked baddies is Nadia’s twin. IDENTICALS (DVD, 22 August) is a low-budget British effort about look-alike finders Brand New U, a lifestyle company that claims to be a socially focused co-op venture, though it quite reeks of exploitative corporate start-up. What begins as a variation of Seconds (Interzone #261) becomes a replay of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, before its one-sided storyline of personal uncertainty is further devalued into Rear Window voyeurism with a tiredly predictable love triangle.
Thugs all dressed up as Santas attempts to add a surreal twist, but it fails to be chilling and it seems pointless as a rent-a-mob disguise. Gimmicky computer-graphic overlays look outdated and are overused. Plotting just trundles along from revelations to crisis management, and from slap-happy solution back into grey self-doubt. With a fussy approach to editing that undermines too many potentially interesting sequences this movie is guilty of style over content. Derivative writing and blundering direction by feature debutant Simon Pummell results in zero intrigue that’s most noticeable in a couple of scenes where long takes and a static camera produce inert drama, perhaps meant to suggest emotional turmoil. Are we supposed to think “oh, what a clever boy the filmmaker is?” Yawn… Obsession in the movies has rarely felt so dull, as Identicals showcases a spartan futurism that succeeds only in convincing us its designer vacuity is all this largely unoriginal production could afford.
Gerry Anderson’s TERRAHAWKS (Volume 1, Blu-ray, 25 July) was a very belated return to puppetry (but with muppets!) and marked the lowest point of his TV career. With no imaginative ambition beyond its Thunderbirds makeover, and zero creativity for the zeroid drones, this proved to be a dreadful disappointment to all except four-year-olds. Can we have a UK Blu-ray box-set of the complete Space Precinct instead?
MUTANT POPCORN
NICK LOWE
THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS
CELL
THE LEGEND OF TARZAN
STAR TREK BEYOND
ICE AGE: COLLISION COURSE
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br /> SUICIDE SQUAD
GHOSTBUSTERS
PETE’S DRAGON
THE BFG
NINE LIVES
An adaptation only in the Charlie Kaufman sense, THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS is a symbiotic version of Mike Carey’s novel – which, though closely parallel, isn’t in fact credited – written in parallel with the book version out of the original short ‘Iphigenia in Aulis’ (covering what is now the film’s first act), following subsequent pitch meetings with director Colm McCarthy and his producers. Child prodigy Melanie is part of a class of Midwich ten-year-olds raised in a closed military facility where they are abused, feared, and from time to time disappeared, for reasons that emerge by degrees ahead of a shocking encounter with the world outside, and the start of an apocalyptic roadtrip in the uneasy company of Gemma Arterton as her adored teacher, Paddy Considine as the pragmatic base commander, and serial vivisectionist Glenn Close, who can’t wait to dissect Melanie’s brain in search of an antigen to the species-jumping Cordyceps symbiote that only children infected in the womb can control, and which is in the process of doing something scary and irreversible to what’s left of the human race. With the help of a precious volume of Roger Lancelyn Green, Arterton has primed her charges with the tales of the creation and transgression of Pandora, and Melanie’s journey brings her to the realisation that her own Epimethean heritage has put her in charge of the box with a bomb in which humanity’s future is both alive and dead. But is the thing that knows itself as Melanie even human at all as Arterton persists in believing, or (as Close suspects) merely mimicking what it’s learned of humanity for alien and sinister reasons of its own?
Interzone #266 - September-October 2016 Page 17