by Andy Cox
A Kill in the Morning opens with the unnamed narrator – though presented like Harry Palmer, he is very much modelled on James Bond – assisting with the destruction of a death camp, and the rescue of some of its inmates. But not all of them. In fact, there’s a curious lack of affect, a blithe callousness to the lives of people, throughout this book. So far, so humdrum.
And then a Fairey Rotodyne flies out of the night sky to pick up the protagonist and the released prisoners.
However, rather than signal an interesting use of Cold War technology, the Rotodyne is merely evidence of Shimmin’s haphazard approach to world-building, which features several jets that could not possibly have been flying in 1955 (and are even less likely to have existed if World War II ended in 1941). Even more bizarrely, the Rotodyne is operated by the Royal Israeli Air Force. Because Israel is a British overseas possession.
If Shimmin’s alternate twentieth century is somewhat peculiar, his story is built from all too familiar patterns. The Nazis are evil, the Israelis are good, the Arabs are bad, the British upper classes are perfidious, the women are beautiful… It’s not so much that Shimmin writes in broad brush-strokes, but that he draws everything in cartoon colours. Take those women: every time a woman appears in the narrative, we’re treated to a description of her appearance and clothing. Not so for the men. The women are also referred to in the prose by their first names, the men by their surnames. It’s the twenty-first century – we should be doing better than this everyday sexism in our fictions.
The plot somewhat redeems these flaws. When the Old Man of the British secret service is assassinated, the unnamed protagonist is prompted to seek revenge on SS Reichsführer Heydrich, and so he inadvertently learns of the existence of a secret cabal of British aristocrats who have reached an accommodation with the Nazis, along with Heydrich’s own completely out-of-left-field plan to use the Bell to travel back in time to ensure global Nazi domination. This latter leads to the climax of the novel, and it’s pure hokum, on a par with the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark; a finale better suited to Cubby Broccoli’s James Bond than it is Ian Fleming’s.
Shimmin’s decision to write his novel in first-person present tense, and to keep his protagonist anonymous throughout, can’t disguise the fact that A Kill in the Morning is pure commercial fiction. It’s a fast read and, despite a number of interesting pieces of alternate history furniture, it manages to make use of every cliché associated both with the National Socialists and alternate history. Read as adventure fiction, it’s an enjoyable enough romp, albeit about thirty years out of date in its sensibilities.
LASER FODDER
TONY LEE
AFTER THE DARK
THE ZERO THEOREM
THE DOUBLE
DIVERGENT
LAST DAYS ON MARS
THE CHANGES
THE BOY FROM SPACE
MINDSCAPE
TRANSCENDENCE
ASHENS AND THE QUEST FOR THE GAMECHILD
RPG – REAL PLAYING GAME
HK: FORBIDDEN SUPERHERO
I’m A Published Poet…Get Me Out Of Here! AFTER THE DARK (DVD, 21 July) by John Huddles is a philosophy class struggle about who deserves a place in the bunker to survive a nuclear apocalypse. It’s a thought-experiment series presented as drama-doc. Set in a Jakarta school for international students, where instructor Zimit (British export James D’Arcy, Cloud Atlas, Anthony Perkins in Hitchcock) challenges his new graduates to confront gene-pool variables and cultural/societal prejudices in divisive scenarios that pit logic against emotion.
Never mind the thorny ethical concerns of testing kids on life-and-death issues before their brains have fully matured, this is a somewhat lackadaisical sci-fi fantasy that starts promisingly enough, but then it loses any focus on intellectual discussions and dissolves into what amounts to a string of theoretical teeny-romantic episodes. It demos the genre reach of a scissor-lift or a cherry-picker but not a rocket launch. ATD explores sundry moral dilemmas, and questions the survivalist mindset, but elements like the recurring black-comedy skit about the uselessness of poetry in post-holocaust worlds, and the pressures of existing relationships between students, undermine any potential suspense and the group tensions of each supposedly enlightening situation.
Huddles’ movie is rarely less than watchable, but too often it feels like a game scenario and an SF stageplay have been roughly shoehorned into a screenplay format; one that works on-screen, crudely, only because of the visual impact of its CGI work.
