Interzone #266 - September-October 2016

by Andy Cox [Ed. ]

  To see the BFI throwing lottery money into a film about a zombie brain fungus is satisfying enough in itself, though the film uses its genre tropes – specifically, the twin icons of modern English apocalypse in 28 Days Later and Children of Men – primarily as the tap for a well of home-counties horror that reaches back through Wyndham to the Blitz and the preceding half-century of invasion literature, with a modernist twist of PKD identity paranoia for added flavour and mouth feel. Child leads have become so identified with YA and family film that it’s refreshing to see a properly adult, violent genre film reappropriating what have become familiar as YA tropes and arcs – the movement outwards from an enclosed, controlled, adult-managed and classroom-like world into a much bigger secret, and the kids reclaiming the world from the manipulative and morally compromised adults – as a launchpad into something very unPG-13 indeed. Melanie is a compelling creation not easy to bring to life, but very beautifully played by newcomer Sennia Nanua – one of a rather effective set of group transformations of the original characters’ ethnicities, at times at odds with their unchanged names – while the score, by Humans composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer, is one of the year’s boldest and best.

  If you haven’t read the novel I’d suggest starting with the film, which is more gradual with the initial reveals and more ambivalent about the characters’ inner lives, maintaining a tighter focus on Melanie’s view of the action despite never going novelistically inside her head (as the book does in turn with all five of the uneasy allies, to the comparative dilution of Melanie’s own unsettling power and presence as the centre of the story). The film has also tidied up its storylines by sensibly ditching the human survivalist third force from the other versions, and though some of the plot points in the streamlined final act (where book and film temporarily diverge) are left a little wobbly in motivation, the ending comes through with the best-ever use of the BT tower on film and a closing scene that, even more than in the novel, ties a perfect bow around the survivors’ story and its twists. I’m sorry to lose the scene from the book where my daughter’s school for her A level Chemistry gets trashed; but the lesson of adulthood is that you can’t have all your gifts in one box.

  Some of the same tropology has travelled a more conventional authorial path from page to screen in CELL, the troubled and long-delayed film of Stephen King’s minor 2006 novel about a mass zombification by mobile phone signal. King himself still has a screenplay credit, and the new ending sting is clearly his, but it’s otherwise unclear how much the film resembles the one he wrote in 2009 when Eli Roth was still attached to direct. The book’s twentysomething leads have turned into John Cusack and Sam Jackson, which isn’t a great fit for the audience, particularly as the whole concept of cellphones as instruments of doom feels already a bit too much like an old people’s idea. In the film version Cusack gets a pass on the apocalypse because he’s careless enough to let his phone run out of charge, just as the flag goes up and half the budget with it as the mother of all cross-platform zero-day exploits turns an airport full of everyday zombies into the throatchewing real thing, before he escapes with Jackson and Isabella Fuhrmann for the obligatory road trip through zombieland in search of his family. This being a horror rather than (as with Girl) an sf take on the theme, the presumably alien force behind the signal isn’t itself an object of plot attention or interest, which is more concerned with the delivery of gruesome shocks and set pieces out of the zombocalypse playbook; King’s novel was dedicated to Richard Matheson and George Romero, which gives a fair sense of where it’s coming from. But in an already saturated genre, it’s risky to go old school without something more for the kids.

