Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

The Days of High Adventure: A Journey Through Adventure Film

Director: Nicholas Meyer

By Roderick Heath

It might seem like a leap from the earthbound historicism of The Sea Hawk to the second instalment of a 1980s TV-derived scifi franchise, and yet they’re both, essentially, pirate movies. Lately, pondering the synergy of elements necessary to create great adventure films, I had to admit that, in revisiting Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (the numerical was added after initial release), I saw it has just about all of them: wonder, action, character, myth, darkness, depth of concept and execution, originality and also noble cliché, a sense of fun, and a sense of legacy, both future and historical.

Gene Roddenberry’s adored TV series “Star Trek”, which ran from 1966 to 1968, ironically became a much bigger hit after cancellation, through syndication showings in the ’70s. The show possessed a ragged, trippy, perfervid energy and channelled scifi’s essential creeds and some fresh ideas into some generically familiar archetypes, stereotypes, and situations—not for nothing did Roddenberry label it “‘Wagon Train’ in space” when pitching it to execs. It survived in part because it channelled a post-counterculture hunger for New Age ideals and inclusivity into a futuristic context, and resulted in the birth of the Trekkie, still the emblematic scifi fan of a strong and obsessive breed. So strong was the series’ belated following that an animated series resulted, and then a push for a movie edition, which reached fruition after the success of Star Wars (1977). The initial result, Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), directed by that sturdiest of old pros, Robert Wise, modelled itself after the show’s more inquisitive episodes, whilst pinching liberally from Arthur C. Clarke. Wise’s sense of visual grandeur and the probing script partly made up for a stiff reintroduction for the old cast and a weak grip for the series’ familiar human element. The general feeling was that the result was a flabby disappointment. Roddenberry’s fussy creative control got the blame, and it’s clear in retrospect that he was trying to revive his creation with a tone anticipatory of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (1987-1994), which, with its ponderously plastic air and drones for heroes, was still similarly curious in its best moments. The Motion Picture made enough money to warrant a sequel, but for the second spin around the galaxy, producer Harve Bennett hired a fresher director with a zippier understanding of the underpinnings of such feverishly followed cult works.

Nicholas Meyer started off as a writer, with the likes of the campy comedy Invasion of the Bee Girls (1972) and the novel The Seven-Percent-Solution, adapted by Herbert Ross for the screen in 1976, before he made a directorial debut with Time After Time (1979). Meyer revealed a grasp on the minutiae of figures like Sherlock Holmes and H. G. Wells, and understood the curious nostalgia that resided within the survival of those characters, revelling in the ironic contrast between the Victorian sensibility that spawned them and the modern perspective on their charm—a sensibility that was ironically similar to the inner, fantastical spirit of Star Trek. Certainly, the catchphrases of Star Trek, like Spock’s “Fascinating,” were becoming as specific as Holmes’ “Elementary,” and Meyer understood that. Meyer responded to his new job by going to school on the original series to carefully recreate its essentials, and did an uncredited overhaul on Jack B. Sowards’ script. The Wrath of Khan was perhaps the first film to provide a nominal sequel to a TV episode, 1967’s “Space Seed,” in which Ricardo Montalban had guest-starred as Khan, a genetically engineered superman exiled centuries before from Earth with his followers, who, when salvaged by the Enterprise on its five-year mission, tried to take it over. They were defeated and left to start a colony on a new planet. Whilst such continuity tickled series fans, having seen “Space Seed” was in no way necessary to understanding the plot of the movie. Indeed, it was slightly confusing, as Khan had never met Enterprise crewman Chekhov (Walter Koenig, who joined the old show after “Space Seed”) but recognises him here. Khan was reconstituted in the film as a phantom from the past of James T. Kirk (William Shatner) who emerges to torture and terrorise him precisely as he’s looking down the barrel of a dull and barren middle age, his swashbuckling days as a space captain behind him.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is today often identified by its moments of unfettered camp, and yet it’s actually a deftly balanced work: warm, funny, dashing, often tongue-in-cheek, and yet emotionally and intellectually quite earnest, filled with lush, fluidic imagery and well-paced action. It’s a film that manages to do many different sorts of thing at once, and for very good reason, it’s become a kind of code word for a movie series highpoint. Meyer gave Wise’s stately approach a kick in the pants, and whilst the same elements of wonder and speculative intelligence that The Motion Picture belaboured are still in evidence, here they’re carefully dovetailed with the onrush of a plot that’s more than a little like Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003) in space.

Meyer’s most personal and effective touch was to remake Kirk, Spock (Leonard Nimoy), and Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy (DeForrest Kelly) into men reminiscent of his earlier takes on Holmes and Wells. They are men out of their time, aware of retro paraphernalia and culture, offering a continuity with the geeks of Earth past, and possessed of an energy and idealism that’s all the more vital in a future world. The film’s very opening depicts one of Kirk’s prize pupils, Saavik (a pre-Cheers Kirstie Alley), a humourless Vulcan neophyte who nettles under the painful lesson of the “Kobayashi Maru,” a test that places potential officers in a situation where they have to find their grace under the imminent inevitability of death. As well as offering up a memorable fillip of series lore, the fact that Kirk administers the test which he himself successfully subverted in his student days presents a thematic echo that rings out through the rest of the story up to its tragic climax. Kirk, with his recurring refusal to believe in the kind of no-win scenarios the test prescribes, must face the real cost of such a situation.

Meanwhile, Chekhov, working under Captain Terell (the late, great Paul Winfield) aboard the Reliant, is searching for a lifeless planet to conduct a vast new scientific experiment with the fantastic new Genesis Device. Beaming upon a planet they believe to be the lifeless Ceti Alpha 6, they fall into the hands of Khan and his fellow survivors, who had been left to form a colony on that planet’s neighbour by Kirk: the planet is, in fact, their former Eden, laid waste by cosmic calamity, and they have only just clung to existence. Now mad for vengeance for the suffering of their exile and the deaths of his wife and several crew from attacks by native animals, Khan takes control of Chekhov and Terell with brain-infesting slugs and sets out to trap Kirk and take control of the Genesis Device. The device has been developed by scientist Dr. Carol Marcus (Bibi Besch), her son David (Merritt Butrick), and a team of researchers on a space station neighbouring the lifeless moon of Regula 1. The device is an incredibly powerful mechanism with the capacity to reshape planets into life-supporting spheres, albeit with the caveat that any life that exists there already would be obliterated, thus making it a work of terraforming wonder that could also be a terrible weapon. David is paranoid about possible military uses of the Device and interference by the Federation, and when Chekhov, under Khan’s control, messages the station ordering the Device to be handed over, pretending the order comes from Kirk, that paranoia seems justified. Carol tries to contact Kirk to demand an explanation, but her message fades out. The Enterprise, on a training mission for the young recruits, heads to Regula 1 to see what’s going on, only to fly headlong into Khan’s ambush.

The Wrath of Khan‘s reduced budget impacted the quality of production noticeably, littered with rather pasteboard-looking sets and props. There are some clunker line readings redolent of a rushed shoot, and Khan’s crew, all strangely much younger than him, look like escapees from a futuristic roller disco musical. But that’s all part of the fun, and otherwise, the film retains the polished look of an A-grade saga. The film’s colour rich and futuristic, yet also fleshy and colourful in an aptly pulpy fashion, is thanks to Gayne Rescher’s photography. The special effects were done by George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic outfit, and included a ground-breaking use of computer-generated imagery for the demonstration film of the Genesis Device’s purpose. The effects are very uneven, and yet still possess an epic lustre. I can’t help but admire the suspense Meyer can wring out of scenes of grim-looking crewmen marching about with what look like vibrators with light globes attached: god knows what they’re going to do with them, but damn if doesn’t look important. Similarly, it’s fascinating how poetic the moment in which Carol brings Kirk into the cavern transformed into a paradise by the Genesis Device is, in spite of the obvious matte paintings, in a way that still dwarfs all the CGI landscapes of Avatar (2009). Much of the film’s impact, it has to be said, is due to composer James Horner, who two years earlier had been working on Roger Corman quickies before he gained notice for his mock-epic work on Battle Beyond the Stars (1980). Horner’s soaring, seafarer-like score permeates The Wrath of Khan with a sense of galloping excitement and swooning awe in such moments as the Enterprise’s sailing out from it space dry dock and Kirk’s first glimpse of the Genesis cave.

Whilst the series’ egalitarian, progressive ideals were certainly heartfelt, “Star Trek” simultaneously always sustained an element of retrograde, imperialist thinking in its assumptions, with a future universe where political stability is enforced by gunboat diplomacy. Khan’s name emphasises this aspect. Rather than revise the discrepancy, Meyer emphasises links with Victorian drama and an imperialist adventuring tradition. Kirk and Khan constantly quote favourite novels, Moby-Dick and A Tale of Two Cities respectively, whilst the story and visuals make reference to a charming retention of seafaring codes in space. The Federation uniforms (redesigned from the hideous things sported in The Motion Picture) make the crew look awfully like Redcoats, and a crewwoman blows a futuristic version of a midshipman’s whistle when Kirk first boards the Enterprise. Simultaneously, The Wrath of Khan does something the series, with its limited budget and effects, and episodic style, could never do properly, which was offer, at last, a genuine space battle.

So perfectly does The Wrath of Khan lay out a form of a swashbuckler that the number of similarities in plot and theme between it and Master and Commander demand a few moments to list. In both, the heroes fight off a superior enemy who gets the jump on them in an initial ambush. The emphasis on the battle of wits between captains is all-important. Spock and McCoy are to Kirk as Maturin is to Aubrey, presenting the schism of man of action and man of thought in the context of the supposedly well-oiled machine of these ships of war. The Genesis Device and resulting planet are equivalent to the Galapagos Islands as cradles of wonderment and new potential that excite that scientific mind, a mind which is stifled in being merely obeisant to militaristic exigencies. In both, the physical maiming of a younger crew member is a major tragedy and spur to action. An ambush is facilitated through one ship pretending to be another: Aubrey’s ploy of disguising his ship as a whaler contrasts Khan’s use of a captured Federation ship to sucker in Kirk. Major acts of sacrifice are required to save the heroes’ ship: Spock’s fatal venturing into the reactor to repower the Enterprise matches Hollum’s suicide in belief he’s the Jonah that haunts his ship, and Aubrey’s hacking free a fallen mast, though its means a man must drown.

In spite of its interludes of cheese, The Wrath of Khan builds story and character with a novelistic intelligence, as individual scenes that often seem discursive and casual actually contribute to the thematic imperatives of the tale. The opening joke, where the revelation that the chaos that engulfs Saavik’s captaincy is, in fact, the Kobayashi Maru test—McCoy, sprawled on the floor, demands praise for his performance—will inexorably lead to a moment where such chaos erupts for real around Kirk. He’s the only candidate who ever beat the test, and did so by creative cheating, and, of course, has to stare down the barrel of exactly the situation it was supposed to depict. Mortality is already weighing on Kirk’s mind at the outset, as it’s his birthday. Spock’s and McCoy’s birthday presents to the aging admiral are both antiques for his collection, a leather-bound copy of A Tale of Two Cities and a pair of ancient reading spectacles, apt for Kirk’s retro sensibility, but also reminding him of the march of years. The film actually lets us see Kirk’s apartment in San Francisco, as McCoy breaks out a bottle of illegal Romulan ale—that’s the sort of throwaway touch that I love and that gives this phase in the franchise real personality. McCoy warns him against letting himself become an antique, too, and to get back to captaining, not training callow recruits.

Saavik is posited as a potential love interest for Kirk: she tries to flirt with him whilst trying to understand the purpose of the Kobayashi Maru test, but proves fatally unreceptive to his sense of humour. But she’s also a potential replacement for both him and Spock, an heir to both their legacies. Carol, Kirk’s former lover, and David, actually his son, albeit one he’s barely had any contact with before, present shades of alternative lives he gave up in his love for gallivanting through space, and give immediate, personal flesh to the film’s recurring motifs of existence as a chain of creation and destruction, birth and death. In spite of the futuristic setting, The Wrath of Khan feels intimately contemporary to the early ’80s, as David’s outright contempt and suspicion for Kirk and the Federation channels obvious hints of the ’60s Generation Gap, whilst Carol’s decision to keep David in her world suggests the impact of feminism and new parenting options, leaving alpha male Kirk in a slightly befuddled mid-life crisis.

Meanwhile, the extraordinary potential of the Genesis Device seems to invoke all of the characters’ essential quandaries and capacities, promising both apocalyptic destruction and miraculous creation. Carol, to cheer up Kirk when he’s feeling depressed about the carnage that’s struck his ship and his son’s ferocious antipathy for what he stands for, ushers him along to take stock of a miracle: the grand cave within the Regular moon that she’s turned into a slice of Eden with the Genesis Device, her gift of maternal beneficence to all. Spock and McCoy, upon first learning of the Device’s existence, swing immediately into one of their classic ethical debates. Spock’s coolly measured curiosity striking sparks against McCoy’s fiery, knee-jerk humanism. McCoy mocks the Genesis Device by channelling advertising speak: “According to myth, God created the Earth in six days. Now watch out! Here comes Genesis! We’ll do it for you in six minutes!’ The thematic conflict of the human and the destructive is even acted out on the level of the canonical texts that preoccupy the characters—the shamanistic nihilism of Moby-Dick and the humanistic idealism and sacrifice that defines A Tale of Two Cities. Spock is, of course, the tragic hero, the Sidney Carton of The Wrath of Khan. His logical and unemotive persona, which McCoy always assumes to be inimical to humane concerns, proves, as Kirk croaks in delivering a eulogy for his dead friend, redolent of the most human soul. Spock, now actually the captain of the Enterprise, hands over command to Kirk without concern when crisis is nigh, reminding his reluctant friend that “You proceed from a false assumption—I have no ego to bruise,” and giving Kirk exactly what everyone knows he needs at the same time. Spock becomes the paragon of selfless action and finds his fulfilment of logic in the act of giving his life to save the Enterprise’s crew from certain destruction.

Spock’s achievement of a kind of transcendence paves the way for a resurrection (though Nimoy was actually hoping to jump ship permanently), befitting his new status as demigod. He thus fulfils the religious imagery that he’s been associated with since the first film, which found him engaged in a rite to cleanse himself of feeling in primal landscape. Spock’s nirvana overtly contrasts Khan’s failed attempt to become the Destroyer of Worlds. Khan, genetically engineered and clearly associated with a remnant spirit of Nazi eugenics and an accompanying übermensch mentality, his own constantly stated superiority itself is a kind of godhead for his supporters—“Yours is a Superior Intellect,” as their salute to him goes, and one which his lieutenant Joachim can’t quite complete in dying as both salute and curse—proves weakened by exactly the egotism that Spock resists. Khan’s ruthless intelligence proves constantly susceptible to elements he can’t master, and his monomaniacal focus, like that of Ahab whom he constantly quotes, proves both infinitely destructive and yet quaintly impotent. “I shall avenge you!” he promises the dead Joachim, suggesting that in spite of his brilliance, he’s got all the capacity to learn from his mistakes of a goldfish.

The film’s booming moments of melodrama, such as Shatner’s immortal scream of “Khaaaaaaaaan!”, are either flaws or strengths depending on taste, but surely a helluva lot of fun either way. More to the point, such touches are part and parcel with the film’s resolutely nonironic, defiantly old-fashioned air. Meyer invests the film with an outsized quality that seems distinctly operatic: indeed, Kirk’s scream comes at the conclusion of a sequence that builds like an aria, as the two bull males gibe and wound each other with a spiritual ferocity that befits the talents of Shatner and Montalban, each capable of being both very good actors and colossal show-offs. Montalban, at the time a prime-time staple in “Fantasy Island” and still showing off his marvellous physique at 62, latched onto the role with gleefully outsized zest and finally gave Shatner a run for his money as the franchise’s biggest pork roast. That said, “Khaaaaaaaaan!” notwithstanding, Shatner’s at his best in the film, swinging from flip, sardonic good humour to introspection to larger-than-life heroism with a few well-judged bats of his eyelids and shifts of the inimitable Shatner voice. If Spock is the film’s tragic hero, Kirk here finally ascends to something like warrior-poet status, conjuring grace notes of wisdom hard-won from tragedy and gazing at the Genesis Planet with a truly affecting sense of wonder and rejuvenated spirit.

Whilst it would stretching things a little to call The Wrath of Khan an intellectual adventure movie, nonetheless, it is distinguished by the genuine intelligence that permeates through the various layers of its plot, character, and theme, and how the film plays them for dramatic value. The central, biblical invocations of the Genesis Device are then overlaid with the Christlike sacrifice of Spock, lending the film a mythopoeic quality of actual depth. Too many modern, action-oriented, scifi films today treat their specific genre’s basis, in science and inquisitive theory, as a source of glib MacGuffins. The contrast with J. J. Abrams’ entertaining yet comparatively shallow 2009 reboot of the series is constantly tempting: whereas that film treated its scifi gimmicks and pivots of plot with throwaway contempt or utilitarian purpose in the name of composing a straightforward adventure, Meyer wrings such flourishes and moments to heighten suspense. Thus, the key moments of the cleverness of the heroes are relishable in staging and impact: Kirk’s foiling of Khan’s apparently complete victory by taking advantage of his superior knowledge of the Federation ships, managing to remotely lower Khan’s shields and hit him with devastating and unexpected force; the rabbit-out-of-the-hat glee of the revelation that he and Spock have fooled Khan into thinking repairs that would take two hours would actually take two days by the simplest of ruses; and the final battle where, at Spock’s suggestion, Kirk taunts Khan into following him into the Mutara Nebula, where interference leaves the two ships blind and lacking shields. There, the greater experience of Kirk and Spock sees them best Khan by simply thinking in the three-dimensional terms that a spaceship offers, whereas Khan’s mind is stuck hopelessly in the 20th century, culminating at last when the nearly crippled and dying Enterprise can still sneak up behind the Reliant and pulverise it to a drifting ruin.

Even with Khan defeated, however, the danger is still not past, as he triggers the Genesis Device as his final apocalyptic stab at a pyrrhic victory: the device’s capacity to bring life means nothing to him, but it comes to mean everything for those left to behold it. In spite of the film’s wobbles, the contrivance of the finale, as the down-to-the-wire crisis demands Spock venture into a radiation-flooded room to restore the ship’s power, is nothing short of storytelling perfection. Meyer’s willingness to reach again for operatic heights is apparent in Kirk’s forlorn cry of “Spock!” as his hideously seared and dying friend makes his last salutary “Live long and prosper” sign through the Perspex that divides them. As his body is fired off in a photon torpedo tube in a scene inspired by a similar stellar funeral in Byron Haskin’s Conquest of Space (1955), “Amazing Grace” surges on the soundtrack as his casket plummets onto the Genesis planet at the same moment a sun emerges from behind: it’s like Wagner in space by this stage. The final effect, ironically, wasn’t entirely what Meyer was after, presenting rather a sop to old Trekkies who couldn’t stand Spock’s death being taken too lightly, and yet it gives the film its truly grand final lustre. The Wrath of Khan fulfilled not only the best elements of Roddenberry’s original series, but connected it to the oldest and most complete forms of adventure mythology, positing the struggles of its sky-shaking heroes in the context of the birth and death of titans and worlds.

The Avengers (2012)

Director/Screenwriter: Joss Whedon

By Roderick Heath

Here there be spoilers

The Avengers could well be the most hyped movie ever made, surpassing the likes of Gone with the Wind (1939), Ben-Hur (1959), and other singular icons of globe-conquering audience awareness, if you consider that some of the predecessors in the series of Marvel Comics adaptations were basically teasers, primers, and set-ups for the cast of superheroes it features. The task of living up to such hype would be unenviable for any director, let alone one with only a single, middlingly successful feature to his credit, but the job of tethering together a dizzying sprawl of characters and plot gimmicks from other films into a single, grandiose bash-‘em-up finally fell to such a man: Joss Whedon. Whedon, who has long been known as the nerd’s nerd thanks to his engaging TV series Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and Dollhouse, and stints writing storylines for some of the proper source comic books, inspires cultish devotion from many and an equal detestation from others. I confess to considering him rather a talent with great but hitherto unfulfilled potential. Whedon’s actual filmography is slight, having directed the cinematic conclusion for Firefly, Serenity (2005). Serenity suggested that Whedon’s talent for creating interesting characters in a stylised genre milieu, and witty, if occasionally gratingly arch, dialogue could be transferred to the compressed demands of a feature film, and that he could mount an exciting adventure story.

But it also frustrated with its lack of visual imagination and blandly TV-shaped sense of staging, and faltered in clarifying the whirl of storylines being resolved from the show for a new audience. Neither lack in Whedon’s touch was a good sign in approaching The Avengers. The first 20 minutes or so of The Avengers could be switchback-inducing for anyone who hasn’t watched the earlier Marvel films, Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) and Thor (2011) in particular, and, indeed, for those who didn’t wait through the end credits of those films to see their hidden kickers. Whedon also has to revive a rather different kind of film, one with deep roots in Hollywood but which has been fairly quiescent for a long time now: the all-star extravaganza, a form not simply defined by featuring a number of famous faces, but by having to sustain and balance them in parts that suit their aptitudes, fans, and dramatic necessity. Yes, this is the Grand Hotel of superhero flicks.

Thus The Avengers hits the ground running with Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), director of the clandestine SHIELD security service, and scientist Eric Selvig (Stellan Skarsgard), trying to deal with the sudden coming to life of a powerful alien artefact, the Tesseract, which was retrieved along with the frozen Captain America from a watery Arctic grave. For a few minutes even I, who did watch those earlier movies, felt a little riled at such a headlong introduction, and the film takes a while to settle down, as it reintroduces the characters and sets the story into motion: because we already “know” the team, Whedon only goes through the motions of the Seven Samurai-esque gathering of the heroes. Loki (Tom Hiddleston), exiled brother of “god” Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and former usurping king of the alien realm of Asgard, has hooked up with a race of mysterious and very ugly extra-terrestrials who control a galaxy-crossing portal, and the Tesseract, as it happens, is the other end of that portal. Loki, having successfully sold the aliens on invading Earth and installing him as ruler, teleports into the SHIELD headquarters and takes psychic control of Selvig and Agent Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), dubbed “Hawkeye” thanks to his awe-inspiring prowess with bow and arrow, and Fury fails to prevent the Tesseract’s theft by bringing down the headquarters about their ears. Fury, recognising that the sort of situation he’s been preparing for has arrived, calls in his sinuous superspy Natasha “Black Widow” Romanoff and sets about tracking down the various powerful weirdoes who will comprise his Avengers team.

Bruce “The Hulk” Banner (Mark Ruffalo) is tracked down to where he’s working as a medic in an Indian slum. Captain America, aka Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), is still trying to adjust to life in the new millennium. Tony “Iron Man” Stark (Robert Downey Jnr) has just built a New York skyscraper powered entirely by his miraculous arc reactor and resents being called away from the arms of his lover-assistant Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). Thor is still apparently trapped on Asgard, having demolished the portal between the two worlds. Whedon’s rush of opening action betrays an uncertainty, perhaps inevitable, about how to get this contraption off the ground: still, I don’t think David Lean could have taken on such a burden and managed to make it flow perfectly. The opening offers a little tough-gal action with Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill, a cool and sturdy SHIELD agent who continues to bob up distractingly throughout the rest of the film, but whilst Whedon does snap into focus, unsurprisingly, when he can focus on a kick-ass female hero, it is in this case Johansson, who, after enlivening the torturous Iron Man 2 (2010), maintains her form as Natasha in a droll introduction. In the middle of being tortured by sleazy Slavic arms dealers, Agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) calls Natasha’s mobile phone and she irritably resists having her mission cancelled now that the “interrogators” are inadvertently telling her everything she needs to know, but, obediently, she clobbers her captors whilst still tied to a chair and makes her escape. She is sent to track down Banner, whose Hulk alter ego, although he’s been keeping a lid on it successfully of late, is regarded as an unreasonable danger; it’s Banner’s scientific knowledge SHIELD wants.

Ruffalo, taking over a seemingly cursed role after Eric Bana and Edward Norton, far outshines them for grasping Banner’s essence, not having the physical presence of Bana and more convincingly anxious than Norton; he instead pitches his performance as a savant gnawed at by the beast within, his skin sallow and his soul seeming to droop nearly as much as his purposefully oversized wardrobe, and so the Hulk stands as the Most Improved Superhero in this movie. Loki makes his presence known in Stuttgart, Germany, where he tries to browbeat a crowd into kneeling before him, only for an old man (Kenneth Tigar), having seen all this before, to resist. Before Loki can blast him away, Captain America arrives to block the exterminating bolt with his shield: he too has seen this sort of thing before. Such a scene is a punchy reminder that Whedon grasps not only the essence of good melodrama but also the powerful underlying thematic ties of this material to the anxieties of the last century. Whereas Stark’s Iron Man, who arrives to give Rogers some needed aid, constantly trails the association of the Cold War his father fought and the American hegemony and embodies the cognitive dissonance of this age, Rogers is still the WW2 fascist-fighter, and recognises Loki’s übermensch mentality. Interestingly, as the least colourful and the most old-fashioned of the heroes, Rogers emerges as the film’s axiom, all the more surprising as Captain America was saddled with the least inspired of introduction films. But Rogers’ air of faintly forlorn, antiquated idealism is compelling as Fury states apologetically that “we’ve made mistakes…some very recently”, and inevitably grazes against the post-modern wise-assed diva act of Stark.

