It has to be admitted that, on its own terms, the film achieves what it intends quite well. I watched with two females aged 9-10, and they were going aww and cute! all the way through, notwithstanding some needlessly scary episodes when the soldiers were trying to catch and kill the monster as soldiers do. Many of the cast are excel-lent, with wee Alex Etel from Millions entirely superb in the lead; and the landscapes are a particularly striking marketing tool for visitscotland.com (an advert for whom immediately precedes the film), being mostly filmed not in Scotland at all but in Queenstown, NZ. Like Loch Ness, it pitches itself at the North American visitor—here quite literally, with a grown-up Brian Cox telling his story to a pair of tourists in a pub called the Bonnie Piper—and pimps its heritage management outrageously: the characters inhabit a vast Rennie Mackintosh-panelled mansion, but (it transpires) are only the caretakers for an absentee landlord who has let it out to billet a literal army of foreign visitors. I daresay that's how we look to them.
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Walden's other seasonal offering has found a rather different rem-edy for the discomforts of adaptation. Rather than burn money on expensive Roald Dahl rights when you're only going to knock it all to bits anyway, why not fob the audience off with an affordable facsimile? This seems to be why we have Mr Magorium's Wonder Emporium, the directorial bow of Stranger Than Fiction writerZach Helm,basedonhismoulderinggraduationscriptaboutamanagerial succession crisis in a magic NY toystore. As a simulation of Dahl, it's only so-so: many of the instore scatter-gags are quite in keeping, but the real Dahl would never have let a name like “Magorium” through the door, and from quite early on it succumbs to a sentimentality and self-help homilising entirely alien to the master, while at the same time resisting the darker edginess that true Dahl likes to layer in. It's unfair to grade it merely as pastiche, of course, but the tonal comparison is nevertheless quite revealing of what doesn't work and why. Like the later-written Stranger Than Fiction, which visibly drew on it for ideas, it's very much a writer's film, with once again a blocked creative trying to find outlet and self-validation, and once again a likable antagonist in the form of an accountant who can do Fibonnacis in his head but has to be retrained to appreciated the value of fun. But the writing is actually rather weak, with an awful start (it picks up once we finally get into the shop) and a particularly poor climax: “It's you ... What you need to believe in is you.” [V.O.:] “And that's how Molly Mahoney's story began. The End.” The resistance to pat romance, gratuitous villainy and threat, and indeed any discernible plot are, I suppose, to be cautiously app-lauded, and I did catch my ten-year-old surreptitiously wiping an eye when Dustin Hoffman delivers his fortune-cookie farewell line to a rather sweet Natalie Portman. But it's a little disconcerting to see branded commercial toys on the racks prominently product-placed alongside the magical merchandise, and all too evident that Helm himself has never actually been inside a real magic toyshop (such as Kristin Baybar's opposite Gospel Oak station, for one). Like his heroes, he probably needs to get out of his head more.
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Elsewhere, the festive slate was a busy one this year. Disney weigh-ed in strongly with Disney-Princess-in-NY fable Enchanted, not just the girliest Christmas no. 1 in memory but also the gayest; and astonishingly feebly with Underdog, live-action retread of a deservedly forgotten sixties cartoon about a pill-popping Krypto knockoff battling a hideous dwarf mad scientist called, incredibly, Simon Barsinister. (No doubt the makers would protest that many of their best friends are hideous dwarf mad scientists.) DreamWorks mustered the pleasingly surreal Bee Movie, essentially an introduc-tion to Marxist economics for four-and-ups that also manages to use the magic of animated family comedy to talk about race, class, agribusiness, and the industrialisation of food production; and the strange Penelope escaped after a year and a half on the shelf to bewilder audiences with its logic-free whimsithon about a pig-nosed Christina Ricci seeking romance and fulfilment on the mean streets of a fairytale midatlantic city that looks like London (except the cg bits) but is populated by British actors randomly affecting American accents, or not.
