There are no less than two different biographies of the late Carl Sagan out this year: Carl Sagan: A Life in the Cosmos, by William Poundstone (Henry Holt), and Carl Sagan: A Life, by Kery Davidson (Wiley), either or both of which may be of interest to genre readers, considering Sagan’s status as perhaps the most prominent science popularizer of the last half of the twentieth century. And moving a bit further out on the borderlands, but still of interest to many genre readers, I’m willing to bet, is Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love, by Dava Sobel (Walker & Co.).
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There may have been more genre movies released in 1999 than at any other time in history, and they ran the full spectrum from immense box-office blockbuster to immense box-office bomb, and from quiet little “serious” films to Big, Loud, and Dumb spectaculars; there were even a few movies that managed to do tremendously well at the box office and be of high artistic quality at the same time. I guess the millennium really must be at hand!
The most talked-about genre movie of the year was certainly Star Wars, Episode One: The Phantom Menace, which had the unhappy fate of being at the same time the most anticipated and the most disappointing movie of the year. Not that it’s easy to call a movie that made as much money as The Phantom Menace did a “failure” – not while expecting anyone to keep a straight face, anyway. The movie made tons and tons of money, especially in the overseas market, and, last time I looked, had settled into the title of “highest-grossing movie of all time”, (Although sales of Star Wars books and spin-off products were nowhere near as high as anticipated, particularly in Britain, where they tanked in great numbers . . . so perhaps even this huge cash cow ultimately didn’t produce quite as much “milk” as they’d been counting on.) Artistically, however, although it may not have been a total failure, it certainly wasn’t anywhere near the success that most Star Wars fans had hoped that it would be. After months of intense hype, and a promotional campaign that whipped fans up into a frenzy of anticipation, with some dedicated individuals waiting outside in all weather for weeks to buy advance tickets, I think that most people, even many of the hardcore Star Wars fans, walked away from the movie disappointed, to one extent or another – which may make it difficult to whip up anywhere near the same level of anticipation again for Episode Two. (One subjective but perhaps telling point: when I saw the original Star Wars for the first time, in 1977, the audience leaped to their feet at the end, cheering, and gave the movie a spontaneous standing ovation. When I saw The Phantom Menace, there was no such outburst at the end; instead, the fans filed quietly out of the theatre, looking subdued, pensive, and, yes, disappointed. Not the way Lucas wanted them to react, I’m sure!)
There was still a lot to admire in The Phantom Menace, including some spectacular special effects, some wonderfully evocative sets, costuming, and set dressing, and a couple of well-staged fight scenes. Even some of the performances weren’t bad, with Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor doing the best they could with the limited material they had to work with; Neeson in particular did a good enough job of bringing a sense of quiet strength and gravitas to his role as Qui-Gon Jinn, a Jedi knight and mentor to the young Obi-Wan Kenobi (McGregor), that you regret the fact that he gets toasted by the villain, Darth Maul, and so won’t make it into episode two. However, the writing is awful (particularly the dialogue, which is terrible even by Star Wars standards), the plot is muddled, illogical, uninvolving, and inconsistent (full of stuff that was obviously added at the last moment, without lots of thought about its implications, that retroactively invalidates everything in the “first” three movies), the characterization is minimal even for an action film (I don’t think Darth Maul gets four lines of dialogue in the whole movie, and his motivations are completely unexplained, which makes him curiously uninvolving as a villain; there’s not nearly enough time spent on the relationship between Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi, either), and some of the actors are just awful (although you could charitably ascribe this to lack of effective direction, if you’re so inclined). The kid, for instance, Anakin Skywalker, the pivotal character upon whom the whole plot revolves, and who is called upon to carry whole sections of the film on his puny little shoulders, is as waxen and lifeless as a department-store dummy (a major-league mistake making him a little kid, anyway, in my opinion; a lot of the tropes that jar and don’t make sense when applied to a six-year-old would play much better with a teenager, someone about the same age that Luke was in the original Star Wars). Which brings us to Jar Jar Binks, the “comic relief” character who makes large stretches of this film teeth-grittingly unpleasant to sit through, and who is probably the most widely and intensely despised fictional character of the year, if not the decade, inspiring dozens of anti-Jar Jar sites to spring up on the Internet almost overnight. Jar Jar has also been widely attacked as a vicious racial caricature, and while I think that this was probably unconscious rather than deliberate on the part of the film makers, it is hard to watch him in action for long without being uneasily reminded of Stepin Fetchit . . . .