  Jackson is miscast again in David Yates’ THE LEGEND OF TARZAN, which makes a bit of a hyena’s breakfast of what is easily the best idea for a Tarzan film in the history of the property: pushing Tarzan’s career back thirty years from its canonical ERB epoch, and setting its story in an alternate 1889 whose divergence from our own is that the legend of Tarzan is historical, with world-changing consequences for the colonial history of central Africa. The film’s uncredited (and unremunerated) source is Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, the veteran historian’s classic pageturner about the exposure of the Belgian ruler’s secret slave-state in the Congo by the political and humanitarian sherlockry of the British shipping agent Edmund Morel. Hochschild has written amusingly of his surprise at discovering from the cheap seats that his book is now someone else’s film, though surprisingly missing from the film is the young Polish riverboatman who crossed paths with the film’s real-life characters in Leopoldville and Boma at precisely this date and ten years later would turn his experiences into Heart of Darkness – whose Kurtz was rather unconvincingly argued by Hochschild to have been partly based on the king’s thuggish agent Léon Rom, reimagined here as a Blofeldish figure of suave supervillainy who could be only played by Christoph Waltz. (Hochschild was keen to imagine a meeting between Rom and Conrad in Leopoldville in August 1890, but if it happened it never left traces.) In the film, Morel’s role and Conrad’s narrative are both folded into the activities ten years earlier of the remarkable if problematic African-American cavalry veteran turned activist George Washington Williams and his famous Open Letter to His Serene Majesty Leopold II of 1890, who in this timeline enlists the Greystokes in his humanitarian crusade to expose the secret horrors of Leopold’s monstrous private dystopia. But Rom has his own nefarious plans for the Claytons, and soon enough Jane is in feisty jeopardy and in need of IMAX-scale 3D vinework and a Tarzan-led last alliance of apes, lions, and wildebeest for her own and Africa’s liberation.

  All this should be a stunning update of the Tarzan legend, neutralising the colonial and racial toxins of earlier versions by bringing Burroughs’ pulp fantasy for the first time into the historical reality it sanitised and overwrote, casting Tarzan as a figure not of romantic appropriation but of liberation from the darkest heart of African colonial history, and making him part of America’s own attempt to make amends for its own history of slavery and genocide. (“The Civil War was dark fighting. I was proud to be part of it, though,” says Jackson’s version of Williams. “Mexico was bad, but what we did to the Indians… I’m no better than those Belgians. I was young, but there’s no excuse.”) But the late Jerry Weintraub’s final passion project has been nibbled away at during its decade of immersion in the development tanks by schools of executives who couldn’t give a flying monkey’s about the Congo Free State but know that their jobs will be safe if they can just get Margot Robbie into a loincloth. To Yates’ credit, that isn’t happening, and the film sticks firmly to its weapon of choice in bypassing the origin story to pick up the Claytons in Mummy Returns mode at Greystoke Manor and catch us up on the backstory in intrusive sepia reshoots, though these eventually have become so extensive that it would have been easier just to fold the historical narrative around the initial courtship instead. Alexander Skarsgård is a fit, gangly Tarzan whose knuckle-acting is going for gold while the rest of his body settles for bronze, while Jackson battles some of the worst dialogue of his life, as well as being thirty years too old for his historical character. In our timeline, Williams contracted tuberculosis in Africa and died in Blackpool soon after the publication of his Letter, while Rom lived on to die of natural causes a few months before Conrad in 1924, with ample leisure to enjoy the French translations of the Tarzan novels from the desk job he retired to in Belgium. Thank goodness Tarzan is real and none of that ever happened.

  Elsewhere beyond the final frontier of canonical time, intrepid pioneers push back the darkness in STAR TREK BEYOND, which boldly goes with mild violence and threat into the third year of the alternate version of the five-year mission and offers, among less interesting things, some of the most ravishing images of interstellar travel and cities in space ever committed to film. Justin Lin, easily the most gifted director of spectacle to tackle the property since Robert Wise worked with Douglas Trumbull on the original Motion Picture, not only delive
rs as expected on the action sequences but proves surprisingly sensitive to the brand’s flagship status among space franchises for old-school widescreen wonders. After a slightly uncomfortable defenestration of J.J. Abrams’ designated successor Roberto Orci from the command deck, a modest but effective new script by Simon Pegg and Doug Jung scales down the thematic ambition of Abrams’ episodes to a long and largely planetbound middle act involving a rather baffling villain with Idris Elba somewhere inside, and a final Kirkian punchout in space Dubai over a genocidal McGuffin that feels a little too much like the previous film’s climactic Cumberbatchfight. Fifty years on, it’s been a struggle to find new stories to tell about these shopworn characters, new life-problems that they haven’t already faced, and the solution here has had to ransack the canon Trekverse to go with Kirk’s misgivings about promotion and Spock’s conflicted long-term Vulcan loyalties, though with an extra and somewhat underspun twist built around the loss of Leonard Nimoy. But the interstellar acts that bookend the TV-episode midsection are thrillingly beautiful, and Sofia Boutella gives one of the finest unrecognisable performances in the history of ice cream-themed special makeup. Audiences seem to have remained earthbound for this one, and it’s a shame that Anton Yelchin wasn’t given more to do for this sad swansong, but there’s plenty of life in this iteration of the franchise and it would be a shame if Paramount were to put it back in space dock. Even the end-credit starfields are worth watching all the way through.