Evans, a surprisingly restrained and grounded actor considering that he first came to attention playing the insufferable Johnny Storm in the Fantastic Four movies, absorbs Downey’s stream of flip with a shield of earnestness far more impressive than the metallic one he carries. Whedon aptly makes Coulson a closet Captain America fanboy, and wants his childhood hero to sign the trading cards he’s collected. Rogers offers Whedon an obvious avatar for exploring not simply the boyish fantasies at the heart of the superhero mythology, but also the powerful pull of nostalgia, and the sense of being a devotee to any creation with a legacy, not just seventy-year-old comic book heroes, which means living both in the past and the present. Rogers searches for something, anything, to give him purpose and direction: when, having sat through a stream of modern techno and military babble, someone’s crack about “flying monkeys” makes him shout with joy that he recognises the reference. Rogers however instantly adapts to crisis situations, and emerges in the finale as the team’s natural leader, as an experienced soldier and strategist, barking out a stream of instructions to the team to take up positions, ending with the immortal last order to his least sophisticated warrior: “Hulk…smash!” That said, Downey, so beleaguered in Iron Man 2, is in fine form here, especially as he mocks Thor’s initial appearance as “Shakespeare in the park,” (“Doth your mother know that you weareth her draps?”) and later dubbing him “Point Break”, and, surprised to recognise in Banner a fellow genius, taking pause to praise him for his work, including turning into an “enormous green rage monster.”

Hemsworth’s Thor, still charmingly arcane in speech and unsubtle in method, arrives trailing fraternal issues, and makes several ill-advised attempts to talk his brother into ending his campaign of violence. Loki’s familial status is key to one of the film’s funniest lines, as Thor demands respect for the villain from the humans because he’s part of the Asgard royalty: when Natasha points out he’s killed eighty people, Thor can only bleat, “He’s adopted.” Whilst it would be easy to make The Avengers sound like a stream of Whedon-speak, the erstwhile writer-director actually for the most part contours his style into the material, which demands a more consistently classical sense of weight than Whedon’s usual pitch offers, with success. Somehow, he manages to squeeze in the great Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, an early sign that Whedon’s aiming higher than usual, as the leader of the baddies Natasha bests at the start, and Jenny Agutter and Harry Dean Stanton also make some wryly stirring cameos for the movie fan with more than the goldfish memory of current pop culture. The Avengers takes some time to find its groove, in part because there’s so much going on, usually the opposite problem to what comic book adaptations have to deal with, and Whedon’s experience at smoothly drawing together story elements as an audio-visual as well as literary entity still isn’t that strong. Whedon instead feels his way along through what is for him the much more comfortable device of making The Avengers, in essence, a TV episode about forty minutes long, getting his characters into a small space, in this case on SHIELD’s amusing new command base, an aircraft carrier that turns into a near-invisible flying fortress, and listening to them argue, snipe, quip, cajole, threaten, butt heads, and bond. Rather than hurting the film, this segment gives the film its traction and the vitally needed human element, as Whedon carefully exposes the raw nerves of the team, their isolation, traumas, guilty legacies, and potential weakness. This puts The Avengers unshakeably on track for the first of the film’s two genuinely epic-scaled action sequences.

Before they start working as a team, in time honoured tradition the heroes clash incessantly, even violently, as they first come into close proximity, as when Thor first appears on the scene, manifesting on the back of a plane and snatching the captured Loki away from Stark and Rogers, sparking a forest-levelling tussle between the demi-god and the mechanical man, which finally the thawed-out ‘40s square has to quell like a teacher interrupting a schoolyard brawl. Later, as it turns out that Loki is plotting to destroy the Avengers before they even really get going by exploiting their fractiousness and unleashing the supposedly uncontrollable Hulk, Hulk rampages first after Natasha, who, although tough as nails, finishes up a quivering foetal ball in hiding at the spectacle of the green monster, and Thor finishes up having to take him in a ship-shaking brawl. In terms of story structure and imagery, it wouldn’t be too inaccurate to call The Avengers a cross between The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003) and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004). Like the former, there’s a team of famous if conflicted and volatile personalities drawn together to fight a nefarious villain, and they initially prove their mettle by saving a super-futuristic craft from sabotage, a craft which looks like something out of the latter movie, as do the flying alien invaders they take on in the finale. Perhaps that merely reflects the relatively limited lexicon of the supposedly endless permutations of such fantasy material. It does however behove me to point out that Whedon’s film does everything bigger and, more importantly, better: better detail, better effects, better characterisation, better drama.

Most vitally, Whedon knows that this sort of tale has to reach a moment of iconic power where the heroes click as a team, and he offers this as the heroes gather in a circle with their enemies about them, but also that the heroes have to all have their distinctive moment of glory, which requires coherence in the style and saves the finale from being a singular mass of tedious action. And everyone gets one, from Natasha pulling off an astounding hijack of an alien flying craft thanks to her gymnastic skills, to the Hulk, irritated by Loki’s mockery, grasping him and slapping him about like a rag, finally reducing the sneering hunk of malevolence to a groaning wreck in a moment that could well come out of a Chuck Jones Looney Tunes cartoon. Loki isn’t as interesting a villain as he was in Kenneth Branagh’s terrific Thor, where his pathos and pathetic neediness underscored his treachery; now he’s a mad and unrepentant would-be dictator, but Hiddleston still serves him well, playing him as the most vicious English boarding school bully imaginable, with a strut archer than Ziggie Stardust-era Bowie and a nice line in antique insults. Renner has the most thankless task in the film, playing the one team member who hasn’t had a substantial prior introduction, and he spends half of it under Loki’s mind control to boot. Hints of his and Natasha’s connection through a personal debt and perhaps, although she denies it, something deeper, does nonetheless clear the way for some emotional urgency in Hawkeye’s return to the fold. Renner projects the same taciturn sensibility of a warrior wit honed to the finest edge that caught the eye in The Hurt Locker (2008), with an added hint of reserved gallantry: thus Hawkeye seems, in his way, the most “real” character in the film.

Of course, whilst the outlay of story elements is busy, the actual plot, once in motion, is actually very simple, even scanty, an excuse to give the Avengers a decent threat to go up against – not always an element these films remember to provide, as Superman Returns (2006) sadly forgot. The real stress is on character conflict, and Whedon smartly makes this the essence of Loki’s plans as well as the general story dynamic: he pricks the heroes, especially Natasha, with their own hang-ups, in his attempts to divide and conquer. The team comes close to disintegrating when they learn Fury and SHIELD have been trying to create new weapons with the Tasseract’s power, the act which alerted the aliens to its presence in the first place. But when Coulson is fatally wounded by Loki, Fury gives them a little propagandist push by soaking Coulson’s trading cards in his blood and presenting them to the team as a spur, an interesting stab at trying to complicate the film’s morality, and consider how such spurs can be both manipulative and dishonest, but perhaps sometimes also necessary. Fury himself has to defy unscrupulous masters in trying to hold off a shadow World Security Council from using the nuclear option on Manhattan, something he fails in, demanding a final sacrificial effort from Stark. On a purely incidental level, it’s cool to see Jackson’s Fury finally get to do some proper badass work, and I kind of wish someone would make a “Young Nick Fury” movie: surely there’s room for a black superhero with ‘70s Blaxploitation motifs in his background and atomic-age power in his hands in the modern pantheon.

When it comes to the crunch, I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that The Avengers finishes up as one of the most spectacular and visually well-organised special effects extravaganzas ever made: it’s certainly trying to be such, although it can’t quite reach the level of imperative Peter Jackson managed in The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003), where there’s a dizzying sensation in the action of multiple elements long in the setting up colliding head on, or the finale of George Lucas’ Star Wars: Episode III – The Revenge of the Sith (2005), where the settings and the effects ebulliently describe the emotions being enacted. This is more spectacle for spectacle’s sake, turning a basic punch-up into something like three-dimensional chess using a city as a playing board, but damn, what spectacle. Whedon, or at least the special effects team provided him, invokes the dreaded Transformers movies at points, especially as the final battle in a cityscape superficially resembles the climax of the first of Michael Bay’s series. The always unpleasant sensation Bay’s films radiate, with their unreconstructed militarist fetishism and sense-contorting editing styles, has been seen by many as transmitting a kind of covert fascism; Whedon answers this by not simply emphasising democratic themes in his tale, but by making his film entirely fluent and thrilling through access, not assault, for eye and mind. I don’t know if it can yet be said that Whedon has any kind of definable visual style, but he does have a fondness for long-take sequences as a way of facilitating that democratic spirit, and this strategy culminates in one utterly bravura shot that seems to move along the breadth of Manhattan, finding each of his individualist heroes engaged in their station of battle in a fashion that unites them strategically and emotionally, from Captain America brawling on street level to Hawkeye atop a skyscraper to Thor and the Hulk riding the back of one of the grotesque mechanical leviathans the aliens employ.

The sight of Thor’s red cape swirling as he rides a colossal beast of dull grey steel over the equally dull grey New York skyline catches the eye like the essence of some secret genre poetry, in which both fantastic invaders and familiar urban architecture are equally complicit in a war against the unrelieved colour and power of the primal individual, and both lose big time. Whedon shoots for some of the supercharged emotion glimpsed once upon a time in the climaxes of the early Superman films or Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (1982) as Stark tries to call an oblivious Pepper for a goodbye as he prepares to sacrifice himself for humankind, an act Rogers earlier said he could never consider: Whedon doesn’t quite hit those heights, but it’s nice that he tried. Some touches do become repetitive, especially characters falling from great heights for bruising landings, but all in all this is a brilliantly made sequence that dwarfs almost all rivals. The Avengers doesn’t escape all the familiar blind spots of this kind of filmmaking. In addition to the stuttering start, it sadly forgets to include a satisfying ending where the characters have a proper farewell, there’s a tacked on promise for another sequel, and a certain amount of fragmentation sets in with Whedon’s need to keep all his elements in some sort of focus.

There’s a constant, uncomfortable reminder with these Marvel movies that they can never just be movies sufficient unto themselves. Romance is mere theory, and sexuality is expressed through the tight pants of its heroines. It’s these lacks that repeatedly stand in the way of the superhero genre truly becoming the heir of the swashbuckler, which was always defined not only by its basis in the immediate reality of the athleticism of its actors, but also by the incision of personal concerns that are definably adult – looking forward to the future, trying to reproduce, and reshape nominal barriers of gender and class to find a place in a society worth living in – rather than the kind of pouting angst, detached from such concerns, so often found in modern superheroes and which makes them so relatable for teens; the reasonably strong romantic element of Thor was one reason it stood head and shoulders above most of the recent pack, and Tony Stark’s former playful licentiousness is down for the count. But it feels a bit churlish to stress such lacks considering that The Avengers as a whole really does hit the mark as surely as one of Hawkeye’s arrows. It has to be said that between this and the fiscally ill-fated but still glorious John Carter, 2012 has seen the blockbuster bar raised pretty darn high for the next few years.

The Fury (1978)

Director: Brian De Palma

By Roderick Heath

Made four years after Phantom of the Paradise, The Fury is a radically different piece of filmmaking in many ways, and yet also vitally similar to its wayward predecessor. Phantom of the Paradise is De Palma’s swan song for laissez-faire youth; The Fury is a new master taking his final step toward becoming a big-budget director with a vast array of technical and financial resources at his command, big stars to work with, and a story that demanded his visualisations maintain a more traditional rhythm, though hardly free of freewheeling invention. In between, he had made Carrie and Obsession (both 1976), films where he revisited the Hitchcockian template he hit on with Sisters (1973), but also developed a more rigorous and coherent style and a richer, less insistently hip emotional palate that veers between the earnest and the ironic with often breakneck speed. They were still filled with his acerbic sense of humour and character, and maintained a socially critical vibe, but they were also rendered with a refreshed and deepened directorial sensibility, full of swooning, sensually loaded, mobile camerawork that often serves the purpose of binding together seemingly disparate events into textured wholes. In short, De Palma had grown up, and rather than seeming to be neutered by his full emergence as a mainstream filmmaker, he revelled in it, even if mainstream audiences and critics hardly always knew what to do with him.

The Fury was adapted from his own novel by John Farris, but it became in every sense a De Palma film, a coherent development of themes in Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise and Carrie that represents a dazzling dance of form and function that builds towards a crescendo that some critics have rightly likened to a cinematic orgasm. It’s also one of De Palma’s most oddly unappreciated movies from his career-defining run of amplified cinema made between the mid ’70s and mid ’80s. What’s specifically remarkable about The Fury is the way, as with Carrie, he turns pulpy material into pure and personal cinema invested with a sense of emotion far beyond the sources. De Palma invested Carrie with a romanticism that was spiritually little like Stephen King’s work in which Carrie herself was as noxious a scion as her persecutors. Like Carrie, too, The Fury revolves around psychokinetic powers in adolescents, redolent of all the supercharged passions of youth, but it offers two young psychics rather than one, whose eventual meeting, fusion, and reproduction are the logical narrative and biological pay-off, but one which is complicated in an impudently clever fashion.

Whereas Gillian Bellaver, played by Amy Irving (thus suggesting her character in Carrie) has inherited the gift/curse of psychic ability and has to face similar social ostracism once her peculiarity emerges in the mercilessly bitchy realm of high school, her male counterpart Robin (Andrew Stevens) is transformed into a pampered psychopath by dint of his extraordinary abilities. De Palma’s usual, sneaky political overtones enter right at the start as a terrorist attack on an Israeli seaside town proves to have been stage-managed by repellent American government agent Childress (John Cassavettes), who runs an organisation known as PSI, which collects and develops psychic talent as the next generation of game-changing weaponry. He betrays his friend Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglas) and claims his son Robin, whose gifts he wants untrammelled use of. Robin thinks Peter is killed when he tries to escape in a Zodiac and machine gun bullets causes the engine to explode. Robin is bustled away, but Peter crawls out of the ocean and sees Childress bossing about the killers; snatching up the gun of one slain attacker, Peter tries to shoot Childress, only succeeding in wounding him in the arm before fleeing and going underground. Two years later, Peter is in Chicago, close to where Childress is operating. He has hired greasy local psychic Raymond Dunwoodie (William Finley) to find Robin, a move Childress has anticipated.

Dunwoodie contacts Peter when he notices Gillian on a Lake Michigan beach, recognising her as a superior talent who could find Robin more easily. But Childress closes the net on Peter. Peter’s escape cues a lengthy, elaborate, funny sequence in which he dives out of a hotel window in just his underwear, and holes up in the apartment of a pair of loudmouths (Gordon Jump and Jane Lambert) who, in the design of the story, stand in for the most absurd components of Middle America, and a crotchety but sympathetic grandmother (Eleanor Merriam) who’s all too pleased when Peter’s arrival with a gun places her irritating daughter and son-in-law in her command. Peter then kidnaps two off-duty policemen (Dennis Franz and Michael O’Dwyer) and makes them drive him away from the goons on his tail, finally fooling one team of agents to gun down another and then crash themselves. Peter then contacts his new girlfriend, Hester (Carrie Snodgress), who works at an institute devoted to psychic research, a place through which many powerful young talents pass. Peter first met with her in the hope Robin may have been placed at the institute at some point, a well-founded assumption, as the institute’s director Dr. McKeever (Charles Durning) is, in spite of his misgivings, essentially a talent scout for Childress. When Gillian causes one of her obnoxious school friends (Hilary Thompson) to bleed spontaneously during a cafeteria argument, she decides to take refuge at the institute, accidentally putting herself in Childress’ hands, but also soon picking up traces of Robin’s presence and current whereabouts.

De Palma’s mature style always pulsates with a deeply corporeal sensibility in films that often become a tötentanz of blood, sex, and carnal excess, innately infused with an eroticised quality. That quality is apparent in this film’s very structuring, down to its offhand jokes, like building scenes that tweak casual sex gags into moments of narrative consequence—for example, Dunwoodie’s girl-watching, which creeps out Gillian and her friend, proving to be a different and even more invasive kind of cruising, or Hester receiving what seems to be an obscene call from a heavy breather who turns out to be Peter, freezing cold after his dip in the lake. De Palma’s feel for eruptions of violence that transfigure flesh and spirit is the key for all the narrative’s pivotal moments, as when Gillian accidentally grasps McKeever’s scarred hand, and has a psychic vision of Robin’s near-fatal attempt to escape the institute, with De Palma achieving one of the keenest moments of voyeuristic switchback by back-projecting Gillian in front of the action she’s “seeing.” Later, she hooks directly into Robin’s mind as he’s experiencing one of the experimental procedures Childress and his research team are inflicting on him, becoming the subject herself, a prone participant in an act of forced viewing of what he thinks was his father’s death: it’s as elaborately cruel as Swan’s videotaping of Winslow Leach in Phantom. Both moments are sparked by Gillian touching someone, and she causes the spontaneous bleeding that finally proves near-fatal for Dr. Ellen Lindstrom (Carol Rossen), McKeever’s number two and lover, who collapses in a bloody mess when Gillian finally returns from her trance. Gillian offers a similar take on the Typhoid Mary character to that of Rogue from the X-Men movies in that, as her gift becomes more pronounced, she becomes increasingly dangerous and unable to make simple human contact. Childress offers her the promise of control of her gifts, but, like the promise to polish Winslow Leach’s gifts, it’s a Faustian bargain of the worst kind, because Childress’ real programme is to turn his psychics not into warriors, which implies a personal sovereignty even in battle and bloodshed, but into weapons, malleable and directed.

De Palma, in his way, helped usher in the era of modern blockbuster filmmaking, defined by a string of elaborate wind-ups with punchy pay-offs, and yet his works finally end up at odds with that format. The Fury was often fiercely criticised when it was released, but like some other signal works of the Movie Brats, like Star Wars (1977)—much less adult than De Palma’s works, but in some ways just as sophisticated in relying on an audience to put together the drama in instinctive, visually associative fashion rather than via literary ways—it represents an evolution in the form that finally threw away the stage roots of the mainstream cinema model. De Palma’s overt worship of the likes of Hitchcock, Lean, and Leone is apparent in the way he constructs sequences in his mature films like symphonic movements, serving their own self-contained sense of grammar as much as an overall narrative.

Whilst De Palma is often thought of as a maven of raw cinematic values and not a dramatist, that reputation often ignores his ear for dialogue and touch with actors. Having stoked Oscar-nominated performances from Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie in Carrie—a miracle for a horror movie in the ’70s—here he gives Douglas one of his best roles of the decade and gets great stuff from the rest of the cast. Irving, a fascinating starlet with a hint of the leonine to her glam, is terrific as Gillian, the film’s pivotal figure as a girl who grows from object of ogling to empowered engine of wrath. De Palma is also keen to the offbeat magnificence of Snodgress, Oscar-nominated herself several years earlier for Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) but little used afterwards, and Durning, who gets a marvellous mid-movie scene where, hurt and squirming under the weight of evil forces, he fends off Ellen’s solicitous invitations in wanting to remain alone and get drunk. It’s the sort of moment that contributes immeasurably to the texture of the film, and reveals an empathy for middle-aged compromise relatively rare in De Palma’s work, even if it doesn’t actually serve the story one iota.

De Palma constantly offers technically demanding shots, with the aid of cinematographer Richard H. Kline, that bind together multiple actions in single frames, and the editing by Paul Hirsch is something close to genius, in moments as seemingly minor as the test for psychic power Ellen and Hester hold at Gillian’s high school, her overpowering talent revealed as she sends an electric train run by mental power at a rocketing rate around a table, zipping past a chart, the clauses of which, the graduating levels of psychic power, are counted off one by one as Gillian’s power becomes clearer and clearer. Another is the shot towards the end where Gillian’s hand, trembling with new-found authority, fills the screen, Childress, with his withered hand redolent of secret impotence no matter how powerful he acts, in the background vibrating as vengeful energy is unleashed on him. The Fury is a tale of colliding and binding forces. The concurrent plotlines of Peter and Gillian are distinct, if destined to coincide, in their personal issues, ages, genders, sense of the world, and even rhythms of storytelling. Peter is already aware of the trap Gillian is walking into unawares, and the film’s deceptively action-thriller-toned first act segues into a quieter, sinister build-up as Gillian’s tale comes to the fore.

Hers is one of apparent homecoming, settling in at the institute where there’s an atmosphere of cheery fellowship and prodigious possibility: The Fury, in that sense, anticipates not only the X-Men films, but also the basic motif of the Harry Potter series, exploiting that atmosphere, and the attendant sense of longing that the exceptional and the outcast share in looking for good fellowship. But whereas in those films, the institutions are positive and offer refuge from harsh realities, as ever in De Palma here the institution is corrupt, the benign care a façade, albeit one that makes McKeever, Ellen, and Hester uneasy in sustaining. McKeever makes a weak attempt at rebelling against Childress by lying about Gillian’s talents, but Childress doesn’t have to share his charges psychic talents to spot he’s being bullshitted. De Palma builds his web of enmeshed parallels not only though crucial moments where Gillian accesses Robin’s mind and has flash visions of the future, but also in a teasing moment when Hester tells Gillian about her boyfriend, the younger woman unaware that she’s talking about the father of the boy she’s become psychically tethered to, describing him as a great dancer who’s only frustratingly difficult to get hold of.

When the two plot strands do finally meet, it comes in one of De Palma’s most ebulliently staged set pieces, as, at Peter’s insistence, Hester plans an escape for Gillian before Childress’s goons can take her out of the institute, going through an elaborately comic routine to arrange the crucial moment when Gillian can take off out the back door; she and Hester fly in a customary De Palma use of agonising slow motion where chains of cause and effect are identified in their components before they crash together and create chaos. John Williams’ largely Herrmann-esque score here offers for a few brief moments that would sound equally at home in E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) in conveying momentary, joyous liberation. Liberation, however, turns on a dime to desperation, as Hester accidentally knocks over an agent rushing to catch them, one moment of happenstance that gives them a clear run, and the pair converges on the taxi in which Peter waits, aiming a pistol at the pursuing car filled with more agents. But his excellent aim proves his undoing, for when he takes out the driver, the car swerves and strikes Hester, sending her crashing through a parked car’s window, a bloodied, instantly fatal demise. Another agent charges out of the neighbouring park and grasps Gillian: Peter, horrified at the sight of Hester in and act he is unwittingly caused (another constantly recurring De Palma touch), turns and shoots down the agent with punitive fury; Gillian regards the gun-wielding stranger who is her “saviour” with bewildered terror. It’s not the most expansive of De Palma’s set pieces, but it is still one of his most ruthless and lucidly composed, not only in the way he physically binds actions together and pursues them with dark irony, but for its thematic intelligence in illustrating the notion that violent resistance always claims innocent lives no matter how good the cause.

Like many of De Palma’s high career films, The Fury becomes a metaphorical tale of resistance to a corrupt order, with outsider heroes flailing in their attempts to penetrate the figurative (and sometimes literal) castles of their persecutors, who usually affect parental or romantic concern: such is true of Sisters, Phantom, Carrie, and Dressed to Kill (1980), Blow Out (1982), The Untouchables (1987), and Mission: Impossible (1996). Scarface (1983) and Femme Fatale (2002) would in differing fashions see the figures converge in epics of interior character conflict. Cassavettes’ marvellously malevolent Childress is a perverter and corrupter in the guise of friend and guide; like Sisters’ villainous psychiatrist and Phantom’s Swan, his plots begin to give way under the strain of trying to maintain a façade, but tearing that façade down properly usually comes at a punishing cost. The Fury also works as another parable of how a society rewards and destroys talent, like Phantom, as Robin can easily be construed as simply an inflated version of any heroic young jock. He is rewarded by being treated “like a prince”, to the extent of being basically given his attractive supervising doctor, Susan Charles (Fiona Lewis), as concubine, even as his aggressive instincts are tweaked and his rage unleashed by the regimen Childress has prescribed, to make the best of his abilities. The chief target of his new licence is, then, his lover, whom he finally kills in the most hideous fashion. What is created is a monster in control of his powers but not his mind or emotions, a perfect end product of Childress’ philosophy. Even here, there’s a dark, erotic joke at work, as Robin’s fulminating frustration is based in how his level of psychic control is not matched by physical control, still messy in a young man’s fashion and unable to sexually please Susan.