Lucas has amassed a great deal of goodwill and positive emotional capital over the years with the Star Wars movies and books – let’s hope he hasn’t spent too much of it with The Phantom Menace to successfully lure customers back into the theatre for episode two. Let’s also hope that episode two is a better movie as a movie than was episode one; there are some failings that special effects alone can’t adequately compensate for, no matter how snazzy they are. Perhaps he’d be better off getting his buddy Steven Spielberg (who, no matter what you think of him, would never make the kind of elementary storytelling and movie-craft mistakes that Lucas makes here) to direct the next one, and settle for the role of producer instead.
The Phantom Menace may have been the box-office champ, but there were other movies that sold phenomenal numbers of tickets as well, and which may actually have been effectively more profitable than it was, considering how overwhelmingly less expensive they were to make. This is especially true in the case of the box-office blockbuster (and cultural phenomenon) The Blair Witch Project, which managed to rake in multiple millions in spite of a production budget of merely $30,000 (practically no budget at all, even by the most modest Hollywood standards!). I must admit that my first thought on seeing the movie was, How did they manage to even spend as much as $30,000 on this? Aside from some videotape equipment, there’s nothing visible on-screen that costs more than a couple of hundred bucks, no sets, no costuming that couldn’t have come off the rack at Kmart, and effectively no actors other than the three young leads, all unknowns. In fact, the movie is perfectly convincing as an amateur film made out in the woods somewhere by a trio of broke and not particularly talented student filmmakers. But the producers of The Blair Witch Project have shrewdly turned necessity into an advantage; because they had no special-effects budget, they never show us whatever it is that’s supposed to be menacing this tentful of unhappy campers out in the woods, allowing the imaginations of the audience to supply horrors far more frightening than anything that could be explicitly shown on the screen, and thus scaring the crap out of audiences who yawned through big-budget, special-effects-heavy, blood-spattered gorefests such as The Haunting. (The other key to the success of The Blair Witch Project is a very clever postmodern campaign that suggested that all this is “real”, that this really is footage found in a film can in the woods after the student filmmakers you see on-screen disappeared, never to be seen again – suggested this so effectively, including even a fake “documentary” about the “case” of the missing film-makers that appeared on A&E, that there are some people unwilling to give up their emotional investment of belief even now, and who will still passionately insist that the whole thing is “real” and “actually happened”, In fact, there are still Internet sites devoted to defending just this proposition! Another unexpected mega-hit was The Sixth Sense, which almost all the critics hated (including one major review that made it embarrassingly clear in retrospect that the
critic had walked out at some point in the middle of the movie, if he’d ever actually gone in the first place), but which survived and prospered almost entirely on word of mouth, eventually building a huge audience. Which it deserved. The Sixth Sense was that rare animal, an intelligent and subtly underplayed supernatural horror movie; I went to the theatre expecting to hate it, and instead walked away thinking that it was one of the best movies of the year. The writing is terrific here, tight and sharp, as is the intricate plotting, which works with the precision of a Swiss watch. The acting is also excellent; Bruce Willis – proving once again that he really can act if you force him to – is very good, but the boy, Haley Joel Osment, walks away with the movie, giving one of the best performances by a child actor that I’ve ever seen, anywhere; on my way out through the parking lot, I kept thinking, Boy, if they’d gotten that kid to play Anakin Skywalker, he might have saved the movie! Another relatively “quiet” supernatural movie, and another one that raked in millions, was The Green Mile, which now joins that small but distinguished group – along with Stand By Me, Misery, and The Shawshank Redemption – of movies made from Stephen King books that are actually worth watching.
