Interzone 251

by edited by Andy Cox

  In Marvel’s rapidly expanding cinema franchise, the Fury gig practically saved Samuel Jackson’s fading career. As for the Hoff…well, let’s list his qualifications and professional skills, and itemise his suitability for playing the ultimate spook:

  1. He’s tall

  2. ?

  The bluffer has no screen presence. Zero gravitas. He can’t be bantered with in any mode of acting except panto farce. Hasselhoff’s take on a favourite comics hero as tough guy is so boring that even vampire-styled villainess Viper doesn’t care for a chat when Fury is easily captured by her big henchmen. There is a heli-carrier (of a sort), a stunt/gag with an exploding eyeball, and Lisa Rinna (Robot Wars) traipsing about in tight leather, although she’s not even a placeholder for Scarlett Johansson’s excellent Black Widow. Overall, then, were it not for the terrorist activities of HYDRA (this is a first live-action appearance for their organisation), this TV flick would have precious little to commend it to new Marvel fans eager to follow such canonical productions. I don’t think this offers half of the shamelessly amusing fun that Albert Pyun’s Captain America (1990) delivers.

  Cosmic fantasy of a Lovecraftian order, THOR: THE DARK WORLD (Blu-ray/DVD, 24 February) is a majestic combination of imagery from the seeming polar-opposite duo of genre giants Star Wars and Lord of the Rings that works wonders because of its appealing characters and strong, updated mythology. A splendid yarn of humans and gods versus monsters, this is a mighty effort of Marvel adaptation light years beyond that of Kenneth Branagh’s Thor. Ancient enemies from one of the ’heims threaten the many worlds beneath Asgard and above the Earth, as all trans-dimensional sky-roads converge upon Greenwich. Scientific interpretations of magic have rarely been this concisely engaging, and there is a fuzzy logic to the romance between heroic physicist Jane and the Odinson that holds an overworked imploding-universe plot in the gentle hands of destiny with an impressive visionary aspect. We are privileged to be living in the golden age of superhero movies.

  Gavin Hood’s adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s 1985 novel, ENDER’S GAME (Blu-ray/DVD, 10 March) delivers a tolerably po-faced epic of military sci-fi, which plays like a Starship Troopers sanitised for teen gamers meets Nick Castle’s The Last Starfighter (1984), by way of some Harry Potter-ish battle school mentoring for young hero (Asa Butterfield, talented star of Hugo). Before setting aside the arguments of provenance, over what nowadays seems a fairly routine space opera idea, it’s worth pausing just to consider that Castle’s early-CGI adventure movie predated the publication – although, according to wiki notes, it was previously available online – of Card’s series-launching book (a Nebula winner in 1986) by a year. Perhaps the very idea of a computer gamer interacting with the machineries of Big War was something that was just in the SF air following John Badham’s popular movie WarGames (1983)?

  Anyway, here’s a coming-of-age tale of prodigy Ender surviving all the bullying trials of spacers’ boot camp (like a Boy’s Own take on Full Metal Jacket) that prime our boy genius for exploitation by nefarious warmongers, ultimately to be an unwitting instrument of planetary xenocide. Butterfield is very good in the leading role and his often mesmerising performance eclipses those of his adult co-stars, with Harrison Ford’s gruff recruiter in particular failing to rise above the characteristics of a TV cliché. Never mind the human drama, zero-gravity tactical games should amuse, and the inevitable climactic space battle is actually quite impressive in its vast scales of hardware, despite being entirely virtual from the heroes’ POV.

  “I’m here to help you with your history report” explains Rufus (George Carlin), surely the coolest time-traveller ever seen, at the Zen starting point of comedy BILL & TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (25th anniversary Blu-ray steelbook, 17 March). Doctor Who never had phone box companions like these. This raucous joke-fest is basically Time Bandits with American teens. The clueless Californian pals’ world tour picks up Billy the Kid, Socrates, Napoleon, Freud, Beethoven, Joan of Arc, Genghis Khan and Abe Lincoln to help with homework. An inconsistently amusing story of innocents abroad – in eras beyond their understanding – this is too dependent on the knowing appeal of Bill and Ted’s ignorance. But, in a twist that might impress Back to the Future’s Doc Brown, they suss out a bootstrap timeline paradox to enable a jailbreak and climactic high school presentation, and indulge in self-congratulatory sitcom routines along the way. Yes, way. “Why would we lie to ourselves?” It’s a fun movie, right? In between all the clowning skits, sight gags and commentary on late-1980s US pop culture, there is also time for a few salient points about literacy, education and self-determination.