The inevitable disintegration is signalled when Susan coaxes Childress into letting her take Robin out to a fun fair in a brief break from experiments, unaware that Robin has already become too crazed and immoral: seeing a group of Arab men accompanying a prince, reminding him of the (fake) killers on the beach, he sends the prince’s Ferris wheel spinning out of control, car flying off through the air and crashing through a window upon his retinue. Robin repeats the trick later when he tortures Susan to death, spinning her around until her blood is painting the walls of their ritzy apartment in the PSI’s mansion headquarters. And, of course, in Robin himself and Childress’ operation, the centre cannot hold. Thus, when Peter and Gillian finally reach the PSI mansion, Gillian’s presence enrages Robin, who sees her as someone brought in to replace him. He kills Susan and two of Childress’s goons, and when Childress finally sends Peter to calm him down, Robin instead causes his own death, driving himself and his father out through a window to dangle from a high parapet. His personality disintegrates at precisely the moment he becomes a virtual god, and he tries to hurt his father rather than save himsef., and Peter hurls himself over the same high parapet in grief. It’s the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy, but Childress doesn’t have any time for that: waving his hands disgustedly (“Go on, get ‘em outta my sight!”), he instead sets about seducing Gillian as the next candidate.

Many of De Palma’s heroes finally fail in their attempts to undo evil and are left traumatised, if not dead, but Gillian evolves into one of his most triumphant, if finally frightening, heroes. Having absorbed from Robin at the point of death his honed gifts, now blended with her still-present moral awareness, she turns on Childress in the most memorable and effective of revolts, first blinding him, his gore-dripping eyes reminiscent of X: The Man the X-Ray Eyes (1963), and then giving him exactly what he wants, proof of an awesome new power, but not in the manner he intended. Reminiscent of the finale of Zabriskie Point (1970)—and, of course, De Palma would soon make a more overt tribute to Antonioni with Blow Out—Gillian blows Childress to pieces in a moment De Palma offers in distended instant replay, an orgasmic celebration of, yes, fury unleashed on the false father. It’s one of the great comeuppances in movie history, and not for the first or last time, De Palma proved that he was a bastard, but a magnificent kind of bastard.

Contagion (2011)

Director: Steven Soderbergh

By Roderick Heath

Time advances, aesthetics shift, technologies update, morals and social maxims evolve, but some things remain constant. Especially movie clichés. The disaster movie, for instance, has hardly changed in form in more than six decades. You take a threat to a slice of, or all of, humanity, and pit against it characters from all walks of life who try to survive and/or nullify the threat. It’s a nifty generic conceit that allows storytellers to work at once on panoramic and microcosmic levels and tap into common anxieties and fantasies about what might happen when things go to hell. One subgenre located at the nexus of the disaster and science fiction movies is bi-fi, where a biological threat is the agent of destruction.

Bi-fi nominally exploits the wonder and terror in quite real and immediate concerns about potential pandemics, perceiving how the porous boundaries in our global village render us ever less insulated against such shocks. But it often tends to exploit other, less specific anxieties as well: that doctors, those virtual new priests of the modern world, might suddenly stop being able to offer us absolution from fear; that governments might gleefully let slip their most authoritarian impulses given half the chance and muster us all into neat rows to die; or that our neighbours, friends and we ourselves might, with the provocations of impending chaos, suddenly turn into marauding looters and killers when society starts crumbling. Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, from a script by Scott Z. Burns, is immediately identifiable as belonging to the genre, and yet it possesses a veneer of the dispassionate analytical cinema Soderbergh turned on the likes of Traffic (2001) and Che (2008).

There’s no kind way to say that Contagion is one of the worst major recent films I’ve seen, so…that’ll have to do. The only wonder and terror Contagion generates is at the profligate expenditure of talent and the dizzying shapelessness of the filmmaking that can’t even rise to the level of the cheesiest ’70s all-star disaster flick or the average mid-’90s telemovie. I’ve confessed before my long-running distrust of Soderbergh’s oeuvre, and whereas Che made me consider laying down my arms, Contagion has me all guns blazing again. There’s something threatening about this terminally bland, unfocused, stake-free collage of reputable thespians achieving poses of mild concern in a procession of offices and labs, as if it presages an era in which, freed from the necessity engendered by shooting on real film, Hollywood’s technocrats can just slap together a project over the weekend and pass it off as a movie. Soderbergh directs with a pretence to docudrama spareness, and yet, as ever, I wonder if he’s ever watched a good one, so completely does he forget to include the “drama” half of the equation and so badly does he fumble the “docu” part. In Contagion, near-apocalyptic forces are unleashed, and yet even the few glimpses we get of chaos and dissolution are so neat and tritely staged that I seriously started to wonder if anyone in Hollywood knows what the rest of the world looks like, beyond the confines of select hotels and institutions.

Soderbergh, to his credit, kicks things off with some fast-paced montage work, as he introduces a Patient Zero, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), from whom a ripple of unintentional calamity spreads outwards. People she met in a Hong Kong casino, including a Ukrainian model (Daria Strokous) and a young local waiter (Chui Tien You), begin folding up and dying all around the world. After a stopover in Chicago for a quickie with a former boyfriend, Beth returns home to Minneapolis to her husband, Mitch (Matt Damon), and her kids. She collapses in a fit in the kitchen and is rushed to hospital, where a postmortem reveals signs of a contagion so terrifying the pathologist tells his assistant to “call everyone!” The A-Team of medical science springs into action, as various health organisations rush to identify and find a solution to the disease, which begins to prove untreatable and fatal to a staggering number of the population. Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne), a bigwig at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, contends first with the problem of arranging a response whilst worrying it might all prove to be another over-hyped menace.

Cheever sets Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) on the task of tracking the disease’s landfall in America and then arranging treatment and containment strategies. WHO official Dr. Leila Orontes (Marion Cotillard) tries to zero in on the source of infection, contending with obstructive Chinese officials, before finally being kidnapped by her liaison, Sun Feng (Chin Han), who feels obliged to try to use her as barter for a supposed secret cure the American and French governments are sitting on to save the remnants of his village. As the crisis worsens, Mitch, who’s immune, tries to weather the storms in the Minnesota suburbs as mass hysteria and mortality set in: after his stepson dies from the disease, he tries to keep his daughter Jory (Anna Jacoby-Heron) safe, fending off visits from her boyfriend Andrew (Brian J. O’Donnell). Meanwhile some plucky researchers, including CDC research wizards Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle) and David Eisenberg (Demetri Martin), and Ian Sussman (Elliott Gould), a grizzled outsider who plays by his own rules, become the first to grow the microbes successfully and lay the groundwork for finding a vaccine.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a less convincing and compelling portrait of an international crisis than in this movie. Whilst Soderbergh is obviously trying to avoid the trashy hype of the likes of Outbreak (1995), he doesn’t succeed in filling his work with anything else that’s persuasive. The pretensions to realism are constantly undercut by the proliferation of famous movie actors playing characters with romance novel names, glimpsed in stodgy vignettes (some, like Martin and Gould, wasted to an astonishing degree). Any intended commitment to procedural integrity and continuity is quickly jettisoned as major plot elements, like Sussman’s and Hextall’s labours, are reduced to glib throwaways, in contrast with a ’30s biopic like The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) that was able to develop not only a sense of process but also of drama in the process of trying to combat a microbe, not to mention a real classic of bi-fi like The Andromeda Strain (1970). There’s a far too cute piece of insta-exposition when the researchers manage to obtain security recordings that show Beth meeting several of the other infected people in pristine clarity and perfect situated detail.

In failing to deal interestingly with the disease itself, therefore, one might expect the real weight of Contagion’s interests to fall on another area, but instead it spreads itself so thinly that it communicates absolutely nothing with depth. There’s no continuity of mood or even detail from scene to scene: whilst there are occasional cutaways to shots of soldiers amassing to impose and maintain blockades, the film fails utterly to evolve a proper visual and thematic pattern of deepening crisis and desperate straits, as it doesn’t even seem able to decide on what level we should take the impact of the disease. Even in the brief vignettes of lawlessness and chaos glimpsed through Mitch’s eyes, there’s something stilted and antiseptic about the whole affair, with barely any sense of contiguity between the various story and character strands. Soderbergh’s idea of upsetting audience expectations is to give a shot of Gwyneth Paltrow’s head being peeled open in an autopsy. Any five minutes of George Romero’s The Crazies (1972) have more existential angst, ruthlessness, and bitter irony than the entirety of this addled slop.

Soderbergh can’t even decide how serious the problem he’s depicting is. While in one frame we’re seeing desperation and danger in the suburbs, as things around Mitch start to resemble The Omega Man (1972) or something, and rows of corpses are buried in mass graves a la The Devils (1971), in another we have our doctor heroes in their still perfectly functional labs looking like they just stepped out of the pages of a Vogue Oscar preview spread. Characters come and go with rapidity and jarring disconnection that borders on contempt for storytelling, for example, when Hextall’s doctor father (Dan Flannery), who falls sick after weeks of labouring with disease victims, is trucked in three-quarters of the way through the film in a rather limp stab at stirring emotional involvement for Hextall, who has taken an experimental vaccine to test its effectiveness. Even Irwin Allen’s terrible The Swarm (1978) manages to extract more drama out of such an act than this film does, failing as it does to shake Ehle’s Mona Lisa smile a fraction of a millimetre. For a film that seems to propose itself as being about detail and studying chains of cause and effect, Contagion looks and feels so segmented and disconnected that it ends up operating a bit like a terrorist organisation full of cells who have no idea what each other are up to. Soderbergh has long had pretences to being a politically conscious filmmaker, and yet his politics and methods of relaying them are hackneyed, and here they are so sketchy and silly as to beggar belief. In the cheesiest attempt to raise a sort of everything-is-connected consciousness I can possibly imagine, the very last scene is the worst in this regard, as Soderbergh returns to the actual process of the first contamination of a pig Beth eats as having resulted from the bulldozing of forest by the corporation for which Beth was an executive.

Along the way, there are portraits of the untrustworthiness of Asians on both the official and personal level, with the latter supposedly leavened by Leila’s eventual empathy and collusion with her kidnappers, as she is seen tutoring kids in Sun Feng’s village—maybe more third world villages should shanghai brilliant white women—and rushing back to them when she learns they’ve been given a placebo in exchange for her. Like many other things in the movie, but perhaps most representative, this subplot is so weakly developed and offhandedly treated that it results in head-scratching bewilderment as to what Soderbergh and Burns thought they were accomplishing. Jude Law contributes the film’s most hilariously awful element, playing blogger and freelance Aussie journalist Adam Krumwiedler, the first of what will undoubtedly be many gross caricatures of Julian Assange in movies, who spreads whipped-up stories about corruption, secret cures, and malfeasance via the internet—because the internet and especially bloggers are evil, don’t you know—and turns out to be trying to make money by flogging a product called Forsythia that falsely claims to be a cure for the disease. Soderbergh gives us repeated scenes of Krumwiedler, complete with crooked front teeth, meeting with a hedge fund rep, billed in the credits as “Hedge Fund Man in Park” (Randy Lowell) to give you an idea of the precision screenwriting that went into this aspect, selling him on helping him flog Forsythia to a populace whom Krumwielder manipulates with rumours and conspiracy theories. It’s the partnership of the hypocritical scare-mongering left and the greedy, feckless right we’ve all not been waiting to see in a movie. Speaking of scene progressions that fail to make sense: in one scene Krumwiedler’s wearing a full-body suit to avoid being infected, and yet soon after he’s back chatting to the Hedge Fund guy in a public place without any protection at all, making it utterly apparent Soderbergh shot these scenes contiguously without pausing to think about the psychological or practical considerations of these characters in the flow of such a situation.

Krumwiedler’s wickedness continues when he attempts to disgrace Cheever by uncovering how Cheever tried to get his wife (Sanaa Lathan) to leave Chicago, and, of course she, like all foolish wives, lets it slip to friends, and so on and so forth—not that this plot element has actual consequences apart from causing Fishburne’s affect of stony decency to become slightly stiffer during press conferences. That Cheever’s actually a decent bloke is illustrated through his conversations with cleaning man Roger (John Hawkes, who might have reasonably expected his Winter’s Bone work might elevate out of parts like this), to whose son he gives his own dose of the vaccine once it arrives, because, well, he’s just good that way. Krumwiedler and taciturn Asians are not the limits of the film’s shallow villains, for Mears also has to deal with a ludicrously nasty Minnesota Department of Health official (Tara Mallen) on the way. One of the film’s few moments of any incipient menace and tragedy comes when Mears awakens in a hotel room to find herself infected, and hurries to track down the hotel employees she may have passed it on to. She is later glimpsed lying with other victims in the disease centre she helped set up, but Soderbergh can’t wring any irony out of that, chiefly because he segues into another cheap piece of pseudo-irony, as Cheever learns he can’t extract her to bring her to the CDC’s better facilities because the plane used for this has commandeered for a sick congressman.

Damon’s part as the lone assailed Everyman in this scenario has rightly been regarded as the best element of the film: certainly Damon plays Mitch, who staves off grief and anger at the sudden loss of wife and stepson and discovery of her infidelity to get down to the hard necessities of survival, with his usual cagey skill. He’s particularly good in the moment when he’s told his wife has died, the reporting medicos stating it in such a dispassionate fashion he doesn’t register the fact and goes on to ask to see her. But even in his subplot, the only real street-level vignette of the movie, Contagion displays a woeful lack of challenging darkness or skill in staging. Mitch glimpses riots in supermarkets—one infected woman comes up to him and gives a stage cough that sets him shepherding Jory away again—and signs of murder and pillage in neighbouring houses. But the biggest problem he has to deal with is keeping Andrew away from his daughter, who pouts and pounds out her frustrations on her iPhone, thus reminding us that, as bloggers are evil, so, too, all modern teens are self-involved and tech-addled to the point where even a major modern disaster all around them won’t inspire them to get their heads out of their asses. The profundity just keeps on a-comin’, folks. Even some of the smaller bits of business are clichéd, like an early moment where an infected man wanders dazedly in front of a truck, this being the second recent movie in a row I saw with this scene in it.

Not very long into Contagion I began to think about Fernando Mireilles’s popularly dismissed Blindness (2008), which, whilst overlong and excessively self-conscious, nonetheless employed and explored much of the same imagery and situational dynamics as Soderbergh’s film, whilst actually managing to invest them with personal and philosophical weight, as well as a grinding corporeal effect. Contagion, whilst a nominally more “believable” and parable-free approach to such a calamitous story, actually startled me with the lack of substance, the lack of immediacy, the lack of any genuine thought-provocation, invested in it. One aspect that particularly struck me was the fashion in which Contagion recycles a motif from one of the earliest bi-fi movies, Val Guest’s 80,000 Suspects (1963), in which Yolande Donlan’s unfaithful wife is a Typhoid Mary spreading disease throughout London. The fascinating repetition of the association of adultery and female sexual transgression reveals that, under all the new-age hype and facile realism, very little has changed in the (probably unconscious) minds of many mainstream filmmakers. Contagion finally limps through to a final narrative phase where the threat dissipates and yet the movie steadfastly refuses to end until we get some unearned emotional milking (Mitch weeping for Beth at last, and Jory getting to dance with Andrew in a makeshift living room Prom Night). All that said, there are one or two scenes, as when Mears chases down one of Beth’s infected coworkers on a bus and particularly that in which Mears reports her own illness to Cheever, in which the strength of this high-caliber cast wasn’t wasted entirely—but not for want of trying. Soderbergh has reportedly been kicking about the idea of retiring. He should have done it sooner, because if this is what the end of the world looks like, we’ll go out with not a bang, but with a whimper of boredom.

Womb (2010)

Director/Screenwriter: Benedek Fliegauf

By Roderick Heath

Films that use the ideas of the science fiction genre to genuinely serious investigatory or poetic ends are pretty few and far between in today’s cinema. If they are taking those ideas seriously at all, it’s more likely to be on a conceptual, rather than psychological or emotional, plane. A coldly beautiful and quietly dazzling exercise in psychosexual provocation, as well as a meditation on mortality and personality with a blend of genre with high Freudian perversity, Womb easily bests the last mainstream film to tackle the moral and humanitarian ramifications of cloning, 2010’s unfocused and soapy Never Let Me Go, for narrative density and effect. Fleigauf’s film expands its ideas with genuinely unsettling and affecting permutations that retain a touch of the otherworldly and yet also proceeds with a nerveless logic.

Strangely, Womb has gained little attention, though not too surprisingly, as it’s inevitably noncommercial; I only came across it by chance, dumped onto DVD, in spite of sporting two excellent young stars: Eva Green, an actress who embodies something intelligent yet provocative and insinuatingly decadent even in the most humdrum of parts, and the rubbery-limbed Matt Smith, currently inhabiting the role of Doctor Who. Indeed, it’s been a good year for dumped Green films, also including the lesser but still interesting Cracks.

At the outset of Fleigauf’s film, Green is a solitary woman sitting on the balcony of her remote house, perched on stilts in the midst of a tidal plain, cradling a belly bulging with pregnancy, thanking, in voiceover, someone for this gift. Fliegauf then jumps back many years in the past to when Green’s character, Rebecca, was nine years old (played at that age by Ruby O. Fee), and staying for a vacation with her grandfather. She encountered a boy, Thomas (Tristan Christopher), when he took a break from being chased about by local hooligans to say hello, and they swiftly became inseparable friends, with Rebecca practically absorbed by Thomas’ parents, Ralph and Judith (Mike Leigh regulars Peter Wight and Lesley Manville), into their family. The two children spent an idyllic vacation in spite of the typically northern European, tempestuous, and glowering atmosphere of the seaside locale, with its pebbly beaches and beautifully blasted shores and sands, until Rebecca finally had to leave to join her mother who was taking a job in Tokyo. The night before she leaves, Tom announces he’s going to see her off and give her a going-away present, but he never shows up.

Rebecca returns over a decade later, having gained a degree and a profession as a designer of software for acoustic devices, to take over her since-deceased grandfather’s house and to look for Tom. When she finds him, he’s grown into the agreeable adult form of Smith. When Rebecca finds his current abode, still in the same seaside town that he loves too much to leave, she finds Rose (Natalia Tena) sitting on the floor in her undies, reading a book. But she’s just a casual pick-up, and she gets frustrated and stomps out when faced with Rebecca and Tom’s instantaneously resumed mutual fascination: “Maybe you two should start sniffing each other.” Tom gives Rebecca the present she was supposed to receive, a matchbox containing a snail, now long dead.

Tom, who is now a biology student and an activist, is planning a demonstration at a new cloning centre called Sparkling Park, and has a crate full of cockroaches ready to release to cause alarm amongst the security staff. Rebecca joins him for this jaunt, but when she gets him to pull his car over so she can go take a pee in the grass, and he starts to get out after her, she hears the unmistakeable sound of another car hitting him at speed. Fleigauf and Green pull off this scene with terrific dispassion and a proper sense of the jarring shock of sudden, complete, irretrievable loss registered in the ever so slightly widening eyes of Rebecca as she surveys Tom’s broken body. Except that it’s not irretrievable, not anymore. As Tom’s parents grieve, Rebecca retains her sphinx-like smile, and presents them with a solution: that they clone Tom, and she will act his surrogate mother. Judith rejects the notion, stating that, “We’re atheists…but that doesn’t mean we can rummage in our deceased’s grave…we are not farm animals…we accept what life gives us!” Rebecca presses ahead, however, going to Sparkling Park, where Rose, who works there, catches sight of her. Months later, Rebecca gives birth to Tom redux, and begins to raise him as her own son.

What end such an act can possibly have, and all its manifold and troubling imputations, looms with constant tension throughout Womb, as Fleigauf describes young Tommy’s growth from bulge in Rebecca’s belly to upright young man. Whether Rebecca can continue to treat Tommy as simply her own child who happens to also be giving the genetic material of her great love a second chance at life, or if she’s nursing a darker, if still possibly inchoate, plan to make him a substitute, and what his reaction to the inevitable, practically Greek tragic moment of realisation will be is the crucial question, one that hovers as not entirely resolved until the very end.

In the meantime, Rebecca keeps the truth of Tommy’s origins from him, and when he has an encounter with another cloned youngster, Dima (Gina Stiebitz), he learns of the intense social hatred toward clones. Other concerned mothers, worried when Rebecca invites Dima unknowingly to Tommy’s birthday party, meet with her and explain, in a note-perfect transposition of such anxieties from more familiar worrisome types, how they don’t want their children exposed to the unknown influence of these strange, unnatural entities. But word soon reaches the parents of Tommy’s friends about his genetic origins, thanks to Rose, and when Tommy asks Rebecca why nobody came to his party, Rebecca only says, “Because they’re stupid!” The next day she packs up and moves them both out to the remote house glimpsed at the beginning, where Rebecca continues to live until Tommy is grown, burgeoning into a man eerily similar to his earlier incarnation, with a deep interest in nature and a loopy sense of childish fun. When he moves a girlfriend from college, Monica (Hannah Murray), into the house, the stage is set for possibly the strangest ménage-a-trois, seething beneath the surface and constantly sensed by all parties without quite taking shape, in cinema history.

Fliegauf maintains a tremendous formal control over Womb, which could easily have toppled into torpid psychodrama or arty sterility. His film bears a distinct resemblance, in setting as well as style and the chilly anthropological deconstruction, to the early work of Roman Polanski. Shot in the Sylt region in Germany, near the Danish border, with its many gradations in hazy beauty, the setting presents a perfect barometer for the oedipal drama unfolding with the mood of increasing isolation from the real world. As far as films that use natural settings to define and dominate the mood of a film, Womb stands far above just about any work of recent cinema, except ironically Polanski’s The Ghost Writer (2010).

The womb of the title is both Rebecca’s physical womb, of course, cradle and battlefield of this experiment in human intransigence and longing, but also the house into which she moves to continue her experiment in peace. Fliegauf pieces together telling detail as he effectively describes a warped family situation with cues, usually subliminal and yet constantly accumulating, occasionally to overflowing, as when Rebecca offers herself to a barely adolescent Tommy in a fashion he doesn’t at all understand. Simultaneously, there’s a distinct echo of biblical myth in the very Garden of Eden where the second-generation man Cain must marry his mother Eve as a precursor to new life: Rebecca retreats into her own little Eden. Images of mother and infant bearing distinct similarities to those seen in The Tree of Life flow by, except whereas there is mystery in familiar human growth—no one’s ever quite sure what a child will look like as it grows—here there is a chilly, preordained sense of how Tommy is going to grow up, what he’ll think, feel, what he’ll be excited by—and what he’ll be turned on by.

There’s a particularly keen condensation of parental affection, childish destructiveness, and unspoken suspicion in a movement in which Rebecca gives Tommy a toy robotic dinosaur, as cruelly adorable as possible, which Tommy along with a boy he befriends then buries in the sand: it’s the sort of thing a boy his age does to toys, an act that’s usually thoughtless but that parents can feel is somehow a rejection of them, and imbued here with another layer as Tommy acts out a detestation of simulacrums. Fliegauf relies on the audience blanching at a lifelike thing being treated in such a fashion, aware that Tommy himself would be considered such a thing, requiring Rebecca’s retreat to the edge of the earth to pillow him from that treatment. “Dima is the victim of artificial incest!” one of the village mothers says in a key, wryly amusing, yet highly discomforting scene: “Her mother gave birth to her own mother!” The ground seems set for another portrayal of small-mindedness and reactionary impulses through a gimmicky prism, but Fliegauf loads the situation thanks to the awareness that Rebecca’s intentions for her own clone are not entirely wholesome. Rebecca, sensing the danger of being caught outside the herd, immediately acquiesces and plays along. Where exactly all the ethics review panels went to in this brave new world isn’t stated, but it’s clear the act of cloning has already been commercialised out of sight, as one of the reasons Tom was protesting the cloning centre was its plan to make most of its money out of “cyberbitches”, cloned prostitutes, and endlessly reproduced household pets.

At the outset, Womb seems cast in the mould of something like Julio Medem’s Lovers of the Arctic Circle (1999) in portraying Rebecca and Tom’s intense connection as something almost sublime and preordained, and Tom’s quirky energy seems quite in line with that familiar variety of lively young man. Smith, however, has a gift for suggesting something slightly alien and asocial in his characters as well as charming and zany. When Rebecca walks back into Tom’s life after years, she doesn’t even need to say her name for him to recognise her, and soon they’re so fixated on each other that they completely ignore anyone else in their world. Their initial reuniting is painfully brief, so Rebecca seems to hope that this innate bond will be sustained as Tommy grows into a man. Yet, for the most part, she plays the almost-perfect mother, with a job that allows her to work from home and continue constant interaction; when Tommy’s grown, she tiptoes into his bedroom to lay down a breakfast tray for him and Monica, whom she’s never met. Monica’s arrival starts a breakdown in Rebecca’s equilibrium: she’s lived without any kind of sexual contact all these years—it’s revealed in the most alarming fashion possible that she’s still a virgin—and her still-manifest physical desire for Tommy, and, it becomes increasingly clear in spite of all his presuppositions, his for her, begins to boil over.