Another box-office champ was The Matrix, which borrowed cyberpunk tropes from a dozen previous books and movies and stylishly reinvented them for the late ’90s, but whose wonderful, state-of-the-art special effects and glossy production values couldn’t disguise the fact that it was conceptually and spiritually empty at heart, more an arcade game or a live-action anime than a “real” movie, raising intriguing questions that it then didn’t bother to face or answer, settling instead for an extended shoot-everything-in-sight climax that had the teenage boys jumping and bopping in their seats, but which sent much of the rest of the audience home unsatisfied (and which, with its man-in-long-black-trenchcoat-walking-around-blasting-everything-in front-of-him imagery, plays somewhat creepily in retrospect after the Columbine High School massacre). Also slick but essentially calorie free (although also a big moneymaker) was The Mummy, which had great special effects, but which somehow, in spite of all the computer-generated gruesomeness and ambulatory rotting corpses, managed not to be even as scary as the 1932 original, whose entire special-effects budget consisted of some bandages to wrap Boris Karloff up in; nobody seems to know how to pace either a scary movie or a thriller anymore, and only the Blair Witch people seem to have figured out that less is usually more as far as scaring the audience is concerned. (To be fair, The Mummy doesn’t take itself terribly seriously, a relief after something like The Matrix, and is full of nice tongue-in-cheek stuff, admirably handled by the affable Brendan Fraser.) In spite of time-travel motifs, Austin Towers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, can’t really be described as an SF movie, but it’s certainly a fantasy of some sort, or at least a spoof of that sort of fantasy, and was immensely popular.
Animated movies of one sort or another also scored big this year, with Toy Story 2, Tarzan, South Park; Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, and the part-live-action, part-animated Stuart Little all finishing near the top of the money-earning charts. (Somewhat surprisingly, the South Park movie also turned out to be one of the most tuneful and enjoyable movie musicals in years, while functioning at the same time as a devastating and spot-on satire of movie musicals, especially Disney animated musicals; don’t expect to hear most of the incredibly foul-mouthed songs on the radio, though, no matter how catchy they are! It’s a lucky break for the Academy that it was “Blame Canada” that got nominated for an Oscar for best song, and not “Uncle Fucka”.)
Not all of 1999’s genre movies were big moneymakers, of course; not by any means. Some of them bombed pretty thoroughly, and the higher the movie’s budget was, the more grandiose the producer’s expectations, the longer and harder it had to fall. Wild Wild West, a big-budget remake of the campy old TV show that was expected to do big business, tanked big-time instead, and was probably the most critically savaged movie of the year as well; not even the charismatic Will Smith could save this one, although he at least managed to salvage a hit song (from the sound track) out of the wreckage. Other big-budget flops this year included the above-mentioned The Haunting, Inspector Gadget, My Favorite Martian, The House on Haunted Hill, End of Days, Deep Blue Sea, Universal Soldier: The Return, Dogma, Virus, Stigmata, The Muse, Mystery Men, and Sleepy Hollow (which made the odd choice of reinventing Washington Irving’s charming little fable as a stylishly bleak splatterpunk movie). A fairly high-end movie called The Astronaut’s Wife was announced, but if it ever played through Philadelphia, it must have done so fast, probably not a good sign. Caught somewhere between the top and the bottom of this food chain were movies that were probably mildly successful commercially, but not that successful, not even close to battling in the same league as The Phantom Menace and The Matrix and Stuart Little; how pleased the producers were with their track records probably depended on how much money they’d invested in them in the first place. My guess is that the producers were probably disappointed with the relatively modest success of the year’s three other cyberpunk and/or virtual-reality movies, The Thirteenth Floor, eXistenZ, and New Rose Hotel, all of which have enthusiastic boosters (particularly The Thirteenth Floor), but which were certainly overshadowed by the immense commercial success of The Matrix, and mostly critically ignored, or – unfairly – dismissed in a “been there, done that” fashion as just another Matrix; I don’t think any of them actually dogged out, but certainly none of them found the kind real mass audience they were supposed to find, either. Nor did The 13th Warrior, which presented Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead (in many ways as much a dry scholarly joke as a novel) as a sort of sword-and-sorcery-with-Vikings movie. Or The Bicentennial Man, which one friend described as “a robot Mrs Doubtfire”, and which most reviewers criticized for being too long, too slow, and too syrupy; perhaps it should have stuck closer to the source material. On the other hand, the producers of lower-budget, lower-expectation films that became modest sleeper hits such as GalaxyQuest, a sharp and funny satire of media SF and of Star Trek in particular, and Blast from the Past, a low-brow but good-natured comedy about a man encountering modern society for the first time after growing up locked in a bomb shelter, perfectly cast with Brendan Fraser to bring a likable, geewhiz, naive-but-not-stupid quality to a role that might just as well be Casper Hauser, or a Man from Mars – were probably more satisfied with how many tickets they moved. I’m not sure how Muppets in Space and The Muse did, and I missed both of them, but they don’t seem to have set any sales records either.