But the most uncertain splash was made by The Golden Compass, which largely flopped in the land of its title but performed much better here and internationally. This visually ravishing but uncomfortably scripted adaptation of the book we know as Philip Pullman's Northern Lights has been made to a fairly impossible brief, in having to prove the trilogy's commercial viability to New Line before the later films would be greenlit, so it's not surprising that Chris Weitz's version has ended up a bit of a bodge. It's pretty startling to see a film of any part of His Dark Materials in which the words “church” and “original sin” are never even uttered; you can bet they'd have been there in the discarded Stoppard script—and the novel's plot has been radically disassembled into its component incidents and the pieces sellotaped back together in a completely different causal sequence, with the actual ending and its extremely unfeelgood revelation about the luckless Roger artfully banished to the start of the next film. As on many other points, you can see why they've done what they've done, and a film version of The Subtle Knife could actually be stronger for the addition of a Lyra prologue than if it went straight into the world of Will and his loopy mum. Indeed, there are many excellent things about Weitz's version, including a first-rate Lyra and a wondrously efficient prologue voiceover that manages to condense three volumes’ worth of explanation about Dust, daemons, bears, witches, Gyptians, and alethiometers into about three sentences. If there's rather too much reading of the next scene off the alethiometer—surely literature's most shameless ever plot device—at least the steampunk England of the first section is quite beautiful, and Nicole Kidman's cold-eyed performance is everything it should be, such that you hardly mind that none of the supporting cast are terribly good at all. Pullman's central conceit of external souls as pets comes wonderfully into its own as a visual device, although unprimed viewers may be puzzled by all the talk of a procedure called “indecision": rather an apt description of the hesitation over theology, script, and sequel commitment that lies behind the intercision of so much of the novel's own soul. We'll have to wait and see whether the next world offers redemption.
As it turned out, the seasonal blockbuster adaptation was not Compass but I Am Legend, ironically the most comprehensively un-made film of the preceding decade. This is a project into whose various aborted versions Warners have sunk so much development cash over the years that it's faintly astonishing to see it on screen at all—particularly as screens have been awash with knockoffs since the 2002 double whammy of franchise log-rollers Resident Evil and 28 Days Later, which have further restricted the available room for manoeuvre in this first credited version of Richard Matheson's novel since 1971's The Omega Man. Over the course of its long develop-ment, the setting has gone from LA to San Francisco back to LA and finally and inevitably to Manhattan; Robert Neville has been Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Will Smith, and eventually Will Smith again; original writer Mark Protosevich has been fired and rehired repeatedly as one director after another has been attached, then detached; and the novel has been rethought and re-written from every imaginable angle, till the last script standing looks like something of a survivalist legend in its own right. Plot elements like Neville's dog, his tapes, the characters of Anna and her kid, the mannequin and trap, the captured female come trailing huge bubble-chamber tracks through the production history, while among the relatively early casualties were Matheson's central conceit of his Krippen virus as a rationale for the myth of vampirism (cool then, tepid now); the infected's capacity for articulate reason and speech; and, needless to say, the original ending (and point of the title), which has swung between upbeat and down to fetch finally up at just rubbish.
The film that's emerged from all this is, unsurprisingly, a very mixed success, and strongest in its mood-setting first hour—which essentially follows the austerely spectacular lines c
onceived origin-ally by Ridley Scott during his 1997-8 involvement (before he was sacked by Warners and took his creative team off to make Gladiator on the rebound), though with the addition of a canine sidekick to give the star someone to talk to and, more importantly, act off. (This, of course, is the very same storytelling cheat that led Pullman to the concept of daemons.) It holds out as long as it can against the survival-horror plot virus, but progressively and messily mutates into Resident Evil: Lost in New York. Perhaps it's no more than it deserves, since despite a string of consultants with the Dr prefix, Colonel Doctor Will rather betrays the novel's elegant flim-flam scientism by instead taking his foundations of virology from Bob Marley: “He had this idea, kind of a virologist idea: he thought you could cure people of racism and hatred by injecting them with music.” Well, yes, but he wasn't much of an advert for conventional medicine, was he?