Incest seems to be emerging as a new subject for would-be provocateurs in the artier cinema brackets, whilst films that try to describe and encompass the repetitive chains of birth, growth, and creation that govern human life seem to reflect a current wave in the zeitgeist: some of the year’s other top films, include The Tree of Life, Hanna, Attenberg, and Mysteries of Lisbon, all present some consistent thematic concerns with this developmental theme, as children become products of, and vessels for, the ambitions and mistakes of their parents. Rarely has the most profound taboo been approached with such supple, nerveless skill as in this film, whilst the theme is carefully leavened by the story frame: there is awareness that Tommy is not a natural son as it would once have been defined, and yet he’s bound to Rebecca in the most intimate way as a product of her body, if not of her genes. Whether Tommy retains an actual bond with Rebecca that transcends the liminal, or whether he’s just responding to endless subtle signals in her manner over the years, is impossible to discern; nor, is it easy to tease apart the specific ramifications of the situation it presents, with their scifi impetus, from any normal mother’s relationship with a grown son who in some ways personifies her husband grown young again. In any event, Womb is a film infused with a sonorous cool and an emotional intensity that builds to an inevitable outburst, which comes when his other mother, Judith, turns up at the house, looking like a gorgon of gnawed conscience, not speaking a word as she partakes of this remake of her son and reels away with profound and baleful knowledge.

This episode lodges a fresh disquiet in Tommy which Smith realises as a marvellous climax of actorly slow burn. Tommy, Rebecca, and Monica are at the breakfast table, his final exhaustion with Rebecca’s evasions and estrangement exploding as he slams a clogged salt shaker repeatedly upon the table and turns the kitchen upside down until he procures a handful of salt to smother his meal, before pointing to his mother and saying the fateful words in regards to Judith, “I know her.” Monica’s pathos in trying to plead for her lover to emerge from the bathroom where he locks himself and realising that she’s the superfluous point in this triangle, causes her to flee. At last, Rebecca delivers self-knowledge to Tommy, and he rests for a bleak and terrible moment on an edge of powerful feeling that will resolve either in matricide or sex—either way, a primal taboo. As it happens, sex prevails. Tommy finally ends Rebecca’s virginity and then flees the house, having fulfilled exactly what Rebecca wanted—to have a real child by Tommy—and finally free to find some purpose for himself. The mood seems at last unbearable, except that in the final shot, as Tommy disappears into the murk, Rebecca switches on a light within the house: now, at last, each is only just recommencing life. Womb is a strange, troubling, fascinating waking dream.

Flash Gordon (1980)

Director: Mike Hodges

By Roderick Heath

It’s a little difficult to write a coherent piece on Mike Hodges’ cult classic Flash Gordon without descending into fetishising its variegated fragments of dazzling impression like a Gustav Klimt painting: Colour! Queen music! Ornella Muti’s thighs! Brian Blessed’s thighs! Today, the popular cinema culture feels an overwhelming need to validate and pump up the mythical seriousness of comic book fare, complete with epic-scaled special effects in which “believability” is a constant maxim. Look at the way Michael Bay tries to cloak his ludicrous Transformers movies with images of martial nobility and heavy-duty patriotism whilst his robots brawl in pseudo-realistic blurs of incoherent motion. Our age is a complete inversion of the camp, pop-art-inflected likes of the Batman TV series and films like Danger: Diabolik (1967) and Barbarella (1968). There’s some good reason for that inversion: campy, self-conscious superhero and comic book flicks eventually became embarrassing to their fans, because camp too often became a lazy creative crutch.

In 1980, Dino De Laurentiis, producer of Danger: Diabolik and Barbarella, and Lorenzo Semple Jr., occasional writer on Batman, collaborated on an adaptation of Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, the seminal ’30s Buck Rogers rip-off that became one of the most recognisable icons of juvenile derring-do, interspersed with fantastical landscapes and dollops of soft-core sexuality. De Laurentiis and Semple had already collaborated on their sorry sack of a King Kong (1976) remake, and the Italian maestro’s attempts to conquer Hollywood through science fiction and horror movies were mostly disastrous, often both aesthetically and financially. George Lucas developed his original Star Wars material because De Laurentiis had bought the rights to Flash Gordon before he could. After trying to interest several high-profile directors in giving their distinctive personal stamp on the material, including Federico Fellini and Nicholas Roeg, De Laurentiis finished up hiring perhaps the least likely candidate for such a project: British director Mike Hodges, most famous for his bone-crunching gangster film Get Carter (1971).

The jump between such cast-iron fare and the delirious psychedelia and playful action of Flash Gordon seems colossal, though Hodges’ previous film was a step in a science-fiction direction—an adaptation of Michael Crichton’s The Terminal Man (1973). Even more problematic was the fact that Hodges, working with De Laurentiis’ mostly Italian crew, essentially had to improvise everything but the dialogue and basic story from day to day during the shoot. Hodges’ Flash Gordon, which provided a sort of postdated antecedent and satiric mirror of Star Wars, nonetheless retains a rollicking verve and delicious sense of fun, as well as a genuinely rich evocation of those pop-art roots. It’s far better than Barbarella, and sustained by a remarkably sturdy sense of when to take the material seriously and when to send it up.

Flash (Sam J. Jones) is in this incarnation an American football champion on holiday in the off season. He meets travel agent Dale Arden (Melody Anderson) on a plane just when Earth is beset by showers of fiery meteorites that announce the campaign of terror begun by alien dictator Ming the Merciless (Max Von Sydow). The very opening of the film depicts Ming being presented with Earth as a suitable plaything and target for destruction by his vizier Klytus (Peter Wyngarde) to sate Ming’s boredom. The pilots of Flash and Dale’s plane are sucked out of the cockpit when it is punctured by a meteorite, forcing Flash to use his rudimentary flying skills to make an emergency landing.The plane crashes into the remote observatory/laboratory in which Dr. Hans Zarkov (Chaim Topol), a genius kicked out of NASA because of his much-derided fear of alien invasion, has built a homemade rocket ship. Zarkov is near-crazed by his determination to search for the alien threat, and needing a second passenger to help him operate the controls after his assistant Munson (William Hootkins) runs off, he kidnaps Flash and Dale by convincing them his ship is a telephone booth. After a tussle, they’re launched into space, sucked into a wormhole, and emerge on Mongo, Ming’s home planet, where they’re taken prisoner and presented to Ming’s court.

Hodges’ flashy visuals, with inestimable contributions by Danilo Donati’s wild production fancies and Gilbert Taylor’s terrific photography, present a vision of totalised style that suits this material perfectly. Hodges’ accounts of the film’s shooting reveal the vast difference between the kind of production De Laurentiis, Donati, and their crew were used to, compared with the oncoming age of Hollywood’s ruthlessly pedantic blockbuster infrastructure, as Donati hurled together gigantic sets for the hell of it and hired famous artists to work for weeks on background paintings, none of which could be used. This style of working perhaps explains why so many of De Laurentiis’ genre excursions finished up as giant messes; but Hodges seems to have had exactly the right sort of wit to make it all work for him.

The opening credits, offering fleeting visions of Raymond’s strip flickering by in a pop-culture dream to the driving throb and declarative choruses of Queen’s theme song, give context for what follows in the same bold, Sunday comic colour and two-dimensional illustrative elegance as Raymond’s pictures. Ming’s kingdom is a candy-tint sprawl of fantastically attired aliens and settings, from the oddly delightful, much-victimised lizard-men who appear throughout, to the army of scantily dressed concubines, and the winged, jockstrap-clad Hawkmen led by Prince Vultan (Brian Blessed at his most spectacularly hambone). Jones, a minor hunk of beefcake whose greatest claim to fame before this was as a Playgirl centrefold, doesn’t display great acting chops, and yet, this makes him oddly perfect as Flash, who’s defined by his slightly dim, utterly innocent approach to life’s problems. “This guy’s a psycho!” he blurts when he witnesses Ming’s rough justice for the first time. He’s immediately plunged into a parade of cliffhangers and deadly situations. In perhaps the film’s most inspired coincidence of comedy and action, Flash starts a brawl with Ming’s henchmen, and, initially outmatched, he catches a ball-shaped ornament Zarkov tosses to him and immediately starts devastating them with his football prowess, with Dale giving pep-rally cheers. Klytus recognises the “barbaric game” and gives plays to the guards, while Zarkov finally accidentally knocks Flash out with a pass. Flash is sentenced to death in a gas chamber, whilst Dale is enslaved by Ming as a prospective bride. But Flash is saved by the conniving of Ming’s lusty daughter Aura (Ornella Muti), who arranges with one of her lovers, a doctor (Stanley Lebor), to help Flash survive the gas. She then spirits him away to the forest kingdom of Arboria, and begs another of her lovers, Prince Barin (Timothy Dalton), to shelter Flash.

Hodges treads a tightrope throughout Flash Gordon and stays on it for the most part, never allowing the film to become too silly whilst keeping tongue in cheek all the time. It helps that he plays the film’s serial-like set-pieces seriously, including Flash’s being forced by Vultan to engage in a deadly test of manhood for the Arboreans by reaching into different cavities in a tree stump where a poisonous creature lives, and later his death-match with Barin on a moving disc out of which lethal spikes randomly protrude. Dale even gets in on the act, besting a bunch of Ming’s blind pig-men guards with kick-ass élan, yet with the witty little touch of her constantly pausing to move out of the way the ludicrously glam high heels she kicked off to do battle until she’s done and can put them on again. The special effects are a different proposition, an advancement on the tinny craft usually seen zipping about on wires with firecrackers in the the ’30s and ’40s serial versions of the strip, and yet still paying more than a wink to their cheesy glee, as hordes of Hawkmen dive through the clouds bouncing about on wires, and suspiciously phallic rockets zip through the hallucinogenic skies of Mongo and its moons.

Hodges’ film came out eight years after Michael Benveniste and Howard Ziehm’s Flesh Gordon satirised the strip in a semi-pornographic, but startlingly accurate fashion, and some critics actually prefer that version. A not entirely dissimilar sense of the strip’s sexuality percolates more subtly throughout this one; after some surprise, Hodges admitted he had learnt just how strong the strip’s influence was on American friends’ early sexual fantasies, and pays some tribute to it, with Aura’s provocative horniness and the eventual S&M-accented torture of Flash and Aura. “We don’t like doing this at all!” claims spandex-clad bitch-queen General Kala (Mariangela Melato) in between lusty blows of a whip on Aura’s back; Klytus stops her with the even more insidious proposal: “Bring me the bore-worms!” Hodges even has famed playwright John Osbourne appear as a high priest whom he frames to look as if he’s masturbating, though he’s actually just engaged in a religious rite. A great pleasure of the film is that everyone seems to be in the right key of overlarge and funny, yet not excessive or mocking, performance. Von Sydow, relishing his first truly nonsensical role after two decades of suffering antiheroes and icy villains, makes a gloriously stylish, even sexy, but deeply psychopathic Ming, strutting through the proceedings with a concise physicality and arch attitude. Just as good is the mordant purr of Wyngarde’s masked Klytus. Muti’s overripe sexuality, practically a cult fetish in itself, neatly contrasts Anderson’s perfectly pitched turn as Dale—I have no idea why the only other film I’ve seen her in is Dead and Buried (1981)—and of course there’s a catfight between the pair. Dalton clearly laid his claim not only to his ill-fated, underrated turn as James Bond, but also his Errol Flynn-esque bad guy in The Rocketeer (1991) with his amazingly dashing performance as Barin, whose instant enmity for Flash is countered by Flash’s gentlemanliness, and he catches on to this whole Earthling decency thing.

This Flash Gordon was misinterpreted as a spoof by some at the time of release, but it’s really a classic swashbuckler with a grand sense of humour about itself. It’s the film’s refusal to modernise its plot and visuals or cynically mock the values it embodies, even whilst being very funny about everything else, that finally make it more than colour and motion. Flash is a patently outdated figure, but like Richard Donner’s similarly strong Superman (1978), the disparity is shoved aside when Flash is stuck into a situation that requires precisely his kind of naïveté. Throughout the film, treated with an ironic glint but with a hint of enough substance to hold it together dramatically, is the spectacle of the human values Flash, Dale, and Zarkov retain that easily, constantly better the cruel, powerful, yet rather sloppy omnipotence of Ming and his followers. There’s a witty and affecting episode in which Klytus and Kala try to brainwash Zarkov, parsing through his memories back to his Jewish roots in Hitler’s Germany: “Now he showed promise,” Klytus purrs upon seeing the dictator. But Zarkov thwarts them by keeping a litany of human arts and sciences flowing through his mind. Flash’s example impresses Barin and also Vartan and his Hawkmen, who follow him into battle, and Flash, with his guileless purity, resists Ming’s offer to give him Earth to reign over. Ming’s attempt to marry Dale comes as circling spacecraft trail signs that read, “All creatures will make merry…Under pain of death,” and the High Priest (Philip Stone) has to amend his marriage vows for Ming: “Do you promise…not to blast her into space…ah, until such time as you grow weary of her?”

Late in the film, Hodges offers a battle sequence that strikes a sturdy balance between genuine spectacle and tacky absurdity, as Flash and Vartan entrap one of Ming’s spaceships and board in a sequence that suggests a mating of The Sea Hawk (1940), Wagnerian myth, and a Peter Pan pantomime. Flash makes a suicide drive into Ming’s defences to bring about a catastrophic explosion that will allow the conquest of his citadel, but Barin’s action within helps Flash make Ming see the point in an hilariously apt finale. Key to a lot of the film’s high-flying impact, particularly in this sequence, is the terrific score provided by Queen (all together now: Flash! Ahh-ahhh!), standing in some contrast to the band’s overblown contribution to Highlander (1986), and orchestrations by Howard Blake. The film’s final shot pays a winking tribute to the end of Terence Fisher’s Dracula (1958) as Ming’s hypnotic ring is all that’s left of his dissolved body, yet suggesting his survival: The End? asks the closing title, but no sequels were forthcoming. Which perhaps is just as well, as it’s hard to imagine how this film’s raucous invention could have been extended without descending into excess. But when Transformers 3 steals the box office and Bay’s notion of fantastic cinema poisons minds like the sputum of some fantastic space slug, it’s not hard to wish for an alternative dimension where Flash stills stands for every one of us.

Stalker (1979)

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky

By Roderick Heath

Andrei Tarkovsky is both notorious and adulated amongst movie fans as the maker of some of the most objectively forbidding films ever made, as well as several of the greatest. His patient, immersive, defiantly ambiguous works represent what is often considered to be one definitive extreme in cinema style. Tarkovsky’s movies are exemplified by their attempts to articulate things that are virtually inexpressible, and yet still, somehow, are part of the common pool of experience, and Tarkovsky wanted to provoke his audience to higher levels of awareness of just what’s going on in the cinematic space before them, but also to force the viewers to deal with their own preoccupations and interpretations. As such, Tarkovsky’s films manage to convey two almost disparate visions of film as an art, as the working definition of eccentric, anti-populist, “challenging” cinema, and yet also the products of an artistic sensibility that prizes the viewer’s receptivity. Tarkovsky’s approach could become enigmatic, even abstract, but at the same time he seemed to be trying to avoid mere obscurity or alienation: for the most part his images, conveyed through his famous fondness for long takes and extended shots that sometimes seem to be searching for some event or epiphany to give them purpose, are deceptively lucid, even guileless. And yet he knew precisely when and how to starve the audience’s flow of information, to force their interactive engagement with his material, the opposite of becoming absorbed by a standard narrative flow. For Tarkovsky cinema was not so much an intellectual game to be solved and broken down, but rather to be experienced on an emotional and intuitive level as well as the intellectual, but with a far broader and less forced definition of experience and emotion than that offered by most commercial cinema. Tarkovsky could offer some of the familiar elements of fine cinema, like smart writing, a vivid story, and nuanced acting, as much as any director, but subordinated them to his own cinematic ideals. In any event, his road less travelled represented a partial rejection of the hitherto definitive Griffith-Eisenstein model of filmmaking, even as Tarkovsky expanded on some of Eisenstein’s later impulses.

Stalker, his fifth film, was adapted by sibling writers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky from their own novel, and followed up Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1971) as an eminently different kind of science fiction movie. Stalker commences in a hovel in an industrial wasteland, the camera scanning the three sleeping members of a family sharing a bed in seemingly perfect contentment, and also noting the objects sprawled on the bedside table, including two enigmatic pills. The man (Alexander Kaidanovsky) is the film’s eponymous protagonist: he’s known as Stalker, but he’s only one of a number who apparently share his profession as Stalkers. This one, our Stalker, awakens and dresses. He tries to sneak out without his wife’s knowledge, but she awakes and upbraids him for recommencing a dangerous line of work that’s already seen him thrown in prison. He meets up with two men in a local tavern that’s as seamy as his place. The two men agree at the outset to only use nicknames based on their occupations—thus “Writer” (Anatoli Solonitsin) and “Professor” (Nikolai Grinko)—and begin the difficult process of penetrating the Zone. The Zone is a mysterious area, so the Professor tells the Writer, that seems to have sprung up since some kind of meteorite or other mysterious object came from the sky and devastated an area of ground. A legend sprang up that a room in one of the buildings in the area had become a space where any entrant’s wish might come true. This, more than the fear of fallout or other danger, made the authorities paranoid enough to entirely fence off the Zone and place armed patrols around it.

Yet the authorities are also deadly afraid of stepping within the Zone for reasons the Stalker tries to sensitise his charges to: the Zone’s environment is constantly changing, full of unseen forces that can kill a man in the blink of an eye. He can only navigate about the place by gut instinct and by tossing objects, usually nuts tied up in cloth, in a random direction. Stalker was schooled in the way of the Zone by a man nicknamed Porcupine, who mysteriously became rich after leaving the Zone, and then killed himself a week later. Stalker spots evidence of Porcupine’s final, apparently malicious damage and rearranging of landmarks within the Zone, something that makes the already precarious job of navigation all the more difficult. Fragments of mysterious magic are glimpsed: the earth at one point seems to throb as if on fire within; later, two birds are seen to fly over a sandpit, with one disappearing and the other flying safely past. Yet none of the dangers Stalker warns about actually strike the Writer and the Professor: the latter turns back to collect his knapsack in spite of Stalker’s imperative command not to, and the Writer safely crosses the threshold of a sandpit before the Stalker shouts a belated warning. Debating about the nature of the Zone, about their own life assumptions and what exactly finding a room that grants a wish might entail, the trio steadily approaches the object of their journey.

Tarkovsky’s career is often considered in tandem with Stanley Kubrick’s. Tarkovsky’s first science fiction film Solaris is called a more romantic, less Nietzschean 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Stalker, in its way, also suggests the latter film’s notions of humanity on the cusp of great transcendence or total degradation and anticipates aspects of The Shining (1981) in exploring the ambiguities of empirical existence and presenting situations where psychological credulity and supernatural obscurity are difficult to distinguish. Stalker is an epic odyssey, a purified quest narrative with roots in the most ancient myth and the traditions of folkloric parable, which, ironically, involves only the most minimalist props and actions. In spite of the film’s ambling pace and stark yet dreamy, paranoid yet becalmed atmosphere, it’s a work of cerebral but clear-cut ideas familiar from both its essential genre of science fiction, and from a distinctive strand of Eastern European fantastic and satiric drama. But the ideas are almost entirely manifested through talk, gesture, and emotion, rather than visualisation: the world around the character rarely deviates from the same old solid, empirical reality. Stalker can be described, on one level, simply as a film about three guys who walk around an overgrown industrial site for three hours, except for certain moments when something amazing and bizarre happens, possessing a precise, coiled, yet still inscrutable strength.

The bulk of Stalker was shot around a disused hydroelectric plant in Estonia, and some believe the pollution around the site was directly responsible for Tarkovsky, Solonitsin, and several others who worked on the film all dying of cancer within a decade. If true, such a tragic real-life consequence feels nonetheless all too harshly appropriate considering some of Stalker’s essential themes. Retrospective analysis has recast the film as a prediction of Chernobyl, a notion that seems absurd, and yet there’s no deep mystery to this seeming echo of future horrors. Soviet industrialisation, not to mention Nazi invasion, had long been making an environmental hell out of swathes of the country. To this day, millions of hectares in Siberia are caked in oil spewed out by decayed infrastructure. Chernobyl was merely the loudest, climactic act in that process of breakdown and despoiling, and the dark imprint of industrialisation’s by-products were surely already quite familiar to Tarkovsky and the Strugatskys. Other aspects are equally suggestive: Stalker’s daughter is a slightly mongoloid-looking girl who can’t walk because she reportedly has no legs, and misshapen children are apparently common amongst Stalkers’ families. Such information is immediately redolent of thalidomide and radiation birth defects.

The haze of everything malefic in the modern industrial world therefore hangs over the film in a thick pall, both metaphorically and, in the early scenes, quite literally. There’s a bleak, totalitarian aspect to the world we catch glimpses of, with the roaming security guards who randomly shoot off guns to try to cut down infiltrators of the Zone, factories billowing out smoke and grime, and locomotives that thunder past Stalker’s house. It could all be a particularly scabrous portrait of the decaying Soviet Union, a notion that’s particularly hard to resist considering that Stalker, with his shaven head redolent of the Gulag, angrily states “everywhere is a prison!”, and the Professor contends with his threatening, authoritarian boss over the phone. And yet they may also be just carefully structured visions of a perfectly ordinary modern nation, most of which have their rust belts, petty official and state-sponsored thugs, and top-secret areas.

When the Writer first appears, he’s come directly from a party, still pretty drunk, driven to the rendezvous by a chicly dressed young woman in a slick car who wants to join the expedition. The pair could easily belong to any society circle: Stalker simply, strictly tells the girl to go, and she speeds away, her whim casually extinguished. The Zone can be interpreted as a bomb-testing site or battlefield that’s become overgrown, but within which radiation or landmines still lurk. Shattered, rusting tanks and armament litter the Zone, remnants of the ill-fated attempts by the government, so Stalker recounts, to penetrate the Zone with military force. The detritus of a pulverised patch of civilisation is likewise scattered: in a long, seemingly pointless, but actually vital moment half-way through the film, Tarkovsky’s camera drifts away from his protagonists to study the material scattered in a waterway. Icons, books, prints, documents, ornamentation, machinery, medical equipment, a gun, utensils, and sundry other remnants of civilisation lie in a kind of dreamy stasis in the water. The Zone itself is steadily reclaiming all human materials into itself, which, whilst seemingly dominated by nature, has its own withholding, inhuman mystery restored.

Meanwhile, the Writer and the Scientist bicker and debate as they follow Stalker. That they stand in not only for their different professions, but also for philosophical disparities, is all too obvious, and the Writer lives up to his part with moments of sodden boorishness and self-pity with a certain level of stereotypical zest. He needles the Professor, a physicist who worked for a government department that seemingly oversees the Zone, over the inadequacies of his empirical worldview in the face of a place like the Zone, and the universe in general. Stalker’s natural, almost primitivist, crypto-spiritual intuition stands in contrast to both men’s forms of intellectualism. Writer nicknames him, half-pejoratively, “Chingachgook,” after James Fenimore Cooper’s Indian hero, and “Pathfinder” would be just as apt for Stalker, who feels rather than thinks his way across the landscape. What lends these schematic figures weight is the way everything is both abstracted to the point where almost nothing literal and everyday is identified definitively, so that the drama unfolding here can stand in for any era and many potential parables, and yet it’s all composed of entirely three-dimensional images and settings so potent in the physical details that you can practically smell the landscape, the characters sharply played and defined. In a way, Stalker is akin to a children’s game—remember how you once declared some random object a castle, and the ground suddenly became lava, and you had to find a way over it?

A similar sense of random danger and reality’s familiar rules rendered capricious dominates in the Zone. Indeed, Stalker expressly describes the Zone as capricious. Stalker relates to the Zone as a religion, a god, and quotes scripture incessantly: one of his more suggestive quotes comes directly after that long view of the detritus in the water, in which he speaks of men who did not recognise Jesus when he came to them because of his altered garb, suggesting that something within the story – the Zone perhaps, or perhaps Stalker himself, or his daughter – may be another divine messenger. At another point, Stalker recites passages from Revelations, and the mysterious object that fell to earth suddenly suggests the “star called Wormwood” from the same book, thus shifting the resonances of the story towards the apocalyptic.

Stalker defines the Zone as a place for people in a state of crisis and without hope; only the desperate can survive the Zone’s caprices, and perhaps only the Wishing Room can solve their problem. The Writer comes to view the Zone essentially as a heart of darkness, a regressive place that will reduce one’s will to a core, key desire, one that will become the “wish” in contradiction of any false (civilised) value one holds and tries to assert. An idealist may also be driven by covert misanthropy, and this hidden aspect will then define the wish. This view seems highlighted by the recounted fate of Porcupine, an enigmatic tale the Writer slowly unravels thanks to some of Stalker’s stories. Porcupine lured his talented poet brother there to be annihilated, and then, breaching the Stalkers’ code, entered the Wishing Room himself and received wealth. His suicide upon returning to the world was because he regretted killing his brother, but when he returned to wish for his brother’s return, the Zone would not grant it, because the original wish was truer. The threat of the wishes of utopians and religious freaks is as terrifying to the Writer and the Professor as those of the vengeful and the vicious. The Writer suggests his crises of faith and imagination at the outset when he tells the girl, “The world is governed by cast-iron laws, and it’s excruciatingly boring!” Cynical and driven by doubt, as he readily, even proudly, admits, he also seeks a proof of a god that will imbue his efforts with meaning. And yet he ultimately doesn’t want proof: he begins to understand that his doubt is a kind of weapon. The Professor is so scared of the Wishing Room’s potential that his own personal mission is to detonate an atomic bomb he’s been carrying in his knapsack in the Wishing Room, thus ridding the world of the threat entirely. Stalker tries to stop this, but Writer instead holds Stalker back, accusing Stalker of enjoying playing God in helping people reach the Wishing Room.