And, of course, there are other ways to measure success than just by how well something did at the box office. The surreal Being John Malkovich, for instance, was pretty far down the highest-grossing list, but it was a succès d’estime (it showed up on most critics’ lists of the year’s best movies), as was the stylish and often grisly (far more violent than the average animated movie) Japanese animated production, Princess Mononoke. One of the best movies of the year didn’t make a dime, as far as I can see, and was pulled out of the theatres only a week or so into a disastrous theatrical first run – nevertheless, The Iron Giant is the kind of wonderful “family” entertainment that Disney animated movies promise to deliver, but (with recent exceptions such as Toy Story, Toy Story 2, and A Bug’s Life) rarely ever do, with the added bonus of being intelligent, witty, thought provoking, and even at times suspenseful, as well as warmhearted, with a much lower maudlin quotient, and no damn songs. In short, The Iron Giant is one of the best animated movies I’ve ever seen, as delightful for adults as for children, and I’d recommend going out and buying the videotape or CD, since it’s long banished from theatres, never to return. Another warmhearted and very well-crafted “small” movie is October Sky, which isn’t technically a genre film at all, but which will certainly appeal to many genre fans with its gritty yet moving portrait (based on a true story) of a poor kid who uses model-rocket making as his gateway out of a Dickensian coal town and ultimately into a job in the space program. Eve
n better than these two fine movies, though, is a movie that I missed on first release a couple of years back (I don’t think that it ever passed through Philadelphia theatres at all), The Whole Wide World; I must admit that the idea of a movie based on the eccentric life of pulp fantasy writer Robert E. Howard sounded like an unlikely candidate for excellence to me, but, against all odds, The Whole Wide World turns out to be a terrific film, moving and absorbing (largely because of a hypnotically intense performance by Vincent D’Onofrio as Robert E. Howard), and certainly the best movie ever made about a genre writer, by a large margin; go out and rent this one, too (if you can even find it at the rental store; many places don’t carry it).
There are lots more genre movies coming up on the horizon for 2000, some of which sound promising, some of which sound like they’re going to be Just Awful; impossible to sort out at this distance which of them are going to be the Big Box-office Blockbusters and which the flops, although it sounds like expectations are being built moderately high for the Val Kilmer Mars-exploration movie. And, of course, oceans of ink (or Internet phosphors, anyway) are already being spilled speculating about how the forthcoming live-action movie version of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is going to turn out, and whether Star Wars, Episode Two is going to be better than Episode One (and who is going to be cast to play the teenage Anakin Skywalker, a role for which every conceivable actor except possibly Daffy Duck has been suggested), although neither of those are going to show up next year, or probably even the year after. Oddly, there’s no new Star Trek movie in production, the producers reportedly not wanting to put something out that would have to compete with the new Star Wars movies. Considering at what a low ebb the whole Star Trek franchise seems to be at the moment, I think this may be a mistake (out of sight, out of mind, and then suddenly you’re Old News, and they don’t let you make a new feature film when you finally decide that you want to) – but then, they don’t pay me for advice.
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