What is the meaning of life? Monty Python’s already-familiar pursuit of the ultimate knowledge receives a fresh perspective in Terry Gilliam’s THE ZERO THEOREM (DVD/Blu-ray, 21 July), a sublime tragedy of disillusionment while staying at home.
Qohen (Christoph Waltz, Richelieu in Anderson’s Three Musketeers remake) is a hacker set on the trail of cyber entities, while striving to solve equations in virtuality that should provide Management (Matt Damon, in some amusingly weird camouflage suits) with illuminating answers to definitive questions about humanity’s place in the universe. However, our bald, reclusive hero lives in a disused church, and is troubled by nagging beliefs as he waits for an important and long overdue call. What a fool he is…expecting enlightenment via his telephone, while employed to work on high-level number-crunching.
Gilliam finds exactly the right balance of uneasy comedy (David Thewlis makes a terrific job supervisor) and heartbreak in this future of corporate brainwashing and philosophical ennui, where colourful street furniture masks cod-Orwellian commerce. The fearlessly optimistic Qohen meets his match in a femme fatale, Bainsley (Mélanie Thierry, Babylon A.D.), who is not simply the distracting sexpot that she first appears in frolics on a VR beach where the Sun never sets. She might offer salvation for finally despondent Q, if he chooses to emerge from a denial-of-hiding in his secret head-trip. Tilda Swinton is good fun as Q’s unhelpful interactive Dr Shrink program: “I couldn’t help but notice this young lady’s pathological attempt to project upon you her daddy issues of abandonment.”
In the end, TZT winds down into a morbid whimsy, typical of Gilliam’s artistic leanings, but at least it steers away from a poetic descent into the galactic-doomsday black hole. Despite everything, the grace note is one of renewed hope, not oblivion.
“Put him down as a ‘maybe’.” Richard Ayoade conjures up some fabulous imagery for THE DOUBLE (DVD/Blu-ray, 4 August), a black-comedy updating of Dostoevsky’s 150-year-old novella. In a dingy, spooky otherworld, office worker Simon (rising star Jesse Eisenberg, Zombieland, Social Network, Now You See Me, and soon-to-be Lex Luthor in Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice) acquires a doppelganger – James – after witnessing a suicidal jumper. Although introverted Simon can only spy on and clumsily approach neighbour Hannah (Mia Wasikowska, Alice in Wonderland, Only Lovers Left Alive), manipulative extrovert James finds usurping poor Simon’s entire life an easy game of charismatic one-upmanship and mischievous karma.
With a photocopying leitmotif in this clerical/business universe of disposable non-people, the identity crisis prompted by nice simple Simon’s alter-ego-plus plays like an inspired Kafkaesque version of Shatterday, while the shifting mood and time-warped identikit-period trappings are a designer tribute to Gilliam’s evocative Brazil.
Eisenberg does well in his dual role, while duelling verbally with his escalating fetch (“I’d like to think I’m pretty unique.” We all would!), and the varied supporting cast – including veteran Wallace Shawn – bring plenty of balancing joviality to what might have been a suffocatingly bleak outlook. In the end, as its genre themes solidify from the nightmarish despair of quantum paradox into homicidal reality, and the amusing oddities evaporate into strong-measurement finality, this is a psychological thriller of a captivating style over familiar rom-com content. Thankfully it’s not too predictable, but The Double’s drama of oppositional personality and body-snatcher takeover has a lurking sense that Ayoade is a haunted director who is still struggling to fully outgrow his cr
eative influences.
With its fenced-in and stratified post-WW3 society in Chicago, DIVERGENT (DVD/Blu-ray, 11 August) presents a teen fantasy of quasi-dystopia; a retroactive brave new world where citizen graduate Beatrice chooses to join the faction of action instead of her parents’ caregiver bloc. The first rule of fight club is: rules change. Poor re-named Tris finds that being Dauntless is thankless, and not a glamour profession. Like some kind of social polymath, our heroine has no trouble adapting to psych-out 101 testing, but her boyfriend/trainer and her classmates begin to suspect Tris of being different, and that’s not allowed.