Stalker defends himself merely as a mediator, a man who tries to lead other men to the edge of something restorative. He seems more like a holy fool, and when he returns home he convulses in pain, both physical and emotional—that’s what those two pills (aspirin) were for—as he frets over the misanthropy and distrust of the two savants. On whatever level he believes in the Zone, as manifestation of the alien or even of the imagination itself, he worships its power. The possibility that the preternatural qualities of the Zone are an invention of Stalker’s is mooted, for the Professor learned everything about the place from him. There’s certainly something strange about the Zone is certain, confirmed by an opening scrawl written by a “Professor Wallace,” who may or may not be the same Professor in the film, the efforts of the guardians to keep people out of it, and the warnings of the Professor’s boss, but the peculiarity of the Zone might not necessarily be what Stalker says it is. What is certain is that Stalker takes his devotion to his job as seriously as any medieval monk. Such devotion is echoed by his wife, who recites a monologue directly to the camera stating that in spite of her writhing ecstatic tantrum at the outset, she’s never been unhappy with Stalker, knowing what she did about the dangers and how their children often ended up right from the start. Whether this can be read as a simple encomium to devotion as a trait in itself, or connected more deeply to her understanding of his sense of mission, such familial completeness as is seen at the start is both outset and endpoint of Stalker’s own journey. Stalker considers, at one point, moving his family into the Zone, reasoning they’ll be beyond harassment there.

For all the oblique, pensively intellectual, arty qualities of the film, it’s worth noting how unfussy the visuals are, and the workmanlike expertise with which Tarkovsky builds tension, particularly in the long, brilliantly orchestrated scene in which Stalker has the Writer enter a tunnel he dubs “the meat-grinder” because of the number of people who have died trying to traverse its length, and his subsequent stumbling into the sandtrap. Likewise, a certain wry, even black comedy percolates throughout, as when the Professor disappears and Stalker gives him up for dead, only to come upon him eating his lunch with ingenuous calm. This aspect of the film provides a definitive punch line once the three are inside the centremost building, only metres away from the Wishing Room. A telephone starts ringing, which the Writer, who was in the midst of one of his rants, picks up. He listens to the voice on the other end, shouts “No this is not a clinic,” slams the receiver down, turns away, and then all three men freeze dead still in sudden awareness of what just happened: this moment is delivered with the comedic precision of a Marx Brothers routine. The Professor’s response to realising there’s still a working telephone in the Zone is to call up his boss, who forbade him going on this mission, to mock him and gloat. The shadows of Beckett and Kafka lay over much of this material, even if the film’s specific flavour is less bludgeoning and negative than their work, and closer in spirit to magic-realism.

Finally, whilst the debates, confessions, and petty in-fighting of the three main characters are fascinating, it’s in Tarkovsky’s images where true wonder and ambiguity lie, refusing any simple reduction of the many interpretations and dimensions of the story, moving beyond the literal, and the literary, and into a realm of total cinema. It’s as if Tarkovsky set himself the task of pitting his images against intellectual formulae, and, amazingly, winning. The Zone retains its threat and mystery when the Writer and the Scientist and even Stalker himself have done everything to reduce its meaning and potential within coherent boundaries. More matter-of-factly, the film’s atmosphere is palpable, and Tarkovsky draws out the strange, poetic beauty of industrial wreckage invaded and infused by rebellious nature, as if in the median ground between civilisation, past, and future.

Where the film’s bookend scenes back in the city are filmed in a near-monochrome with a faintly bronzed tint, the Zone is a sprawl of muted, lustrous colour that returns in two concluding shots of Stalker’s daughter, immediately zeroing in on her as the vessel for something as strange and wondrous as in the Zone. Stalker’s devotion to her, carrying her on his shoulders across the inhospitable landscape, is both pathetic and joyous all at once, almost Dickensian, and yet the very last scene moves into a new realm. Like another, more earthbound, yet equally wondrous version of 2001’s star child, the girl sits in her little hovel vibrating to the passage of trains, stares dimly at glasses on the kitchen table, and begins to move them about telekinetically. Stalker’s adventures in the Zone have resulted in his offspring possessing something deeply abnormal, perhaps inhuman, and potentially terrifying. Yet Tarkovsky lets a snatch of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” creep into the soundtrack, suggesting that where now the world shakes her house, some day she’ll shake the world right back.

CIFF 2010: Asleep in the Sun (Dormir al Sol, 2010)

Director/Screenwriter: Alejandro Chomski

2010 Chicago International Film Festival

By Marilyn Ferdinand

I really like when films creep up on me—tell me I’m going one way and then take a sharp detour to an unexpected destination. Asleep in the Sun is a charming, unnerving film whose picture-postcard, 1950s setting lulls viewers into a sweet dream of nostalgia, only to turn a character’s moderate neurosis into a nightmare for all those in her circle.

Lucio (Luis Machín) is a watchmaker who works out of the boyhood home he inherited from his parents when they died in an accident. He lives with his adored, but troubled wife Diana (Esther Goris), who is fixated on dogs and attached to Prof. Standle (Enrique Piñeyro), who runs a dog clinic. Diana visits his clinic frequently to play with the dogs, and hopes one day to get herself a bitch puppy—females make the best watchdogs, says Standle. One day, the professor comes to Lucio and observes that it is not normal for a person to be so indecisive about choosing a dog. Intuiting that Diana has mental problems, he suggests a “phrenopathic” clinic that will cure her in a matter of mere days, not years of expensive psychoanalysis. Lucio, who has endured separation from Diana before while she pursued cures at other mental hospitals, resists. Eventually, however, he agrees to let Diana try to get well at the clinic. “We must trust the professor,” Diana says.

Bad idea. Lucio is denied access to his wife, something that never happened at the other hospitals. When Diana is released after what the imperious head of the clinic, Dr. Samaniego (Carlos Belloso), says is a complete cure, she doesn’t seem the same. She suddenly likes to take walks and perform fellatio, and she doesn’t recognize her nephews or make her corn pie using her usual recipe. Lucio’s housekeeper, Cerefina (Vilma Ferrán), finds a photo of a woman among Diana’s belongings and thinks there is some connection. When Lucio confronts Dr. Samaniego about the disturbing alteration in his wife’s personality, he puts everyone in his household in danger.

As the movie unfolds, it’s not hard to guess what has happened to Diana, but the journey is so enjoyable and the dawning realization that we’re in a science-fiction horror movie is so surprising that I fell for this movie hard. Visually, it is a complete treat—the vintage cars with windshields that open, the kitschy wallpaper inside Diana and Lucio’s home so bizarre I kept trying to decide what it depicted (I settled on a golfer), the decorative prints on the walls so in keeping with the 50s aesthetic of artificial nature. I loved the cash-register-sized phone in Dr. Samaniego’s office, looking the world like a hotline to hell, and the full-length tile walls in places other than the bathroom, their turquoise glaze giving the room inhabitants a queasy look.

Chomski’s inventive opening—a rapid-moving steadicam at ground level with a slightly hazy focus depicting a dog’s point of view—had me at hello. A dreamy interlude of a dog laying on a raft and drifting on water under a warm sun intrudes at key moments; only slowly do we come to understand what this image signifies and put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Chomski attended the screening, only the second of this film anywhere in the world. He told of the genesis of the film, which arose from his friendship with Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares and his admiration for his novel Asleep in the Sun. The pair talked about adapting the book for the cinema, and when Casares died, Chomski decided to push on. He retained the spirit of the book, though many plot points had to be added—for example, an explanation of what had happened to Diana was devised based on quack-science research Chomski conducted—to render the story coherent. And he decided to film it as a period piece, as originally written, instead of updating it to the present because he felt the story was too delicate to stand up to today’s information-soaked scrutiny. This was, indeed, a great choice.

The actors appearing in the film, great in their quietly comic sincerity, with faces straight out of a Coen brothers film, are well known in Argentina. Chomski said he is very curious to see whether familiarity with these actors will affect how Argentinians will receive the film, and he was gratified to see how we reacted without this baggage to mitigate our perceptions of what was on the screen.

Chomski added a very slight political agenda to the film by showing that people often are powerless to stop bad things from happening in their countries and communities. He used the examples of Americans who opposed the invasion of Iraq and Argentinians who did not want a military dictatorship who had these things foisted upon them with no recourse. Of course, history catches up with every event. I wonder how it will catch up with Lucio and Diana. I heartily recommend that festival goers check out this engaging, sly film.

Asleep in the Sun screens Thursday, October 14, 9:15 p.m., and Monday October 18, 1:30 p.m. The director will be present to take questions. All screenings take place at the AMC River East 21 Theatres, 322 E. Illinois St.

Previous CIFF coverage

Tuesday, After Christmas: A beautifully photographed story of adultery poses a potent metaphor for Romania in its new prosperity. (Romania)

On Tour: A French TV producer returns from “exile” in America with a troupe of burlesque dancers to try to get back on top in this amiable, improvisational comedy. (France)

Circus Kids: The St. Louis Arches youth circus travels to Israel to join forces with the Galilee Circus to help bridge the gap between Arabs and Jews in this optimistic documentary. (Israel/USA)

The Matchmaker: Magical coming-of-age drama in which a teenage boy learns a message of love and tolerance from a Holocaust survivor. (Israel)

Ten Winters: Love will find a way, but it takes its time in this wise, realistic story of a young man and woman whose mutual attraction and friendship take some interesting turns over 10 years. (Italy)

Certified Copy: Elliptical tale of seduction by renowned director Abbas Kiarostami in which two strangers pretend to be a married couple in crisis. (Iran/Italy/France)

The Princess of Montpensier: The French Catholic persecution of Protestants forms the backdrop for this period drama about the travails suffered by a beautiful noblewoman desired by four men. (France/Germany)

Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff: Legendary British cinematographer Jack Cardiff and others who knew him discuss his career, including such highlights as The Red Shoes and Black Narcissus. (UK)

Waste Land: A moving examination of the positive transformation of workers in Brazil’s largest landfill when artist Vik Muniz comes to photograph them. (Brazil/USA)

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives: This 2010 Palme d’Or winner chronicles the final days of Boonmee using magic realism and experimental techniques to explore universal myths and symbols. (Thailand)

The Last Report on Anna: A dreamy, romantic film centering on Anna Kéthly, real-life Hungarian minister in exile, and a spy’s attempt to silence her by seducing her into returning to their communist-controlled country. (Hungary)

Inception (2010)/American Psycho (2000)

Director: Christopher Nolan/Mary Harron

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The big movie of the 2010 summer season, by amount of attention paid, seems to be Inception. This latest outing by the man who set the cinematic world on fire with his mind-bending mystery Memento (2000) and left fanboys panting with devotion in 2008 with The Dark Knight, his version of the Batman myth, has critics and the general public admiring it as the blockbuster with a brain. Isn’t it nice, they say, to actually walk out of an action film with something to think about?

I must say that I’m a bit dumbfounded by this reaction. “What could they be thinking about?” I ask myself. It’s possible, I suppose, that some of the archetypal images Nolan used in the film, for example, the malevolent anima represented by main protagonist Cobb’s “wife” Mal (French for “bad”) or the fortress that represents the Self of Cobb’s supposed target Robert Fischer, could have reacted with unconscious material in the male audience’s mind. As a woman, I wouldn’t react to an anima image, so I readily admit to a built-in block toward a kind of thinking this film could generate.

And is it inherently more intriguing to think that you can, as Roger Ebert put it, think your way into a dream than, say, being plugged into the hive mind of the Borg in Star-Trek or fight the soma-like virtual reality created by the machines in The Matrix? Say, aren’t those Matrix agents kind of just like the “projections” that attack Cobb and his team in Inception? Well, that’s another argument for another day.

Personally, I don’t think people are using their post-movie think time to consider the possibilities of the unconscious, the richness of dream material in understanding ourselves and our world, or any other larger implications that could arise from such a film. Sadly, Nolan has contented himself to enter the realm of the psyche as though it were merely a soundstage to film yet another loud, crashing movie. So I think the only thing Inception accomplishes in the way of thought is encouraging audiences to figure out what really happened. Did Cobb and his team succeed in their mission to plant an idea in Fischer’s psyche, or did the entire movie happen in Cobb’s head? Most people concede that Nolan’s dreamscape doesn’t resemble real dreaming, and assumptions the film makes, for instance, that lucid dreaming actually exists, are open to debate. (Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz contends that dreamers believe they are consciously controlling something the psyche was doing on its own anyway.) Nonetheless, a movie can make its own rules as long as they don’t have too many internal inconsistencies and don’t stretch the suspension of disbelief too far. That the ambiguous ending of Inception is neither disturbing to consider, nor particularly memorable, speaks to just how modest the film’s ambitions are—and how overblown its reception has been.

A film that debuted the same year as Memento—and that was as mysterious and involved in the inner workings of the mind as that movie—was American Psycho. Based on the 1991 notoriously violent book of the same name by flavor du jour writer of the East Coast literati, Bret Easton Ellis, the film was a disappointment at the box office—perhaps backlash to the perceived misogyny of the book—and faded from view. Yet, the genuinely disturbing implications of that blackly comic film have a heft and longevity that the humorlessly drab imaginings of the mind of Nolan will never approach.

The confusion American Psycho plants is much more subtle and, therefore, more powerful. Patrick Bateman, a narcissistic 27-year-old graduate of Harvard and its business school, works on Wall Street, dates graduates from the Seven Sisters colleges who couldn’t figure their way out of a paper bag, and competes with his peers over everything from the look of their business cards to the size and location of their apartments. Driven crazy by the supposed perfection of the business card of colleague Paul Allen, Bateman gets him drunk, takes him home with him, puts on a CD of Huey Lewis and the News, and hacks him to pieces with an axe. When several of his colleagues catch him stuffing the body, now encased in a two-suiter, into his car, one of them asks Bateman where he got the luggage. “Jean-Paul Gauthier,” says Bateman, relieved that they hadn’t questioned him about what was inside it.

Indeed, what’s inside doesn’t count for anything to the characters in this movie, forming the flipside to the philosophy of Inception that ideas can only take hold if the person believes they have come from within. However, American Psycho takes its cynicism about the manipulation of identity seriously, whereas Inception, whether or not you believe Cobb’s mission was real, suggests that brainwashing in service of a noble cause—in this case, breaking up a monopoly that could concentrate control of virtually all the natural resources of the world in a single man’s hands—is the right thing to do. Much of the thrilling suspense Inception offers comes from our fear that our heroes will be “killed” in the dream and stuck like Sleeping Beauty in something called limbo forever.

In American Psycho, barely perceptible differences in various black-type, whitish-paper business cards form a literal case of life and death. The derisive laughter of a woman at Bateman’s impassioned treatise on the depth of Whitney Houston’s music dooms her as well. Bateman represents a type for whom marketing has become gospel to such an extent that he convinces himself of the profundity of the superficial. He complains, for example, that a hooker he has picked up for an evening threesome is not drinking his very fine chardonnay without even realizing that labeling a wine by the grape used to make it is a generics marketing strategy of recent vintage that disassociates the product from the producer.

In both Inception and American Psycho, the central character starts to lose control of himself. Cobb can’t keep thoughts of Mal out of the engineered dreams of his team, leaving them vulnerable to attacks by the imaginary people Fischer deploys like white corpuscles to rid his mind of their foreign presence; Bateman can’t control his irritation with people and finds himself in the throes of an uncontrollable bloodlust that will see him shoot, chainsaw, eat, blow up, and dismember, by his own count, 20 or more people. Yet, it is the original murder of Allen that has him the most worried about getting away with his crimes, as a police detective has been snooping into that one. We can see a rough correspondence between Bateman’s guilt over Allen and Cobb’s guilt over causing the death of his wife.

Yet, Mary Harron implicates the audience in Bateman’s nightmare by allowing us many moments of black humor to distance us from his sickening deeds. Bateman’s dissertation-like dissection of the lyrics of a lot of catchy, meaningless tunes (“Take the lyrics to ‘Land of Confusion.’ In this song, Phil Collins addresses the problems of abusive political authority.”) while giving orders to two prostitutes is one of several comic vignettes bordering on genius, recreating the bread and circuses of the 1980s that distracted citizens (“don’t worry, be happy”) and allowed radical conservatives to begin their assault on America’s political, financial, and social landscape. She reinforces the madness of that assault and the delusions that clouded our judgment by presenting a final nighttime action sequence, complete with exploding cars and shattering plate-glass windows, and then making us wonder if Bateman hasn’t been imagining everything we’ve just seen. His nearly incomprehensible conversation with a man he made a rambling confession to over the phone may be entirely in his head, or his very identity and life as Bateman may be fictitious.

The final lines of the film coming to us from the go-go 80s are portentous of where we are today: “My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone, in fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape, but even after admitting this, there is no catharsis. My punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself, no new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.” Thanks to the deft handling of this despicable story by Mary Harron, the confession is hardly meaningless. Bateman’s desperate grasping at externals has driven him to a psychotic break, one, she seems to suggest, we may all be headed toward if we don’t find ourselves in time.

Inception’s final moments are simply a plot twist that may involve a person to whom we have never been properly introduced who has, perhaps, solved a personal problem we can’t trust is even real. And/or he perhaps really has saved the world from a dangerous corporate monopoly through some kind of scifi magic no one can take seriously. This is not progress of thought or introspection. As we shoot impotently into the giant maw of international corporate rule, it looks like the Batemans have won.

The Prisoner (TV, 1967-1968)

Directors: Don Chaffey, Pat Jackson, Patrick McGoohan, Peter Graham Scott, David Tomblin

By Roderick Heath

The Prisoner, an epochal surrealist-satiric thriller series, feels as much a commentary on the television show itself as it is on politics or society: the construction of a bogus living space that’s constantly filmed; the random-seeming changes of cast; the ongoing, enclosed situation that may have no discernable outcome; the unvarying efforts to create and force story and character arcs and spark behaviours with predetermined ends whilst mimicking the happenstance flow of life. Quite apart from the anticipation of the inane horrors of reality television, even the episodes that bend the boundaries of genre, transposing the essential plot into Western and comic book settings, reveals the often interchangeable elements of sausage-factory entertainment. Star and co-mastermind Patrick McGoohan was partly inspired by his own exhausting workload on his hit show Danger Man. He and key collaborators George Markstein and David Tomblin presented a perfect metaphor for the way television, cranked out day and night, with shows that either run impossibly long or get cancelled before they can logically and succinctly end, becomes a kind of ongoing existential nightmare.

The Prisoner wasn’t one of those shows of the kind I’ve mentioned above; at just 17 episodes, it describes a fascinating and relatively contiguous narrative back when that was still a rare idea. McGoohan sold the concept of The Prisoner to ITV boss Lew Grade after considerable wrangling over how long the series would be, and the final episode count sports some obvious filler episodes towards the end (not to say they aren’t entertaining anyway). Although it’s not a uniformly executed unit, the core concept, and the way the major elements are introduced and illustrated, possess energy unique and obvious more than 40 years later. I’ll try not to bore you with comments on how the show anticipated more recent creations like Lost, The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Dennis Potter’s works and myriad other permutations throughout popular culture (though I think I just did); the list of influences could go on and on, especially on scifi movies since the early 1970s. And that’s not to mention a pitch-perfect episode of The Simpsons in 2000, when about 80% of the audience would have had no idea what all those gags about Number Six were referring to.

It’s taken me a long time to catch up with the series, and the experience was certainly tinged bittersweet in finally watching it over a year after McGoohan’s death. McGoohan had a terrific, compact force as a screen actor, and even as late as Braveheart (1995), it was delightful to watch him galvanise overblown claptrap into something like delicious melodrama. The Prisoner’s later episodes were affected by McGoohan’s work on the film Ice Station Zebra (1968), which is chiefly worth watching today for the spectacle of McGoohan giving Rock Hudson an acting lesson. Considering the deep involvement he had in The Prisoner, it is, in its way, testimony to a talent that never was quite fulfilled—but then again the compressed brilliance of the series with its unmistakeable tropes and intricately orchestrated ideas was a hard act to repeat. The atmosphere of The Village, a fake community with its false front of jollity, jaunty uniforms, omnipresent sloganeering and surveillance, and the roaming, shapeless, unnerving “Rover” security guards, is minutely conceived and indelibly portrayed.

The Prisoner accounts the experience of its unnamed protagonist when, having abruptly quit his post with a British government intelligence service, he’s gassed and awakens some time later in a room that looks like his own home, but proves to be a replica. He’s now in The Village, a locality that soon proves to be both a jail and a home for “people who know too much or too little,” where prisoners and Guardians are indistinguishable except for certain elite members, and everyone has a number, not a name. Coded as Number Six, the hero contends with a power system that is arranged to flatten all resistance, and quickly distinguishes the few genuine rebels from natural conformists. Although he, because of his nominal importance, is spared most of the worst methods on hand, Number Six is still subjected to a merciless and gruelling procession of manipulations, plots, and scientific procedures to crush his spirit and extract his reasons for resigning. The Village is located on a remote island, and escape is virtually impossible thanks to the Rovers, giant plastic balls that swallow up escapees. In each episode, Number Six faces off against Number Two, the supposedly elected administrator of the island, but the person in the post in constantly changing and answers to a mysterious Number One and the rest of their organisation.

The first episode, ‘Arrival,’ establishes most of the essentials with clarity and a surprisingly cinematic style, with the rapid, choppy editing and forceful, almost abstracting camerawork offering an expressive intensity TV still doesn’t offer much. The debut was put together by Don Chaffey, who had directed Jason and the Argonauts (1963) for Ray Harryhausen and worked on several Hammer films. The filmic, pop-art-infused look and structure of the series is just one of its stand-out qualities, and though some episodes dip close to the look and plotting of more average action series like The Saint, The Avengers, and Danger Man itself, that’s more the exception than the rule. The bewildering clash of textures that is The Village—the faux-Italianate architecture of the town centre, the seaside pleasantness of the neighbouring port with its mocking fake boat, and ultra-futuristic hidden abodes of the Guardians—establishes the matryoshka-like multiplicity of hidden truths. A serious question for Number Six is whose “side” runs The Village. Although clearly still conceived in the schismatic structures of the Cold War, the “sides” are kept purposefully vague, and soon enough, the notion that there are or soon will be no sides, that The Village is the future world in miniature, is introduced with relish by one of the Number Twos. A distinct pleasure of the show, over and above its Byzantine complications, is the impressive array of then-contemporary British acting talent, with the likes of Eric Portman, Leo McKern, Derren Nesbitt, George Baker, Guy Doleman, and Mary Morris popping up throughout, particularly in the Number Two spot.

It’s bordering on the obvious to say that although aspects of The Prisoner are certainly late-’60s modish, with aspects of its style and satirical approach now hackneyed. And yet, in other ways, it’s even more relevant today than when it was made, now that Britain’s been turned into a giant CCTV playground, the spectacles of Guantanamo Bay and the War on Terror’s renditions, and an increasingly high level of distracting gibberish infuses contemporary media and political sources. The dark heart of The Village’s purpose is glimpsed in brief, but telling vignettes when Number Six visits the hospital and sees people being subjected to therapies to make them compliant members of the society—methods that both take aim at quack psychiatric practises of the era, such as the aversion therapies being inflicted on homosexual people, and also anticipating today’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The image of the prisoners caught by a Rover, their faces distorted in terrified masks while being smothered by plastic, is a grotesque one. The show’s opening credits are ritualised in depicting Number Six’s kidnapping, turning his plight into an Oroborus-like experience of constantly awakening in the strange locale, his shout of “I am not a number, I am a free man!” met with the hilarity of whoever’s Number Two that week.

Whilst Number Six is supposedly being saved from the worst punishments of the operation, the cruelty that is part and parcel of The Village (underneath the smiling threat of the Number Twos and the stern, hysterical outrage of the citizens’ committees, and inherent in the various manipulations enforced on Number Six) is mind-boggling—at one point, in ‘Many Happy Returns,’ he’s allowed to escape the island temporarily as a mocking birthday present. And yet the series suggests many people put up with such sadisms every day and call it being a member of society. Not all the anticipations are negative: it’s hard to believe that modern internet-fuelled alternative culture wasn’t anticipated and indeed partly based on Number Six’s methods, and also those of his fellow prisoners. In ‘It’s Your Funeral,’ the villagers who are still resisting indulge in a game they call “jamming” (hence the ’90s fad for anarchic “culture jamming”?), feeding the authorities disinformation: “It’s one of the most important ways of fighting back!” declares one participant (Annette Andre). But their need to muddy the waters is then used by their enemies for their own ends.