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But the most ambitious doomsday movie of the season was Richard Kelly's unfairly derided Southland Tales, the film half of his epic comics/movie hybrid about a sprawling cast of weirdos stumbling through industrial quantities of story in a near-future world of paranoia,conspiracy,andpoliticalbreakdowntowardsafinalcosmic cliffhanger in spacetime. It is, safe to say, a pretty unique experience. The first three of the saga's six chapters appeared as a graphic novel series, so that the film dumps you straight in the middle of a vast and bonkers apocalyptic soap with two amnesiac leads stuck in a hugepolitico-industrialconspiracyplotinwhichthey,likewe,know neither who they are nor what's going on. Surprisingly, though, you do find yourself swimming with it, and the film's legendarily apocalyptic fate among audiences and critics alike is probably less to do with its narrative weaknesses than with the particular kind of story it chooses to tell. Unlike pretty much everyone else in Holly-wood, Kelly is dangerously serious about physics and about sf, and Southland Tales is fairly open about its particular debt of tone and texture to the later novels of Philip K. Dick. This works rather well on the graphics page, but becomes a distinctly more specialised taste when transferred to film, where it's become something of an encyclopedia of things you're supposed not to be able to do: huge novelistic casts and story webs; epic running times without a recog-nised brand to sustain them; rapid, geeky concept barrages in voiceover and exposition; disdain for the shibboleths of character arc and conventional act structure; above all, a plot awfully like a high-aiming, fan-friendly, propeller-headed science fiction novel. It's a fairly doomed enterprise which, like Donnie Darko, loads more anticipation on to its ending than the climactic conceit will actually bear, and this time without the support of an obviously cool teen-culture environment. Yet the cast do an impressive job of pretending they know what's going on in their scenes, and there are many great lines and vignettes, with plenty of sharp dramatic beats to keep the whole thing moving along. I personally wouldn't have minded another three hours, but it's probably a relief that it's unlikely to spawn any followers.
Copyright © 2008 Nick Lowe
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laser fodder—Tony Lee's Regular Review of DVD Releases
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TO METALUNA & BACK AGAIN
Somewhere between the glorious homecoming of Star Trek: Voyager in 2001, and the foregone conclusion of Star Wars’ atrocious prequel trilogy with Revenge Of The Sith in 2005, space opera for the screen expired from sheer exhaustion, the inevitable result of incessant starship battles, and the overkill of blatantly ‘foreign-devil’ villains targeting rebel spacers and ethical heroes with uninspired plots of conquest. Since then, there has been so little originality or even fashionable amusement to be found in this subgenre that assorted filmmakers and franchise contributors abandoned any last pretence of being inventive, opting for a damaging reuptake of popular ele-ments and very basic themes. The tenth Trek film, Nemesis (2003), was a dismal last outing for the Next Generation crew. Star Trek pre-quel Enterprise (2001-5) proved a non-starter, failing to maintain the sadly pedestrian standard established by previous Trek shows, or meet even the most pessimistic fans’ expectations. Rockne S. O'Bannon's Farscape (1999-2003) had secret admirers of its genre deconstructions, but it never avoided schlock-of-the-knew associ-ations as a pimped-up variation of Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, and those ghastly muppet characters were ultimately its downfall. A love of simplistic adventure is never enough, as Joss Whedon soon found out.