  Pegg’s other underperforming space movie is, rather unexpectedly, ICE AGE: COLLISION COURSE, fifth in Fox’s seemingly extinction-proof catastrophist toon series that peaked in episode three (Dawn of the Dinosaurs) and nadired in the Mammoth Christmas TV special. The Ice Age films are an odd collision of cartoon genres, the golden-age Looney Tunes madness of the Scrat sequences feeding intermittent consequences into the fairly boilerplate family-feature main plots, built from standard character-driven situation and relationship arcs and thematised around family and coming-of-age life lessons. But Collision Course at least ramps up the crazy, with a plot that now exports the laws of cartoon physics to planetary bodies, as Scrat pilots a buried alien ship into a chain of Velikovskian cosmic mishaps that threaten the planet with bolidic doom, which must be averted through the leadership of Pegg’s mad weasel character from two films back – while new mammoth in-laws Manny and Ellie have to learn to let go of their little girl, and hopeless sloth Sid finally finds a mate in a bonkers pastel Seusstopian lost realm ruled over by a llama lama known, inevitably, as the Shangri-Llama. (I heard that.) It’s actually the most amusing and certainly the loopiest instalment since the third, its two clades of cartoon action as proudly incompatible as the wildly different strata of prehistory it collapses together, which have gradually dug down from the Pleistocene through the Cretaceous to the formation of the solar system and forgotten alien civilisations before it. It’s a little hard to see where, if anywhere, the franchise goes from here, though it does rather look as if the only way is down.

  SUICIDE SQUAD has become the late-summer poster pic for the things that have defined blockbuster cinema in 2016: the widening gulf between critical and audience taste; the birth struggles of universe-based cinema franchises, and particularly of Warners’ attempt to grow their DC cinematic universe aggressively; jittery studio control-panic, chaotically compressed writing and production schedules, and unwarranted sighs of relief and told-you-sos when things go right for reasons nobody intended. In this case, the surprise result is a film that captures better than anything yet seen the texture and feel of a comics universe in all its teeming, thrilling incoherence and stupidity. A vastly overpopulated cast of D-list characters, each with their own ridiculous origin story and utterly rubbish powers, are overplayed to the hilt by a deliciously mixed-ability cast, in a plot that barely exists, and in which only two of the team (plus the sword of a third) are even slightly metahuman or, as silver-age DC more charmingly preferred it, super. So Will Smith as Deadshot is so charming, quippy, soft-hearted, and redemptible that you scarcely hold his execution-style serial murders against him. Jai Courtney throws boomerangs and banters in Australian, which is somehow nearly enough. Cara Delevingne, at times quite an effective presence in more naturalistic roles, is saddled with the triply impossible part of a female Indiana Jones, a 6373-year-old spirit (actually not bad), and the former possessed by the latter for one of those long third acts where you stand twirling fingers in a column of fx while people do action and occasionally remember that you’re there.

  The undoubted star is Margot Robbie’s insanely full-blooded take on Harley Quinn, a medals contender for stupidest character in the DC universe, but here played at metahuman level of intensity that turns Robbie’s gigantic Jack Nicholson grin on everything that’s traditionally awful about women and their bodies in comics, delivering a masterclass in vivifying a character whose only discernible powers are self-objectification and psychotically inflected ultraviolence. So powerful and threatening is her presence and what it embodies that her character has to be contained by a human shield of less interesting performances, including Jared Leto’s completely upstaged Joker – who also has to measure against the apogee of Mark Hamill’s animated version in the simultaneously-released Killing Joke, which screened briefly in cinemas as a promo for the home release, despite the film as a whole being a bit of a carcrash whose multiple offences include a 27-minute Batgirl prologue so horrifically ill-judged as to make what notoriously follows seem almost acceptable. In contrast, Suicide Squad may be the dregs of the universe trying to be the Guardians of the Galaxy, but it’s a teamup that if anything has benefited from an involuntary reenactment of the too-fast writing and banged-together creative anarchy that made that universe in the first place.