Whilst Number Six is an empathetic hero, the notion he’s not all that much different to his oppressors is repeatedly mooted. Thanks to McGoohan’s superlative, sustained performance, he’s cool, relentless, and aggressive, self-satisfied in his public schoolboy ideal of rugged individuality, seemingly as asocial outside The Village as in it. His private war with the world is only literalised when he’s put there, a notion that echoes when he finally escapes the island in the last episode, but with the world now taking on aspects of The Village. McGoohan’s extremely Catholic dislike of playing love scenes means the only time Number Six kisses a woman is when his mind’s been transferred into another body (that of Nigel Stock) and then it’s a fiancée (Zena Walker), daughter of his boss, who hadn’t been mentioned before; that aspect only reinforces the miasma of alienation that surrounds Number Six. In ‘Checkmate,’ Number Six puts together a cabal of resistors after developing a method to discern prisoners from jailers though their behaviour, only to have his escape plot foiled when his people turn on him because he acts more like a Guardian. In ‘Hammer Into Anvil,’ Number Six is at both his most righteous and most vicious: he uses the atmosphere of paranoia, distrust, and elusive truth for his own ends, when he sets out to destroy the current Number Two (Patrick Cargill) after he causes the suicide of a woman he’s interrogating, by faking evidence that suggests Number Two is being plotted against by his own side, reducing his quarry to a quivering, hysterical mental wreck.

There’s a tone of satire of macho values and more specifically the action-man ethos of a lot of ’60s pop culture (McGoohan and Markstein disagreed for years afterwards as to whether Number Six was Danger Man’s protagonist John Drake), with the fact that Number Six is physically indomitable—a champion boxer and fencer, he never loses a fight where he isn’t outnumbered five to one—and yet this usually does him no good at all. In ‘A Change of Mind,’ he’s relentlessly hounded precisely because he resists a couple of bullies, a touch that might remind a few of us of high school. Number Six’s great mental fitness usually serves him better in resisting all the attempts to subsume his personality and distort his sense of reality, whether they involve fooling him into thinking he’s an impostor created by the Guardians to take on the “real” Number Six, in ‘The Schizoid Man’; making him think he’s undergone a behaviour-controlling lobotomy, in ‘A Change of Mind’; or, most bizarrely, feeding him full of psychedelic drugs and making him play out a western scenario, in ‘Living in Harmony.’ The latter episode introduces a particularly good performance from Alexis Kanner as The Kid, a young subordinate of Number Two posing as a hotshot gunslinger, who’s driven mad by that pose and kills a woman and then himself—only to be resurrected later as the spirit of youthful, countercultural rebellion.

Some of the show’s metaphors were corny even in its time—the characters being likened to chess pawns in ‘Checkmate,’ Number Six sabotaging The Village’s controlling supercomputer project by asking it the illogical question, “Why?”—but many others are still potent. In the pungently funny satire ‘Free For All’ (an episode McGoohan wrote and directed), Number Six is encouraged by the current Number Two (Eric Portman) to run for his job in the annual elections because his reputation as an aggressive resister lends the vote an veneer of authenticity. What follows analyses the processing of authentic statesmen into regulation politicians, as The Village journalist replaces his initial lack of comment into standard political cliché before he’s then drugged and brainwashed into speaking mindless rhetoric to wildly enthusiastic crowds. He wins the election, but then the woman (Rachel Herbert) who’s been his assigned driver throughout the campaign and has spoken only in foreign gibberish and acted childishly slaps him silly and imperiously takes Number Two’s chair. In ‘The Chimes of Big Ben,’ Number Six enters an art contest where all the other artists, having succumbed to the cult of star-fucking, have all produced works that idolise the only celebrity about—Number Two.

McKern was the obvious choice to bring back for the final two episodes, ‘Once Upon a Time’ and ‘Fall Out,’ where the series takes a wild swing towards allegorical surrealism and doesn’t come back: ‘Fall Out’ was nominated for a Hugo Award, losing out to 2001: A Space Odyssey of all things. McKern’s Number Two is brought back to break Number Six at all costs, with the death of one of them certain. Number Two tries to deconstruct Number Six by devolving his mind back to childhood and leading him through his experiences, only to find that Number Six’s presumed asocialness is actually derived from his social values, and his individualism finally triumphs. But Number Two is revived, along with The Kid, as examples of failed rebellion to contrast Number Six, who’s presented to a bizarre cabal of masked people, each representing some segment of society, ready to accept him as ruler. But when he is ushered in to meet Number One, the head honcho proves to be a lunatic wearing a monkey mask, and the whole enterprise is a self-perpetuating delusion. The series resolves in a kind of hallucinatory anarchy close to that same year’s If…., as Number Six, Number Two, and The Kid machine-gun their captors to the strains of “All You Need is Love” and flee by a mysterious underground route directly into London. The technocratic world of the Guardians coalesces into a final vision of a madman blasting off into outer space, whilst the three rebels ride along the highway in a cage, dancing to “Dem Dry Bones.” It’s a finish that manages to be threatening and elating all at once, as close to genius as anything I’ve ever seen in television. l

Ink (2009)

Director/Screenwriter: Jamin Winans

By Marilyn Ferdinand

The technical wizardry and straightforward, heroic storytelling of James Cameron has again captured the world, as the science-fiction actioner Avatar is thrilling audiences and earning back its stratospheric cost in spades. But there’s another 2009 action-fantasy movie pitting good against evil that manages to razzle-dazzle on a modest $250,000. Jamin Winans is younger and less experienced than Cameron, and the ambitions he set himself with Ink seem a little beyond his capabilities. Nonetheless, Ink has its huge heart in the right place and some dazzling special effects that provide an intriguing alternate reality for audiences to ponder.

The film opens with a man in a highly agitated state screaming “fuck” repeatedly, getting into his car, screaming some more, looking around at people going about their business, and getting broadsided by a car crossing an intersection. The scene switches to nighttime. Some hip young men and women we later learn are called storytellers appear in the deserted streets and enter homes through doors and second-story windows. They lay hands on some of the sleeping people we were introduced to earlier in short vignettes. The dreams of these people are very good. Another set of beings called incubi also appear; they have screens in front of their faces onto which ghoulishly grinning faces with glowing eyeglasses are projected. When they enter homes and send their black fog across other sleepers, nightmares are the result. In one house, a fierce battle between the storytellers and Ink, a fearsome-looking creature dressed in a tattered cloak and hood, takes place. He is trying to make off with a seven-year-old girl named Emma (Quinn Hunchar). Despite the storytellers’ best efforts, Ink taps on a small drum that opens a portal and disappears into thin air with the girl.

As the storytellers plot ways to rescue Emma by enlisting the help of the ironically blind pathfinder Jacob (Jeremy Make) to locate her, an angelic, but strong storyteller named Liev (Jessica Duffy) projects herself to Emma and Ink’s side. Ink tells her that if he delivers Emma to the assembly of incubi he will be made numb. After unmasking the grotesque Ink, Liev sees that he entered their otherworldly realm by violence—a suicide—and imagines that someone in such pain must covet numbness. She offers herself as a prisoner instead of Emma, but Ink decides to take them both to the assembly as gifts. In the living world, the storytellers are trying to reunite Emma, who has been in a coma since Ink abducted her spirit, with John (Chris Kelly), the car crash victim who is Emma’s estranged father. “The girl needs her father,” everyone agrees. Everyone but John, that is.

At the heart of this story is how we direct our destinies by our ability or inability to feel and love. John lost his beloved wife Sarah (Selby Malone) in a car accident, a loss we are made to feel acutely by observing their shy and warm first meeting, courtship, and the birth of Emma. Winans shoots these scenes using soft edges and golden tints. He contrasts John’s empty present-day life as a workaholic finance executive who lost custody of Emma to Sarah’s parents with these more idyllic scenes to emphasize the extend of John’s pain and the difficulty the storytellers will have bringing him and Emma back together. At the same time, Liev works on Ink’s despairing resolve, comforting Emma with games of imagination and acceding to Ink’s wishes because, she reveals to Ink’s amazement, she did not come to help Emma, but rather to help Ink.

The meshing of the imaginary and real worlds is cleverly handled, particularly in a hospital scene in which John, realizing that he has been taken to the same hospital where Emma lies comatose, walks absently toward her room as the incubi who wish to block his journey and the storytellers battle furiously around him. I liked the rendering of the incubi—machinelike with assembly-line movements. Winans did a good job of differentiating with color and image sharpness the worlds of the incubi, the storytellers, Ink, and the living, even if the shifts were rather too frequent, making them seem a bit gimmicky.

Jacob the pathfinder was oddly costumed with a large, black “x” taped over each eye, as though he were a cartoon baddie who has just been conked on the head. His method of finding paths is aural, and setting people on a certain path is a matter of striking the right rhythms. As he arranges the car accident that puts John in the same place as Emma, I was reminded of a Rube Goldberg machine crossed with the 2000 Volkswagen Jetta “Synchronicity” commercial, not exactly a deep philosophy or mode of expression from which to draw.

I also thought that the film would have been more personally resonant and wouldn’t have begged the question of why Emma was so important in the spirit world if the ideas it expressed were more allegorical than literal. I think it hurt Winans’ story to actually posit a land of the physically and spiritually dead, essentially putting human beings on a path of predestination and divine intervention rather than owning their own faults of attention, emotional poverty, and self-loathing. It appears that Winans might have started down the less-literal road with the anagram names he gave some of his characters (Liev = Live, Ink = Kin), but changed course. Yet, the fact that these ideas came through to me with a good deal of clarity shows that the film simply needed to get out of its way and believe in its own ideas more.

In general, the cast of unknowns did a decent job with the material, especially young Quinn Hunchar in a large and pivotal role. An extra on the DVD in which Kelly and Hunchar talk about the film was strange and unintentionally echoed some of the themes of the film. When Quinn asked Chris what he thought the film was about, he said “redemption” and waxed philosophic in language far above the young actress’ head. When he asked Quinn what part of the film was her favorite to act, she said one in which she is playing imaginatively with her stuffed animals because it was most like what she does in real life. The high-falutin’ actor in Kelly was clearly nonplussed by this, very much in the way John found it almost impossible to play a game of imagination with Emma. Obviously, Winans cast these two actors perfectly, and he came very close to making an unequivocally good film. As it stands, Ink is a thought-provoking and impressive effort from a talent to watch. l

Avatar (2009)

Director/Screenwriter: James Cameron

By Roderick Heath

The entertainment value of entertainment sometimes seems to have become less and less valued. A more broad-minded way of looking at genre fare has entered contemporary criticism, transformed by an academic reading of subtext and semantics that can often invert the presumed value of high and low culture in movie-making, with the potential message-making power of generic films acknowledged. An instance of this can be seen in numerous commentaries I’ve read on 2009’s diptych of scifi allegory, Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 and James Cameron’s Avatar, many of which made both films sound like sticky tracts on racism and environmentalism rather than the rip-snorting action flicks they are. Nor is it hard to see why this element still tends to be emphasised: an action-adventure film still can’t really be just an action-adventure film without having some variety of pretension attached to it to justify its existence.

All of this is a long way of saying that I didn’t know until I’d watched it that Cameron’s Avatar is vintage Cameron, probably his best film since The Abyss (1989) and an unabashed scifi swashbuckler.

Here’s the plot. A couple of hundred years in the future, humans are now engaging in gleeful colonial rape of neighbouring planets, executed by the people who obviously never took a cultural studies class at college. The people who did are represented by Sigourney Weaver, as Dr. Grace Augustine, a humane scientist who’s trying to communicate with the understandably xenophobic natives of Pandora, the Na’vi (Native, get it?), who, with their glamorous blue complexions and long, pendulous bodies, resemble nothing so less than a race of Kate Mosses. She does so by creating hybrid bodies, or avatars, that can be mentally controlled by human operators. The mining company whose concerns take precedence over all projects, represented by Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi, caricaturised, if not ineffectively) and their hordes of mercenary bullyboys, led by the formidable Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), want the Na’vi shifted from their home over a particularly large and juicy seam of “Unobtainium,” an obscure ore that, like everything else on Pandora, seems part of its amazingly interconnected ecosphere, which, Grace realises, resembles a colossal brain.

Into this scenario comes Jake Scully (Sam Worthington), a paraplegic ex-marine whose identical-twin brother, intended to be one of the anthropologist avatar operators, dies just before embarkation. Thus, Jake, having the same genetic make-up, can plug into his brother’s intended body. Grace is initially appalled by having a solider imposed on her team, and Selfridge and Quaritch immediately presume him to be a malleable tool to gather information. But Scully takes to his new part-time body like a duck to water, and his mysteriously anointed status, bestowed by the Na’vi’s nature-deity, which proves to be rather more than a merely ethereal being, gives him a foothold in the Na’vi tribe. Quicker than you can say “A Man Called Horse,” Jake is trained by whippet-hipped Na’vi chick Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) in Na’vi ways, earns induction into their tribe and religion, and gets busy Na’vi style with Neytiri. And, when the time comes, and the humans’ bulldozers and gunships come rocking in, Scully’s loyalties are, of course, brought into desperate question. When Quaritch kills Grace, Jake and a few human confederates, including tough-girl helicopter pilot Trudy (Michelle Rodriguez) and nerd Norm Spellman (Joel Moore) are left with few options. Will Jake man up and show the Na’vi how to fight off the invaders? Well, duh.

Avatar has much in common with the last major Hollywood swashbuckler, Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), in the way it contrasts and intertwines yearning, conscientious, scientific spirit and Enlightenment idealism with martial vainglory and ra-ra action: if it’s not half as smart and nuanced as Weir’s film, it executes action better. Of course, the uptown guy in me kept thinking that it was an inferior variant on Malick’s The New World, with hero Jake and Neytiri taking the place of John Smith and Pocahontas and utilising a battery of special effects to evoke the same feeling of wonder and awe in the natural world that Malick was able to conjure with some stalks of grass. Where Malick turns the familiar into the spectrally strange, Cameron specialises in turning the utterly alien into the cosily familiar.

But, if it’s a stock story, the film knows it, and stock stories have always been a motif of space opera upon which to hang evocations of wonderment. There’s a reason why such a plot has survived a couple of thousand years: scenes of Jake taming and riding a kind of dragon to rouse the Na’vi to follow him is pure Joseph Campbell (or is it Robert E. Howard?), backed up by the Dickensian character names. It’s long been Cameron’s stand-out trait to fuse intriguing genre ideas pilfered from a multitude of sources with a rocking matinee pace: just because it’s older doesn’t mean The Terminator is any different in this regard, even if, like Spielberg and Jackson and George Miller and many others, Cameron has long ago left behind the bargain-basement gore and cruder provocations for blockbuster blandness, a development that film fans can never quite forgive. But Avatar sports great ideas, with its concept of a biological version of the internet conjoining organisms in a web of awareness and reliance, lending the hippy-dippy nature mysticism an unexpected solidity. And, of course, the metaphoric potential for on-line networking and gaming, and traditional cinephilia, in the avatar concept will launch a thousand term papers in the near future.

Although Avatar is indeed cutting-edge technical cinema redefined, Cameron remains utterly, blissfully indifferent to many modern Hollywood faults, like its love of excessively tight framing, space-distorting editing, and wobbling cameras that destroy most contemporary would-be thrill rides. His sense of spectacle is just as cleanly organised and visually easy to read as it was 20 years ago. If you don’t have a taste for action and spectacle, that’s all well and good; I’ll see you later at the Tarkovsky festival, no fear. But then again, a shot of one of the Na’vi’s six-legged riding beasts running away from battle engulfed in flames evokes the stumbling horse in the battle scene of Andrei Rublev, and like that film, it raises the question of whether the divisions of pagan nature-worship and more polite creeds might be wrong-headed, with an overall concept of humanity and nature fatally out of balance. Avatar is also, like The New World, about the American dream of an Eden, and, like The Last of the Mohicans, a fantasy of cross-cultural merging that promises the growth of a new and better kind of man by embracing values rejected by the Old World. When Wes Studi turns up playing the Na’vi chief, I nearly laughed out loud, not knowing if this was a cunning or corny casting cue. Both? I could say that of the whole film. But Studi isn’t playing Magua here, the embodied spirit of the savage in man: that part is reserved for Lang’s Quaritch.

Ironically, and amusingly, that Old World is now one of super-technology and asshole corporate types, and the New conceptualises god as a unified natural scheme, pantheism with some organic cyberpunk jive thrown in. Some right-wingers have criticised Cameron for offering greenie propaganda, and they have a point—in fact, it’s utterly, thumpingly obvious—but Cameron is a bundle of contradictions as a director. He doesn’t analyse the divides between his preoccupations, but sets his disparate selves in highly unironic conflict, which is perhaps why he’s so popular. A supreme Hollywood technocrat who began in special-effects production, he’s also an unabashed romantic who gives us a love affair between two animated cat-people that’s warmer than most of those found in modern romantic comedies. A fetishist of military lingo, hardware, and attitude, he often deals out ruthless punishment to soldierly and authoritarian types for blind arrogance and aggression. A pillar of Hollywood cultural imperialism, he, like George Lucas, constructs fables of embattled outsiders fighting to overcome unstoppable monopolies and spends huge sums of money on making films that metaphorically reflect the exploitation of third-world populaces.

Cameron’s not very subtle—anyone who’s seen his award speeches knows that—but he is a canny filmmaker and curiously ardent one: Avatar, even more than Titanic, flies a long way on pure enthusiasm. If it’s a better film than Titanic, a film I liked well enough for its visual beauty, strong stars, and felicitous quotations of ’30s screwball comedies and Victorian melodrama, it’s because Cameron’s love of antisocial rebelliousness and resolutely contemporary sense of character and dialogue fit far more easily into the not-too-distant future than into the not-too-distant past. Where he never had a hope of successfully grafting his American love of the fighting chance onto a situation defined by accepting the inevitable, he’s in his element with Avatar. In engaging with his conjured alien milieu, he maintains a depth and care in his scifi and metaphorical concepts that eluded the less detailed, more self-congratulatory analogies of District 9, whilst also cranking his narrative up to an action climax that is too long, but brilliantly done. What’s inherently likeable about Avatar is that it wears its values on its sleeve: it’s not busy hiding behind a glaze of hip alienation and elusive visuals.

It’s not perfect. Not nearly. Cameron’s habit of writing dialogue that drops like lead weights now and then hasn’t altered, his storytelling in the first third is occasionally choppy, and if the imagery doesn’t tap into your sense of wonder, the obvious narrative will leave you cold. The special effects are indeed amazing in their immersive detail, but the film’s greatest avatar is Stephen Lang: building on his impressive, if brief, turn in Public Enemies, his face carved to an Easter Island idol under a mean crop of white stalks standing at parade attention, his villain is the best kind—one you both enjoy enormously and badly want to see get it in the neck. Requiring no more props than some make-up scars, Lang as Quaritch offers a hybrid of every gung-ho hard-ass in screen history and the mean gym teacher from your nightmares, embodying everything malevolent about the über-macho type. His and Scully’s relationship, defined at first by patronising paternalism, and then, finally, by nakedly bellicose warfare, evokes the clash of John Wayne and Montgomery Clift in Red River. Like that film, it’s fundamentally about the irreconcilable clash of force and felicity, frontier and civilisation, but it also reveals changes in the popular zeitgeist ever since: the world’s gone native, and the best cowboys have joined the Indians.

Worthington himself is, well, worthy: his capacity to play undoubted masculinity with low-key soul is intact, and it’s to her amazing credit that Saldana projects as much charisma CGI’d nearly out of existence as she did in her other scifi hit of 2009, Star Trek. But it’s Lang who animates the film and drags it toward sheer mythic confrontation. Of course, I can see through all of Cameron’s tricks, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I enjoyed them enormously, though, admittedly, my expectations were mild. Avatar will probably win a lot of Oscars and make a mountain of money. For once I won’t mind. l

Cloverfield (2008)

Director: Matt Reeves

By Marilyn Ferdinand

A strange unease has overtaken me in the waning days of 2009. Suddenly, the filmic hills are alive with lists and best-ofs not only of this year, but of the entire decade. We’ve reached another tick on the artificial ruler of time, and I’m feeling I ought to produce some Aught talk. Fortunately, I was presented with a question last week that asked me about the film that most conveys the spirit of the double-0s. It was a question I could answer easily; indeed, I have been meaning to address just this question and film for some time. It was thus with a sense of purpose not only to my own intentions, but also to my many colleagues who can’t seem to exist without placing each film into its properly ranked cubbyhole, that I steeled myself to endure the queasicam extravaganza Cloverfield.

Cloverfield is one of the most cleverly constructed films in recent memory. A monster movie in the classic tradition—giant monster inexplicably pitches up in big city to wreck inexplicable havoc, while a small band of plucky civilians mess around in the war zone of monster and military on a rescue mission—it updates the possible source of and response to the threat by posing electronic communications and mass-marketed DV cameras as the worm-riddled fruit of the 21st century tree of knowledge that atomic energy was to the 20th century. In so doing, it provides commentary not only on the seminal event in recent American history (and because of its position as the ascendant nation of the 20th century, the world)—the terrorist attack on New York City—but also on the cultural self-absorption that comes with mitigated reality that far exceeds the almost quaint film critiques of television that came in the previous few decades in such classics in the field as Network (1976) and To Die For (1995).

Reeves prepares us for a movie within a movie by opening with a title card, an apparent military description of footage from an operation code-named Cloverfield from a camera found in a sector “previously known” as Central Park. Cut to the video showing Central Park from a posh 39th-floor apartment that borders it. The video was shot by Rob Hawkins (Michael Stahl-David), who has just spent the night with Beth McIntyre (Odette Yustman), whom he then ambushes with his camera as she lounges in bed. Cute love talk ends with a plan to go to Coney Island and an abrupt shift, time-stamped a month later, to a going-away party for Rob in lower Manhattan.

In a nod to the antecedents of Cloverfield, scriptwriter Drew Goddard has written Rob a promotion to vice president (of what is never revealed) whose new job is in Japan. Rob’s best friend Hudson Platt (T. J. Miller) is given the job of recording farewell messages from the partygoers by Lily (Jessica Lucas), the girlfriend of Rob’s brother Jason (Mike Vogel). Hud gets in the face of Marlena Diamond (Lizzy Caplan), a girl he’d like to get to know better, despite her insistence that she barely knows Rob, doesn’t want to record a message, and definitely doesn’t want Hud hanging around her. When Beth shows up at the party with a date, Rob is jealous; Hud follows Rob and Beth out of the apartment to record Beth’s complaint that after the Coney Island trip, Rob never tried to contact her. Hud can’t contain himself; the juicy story of two long-time friends suddenly becoming lovers makes the rounds of the party, only to be interrupted by a sudden jolt. Earthquake? People pour out of the surrounding buildings. They witness a bomb burst, flames, and then the head of the Statue of Liberty comes bowling down the street, skidding to a stop in front of Lily’s building. Cellphones come out to photograph the sight.

Soon, a figure is spotted in the distance. On television, live feeds show an enormous creature breaking down buildings and depositing spiderlike “babies” that begin attacking people. Back at Lily’s, Marlena says she saw “it” eating people. The race away from the death zone is underway until Rob gets a call on his cell from Beth saying she is trapped and hurt in her father’s apartment. Rob decides to go to her rescue; Lily, Hud, and Marlena agree to accompany him. Their bleak odyssey through the streets, subways, and finally through Central Park forms the rest of the film.

As a film, Cloverfield sets up believable actions for its main characters—avoiding the firefight aboveground by making their way to midtown through the subway system, creating a plan to rescue Beth that within the conventions of science fiction work well, even having Marlena join the band because she really doesn’t have anywhere else to go. The effects work well, and Reeves understands the effectiveness of the symbology he has chosen to strike horror into viewers, from the decapitated Lady Liberty to a gaping hole of fire in a tall building in lower Manhattan. The film is masterfully shot as well, with the monster obscured tantalizingly at first, great camera angles making scenes such as the crossing from one building to another look possible and yet still treacherous, and editing with precise pacing to keep our hearts pounding with dread and hope.

But it is as a work of sociology and social critique that Cloverfield works so brilliantly. Putting the video camera in Hud’s hands is the first great move Reeves makes. The character is socially awkward, a clown. He wants to chat up Marlena but doesn’t know how, so he forces her to provide a farewell message just so he’ll have a pretext to keep talking to her. He absentmindedly brings up a horror story of homeless people being set on fire in the subways while the band is making its way through the tunnels, then suddenly realizes that his comments are in poor taste. He hangs onto the camera even while making a dangerous crossing from the hi rise Beth’s crumbling building is leaning against: “People need to see this, you know? It’s gonna be important. People are going to watch this.” It’s hard to argue this point given the circumstances he is recording—not to mention the fact that the fictitious military authorities viewing this archive of Operation Cloverfield and we are, in fact, watching—but the comment is eerily similar to one Suzanne makes in To Die For: “On TV is where we learn about who we really are. Because what’s the point of doing anything worthwhile if nobody’s watching?” Hud is enough of a narcissist to think that what HE is doing is important, regardless of what he’s filming.