  Directed by Francis Lawrence (maker of the great Constantine, and weakling remake I Am Legend), THE HUNGER GAMES: CATCHING FIRE (Blu-ray/DVD, 17 March) has plenty of strong development after a disappointing launch. Although it maintains the basic silliness – necessary for cinema series continuity – of a dystopian scenario that’s long since lapsed into a ready blueprint for sci-fi parody (cf. Idiocracy), its feudalism is stocked with appallingly unsympathetic noncombatant antagonists, presented not as po-faced meritocracy satire but as futuristic drama of political hypocrisy, intended as a morality lesson for teeny viewers.

  This sequel repeats the plodding sentimentalism of the first movie, as it starts with a victory tour for coal-miner’s daughter-on-fire Katniss (a terribly over-praised Jennifer Lawrence) and baker’s boy Peeta (Josh Hutcherson, remakes of Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Red Dawn) who find themselves lauded as figureheads of impending revolt, with three-fingered salutes all round. Amidst corrupt decadence of Capitol parties celebrating the PR charm of these ‘lethal lovers’, backstage plotting exposes game-cheats as the whole of the game, before and after all the arena killings.

  President Snow (Donald Sutherland, still doing his ‘a boiled egg for breakfast’ shtick) orders Orwellian boots to descend on rebels in the districts of utmost poverty. The storyline soon contorts with themes of our heroine as either lioness underfoot or fighting lamb, but redrafted huntress Katniss finds that champion spirit is harder to channel here than it was for more radical genre-actioner competitors (Battle Royale, especially).

  The 75th games and a neo-Nazi quell under martial brutality eventually sparks warrior feats from Kat – bride of showbiz death (still very chummy with her stylist, if not her drunken mentor) – upsetting the theatricality of a conceptualised gladiatorial galumphiad. Alliances and betrayals are stage-managed hostilities in the tournament environment. The main event commences with lasers in a jungle somewhere, under a dome where toxic fog and mandrills make any rest, let alone sleep, impossible. And if knowing honest identikit enemies from untrustworthy friends becomes more difficult as the hours of play tick by, at least Amanda Plummer is on hand to do her unnerving crackpot act to good effect when she helps figure out how to predict the danger room systems of this Truman Show variant just in time for the myth-building cliff-hanger.

  Trilogy closer Mockingjay comes in a two-part adaptation (again directed by Lawrence) released this year and next.

  British robot movie THE MACHINE (Blu-ray/DVD, 31 March) is written and directed by one Caradog James, and considers the results of an arms race based upon artificial intelligence while Europe is locked a ‘cold war’ against China. Chief scientist Vincent (Toby Stephens, Severence, Dark Corners) runs a technology bunker and works on a quantum computer, while providing cyber-implants and bionic limbs for injured military veterans. American specialist Ava (Caity Lotz, Black Canary in TV’s Arrow) joins the research team, but she does not survive very long in this crudely dystopian world.

  Like Caprica, it’s about the perfect-android Singularity, as the female Machine struggles to learn about humanity and cope with immature fears. As a runaway robot thriller it’s almost ruined by the foolish use of lens flare in a misguided attempt to generate atmosphere in the dingy hardware labs. As a typical home-grown effort, The Machine is a woefully underfunded production that showcases all the usual Brit-SF problems – so muc
h like the BBC’s current genre output – in that it exhibits a simplistic and almost throwback attitude to its foregrounding of speculative futurism. It is as if sci-fi movie developments of the 1970s (Westworld, Stepford Wives, Questor Tapes) and the rather more sophisticated 1980s (Blade Runner, Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, Aaron Lipstadt’s Android) never happened, as it rehashes many familiar tropes.

  It is much less fun than Eve of Destruction (1991) or gynoid blonde Galaxina (1980) as the corporatised government bad guys take control of Vincent’s project for military prototyping and it becomes a numbingly predictable actioner. Admittedly, there are some competent visual effects, but The Machine is sadly lacking fresh ideas. We can easily trace Machine’s genre lineage back to Maria in Metropolis and Olympia in Tales of Hoffman, but such vintage adds nothing to The Machine, and the movie’s bland synthesiser score weakens it further, making it all sound horribly dated, so that it feels even more like watching an ill-advised remake.