As if re-combining DNA themes sampled from his previous genre movies – The Illusionist and Limitless – director Neil Burger tackles plot elements of romantic social climbing and eclectic individuality versus artificially-maintained conformity, for sci-fi drama about diversity that demonstrates the usefulness of anarchic thinking, without too-eagerly suggesting that outlaw behaviour is necessary. Divergent clearly attempts to bridge the demographic gap between Harry Potter and Hunger Games. But, as it’s a formulaic thriller where arguments are settled with guns, and the production meets the requirements as a typical franchise starter (casting Kate Winslet fulfils the criteria for a British villain), there’s much bitter irony in the movie’s lack of any high ground – as political commentary or genre satire. Divergent is no more or less torturously silly, as SF, than that Hunger Games malarkey, but it remains horribly sad that the best, if perhaps not the only, way to ensure a modicum of success for an origin story of young and restless rebels against the new orthodoxy has an utterly conventional approach to storytelling and morality that amounts to following a tired, trite Hollywood template.
A sequel, Insurgent, directed by Robert Schwentke, is due out in March 2015.
The feature-debut of filmmaker Ruairi Robinson, LAST DAYS ON MARS (Blu-ray/DVD, 18 August) suggests that finding fossilised bacteria on the red planet could not/would not provide sufficient entertainment value for any sci-fi drama. This is a movie that respects only a hyperbolic degree of conflict. It is a basic hack of Alien DNA with John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars spliced into its helix for a Martian zombies horror.
Captain Brunel (Elias Koteas) leads the Aurora mission – an international crew of explorers/sample-gatherers ranging from Tantalus base, to discover what is under the ground on Mars. When a microbial life-form infects the least cautious astronauts, Canadian Brunel’s command dissolves with his rapid mutation in the labs, and a loss of humanity becomes the principal focus of this too-earnest drama’s version of cross-genre clichés (such as The Incredible Melting Man, 1977).
Despite the astute casting of Briton Olivia Williams as nominal heroine Kim, in a Ripleyesque role, it’s Liev Schreiber’s American hero Campbell who’s destined to be the last man standing for a desperate escape from the surface. Oddly, this movie (co-produced by the BFI with some Irish funding) of undead violence on a world of blood and dust is based on a rather obscure short story, ‘The Animators’ (1975) by Sydney J. Bounds. Although nightfall on Mars helps to generate a palpable atmosphere of dread in the hellish darkness of dust-storms and habitat power-failures, this UK production rejects the hard-SF affect of Gravity, opting for overly-emotional scenes that damage the potential for character-based intrigues of what might have been another neat little genre mystery to rival Duncan Jones’ cult favourite Moon.
Still, I should not quibble. It’s great to see a homegrown science fiction/horror that is based on an existing (albeit old and forgotten) story instead of just another (Star Wars/Trek) remake or sequel, wasting enormous budgetary resources on trite action sequences and uselessly revamped 1960s–1970s genre icons. Many more adaptations of SF literature – such as Banks’ Culture and Asher’s Polity – are required urgently for a new space-opera boom, so it’s well worth supporting such efforts as LDOM (despite its flaws and overbearingly hysterical tone) to show Hollywood’s bigwigs what’s really welcome. There are thousands of short stories and hundreds of novels to choose from so a radical change of source material for new SF cinema is long overdue. Why are we still waiting?
Made in 1975, TV series THE CHANGES (DVD, 25 August) posits a crackle ‘n’ buzz apocalypse that prompts mass-hysterical vandalism (of a Luddite variety) in episodic revolt against machines. In the social collapse that follows, schoolgirl heroine Nicky is home alone, but she decides not to stay and wait for her missing parents. After all the domestic gadgets and public utilities are scrapped, nothing works, and the doomsday clock sub reads 12:15 to mark the fragility of civilisation dependent upon technology. This very British drama wears its Wyndhamesque fashions well, with cider instead of tea as the cosy catastrophe’s beverage of choice. Curious oddities in the urban crash: why smash bicycles, but not prams and carts?