In fact, most of the characters in this film are afflicted with some level of narcissistic disorder. Rob is very concerned that Hud is using the tape that recorded his day with Beth: “I had a tape in there…something important.” His record of his love affair is precious, yet he didn’t see a reason to keep in touch with Beth herself. “What’s the point?” Rob tells himself. “I’m leaving.” Then what was the point of making love in the first place? His actions reduce their relationship to that of “friends with benefits,” an incredibly blasé relational designation of the X generation, and his brush-off little more than a delete-unread e-mail. His brother calls him a douche bag, so all understanding of interpersonal contact has not disappeared. Yet Cloverfield is more interested in the failure to connect, the deep penetration of mitigated reality into our social fabric. In this film, Rob breaks into an electronics store instead of a gun shop to arm himself—with what?—with a new battery for his cellphone so he can call Beth. His crisis is not that a monster may eat him; it’s that he can’t connect without his gadgets.

Marlena seems a truly lost soul—angry, blunt, staring at her cellphone instead of engaging with Hud. Based on her farewell-to-Rob video, admitting to being drunk every time she’s “met” Rob, it’s pretty clear that she absents herself in any way possible from the world around her. Later, Marlena saves Hud from one of the spiderlike creatures. He thanks her for coming back to help him. She can only reply defensively, “Do you think I’m the kind of person who wouldn’t do that?” When he says he “knows” she’s not that kind of person, she softens. But how would he know that? Based on her previous actions, even she seems to know that he’d be justified to think she wouldn’t lift a finger to help his sorry ass.

And what of Beth? What of sacrificing all for love? She set out to hurt Rob at his party instead of talking to him long before that when he failed to call. She’s a girl who clearly has internalized “The Rules,” except that The Rules are written for players, not real people. The phoniest part of the film comes at the end when Rob and Beth give a foxhole declaration of love to each other. Reeves wisely ends with the last bit of the original Coney Island tape, with Beth saying, “I had a good day.” This smiling, shallow assessment of a day that supposedly meant the world to her is as honest as it gets.

The larger lesson comes from Hud and Rob’s speculations about where the monster came from: Deep-sea trenches? Outer space? The elitist world is teetering like Beth’s leaning tower of privilege on Central Park. We might easily have noticed the enemies from without and the American-born and bred monsters within our own borders. But the media shined its light elsewhere. And we didn’t stop texting soon enough to see the evidence with our own eyes. l

Skhizein (2008)

Director/Screenwriter/Animator: Jérémy Clapin

By Marilyn Ferdinand

To be “beside oneself” is a turn of phrase we’ve all heard or used at one time or another. It usually refers to someone experiencing something very emotionally charged. Of course, the part of that phrase that most people don’t think much about is that the emotion literally drives one out of one’s body. If you’ve ever witnessed a car wreck or been threatened with serious physical harm, as I have, you’ll be able to testify that it is possible for your mind to disconnect and float away from your body.

French animator Jérémy Clapin took his experience of being in an earthquake and some odd perspectives in some drawings he was rendering and conceived a story of a man whose encounter with a 150-ton meteorite crashing toward him sends him exactly 91 centimeters beside himself. “Skhizein” is from the Greek for “split” and is the root for the word “schizophrenia.” Whether you think Clapin’s protagonist Henri (Julien Boisselier) has literally been cleaved from his body by a quasi-supernatural event or has had a mental health crisis may depend on whether or not you are a fan of The Twilight Zone.

The muted animation, moody music, and flat affect of Henri make Skhizein a disturbing chamber piece that is open to various interpretations, and Clapin is more than happy to confuse the issue. The film starts with Henri visiting a psychiatrist. Although his body is hovering in the air, he is at exactly the height he would be if he were laying on the examination couch. The nonchalance of the psychiatrist indicates that he sees Henri’s body right where it should be. The dissonance between what we see and must imagine, what we believe could have happened, and the boundary-free world of animation create tension in the viewer. Like a proper audience, we want to believe the person Clapin has set us up to identify with, and Clapin’s meticulous creation of Henri’s altered world—one in which he is able to calculate and diagram in chalk precisely where he must put his hand to flush the toilet or pick up the phone—lends logic and veracity to Henri’s predicament despite its patent absurdity.

When Henri realizes that the psychiatrist is of no use to him, he takes matters into his own hands. When his television goes snowy with static as it did when the meteorite “struck” him, he looks out the window and spies it again. His pursuit of it—sitting outside his car as he races haphazardly through the streets—is an elegantly crafted chase sequence. At land’s end, we see the outline of Mont St. Michel in the distance—a mountainous island periodically cleaved from France when the tide washes over a land bridge and the only part of France that has never been conquered by invading armies. This landscape detail cannot be a coincidence. Henri plants himself on the sandy beach, draws a quick calculation of where he must be for the meteorite to strike him again, and holds his arms wide.

Did it work? Clapin says, “Henri is alright now, he doesn’t need to get organized anymore.”

The animation, a combination of traditional drawings by Clapin and models rendered by Jean-François Sarazin, Loli Irala, and Raphael Bot-Gartner, is both rather quirky and quite poignant, particularly at the end. The sound design by Marc Piera is almost hyperrealistic; I recommend viewing this short film with a good pair of headphones for maximum effect. And here now is Skhizein. l

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984)

Director/Screenwriter: Michael Radford

The Class of ’84 Blogathon

By Marilyn Ferdinand

This entry is part of the Class of ’84 Blogathon being hosted by Joe Valdez at This Distracted Globe.

Big Brother is watching you.

Whether you’ve ever read a word, or even heard of George Orwell’s seminal dystopian tale 1984, the above iconic quote is certain to have chilled your heart at some time or another. I’m not even sure this quote occurs in the book. It certainly doesn’t in Michael Radford’s evocative interpretation. Instead, in true cinematic fashion, the ever-present image of the carnivorous face of “B.B.” staring rapaciously out of two-way video screens all over the fictitious land of Oceania is all we need to experience what the people of Oceania do—a humorless totalitarian state where even thoughts are monitored for antisocial tendencies.

Orwell (real name Eric Blair), a British subject, recorded propaganda broadcasts to combat Tokyo Rose and other Axis propagandists in the Pacific theatre during World War II. Tellingly, his main protagonist in 1984, Winston Smith, spends his days at the Ministry of Truth—in newspeak, Orwell’s vocabulary of political obfuscation, Mini-true—“correcting” history by replacing purged enemies of the state with acceptable icons in newspapers and broadcasts. It seems Orwell, whom one presumes was a patriot, might have had second thoughts about propaganda, particularly after the truth about Stalin’s brand of communism became all too clear. 1984 is clearly a cautionary tale to those in the West whose faith in Stalin would not be shaken.

The film begins with an epigram: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.” We enter a stadium-sized gathering of Outer (rank and file) Party members watching a show trial of traitors accusing themselves of thought crimes and antisocial acts on an enormous screen. As the camera pans across the expanse of blue-jumpsuited workers, some rise spontaneously with the wrists of their fisted hand crossed over their heads. One of these workers is Smith (John Hurt), whose attention strays from the trial to the front row of Inner Party members. At the conclusion of the trial, the workers rise and shout hate-filled diatribes at the traitor, including a bitter-faced woman (Suzanna Hamilton). Smith retires to his quarters and in the only part of the room that isn’t viewable, removes a brick from his wall and extracts a journal into which he records his thoughts. In it, her writes that he hates this woman. Little does he know that an anonymous note that comes through the pneumatic tubes that send him his work for the day is from her. Her name is Julia, and she says “I love you.”

Knowing that he is helping the State to lie and remain in a perpetual state of war drives Winston to rebel. For some time, he has been going in to the squalid proletariat section of town where vestiges of the old way of life—people in everyday clothes who continue to have sex and babies and where artifacts such as paperweights and wooden beds with mattresses can be found—exist unmolested by the Party. He paid a prostitute $2 to have sex with her; he loved how sloppy she was, the sense of disorderly freedom he felt. When he and Julia meet and become lovers, he takes her to a room Mr. Charrington (Cyril Cusack), an antiques dealer in the prole section, rents to him for $4 a week. He reads a book that seems modeled on Machiavelli’s The Prince to her as they lay in bed, a secreted gift to him from Inner Party leader O’Brien (Richard Burton). And then the thought police swoop down on them, and O’Brien sees to Smith’s torture-filled reeducation himself, ending with terrifying Smith senseless by placing a cage of rats over his head, rats being Smith’s greatest fear after seeing them crawling all over his dead mother in the aftermath of the war that saw B.B. rise to power. In the end, Smith and Julia are hollowed out, their love destroyed along with their free will.

Radford’s Oceania is claustrophobic in private and fascistically grand in public. It provides a believable environment for what is essentially a caricature of a communist country, its machinery antiquated even as its world seems futuristic. This is, I feel, a great strength of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The utter devastation of war without end—the enemy changing frequently since the object is to keep warring, not win any concessions—and Smith’s memories looking all the world like London after the Blitz, ground this film in a European reality that was real not only for Orwell, but for the British cast and crew who made this film. The performances thus are wholly consonant with the mise-en-scène.

It’s well known that I’m not a big fan of the Coen Brothers, but I have always admired the work of their regular cinematographer Roger Deakins. Here, before the Coens were a blip on his radar, Deakins works with the blue steel palette that is de rigueur for coloring dehumanization and misery, inflecting it, of course, with idealized images in bright colors and Julia’s nude body as a place Smith escapes to as he is tortured. There is nothing revolutionary about this cinematography—in fact, it could plausibly be argued that Radford, whose film debuted in December 1984, might have been highly influenced by the Ridley Scott-directed commercial for Apple computers that electrified a worldwide audience watching the 1984 Super Bowl 10 months earlier. It’s also possible that the two Brits merely compared notes in creating imagery and color schemes that were nearly identical for their renderings of Orwell’s world. I find it fascinating that an abstract landscape of rolling hills and sparse green trees Deakins and Radford composed for Smith’s oasis resembles a standard wallpaper image found on Microsoft PC monitors.

The duplicity of all of the characters surrounding Smith is extremely well rendered by the film’s stellar cast. Hamilton’s Julia seems a passionate drone of the State, only to reveal startlingly her passion really lies in the pleasures of the flesh. Burton is so quiet in this, his last film role, that his betrayal of Smith comes as a genuine shock. Cyril Cusack is perfect as a symbol of a quaint, bygone era who preys on the nostalgia of Party members.

And then there is Hurt in the performance of a career. He’s sweet, gullible, absolutely no match for the mechanics of his totalitarian world—and yet he cries out even in his worst moments, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” In the end, when Smith, unable to say anything unrelated to the Party sits at a dusty café table and draws “2 + 2 =” in the dirt, unable to finish, the poignancy of his suffering is almost too much to bear.

Naturally, there had to be a movie of 1984 in 1984. I’m glad it was this one. l

The Damned (aka, These Are the Damned, 1963)

Director: Joseph Losey

By Roderick Heath

Like Stanley Kubrick, Joseph Losey decamped from America for Britain and remained there for the rest of his career, albeit more for political rather than artistic reasons. The Damned, a coproduction between Columbia Studios and Hammer Films, had a troubled history. The resulting product begins with some charmingly perverse fake rock (“Black leather, black leather, kill kill kill!”), reflecting the difficulty filmmakers were having in adapting to that new argot, and the off-kilter narrative takes a while to find its feet. And yet, once it does, The Damned is one of the richest and most intriguing of the crop of what could be called sci-fi noir to come out of Britain in this period.

Macdonald Carey plays Simon Wells, a former insurance salesman and middle-aged drop-out who, having moored his yacht in Weymouth, skylarks around the docks and tries to pick up Joan (Shirley Anne Field), a comely young slapper who’s used as bait by her older brother King (Oliver Reed) and his mob of Teddy Boy thugs to entrap men like Simon, and then mug him. Two soldiers in civvies (Walter Gotell and James Villiers) come to Wells’ aid and take him to their superior, Bernard (Alexander Knox). Their boss is a gentlemanly but mordant scientist who’s in the company his bohemian sculptress girlfriend Freya Neilson (Viveca Lindfors). Freya is troubled by Bernard’s increasing distance and secrecy as manager of an installation outside town, but maintains an air of informed appreciation of the state of the world in irreparable fragmentation.

Simon, returning to his yacht, is visited again by Joan, who both abuses him for assuming she was a cheap tart he could pick up, and also seems to want something from him— respect or love or whatever’s coming—because she’s feeling trapped by her unstable, possessive brother, who locked her in a cupboard the last time she flirted with a man. When King and the gang come upon them, Simon guns the boat and sails out of the harbor; Joan, instead of remaining with them, runs after his boat and jumps onto the stern. King, infuriated, orders his boys to watch the coast. When they do row ashore, Simon and Joan shack up and make love in a house owned by Bernard and used by Freya as her studio. Freya’s arrival scares them away. Freya is confronted by King when he arrives, and he, in an irrational fury, smashes one of her weird sculptures before he joins his boys in chasing after Simon and Joan. Joan falls over the edge of a cliff into the water below; Simon and then King follow her down the cliff face. Joan and Simon are washed into a grotto and crawl into a cave, fitted out like a Bond villain’s hideout, where a colony of mysterious children with ice-cold skin live.

These children are indeed the damned, born inoculated with radiation after their mothers were accidentally exposed and taken in hand by Bernard and the state to be raised in perfect isolation because they are poisonous to other humans and vice versa. The children, educated via video screens and prodigiously adept in science, have formed their own little society, complete with a hiding place Bernard allows them to maintain. In this space they have set up achingly pathetic shrines to their unknown parents, with pictures clipped from magazines providing the faces. Above ground, Bernard and other military and science officials argue about how to handle the children, who help to hid these adults who have stumbled into their world. One of the soldiers accuses a scientist of wanting to make them “little Beatniks!” Bernard, both avuncular and conscientious, yet disturbingly dedicated and self-assured, is utterly certain nuclear holocaust is coming, and offers hope of repopulating the Earth after the fire.

The Damned was adapted from H. L. Lawrence’s novel Children of the Light, and it plays a game later used to quite different effect by Tarantino and Rodriguez in From Dusk ’Til Dawn (1995). It begins as a realistic narrative and then swerves unexpectedly into fantasy. There’s an odour of opportunism in trying to tie together youth appeal (its rampant Teddy Boys) and scifi horror that seems to have been foiled by director Losey’s bent, which is utterly individual, even poetic. He is backed up by an exceedingly intelligent script by Evan Jones that gives a keen edge to the film’s divided personality that’s quite different to even the best Hammer horror. The film’s odd casting deepens the weird air; Carey is out of place, Field seems too toffy-nosed for her part, Knox’s Scots accent is bad, and perpetual foreign villain Gotell is amusingly cast as a British officer. Reed, however, is effective as King, with his soon-to-be familiar smouldering mix of raw force and febrile spirit, and Lindfors is extremely good in imbuing Freya with vital soul. The children’s number includes future Excalibur Lancelot Nicholas Clay. Fascinating little moments and exchanges abound, such as when Freya strikes up an easy conversation with one of the better-natured Teddy Boys, or in her conversations with Bernard that reflect both ardour and cool, aging perspective, and in Joan and Simon’s edgy relationship, two wildly different people crashing together by natural selection.

Bernard’s hopes for the children only offset the cynical, murderous spirit that underlies his humanitarianism. He believes in nature’s capacity to adapt and change, an idea that draws him to Freya’s sculptures, which resemble animals and figures either decaying or unfinished—evolution or devolution rendered indistinguishable. Much as King, a barely coherent personality shoved inside a powerful body, keeps Joan desperately in thrall for protection and self-justification, so, too, does Bernard, as a representative of an increasingly schizoid society, keep the children in their underground abode.

Although King’s Teddy Boys in their leather gear and the children in their pristine uniforms and public school accents seem different, they’re all avatars of an anxiety over the future of humanity that seems set to fall prey to its own craziness. The underground children gleefully erupt in rebellion when given a chance, smashing the cameras and predicting the imagery of rebellious-kid films like if… (1968) and Pink Floyd’s The Wall (1982). Moreover, Reed’s King seems kin to Alex of A Clockwork Orange as a representative of a new, dangerous youth culture, with his mix of brazen antisocial rage and performance art, dressed in a dapper suit, carrying a knife-cane, and playing the sergeant-major to his men. Like Alex, he confronts a female artist in an isolated setting and takes a club to her artworks in unleashing his oddly misdirected male potency against her feminine remoteness and creative self-sufficiency.

A couple of years ago, George Miller, kicking about the idea of a new Mad Max film, noted with some amusement that people were nostalgic for the end of the world. Similarly, it’s always the edge of incipient paranoia, of frightening novelty, of inevitable calamity both in the immediate past and just around the corner that’s always fascinated me about the popular scifi of the ’50s and ’60s. Some of the best examples of this type of film came in Britain, with writers like Nigel Kneale, Arthur C. Clarke, Terry Nation, William Golding, John Christopher, Brian Aldiss, and John Wyndham and movies like Village of the Damned, The Abominable Snowman, the Quatermass series, and The Day the Earth Caught Fire, leading to more overt nuclear-holocaust films like Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Peter Watkins’ The War Game. Often visually quoting the Blitz, the Holocaust, and the Manhattan Project and citing Britain’s new, unfamiliar piggy-in-the-middle status in the new Atomic Age, such works often possess an inky, forlorn, menaced atmosphere. The Damned embraces its own apocalyptic heart, cowering before the prerogative of science and government, presenting a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t quandary that’s unsolved at the close.

As to whether Bernard’s plan offers hope for the future or reflects the unbound obscenity of the modern era, the answer, perhaps, is yes to both. The caring Simon and the orphaned Joan immediately want to help the kids escape; the anarchic King, brought into the cave by one of the boys who latches onto him as a father figure, takes on the efforts of the military to put the genie back in the bottle. But they’re fighting against a situation that’s far larger than any of them, and Bernard and the soldiers manage to recapture the kids shortly after escaping. They let Simon, Joan, and King flee because they will die soon of radiation poisoning. Freya, having witnessed the events, rejects Bernard’s prognosis, and so he calmly shoots her. The last, haunting image is of Simon’s boat sailing out to see with its anti-Adam and Eve expiring, followed, like a great mechanical vulture, by a helicopter that will destroy their boat once they’re dead, whilst the voices of the children on sound scream out for help.

Dark and cumulatively disquieting, The Damned is a small gem.

Torchwood: Children of Earth (2009)

Creator/Writer: Russell T. Davies

By Marilyn Ferdinand

For anyone who has been wondering where I’ve been all week, the explanation is that the hubby and I have all but eschewed movies in favor of a nightly rendezvous with BBC America to watch a five-part miniseries of one of our favorite TV series: Torchwood. Two years ago, the series disappeared. How could the BBC cancel such a winning show? We despaired of it ever returning. Thankfully, creator Russell Davies and the remaining regular cast members, John Barrowman, Eve Myles, Gareth David-Lloyd, and Kai Owen, were given a chance to come back and end the series properly (despite hints that it could return, I don’t expect it to this time).

Torchwood is a spin-off from Doctor Who, television’s longest-running science fiction series. The Doctor, played by various actors since the series premiered in 1963, is a time lord who recognizes the central character in Torchwood, Captain Jack Harkness (Barrowman), as something that shouldn’t exist—a fixed point in time and space. Harkness started life in the 51th century, but because he is a constant, he cannot die. The Doctor has facilitated his travels through time. A couple of centuries before the present, Harkness became involved with Torchwood, a secret branch of the British government based in Cardiff, Wales, where a rift in space/time allows aliens from other times and worlds to enter Earth’s space. Harkness now leads the Torchwood team. In the second season, two series regulars, physician Owen Harper (Burn Gorman) and math genius Toshiko Sato (Naoko Mori), were killed. Children of Earth finds the remaining Torchwood team of Harkness, former cop Gwen Cooper (Myles), and Ianto Jones (David-Lloyd), grieving their loss and continuing the business of capturing straying aliens and returning them to wherever they rightfully belong.

The series starts benignly enough, with Ianto and Jack pretending to be neighbors of a recently deceased man without family. A sympathetic doctor at the hospital, Rupesh Patanjali (Rik Makarem), allows them to spend a few moments alone with the body, whereupon they make a laser incision in the body and extract an alien symbiote with some forceps. Patanjali walks in on them as they scurry away. He knows they’re Torchwood, an open secret in Cardiff, and alerts them to some strange goings-on in the hospital. Soon, he is contacted by Gwen as a possible recruit to replace Owen.

At about this time, all of the children on Earth stop dead in their tracks, frozen in position. Then they start on again as though nothing has happened. Later, they all speak in unison, in English, repeating the phrase, “We are coming,” then resume life again. There’s no doubt to viewers of the show and the Torchwood team that aliens are using the children to communicate. A very select group of people in the British government know exactly who these aliens are because in 1965, 12 children were turned over to them in exchange for a life-saving antidote to a virus that would have killed perhaps 30 million people worldwide. Prime Minister Brian Green (Nicholas Farrell) decides that Britain’s previous dealings with the aliens, called the 456 for the wavelength on which they communicated, be covered up. He orders lowly bureaucrat John Frobisher (Peter Capaldi) to see to the elimination of anyone with knowledge of the 456—including Jack Harkness—and construct a device the 456 will occupy when they return to Earth.

To say much more about the plot would ruin the suspense the miniseries builds with admirable dexterity. The series breaks no ground in suggesting that the 456 are a nasty piece of work, characterizing them as arachnoid giants who breathe toxic air, explode suddenly with fountains of acidic sputum, and think nothing of turning the world’s children into temporary zombie-puppets for their own purposes. They are also politically shrewd, accepting private terms put forward from the PM by Frobisher to keep the 1965 visit secret from the world that will be party to this new negotiation. Their mission to Earth, moreover, is shown to be absolutely craven, having nothing to do with the usual scifi staples of preserving their dying species or colonizing Earth because their planet is dying. They are very forthcoming about their frivilous purpose, and that only fills us with more disgust.

What matters in Torchwood is not the monster of the day, but the very human relationships that the cast bring to life in minute and touching detail. Gwen and trucker Rhys (Owen) are married; Rhys is kept in the dark about what Gwen does until she can no longer take the secrecy Jack demands of her. Rhys becomes an unofficial member of Torchwood, helping out when needed, keeping Gwen grounded in the real world, adding both comic and romantically touching moments throughout the series, and running afoul of harm more than once. In Children of Earth, Gwen learns she’s pregnant, with Jack and Ianto learning about it before Rhys. Jack predicts, correctly, that Rhys will hit the ceiling when he finds out he’s third in line of discovery. Yet, the moment Gwen tells him is classic Torchwood—hiding in the back of a truck hauling potatoes, she talks ruefully about rehearsing moments for big announcements long before they happen, and how the best laid plans go awry. One look at her broadening, impish smile tells Rhys all he needs to know. Owen and Myles are terrifically likeable actors, and their chemistry makes the relationship the diamond at the core of the Torchwood story.

Ianto and Jack are lovers. Jack, who has lived for centuries, doesn’t think twice about behaving as part of a gay couple, but Ianto, who never had a male lover before Jack, is still feeling around the edges of their love. When he reveals all to his sister Rhiannon (Katy Wix), she squeals incredulously, a loving and teasing sibling wondering how she could have missed that her brother was gay. Ianto says he wasn’t interested in other men, “Just him.”

A trio of tragic figures emerges: Clem McDonald (Paul Copely), the only child from 1965 to have escaped abduction; Frobisher, a dedicated civil servant being set up to take the fall because he’s entirely expendable; and Jack himself. Clem, a scruffy, pathetic man confined to an insane asylum for years, is still linked to the 456. His instinct for survival is as keen as it was in 1965, as he senses the aliens’ approach all along the way and runs from them. Kind-hearted Gwen takes him in and tries to comfort him that he is safe with Torchwood, a claim she forces herself to believe after the Cardiff headquarters have been blown to bits by a bomb planted inside Jack. Copely infuses this potentially annoying character with a pathos and native intelligence that make us feel the deep tragedy of this boy who never really grew up because he was made a pawn in a devil’s bargain.

Frobisher, likewise, is tasked with negotiating with the 456 and meeting their demands after a show of force convinces the various governments of the world that they are no match for the aliens. In another black bargain, the men in charge pussyfoot around making decisions. Three women close to the hub of power—cabinet minister Alice Carter (Lucy Cohu), assistant to Frobisher Bridget Spears (Susan Brown), and brand-new office hire Lois Habiba (Cush Jumbo)—make the difficult choices, show courage and loyalty, and dare to challenge the status quo. Indeed, in Torchwood, a perhaps idealized view of the superiority of women’s judgment is at the forefront. Men can be brave, loyal, and true, but they are frequently shown to be foolish, narrow-focused, naive, and cynical.

The most morally ambiguous character, and the most classically tragic character of the lot, is Jack. What hasn’t a man who will never die seen? What bargains hasn’t he made that he has learned to regret—or regretted the moment he made them? What must it be like for a man to see those he loves grow old and die—or die in the prime of life? Torchwood is certainly well named for the bright lights that blaze and burn out young. Only Jack has nothing to fear mortally, but his conscience in some sense may be seen as the conscience of the divine: seeing the world and despairing at creation and the misery that has attended it. Gwen herself voices this moral dilemma, wondering why The Doctor shows up sometimes to save the day and is absent at other times. “The Doctor must look at this planet and turn away in shame.” Gwen stands for facing each day, no matter what; Jack has learned that running away is not only acceptable, but also the only choice in some circumstances. Bravery means nothing to him; learning to live with what he’s seen and knows is his life’s great task.