  BAND CULT: 88 FILMS

  Father and son team Albert and Charles Band ably mimicked Roger Corman’s hugely successful approach to low-budget genre pictures. Their combined filmmaking was a mirror of Corman’s output from the 1950s to the 2000s, with or without exploitation content, and the Bands’ production companies – Empire and Full Moon – were almost perfectly attuned to genre fandom’s demands in the era of VHS rental/retail markets. Despite the variable quality of their product, the Bands enjoyed triumphs with the likes Trancers and Re-Animator, and they regularly mixed sci-fi/fantasy-horror with comic book themes. Whereas Corman was calculating and frequently cynical in tone or satirical with sociopolitical messages, the Bands movie trademarks were just good fun and often endearingly silly amusement. Formed in 2012, British DVD label 88 Films unleashed a growing collection of trashy obscurities (that include Cannibal Women, The Day Time Ended, Laserblast and Mandroid) under a rather misapplied ‘Grindhouse’ banner, alongside a parallel stream of releases beyond that – such as the Puppet Master and Subspecies series – handpicked from the Empire and Full Moon catalogues.

  Continuing the label’s run of low-budget fare, their Grindhouse collection adds Charles Band’s 1997 comedy-horrors Hideous! and The Creeps (DVDs, 27 January), while the latest batch of unearthed oddities from realms of sci-fi/fantasy are on DVD, 17 February. Although it is basically just a borrowing from Marvel’s supreme sorcerer Dr Strange (the comic was first adapted for TV in 1978), Full Moon’s 1992 production of DOCTOR MORDRID (ref. Mordred from Arthurian myth) stars Jeffrey Combs as the reclusive immortal magician turned criminal psychologist Anton Mordrid. Delivering a typically sober and measured performance, Combs imbues this comic book material with street credo that Peter Hooten’s mystic Stephen Strange never quite managed to achieve in Philip DeGuere’s 1978 movie, which relied on colourful renderings of other dimensional realms – reasonably faithful to imagery from the acid-trippy comics – for its cosmic-sorcery conceit.

  While in magical conflict against evil alchemist Kabal (Brian Thompson in full-house panto mode), lonely Mordrid befriends neighbour/police consultant Samantha (Yvette Napir, later promoted to detective in the TV-sanitised RoboCop spin-off), and she becomes his confidante and the movie’s heroine. During their final confrontation, Kabal and Mordrid animate dinosaur skeletons in a museum and perform light-show theatrics comparable to other magical duels in more recent cinema.

  Of somewhat lesser interest, Albert Band’s ROBOT WARS concerns a futuristic mega-mecha transport hijacked by bad guys. The huge walking machine of scorpion-like design (as with Dr Mordrid’s dinosaurs, stop-motion animation here is by David Allen) tackles a giant humanoid robot in the modest finale. In cheesy nonsense that’s wrapped around the special effects, Barbara Crampton plays a scientist caught up in the mayhem, opposite Don Michael Paul who is archly comic as Drake, the ‘renegade pilot’ of the MEGA-1 robot and this movie’s supposed hero, who easily shrugs off the threat of Japanese villainy.

  With the current 3D fad showing no sign of fading, and numerous rebranded apocalypses extant, let’s hope that 88 Films will delve into the dense fringes of genre popularity and soon release such neglected 1980s movies as Metalstorm, Robot Jox and Lee Katzin’s World Gone Wild. Is it too much to expect a DVD release for Pierre-William Glenn’s forgotten Terminus too?

  MUTANT POPCORN

  NICK LOWE

  HER

  ROBOCOP

  A NEW YORK WINTER’S TALE

  I, FRANKENSTEIN

  47 RONIN

  ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE

  MR PEABODY & SHERMAN

  THE LEGO MOVIE

  Can we love what is not human? Will we? Should we? Must we? In a sense, we already do. Film is all about seducing us into loving the unreal, the dead, the Maschinenmensch, using our cognitive overspill to project on to the faces of the stars the illusion of inner life and being, as our hyperactive theory of mind already does for animals, toys, machines, and gods. But a singularity is approaching, where our relationships with imaginary friends outstrip our dwindling power to interact with living minds; where the worlds on our screens become more involving than the lives we inhabit and share, and our repertoire of affect dwindles as we fixate on ever more tailored and appealing simulations.