Firefly (2002), and spin-off movie Serenity (2005), added nothing worthwhile to its allegedly science fictional milieu of inter-worldly buccaneering, except mildly witty attempts to subvert the overly fam-iliar conventions of both sci-fi and westerns with pointlessly quirky characters, salty humour, or ‘astonishing’ narrative twists devised only to blindside irregular viewers. Children Of Dune (2003), the follow-up to 2000's underwhelming miniseries (a TV remake of classic Dune, 1984), was a shamelessly deadweight misadventure, trashing the messianic appeal of Frank Herbert's enduring legacy, and replacing David Lynch's widescreen baroque of dreamscape horrors with feeble CGI. Steven Soderbergh's aimless 2003 retread of Tarkovsky's extraordinary Solaris (1972) cruised by, all tricked out with glossy hardware and a fittingly sombre mood, but its cast lacked conviction, and the film remains a regrettable example of just how wrongheaded Hollywood can be when ‘re-imagining’ non-English language works. American studios also blunder when tack-ling essentially British SF humour. So long in preparation that many of Douglas Adams’ original jokes were overexposed to the point of becoming clichés, Garth Jennings’ movie The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy (2005) mistakenly added starship romance to a range of satirical themes, perhaps not realising that geek fans probably iden-tified with bewildered protagonist Arthur Dent because, in previous incarnations, such a nominal hero usually failed to save the world and/or win the girl.
David Twohy's overblown epic Chronicles Of Riddick (2004) was a mightily disappointing expansion of unpretentious monster movie Pitch Black (2000). Long before Riddick, or the updated Kelvin, con-fronted alien mysteries on distant worlds, ‘sci-fi legend’ Jack O'Neill (insufferably bland Richard Dean Anderson) had, for a decade, led the way to the stars via the miracle of teleportation, instead of all that mucking about in spaceships. Back in 1997, Stargate SG-1, didn't so much pick up from where Roland Emmerich's 1994 movie left off, it carried on regardless where the movie had wisely given up. Spin-off series Stargate: Atlantis has continued the monotony since 2004, and there's more to come when time-travelling Stargate: Continuum (due July 2008) winds the clock back, right to the start. Although Gene Roddenberry has been safely dead for years, TV producers exploited his profound credibility as genre TV maven to launch Earth: Final Conflict (1997-2002), essentially a vapid replay of Kenneth Johnson's cult TV series V (1984-5) but with androgy-nous alien visitors; and then added insult to injury with far-future actioner Andromeda (2000-5), a show composed of almost limitless (socio-political, cultural, and technological) preposterousness as sci-fi, with a regular cast that were so teeth-grindingly awful (Kevin Sorbo's fans are called ‘tree-huggers') that pathetic frequent-flyers on Farscape (read as: ‘farce ape') would often seem like a cool Shakespearean acting masterclass in comparison.
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The best ‘SF’ usually concerns revolutionary ideas bringing per-manent social change. Typically, ‘sci-fi’ is concerned only with con-fronting mystery or solving any problems arising from change, and then heroically/successfully re-establishing the status quo. Despite critics’ preference to read big political and theological allegories into Ronald Moore's remake of Glen Larson's Battlestar Galactica (1978-9), the new BSG tends to wallow in soapy subplots, much to the detriment of its earnestly sci-fi, interstellar refugees scenario. Admittedly, Moore's BSG started well. It cloned enough junk DNA from the original to catch the interest of those with fond memories of Larson's pulp-derivative nonsense. However, the dramatic impact of the pilot movie and follow-up first season's varied surprises tailed off rapidly in subsequent seasons, le
aving bitter aftertastes of science fictional absurdities and narrative incoherence. In TV-land, the remarkable often becomes rotten after one year. Repetitive melodramatics very soon become wearying, and some very fine performers—especially Edward James Olmos’ admiral, and Mary McDonnell's president (also, Michelle Forbes is always watchable, Richard Hatch's opportunist rebel is great fun, and let's not forget James Callis as the amusingly scatterbrained Baltar), cannot save it. Because it requires foreknowledge of the on-going BSG series and its quest-for-Earth scenario, spin-off movie Razor is not an authentic piece of standalone drama (thirty years ago, the same was true of Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack, also released on DVD). Now, as then, viewers can follow the basic storyline but would fail to notice many items of significance unless already well versed in the revised commercial sci-fi lore of this partially redundant TV show. Is BSG radically updated space opera or shameless pulp homage?
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #215 Page 18