Torchwood: Children of Earth deals dramatically with how those in power exempt themselves from sacrifice, force sacrifice on those they consider expendable, and dissemble even to their allies. It takes up the question of bargaining with terrorists, and whether such bargains can ever be trusted to hold. It looks at the appetites we all have—for pleasure, power, security—and places them against the cost to others. It shows what is best and worst in humanity, and how people choose their loyalties. In Torchwood, loyalty to the personal almost always outweighs loyalty to country, even though Torchwood exists to serve the British state.

The script for this miniseries takes in these big questions almost effortlessly, and the cast infuse their parts with nuance and charisma. There are a few “conveniences,” particularly in wrapping the story up. For example, how does Lois go from her first day of work to sitting in on the negotiations with the 456? In reality, it wouldn’t happen, but given the crisis that has thrown apart normal operations, we can see how someone no one knows could slip into high-level meetings as almost a piece of furniture. We accept certain plot devices, because like all good scifi, the series largely maintains its own internal logic. And when we’ve spent five or so hours gripped in a ripping yarn that engages our minds, we can only wish that it would go on forever.

X: The Man with the X-ray Eyes (1963)

Director: Roger Corman

By Marilyn Ferdinand

There are few film buffs who don’t have some affection for Roger Corman, the shlockmeister from American International Pictures who produced careers for budding filmmakers almost as fast as he did movies. No one would confuse an AIP film with great art, but Corman’s sense of the bizarre and sensational, his ability to make decent B pictures for so little money, and his knack for attracting some pretty decent talent have earned our respect. X is one film from his vast oeuvre I hadn’t caught up with until our local revival house showed an outstanding print of it last night. It is a surprisingly compelling, even moving picture. It might even be the best Corman ever made.

Dr. James Xavier (Ray Milland) is a physician who has temporarily abandoned his practice for research. The film opens with him in the chair of his optometrist Sam Brant (Harold J. Stone) having his eyes examined. Brant says there has been no change since the clean bill of health he gave Xavier three months before. “No change yet,” says Xavier. “You intend to experiment on yourself, don’t you,” scolds Brant. Xavier explains that the human brain processes only 10 percent of the known wavelengths in the universe. He wants to extend the range of human vision, perhaps look directly into the human body to diagnose diseases that standard X-rays can’t reveal.

Xavier returns to his lab, where he is visited by Dr. Diane Fairfax (Diane Van der Vlis). Fairfax works for the foundation that funds his work, and she says the foundation is ready to pull the plug because of a lack of results. Xavier says he’ll show her results that will knock her socks off. He places a drop of a compound he’s developed called “X” into each eye of a test monkey, and shows how the monkey can see through several sheets of paper. Suddenly the monkey dies. An autopsy reveals no organic damage; Xavier says the animal must have died of shock because it could not adjust to all the new images it was seeing. Fairfax is convinced.

Xavier starts to experiment on himself. With his new X-ray vision, he sees directly into a patient he is supposed to help operate on. His vision shows she was misdiagnosed, but he can’t get the chief surgeon to listen to him. In the operating room, Xavier cuts the surgeon on the hand so he cannot continue operating. Xavier takes over and goes after a tumor in another part of her thorax. Despite proving he’s right, he’s threatened with sanctions and his research funding is pulled.

A tragedy Xavier causes has him on the run, using his new sight, renewed by regular doses of X, to support himself in a carnival sideshow as “Mentalo.” His partner in the carnival, Crane (Don Rickles), finds out he’s not just pulling a stunt and sets him up as a healer who accepts donations. When Diane tracks Xavier down through the patients who visit her after getting diagnosed through him, they decide to head for Mexico or Canada where he can continue his research. Before they leave, he heads to Las Vegas to win the money he’ll need to set up shop elsewhere, but fate has something different in store for him.

As science fiction plots go, this one certainly isn’t the most farfetched. Despite the silly lab Xavier has, rigged with bottles containing colored liquids and tubes, the scene with the monkey is handled in a fairly believable way. In 1963, the general public might not have bought that the doors to perception could be opened with eye drops, but subsequent knowledge of how powerful a single drop of LSD could be lend some veracity even to this simple plot device.

Corman, of course, can’t keep cheese off the menu. His opening credits feature a close-up of an eye floating in formaldehyde. He knows what audiences would do with X-ray eyes, and throws them the bone of a party in which Xavier sees everyone naked (he even has Rickles voice this desire later in the film). He covers Milland’s eyes with white and black contact lenses, and gives us POV shots from Xavier’s eyes that employ colors suggesting theatres may have handed out 3-D glasses before the film. The scene in which Xavier spots the tumor inside his patient looks like nothing discernable to me; other scenes employ fluoroscopic images of skeletons moving and models of internal organs. Naturally, everything is cheap and looks it.

What really makes this picture the engrossing experience it is is the commitment of Ray Milland to this role. Xavier doesn’t become an evil scientist; he stays committed to trying to perfect X, make it more controllable, even as he seems to develop an addiction to it. Milland, an Academy Award winner for his star turn in the only Billy Wilder film I wholeheartedly endorse, The Lost Weekend, has considerable acting chops. Even though his career dipped into B pictures, he brings a force and grace similar to what Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing lent to the best of the Hammer horror films. Even with a basic script and players who were not his match (though Rickles’ combination of his insult act and self-interested huckster was better than I thought it would be, and the character of Dr. Fairfax was a strong, intelligent woman, not just a loyal woman at her man’s side), Milland gets us on his side so quickly and thoroughly that we don’t feel that dread many scifi/horror films sell regarding the folly of science. He tempers Xavier’s idealism with practical ambition, his undercurrent of belief in the benefits of his work a spur to staying out of the reach of authority, and his mad dash in a stolen car a cause for concern at what might happen to him.

I know I’m a little behind my fellow bloggers in singing the praises of this B movie with an A heart, but I’m glad I now know what all the fuss was about. If you are like I was, it’s time you found out, too.

Polar Paranoia and Generic Invention: The Thing (From Another World) (1951)

Directors: Christian Nyby Jr. and Howard Hawks

By Roderick Heath

Christian Nyby’s The Thing (From Another World), which portrays a battle with an alien life form in an isolated and besieged setting, became an early and vital foundation for the way the science fiction genre developed on screen in the 1950s. The film’s iconography, Cold War atmosphere, and themes of science clashing with militarism and humanism pitted against technocracy lay out significant aspects of the developing genre’s concerns. Arriving in the same year as Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, the two films represent distinct strands of the subgenre of the alien invasion tale: evil and benign intrusions.

The Thing was produced and as has been suggested by many, including cast member Kenneth Tobey, actually directed by Howard Hawks, whose aesthetic influence is, at any rate, noticeable. The story was adapted from the novella “Who Goes There?” by Astounding magazine editor and signal scifi author John W. Campbell. Nyby’s adaptation, unlike John Carpenter’s 1982 film of the same material, altered the alien’s nature so that it was no longer a xenomorphic alien, but an “intellectual carrot” from space. The novella’s protagonists find battling the beast difficult not merely because of its malevolence, but also because the heroes cannot discern if one or more of their fellows is the alien and, therefore, who can be trusted. Yet the film’s tone is one of vibrant tension and paranoia, and the idea of an “enemy within” is still present in the clash of the core human protagonists, Captain Pat Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) and Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite).

The Thing enshrines two core icons scholar Rick Altman called “blueprint” elements of the science fiction genre—the unidentified flying object and the invader from outer space. Just as central to the 1950s scifi genre, the threat of apocalypse, alien invasion and possession, the atom bomb and radiation are all present in The Thing. Other aspects of the film can just as easily appear in films from other genres, and yet are also common in this subgenre: the heroic military leader; the super-intelligent scientist, and the band of select character types; the isolated setting and siege situation; the steady whittling down of the cast; ambiguity of threat and the process of explicating it through scientific detection; the threat of nascent apocalypse; and final defeat of the monster. Stick in Sigourney Weaver and you have Aliens.

The film is less about establishing a semi-mystical credulity, an aspect scholar Patrick Luciano insisted was a constant in most later alien-intruder tales, and more purely about discerning and dealing with threat. Perhaps the film’s greatest importance as an early entrant in the genre is its treatment of the science/military schism as not merely procedural but philosophic. Hendry and Carrington, embodying the human/science debate, are replicated variously throughout the genre, perhaps most idealistically in the Kirk-Spock relationship of the Star Trek series, where heart and head balance each ther. Carrington’s cool, logical need to learn is optimistic, but disturbingly conceives of individual lives as expedient. Hendry’s instinct to destroy the alien is barbarian and human. The clash between hubris and conscientiousness was already a feature of the genre before World War II, acted out, for example, between Dr. Thorkel (Albert Dekker) and Dr. Bullfinch (Charles Halton) in Dr. Cyclops (1939). Carrington not only is opposed by Hendry, but also by Dr. Chapman (John Dierkes), representative of a more engaged scientific cadre. What is new in the picture is the atomic bomb, which makes the idea of progress run amok less ethereal; now, a larger sense of social purpose, represented by militarism, is keeping the old wicked alchemist fantasy contained.

Hendry sets out to defend the base personnel from the alien, whilst Carrington’s philosophy contains coded notions that endanger the personnel: that scientific knowledge is a godhead to which anything can be sacrificed, and which contains no preexisting moral precepts outside its own logic. He becomes a kind of general, insisting that casualties will be necessary in capturing the alien’s knowledge. Yet his motives are altruistic, even utopian: it’s his species as a whole he imagines as benefiting. This echoes, perhaps deliberately, the utopian, anti-individual prerogatives of Communism. Carrington’s fascination is dismissed as like a child playing with a new toy, and Hendry’s sense of responsibility is held as inherently adult.

The Thing is also a film made in, and about, an age of expectation: expectation of war and of new discovery. The relative proximity of both the first A-bomb blast and reports of UFOs (Kenneth Arnold’s sighting and the Roswell incident, both in 1947) put them on an conceptual par. “We finally got one!” Scotty (Douglas Spencer) exclaims at the UFO crash site, as if it were only a matter of time. Peter Biskind calls The Thing’s perspective exemplary of a right-wing subgenre, celebrating a military man’s moral triumph over a scientist’s in dealing with nascent threat.

Political context is important as another formative aspect of the ’50s genre. Constantly reiterated in the film is its relative proximity to World War II. Even nonmilitary men have experience in war, like Scotty, the journalist and everyman in the narrative: he describes the edgy atmosphere as “just like the old days”. But this is not merely a metaphor for the values of social regimentation. Hendry sets himself both against Carrington and his own superiors in his actions: rather than being a passive tool of power, his ethos requires him to act for the people around him. There is a fundamental distrust of elitism: both Carrington’s Nobel Prize and the distance-muffled rank of Hendry’s commander, General Fogarty (David McMahon), dissociates both from understanding the travails of mere humans. More than this, the struggle between men, and not merely with an alien, is crucial. Although Carrington explores the Thing’s biology, including how it might cause apocalypse with its reproductive method, it’s Nikki (Margaret Sheridan), his secretary, who suggests how to deal with it and lesser scientists and soldiers who turn this into a battle plan.

When Carrington employs the atomic bomb as an example of scientific progress, one soldier sneers, “That sure made everybody happy.” The Thing itself is radioactive, further condensing the atom bomb, the unknown monster, and out-of-control science into a single entity. The alien’s reversal of the assumed relationship of man to plant and thus to nature, further feeds the anxiety that the human relationship with the world has been distorted. Carrington explicitly admires the Thing, which has “no pains or pleasures as we know them…no emotions…no heart…superior – far superior in every way…” This desire in science to discover or create something lacking human weakness, with its fascistic yearning toward perfection, casts a long shadow in the genre—cyborg Ash in Alien (1979) admiring the creature’s “purity”, or Tyrell’s celebration of übermensch Roy in Blade Runner (1982) as “perfect as we could make you,” designed with a short enough life span to curtail emotional responses. As in the conflict of Adams and Morbius in Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956), the super genius needs the ordinary man to reveal a basic fact about humanity. Carrington’s relationship to the Thing resembles a reframing of Dr. Frankenstein, in Curse of Frankenstein (1957), as a sociopathic seeker of supermen blind to common human considerations.

The alien is savagely inimical to other life forms, and yet characterised as possessing vastly superior technology and intellect. Being a vegetable, it reproduces asexually and lives by draining blood directly from other creatures. Its intelligence then is not linked to any sense of emotion or ethical consequence: it has no empathy, only parasitic self-interest. Whilst the Thing possesses raw intellect without passion or empathy, the red-blooded Hendry romances Nikki with such out-of-control fervor that she insists on his being tied up when giving him liquor. The necessary self-control that is part of being human—that irrational and imperfect creature—is absent in the Thing. The alien, and by implication science in general, is seen as more—not less—barbarian for eliminating human concerns like reproduction and community. The title confirms the prejudice: it’s a thing from another world, not a man, woman, or even animal—as Carrington puts it, “as different from us as one pole from another.”

That the Cold War is on the film’s mind is acknowledged when Hendry mentions that the Russians are “all over the pole like flies.” The film exploits the frigid setting for both symbolic and strategic relevance with the paranoid notion that the Soviets have access to the American continent via the polar ice. The image of fraught confrontation between East and West in the polar zone is shared with movies like The Bedford Incident (1965), Billion Dollar Brain (1967) and Ice Station Zebra (1968), pseudo-realistic thrillers on the fringes of scifi. The base is, then, no mere research station, but a frontier outpost in Indian country, like those in the many westerns Hawks and Nyby made. When the team locates the UFO, the weather is clear, befitting a moment of illumination. Once the Thing escapes, a blizzard rolls in. Beyond the safe confines of the base’s living quarters is threatening, shadowy, and stalked by unseen threat. It is made clear that it is necessary to contain the Thing’s threat here, or see the world overrun. Here are the essentials of paranoia, placed in a specific political milieu, but with a timeless element of dread. The Thing portrays a society gearing itself up for another confrontation, one war recently passed with a new one on the polar horizon.

The respect for stolidity over theoretical genius can be seen as a reflection of Hawks’ influence on the film, with his admiration for hard-bitten dutifulness and the necessity of teamwork amongst professionals and his distaste for amateurism, both of which characterize Only Angels Have Wings (1939) and Rio Bravo (1959). In The Thing, the businesslike characters know when to get to the point and shut up. Constant, friendly chat changes to terse “I see what you mean” or “you’re right” once the situation demands it. Other familiar elements of the Hawks oeuvre include the tough, level-headed woman (Nikki, who can drink Hendry under the table), the far-flung setting and mounting death toll amidst a group of professionals; the rapid-fire, overlapping dialogue; and the complex relationships of actors within frames composed at eye level.

More distinctly Hawksian than generic is the mature approach The Thing takes to a morally dubious, conflicted character. Usually in a scifi melodrama, a character that creates or exacerbates a dangerous situation will be killed off in ultimate retribution. The Hawksian template here twists a once and future cliché into a more complex conclusion. Although Carrington endangers everyone, he earns readmission into the circle (cited by Scotty as recovering “from injuries sustained in the battle”) by putting his own neck on the line in trying to talk with the Thing, testing and receiving a blunt answer to his hypotheses. In this, Carrington resembles the redeemed Bat McPherson (Richard Barthelmess) in Only Angels Have Wings.

The last stage of the monster movie involves a humbling of humankind, as we gain a new awareness of our place in the universe. Scotty’s admonition to “watch the skies” signals a new era of fearful awareness of the heavens from which it is entirely possible that doom will come. Luciano’s mystical element is important here, for in The Thing, both prophet and alien have more of the demonic than the angelic in what they augur. Scotty’s line also closes the circle on the Cold War theme, as the world of 1951 is only just becoming used to nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and stratospheric aircraft. The world has, to quote Edmund Gwenn’s Dr. Bedford at the end of Them! (1954), stepped through a door into a new world. There is a sense of the enemy and a readiness to fight, but there will be no relaxation or relief in this new world. l

Star Trek (2009)

Director: J. J. Abrams

By Roderick Heath

And now for something that has never been done on the internet before: a nerd will tell you what he thinks about Star Trek.

I’m far from being a Trekkie, and yet Star Trek’s been a part of my life for most of that life. My favourite phase of the franchise was movie episodes II to XI (The Motion Picture and The Final Frontier strategically ignored). This was a series built around a bunch of clapped-out old guys who’d rather be sitting at home reading Dickens and sucking down vintage Romulan Ale instead of still humping it ’round the rings of Saturn dueling Klingons. That was the joy of those films, the lived-in quality of the repartee between Jim Kirk, Spock, Bones McCoy, Scotty and all the rest: there was something of the reality of getting old as a team as well as individuals in them, an affirmation of mortality and humanity amidst the cheesy special effects and new age posturing. Certainly the walking clipboards of The Next Generation and its successors never lit my fire. As for the original TV show, it was a very uneven creation. Yet it had a quality of invention, a solid genre basis, a sense of humour, and, most indefinably of all, a breath of loopy poetry that made it the stand-out American scifi creation of its era.

Now, boldly going where few oversold franchises running on diminishing returns have gone before, J. J. Abrams, the whiz behind Lost, Alias, and the only watchable installment of the Mission: Impossible saga, has reinvented Gene Roddenberry’s venerable series with the newly fashionable idea of beginning at the beginning. Again. In case you live on Mars, in which circumstance this will be a busman’s honeymoon anyway, Abrams’ new film takes us all back to when Kirk, Spock, Uhura, and all the rest first boarded the Enterprise and took it for a spin. Gone, Next Generation bodysuits. Back in, groovy ’60s miniskirts.

Abrams’ love of a heightened, almost operatic emotion inflecting his slam-bam action, more Baroness Orczy than Michael Bay, is in evidence from the opening sequence. In Mission: Impossible III, his signature touch was to accessorize his plastic hero with a wife, to put an actual stake in the drama; here he goes the whole hog with a prologue in which mysterious Romulan renegade Nero (Eric Bana) plunges through a wormhole from the future with incalculable villainy on his mind. He immediately encounters the USS Kelvin, cripples it, and kills its captain (Faran Tahir), leaving first officer George Kirk (Chris Hemsworth) in command. The crew, including his own wife, who is giving birth to their son James Tiberius, are evacuated, but George remains aboard and heroically and, needless to say, fatally, rams the Kelvin into Nero’s ship. Right off the bat, Abrams goes for a soaring, happily absurd passion.

When next we encounter James Tiberius Kirk, he’s a troubled lad tear-assing about Iowa in a stolen car, and, later (now played by Chris Pine), getting into fights in bars–specifically, when he tries to pick up Uhura (Zoe Saldana), a Starfleet Academy cadet, and her fellows object. This literally throws him in the path of Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood), who prods Kirk to rise to his calling. And he does, boarding a ship for the Academy at the same time as grumpy, flight-phobic doctor Leonard McCoy (Karl Urban), who’s on the run from a bad divorce: “She took the whole planet!” Meanwhile, future comrade-in-arms Spock (Zachary Quinto) has issues of his own: he’s ostracised by other Vulcan youths and conflicted about his bi-species origin, represented by Vulcan father Ambassador Sarek (Ben Cross) and human mother Amanda Grayson (Winona Ryder). Spock plays the rational Vulcan but sits on a lode of resentment that sees him reject a place at a prestigious institution when they patronise his human heritage, heading instead for Starfleet. Kirk and Spock butt heads when Kirk sabotages the “Kobayashi Maru” simulator, the Academy’s no-win test of leadership poise that Spock designed. Before the issue can be settled, alarm bells ring: Vulcan suffers from unexplained seismic upheavals, and the trainees are dispatched in the new vessel Enterprise under Pike. But as a stowaway, Kirk realises Vulcan is actually under attack by a returned Nero, who is determined to destroy Spock’s home planet, Spock being somehow destined to contribute to the annihilation of the Romulans.

What Abrams gets most vitally correct is building the film around the personality clash between Kirk and Spock, which, of course, converts into inseparable partnership. It’s both the core dramatic quality and the engine of much of the plot. Kirk’s insouciant, loutish charm concealing great intelligence and not a small amount of damage, and Spock’s cool demeanour suppressing an unresolved conflict, register with uncommon force. The film’s real climax comes when, needing to supplant Spock as captain because the situation requires his brand of leadership, Kirk provokes the Vulcan into revealing his all-too-earthly rage. The irony here is that Roddenberry hated William Shatner’s persona as Kirk and came closer to realising his high-fibre, solar-powered, biodegradable vision with the later series, so reviving and indeed cranking up Kirk’s swaggering, screw-anything-that-moves self-satisfaction is an embrace of bastard child over chosen heir. If Shatner is only present in spirit, Leonard Nimoy’s presence as the aged, haggard Spock flung back in time along with Nero and advising Kirk on the backstory, provides effortless gravitas. Pine is a lean, mean Kirk, but Spock is and always has been the juicy and harder part to play. Quinto acquits himself with aplomb.

The other characters don’t fare so well, though everyone gets a star turn, from John Cho’s zesty Sulu pulling kung-fu moves on a Romulan henchman, to Simon Pegg’s hilarious, too brief contribution as Scotty, a genius scientist whom Kirk saves from a bureaucratic exile in a wintry hell. Best of all is Saldana’s Uhura, who is sketched now as an actual character. Kirk spends the first half of the film trying to make Uhura, even bedding her green-skinned roommate (a fittingly cheeky reference to Kirk’s pansexual bent), but the hyper-alert xenolinguist only has eyes for Spock. Abrams reveals a surprisingly rich awareness of the show’s attendant baggage. It’s hilariously apt, considering that “Spock” is a schoolyard epithet to fling at nerds (at least around my way), to make Spock himself the target of taunts, and to acknowledge that it was him, and not über-stud Kirk, that set female fans’ pulses racing back when as the eminently meltable man of ice.

Abrams and screenwriters Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman have expended tremendous energy in trying to pack the material neatly, so that the in-jokes, set-ups, and references fuse with a charge-ahead storyline. The cleverest idea is to present all this as spinning off into a similar, but not exact, parallel reality where time is altered irrevocably by Nero’s intrusion, which wittily excuses Abrams’ liberties and also presents intriguing paradoxes. But there’s also something clumsy and rushed about much of it. Bringing in Scotty when the film is two-thirds finished shows a lack of skill in putting complex elements into play, and the sense of a fractious group of personalities forming a winning team is oddly fumbled: all of sudden, they’re just…there. The plotting is, as in Orci and Kurtzman’s script for Transformers (2007), confused and choppy, and the story throws in some genre Macguffins–like a pioneering method of beaming that Scotty invented but that old Spock has to teach him–that despoils the cleverness and ingenuity that is supposed to be a trait of the characters, and the pleasure of the storytelling. Take, for instance, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, when Spock and Kirk have to invent ways to fool Khan on the run, and finally outwit him: there’s nothing of that wait-for-it tension or calibre of writing here, just more spaceships crashing into each other and speedily recited techno-jargon that’s actually a sign of a dumbing-down, as if the filmmakers aren’t sure the audience can grasp anything else.

And so, despite this film’s strengths and undeniable entertainment factor, Star Trek finally, and not so subtly, disappoints. With all the smarts on display, once the film hits warp speed, it leaves behind most of the delight in the intricacies of the Roddenberry universe and the deftly recreated elements of the model, for an almost serial-like pace. Abrams is a director of verve with an eye for detail, and has a way with actors that keeps them at full throttle despite the overload of special effects and ornate dialogue. But he also purveys that in-too-tight, slice-and-dice editing Hollywood’s so enamoured of these days that sucks the fun out of fights. The last half-hour degenerates into lots of green, flowery explosions in space. Bana is too good an actor to waste on such a piecemeal villain as Nero, who has none of the oversized delight of Ricardo Montalban’s Khan or the Klingon warlords portrayed by Christopher Plummer and Christopher Lloyd. Despite his awesome acts of violence, Nero–whose name suggests Kirk’s darker double–never comes into focus as an antagonist, and his noisy, rushed comeuppance lacks creativity and heroic effect.

It’s also true that the original model had a scope greater than mere zippy action-adventure, whilst the film has little hint of the probing of social mores and the wistful grandeur seen in episodes like “For The World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky” or “The Trap,” the discarded pilot in which Jeffrey Hunter played Pike and still possibly the finest edition of Roddenberry’s concept to date. The show had, in such moments, genuine genre artistry. It’s that poeticism that took Roddenberry’s creation over the edge. Abrams employs it only in early scenes in which Kirk burns his chopper across a rural Iowa where vast, futuristic technological installations only enlarge the sense of mystery inherent in remote oil refineries or wheat silos, haunting Kirk with the promise and threat of greater things. Finally, although he has a sense of drama, Abrams cannot distinguish true spectacle from pizzazz. He’s revved up the series, ready to take off again, but what it might find in its new five-year mission looks a lot more limited. l