  This is the wise, deep, and melancholic comic business of Spike Jonze’s cyber-romance HER, which as we go to press has just become only the second science fiction film to win a screenplay Oscar (after Eternal Sunshine ten years earlier, though Return of the King did score a rather less deserved trophy the previous year). It’s an achievement the more extraordinary for what is Jonze’s first solo feature-writing credit. After two films and nearly a third with Charlie Kaufman, before the gruelling production on Where the Wild Things Are took Jonze out of directing Synecdoche, New York and he returned instead to the short subjects that had made his name – particularly 2010’s robot romance I’m Here with Andrew Garfield, who is thanked along with many other former collaborators here – he’s reinvented himself as a complete auteur without breaking the stride of his utterly unique and coherent body of directorial work.

  The premise seems mild enough – unhappy divorcing midlife male falls for his next-generation AI operating system – but from the opening multiple reveal, it’s a film that springs piquant twists whenever you find yourself beginning to settle into thinking you know where it’s going. Jonze himself has talked the film down as sf and up as a film about relationships, which is certainly a level on which it works with a kind of grown-up wisdom not normally looked for in Hollywood. Nevertheless, if you could imagine everything you could reasonably want in a great terrestrial science fiction film, it would probably look a lot like Her. The most powerful and delicious cognitive frisson comes with the discovery that the story we’re watching on screen has not been the real story, which instead was the more lingering and affecting tale of invisible Samantha’s own reality, and her meticulously mapped evolution from a coy simulation of mind to a transcendent being beyond consciousness, body, comprehension, and (poignantly) human reach. The near-future scenario, set in a persuasive Shanghai-inflected (and -shot) future LA whose like we haven’t seen before, plays inventive changes on its theme of simulated feelings, from the hero’s day job as a ghostwriter of intensely affecting computer-handwritten personal letters to the metaphysical dilemmas of Samantha’s increasingly disruptive sense or pretence of her own reality and her negotiations with her own body envy.

  It is, as well as a brilliantly played and directed film, a brilliantly written one. Every few minutes an idea comes along that you haven’t seen before, and Kaufman’s tutelage is especially apparent in the scenes of crosstalk between multiple realities, as when the hero tries to interact with a sweary and attitudinal VR game character while simultaneously carrying on an audio conversation with Samantha in which a third-party e-mail is embedded. Nevertheless, it’s tempting to suspect that the film couldn’t have ended up as affecting as it has without its necessarily innovative shooting technique (with Sama
ntha’s lines recorded live but the actress screened from view) and the radical revision it then enabled in post (where Samantha Morton was replaced with Scarlett Johansson to salvage Jonze’s troubled three-hour rough cut). It’s a film that nobody else could have made, or written, or imagined, full of strange beauties, sad truths, and sweet mysteries. Who would ever have seen it coming?

  Alex Murphy has to discover the man inside his own machine in Jose Padilha’s unexpectedly smart and resonant remake of ROBOCOP, in which the Brazilian incomer brings to his Hollywood debut the same outsider’s squint at America that Verhoeven brought to his, but with an appropriately updated geopolitical spin and some unexpectedly deft use of the wife and child that the original film series so casually wrote away (though original writers Michael Miner and Ed Neumeier, still credited here, did reinstate Murphy Jr for the 1993 live-action TV series). The distinctive satirical element that Verhoeven and Neumeier wrought in their collaborations on RoboCop and Starship Troopers has wisely been judged inimitable, but is homaged by getting Samuel Jackson in for a morning of greenscreen to steal the show as a corporate-shill TV troll: “It is great to see American machines helping to promote peace and freedom abroad … Some of you may even think that the use of these drones overseas makes us the kind of bullying imperialists that our forefathers were trying to be!” (Bit on-the-hooter there, Sam, but thanks for stopping by.) Ingenious use is made of veteran rehabilitation narratives and a thumping intertextual evocation of Jake Sully’s rebirth, and there’s some clever, if ultimately copped-out-of, play with the modern illusion of free will: “Consciousness is nothing more than the processing of information. I can fix him and he won’t know the difference.” But the sequence that hands-up defines the film is an unflinchingly sustained display of exactly what is left of the organic Alex Murphy, which with any luck will give the PG-13 audience nightmares for life. That’s a legacy that any machine could be proud of.