  Over at Sony, studio panic has delivered something unexpectedly new and interesting out of superannuated IP in Paul Feig’s GHOSTBUSTERS reboot, where the simple-sounding agenda of gender-bending the original quartet has turned into a sustained and surprisingly thoughtful exercise in creating a new kind of film that normalises middle-aged women in narratives previously occupied exclusively by men, and in Melissa McCarthy’s case with for once a salary to match. Lazy options have been staunchly refused; there are no romances, no familial baggage, just four outstandingly capable veterans offering up four different kinds of female comic performance in an ensemble that outclasses at least three-quarters of the original team, with Kristen Wiig’s character serving here as the audience’s entry point into the wilder world of McCarthy and her more out-there teammates. Elements of the brand – the logo, wheels, costumes, gear, base, catchphrases – are given their own origin stories within the new world, with dropins and shoutouts from the surviving cast, and Slimer (and Ms Slimer), Stay-Puft, and their spooky apocalypse friends digitally summoned from the other side to terrorise Times Square in Gener8 View-D Stereo. Like Jason Statham’s character in Spy, Chris Hemsworth’s dopey receptionist is a bottomless bucket of stupid jokes; but the real payload is the presentation of a professional and personal dynamic between female scientists (plus one NYC street historian, which apparently is a black lady job) who are all smart, capable, committed, resilient, and effective in a team, despite all in their different ways being victims of a professional career environment that marginalises, underfunds, and underpromotes them, and eventually forces them out on the pretext that what they’re doing isn’t proper science. (“You must have been afforded the basic respect that is the dignity of a human being?” “Not really. People pretty much dump on us all the time.”) It’s still stuck, obviously, with being a Ghostbusters film and has to go through a lot of quantum-flimflam ectoplasmatological motions that have long since become the preserve of Doctor Who; but if it’s not a film that its writer-director or anyone in it particularly needed to make, it hasn’t been quite the anticipated catastrophe for the studio and brand, though hopes for a plasma-energy creative defibrillation seem not to have achieved the requisite crossing of profit streams.

  The on
e studio that isn’t in full-on panic mode in 2016 is Disney, whose remake of PETE’S DRAGON is the kind of film you can only afford to take a punt on if you’re holding a Grosvenor-sized portfolio of intellectual property that won’t even notice when you toss an expensive seventies fixer-upper at an indie upcomer to test his fitness for the big time. David Lowery, the Ain’t Them Bodies Saints writer-director whose editing on Upstream Color saved Shane Carruth from a breakdown, has been given a startlingly free hand with Disney’s expensive but irrecuperably dated 1977 musical, of which little is left here beyond the premise of a live-action orphan with a cartoon (now cg) monster friend whose power of invisibility leads adults to think him imaginary. Lowery has transplanted the action from Florida to a 1980s Pacific Northwest lushly impersonated by New Zealand, where the plot is now My Neighbour Totoro meets King Kong as Karl Urban’s boorish logger seeks to capture and exploit the giant furry forest spirit that only the child can see, while Bryce Dallas Howard’s Fargo-lady forest ranger makes her own journey from hardnosed investigator to invested surrogate mom.

  Though every beat of the plot is machine-made, the execution is anything but cartoonish. Even the genteel opening carsmash, filtered for violence and injury detail, which takes out Pete’s parents is part of the forest’s stand against human encroachment on its American Jungle Book, enacting Bambi’s revenge on the Disney human family. In the original 1957 treatment (devised as a TV anthology-series episode, and only much later repurposed as a Poppins-style feature under Don Chaffey for the live action and Don Bluth for the animation), Elliott was more equivocally real, and some of that remains in the delicate treatment of Pete’s processing of the adults’ incredulity: “Are you my imaginary friend too?” But Lowery’s cryptozoological Elliott is massively physical – furry, doggish, mediaeval-looking, and even less aerodynamically plausible than Bluth’s version – and even Urban comes round in the end, in an American exchange of manly nods that says all that needs to be said.