Predating Terry Nation’s Survivors by a few months, this BBC kids’ show turns a refugee caravan into a jolly adventure trek. Typical of its TV era, middle-class values abound, but many villagers’ attitudes harden against outsiders. Indian stereotypes do present a sympathetic face/force for good, with their simpler ways and national dress traditions. Although well-intentioned, they are suspiciously unaffected by the strange, brain-scrambling noises that come from an ancient magical source.
One of the worst despotic villains that Nicky confronts is a robber/kidnapper (“Do you think they will actually burn the children?” Gosh!), involuntarily supported by traders emerging from the rural shambles of broken communities where she finds refuge. Bad guys are tackled by sword-fighting Sikhs; faithful heroes not alienated by racism. Those hostage boys and girls are rescued unharmed, of course. On her way to the Cotswolds, Nicky meets sheepish farmer Peter (Jack Watson – most recognisable face in this cast), a reluctant helper of witch-hunters happily adopting superstitious nonsense, and this segues into a bucolic soap opera interlude before the story shifts back towards proper genre concerns for climactic discoveries (cue scrambling about in a quarry) related to the mythic sorcery of Merlin. A cheerful ending ensues. This two-disc set of ten 25-minute episodes has been re-mastered from its original source to produce a respectable if not quite stunning release from the film archive materials.
Another BFI release is THE BOY FROM SPACE (DVD, 25 August), made in 1971. This TV series is a kind of junior UFO, with adventurers Dan and Helen meeting young alien Peep-peep (who struggles to communicate in his ‘radiophonic’ language), and various encounters with a menacing ‘Thin Man’ who’s obviously not from around here. There’s a feature-length (70 minutes) edit on disc two of this restoration release and that’s worth seeing. Much less interesting, the main presentation – a 1980 version with wraparound commentary of the ‘Look and Read’ educational type – can be viewed as campily amusing despite the best efforts of pedantic reader Wordy and Blue Peter-ish astronaut Cosmo to provide spelling checklists and explain grammar via cartoons. Annoying interruptions spoil the fun as, buried in their genre-stifling antics, Richard Carpenter’s original drama struggles to exist as a half-decent kids’ sci-fi that it clearly is – but only if you see the movie cut.
Cinematographer on the Dark Knight trilogy, Wally Pfister earns his directorial debut with TRANSCENDENCE (Blu-ray/DVD, 25 August), a fascinating mystery starring Johnny Depp as Will Caster, the first man in cyberspace. If the main character’s name is a blatant pun on the movie’s uploaded-consciousness plot, then the drama ought to be a work of higher grade SF to make up for such a jokey conceit.
From white-board scrawls to over-mind menace and beyond, this is a techno-thriller and epic tragedy centred on fairly typical singularity themes. While our fatally poisoned hero’s copied mentality stumbles towards godhood opposed by neo-Luddite terrorism, there seems no doubt about whose side SF fans should be on. At first, even the genius’ wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall, The Awakening, Iron Man 3) is not persuaded by any impassioned arguments for slower development, and the opposition’s violence only strengthens her resolve to engineer a proverbial ghost in the big online machine.
The
baddies, led by Bree (Kate Mara), stir the doomsayer’s pot of hot paranoia without realising there is no logic spoon. Two years later, but before you can even say “open the pod bay doors”, a virtual son-of-Will is advancing rapidly through his post-humanity phases. Forbin’s mighty Colossus of dictatorship and the rogue shadows of Demon Seed’s pragmatically-evil Proteus lurk as genre spectres while the iWill prog’s building a cyborg army (cue bionic stunts!), primed for networking by their nanotech implants.
Skynet angst sways the judgements, almost invalidating conventional scientific wisdom. Do people fear what they don’t understand, or are they simply rejecting what cannot be controlled? Is the question here about avoiding involuntary but practically benevolent ‘uplift’ and/or potential-immortality scenarios at any cost? Can the plans of an autonomous messiah be trusted? Why does social regression to steam-funk-city seem preferable to living with the challenges of an omniscient clone? These and other puzzlers are considered by Transcendence, without actually providing any answers or reaching persuasively ethical conclusions.