The original Independence Day script was dashed off in a month, and its enduring charm owes much to the giggly “Dare we actually write that?” outrageousness of its deadpan sentiments and relationships. This time around, they had twenty years to prepare, and so did we, with the result that the project has not only lost its original freshness and fun, but has been through a Crystal Skull development process in which ideas from multiple versions have been dropped on top of one another like Asia on top of Europe, leading to a script that, ironically in view of its scale, shrinks the world absurdly to shuffle its half-dozen leads into the necessary positions for their stories to cross and converge, most preposterously when Judd Hirsch (remember him as Goldblum’s comedy yiddishe dad? thought not, but he’s back and keen to remind you) drives an interstate busload of kid refugees into the heart of the act 3 smackdown. (In the desert, to Goldblum: “Sir, there’s a school bus heading directly towards the trap!” On the bus, to Hirsch: “There’s a tall gangly man waving us down!”) But Emmerich is an enormously able filmmaker with an equivocal relationship to his popular rep as the man who likes to get the landmarks – whence such sincerely-meant career outliers as the floptastic Anonymous and Stonewall – and though this Resurgence seems likelier to disappoint than to delight, at least it’s made by people who really love Independence Day, even if they’ve now become their own tribute act.
A bigger test of enduring franchise love is whether it’s still possible to have fun with a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film, a full quarter-century on from the first live-action version. But in the new world of Chinese co-production companies to which producer Michael Bay has already shown himself ahead of the game in hitching his wagon, there’ll always be a place for the original martial arts/live-action kiddietoon crossover property; and for those who’ve grown up with the franchise, TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: OUT OF THE SHADOWS does pretty much everything right, importing a first-rate kids’ director (Dave Green, who did Earth to Echo) and allowing the writers of the 2014 reboot to bring in a host of key figures from canon including Casey Jones, the evil space villain Kang, henchthugs Bebop and Rocksteady. Out of the Shadows brings us the seasonally obligatory civil war storyline, as the brothers fall out under the pressure of tensions between the ninja way and the adolescent impulse to personhood. (“I’ve always wanted to be in Halloween parade. It’s the one night of the year when I fit in.” – “We’ll never fit in. We’re ninjas. We live in the shadows.”) For the slightly older brother, Megan Fox’s April O’Neil shoplifts clothes a couple of sizes too skimpy in pursuit of her undercover story; and Bay’s godfatherly supervision ensures that cars are flipping within the opening minutes just to score the boys some pizza, while later set pieces give us a tank going over a waterfall and yet another of those portal endings where the bad guy tries to wormhole in an alien army. (“Galileo, Isaac Newton, Steve Jobs,” incants the mad-scientist sub-villain: “their names will be footnotes in the annals of science compared to what’s about to happen here!”) Needless to say, just like Magneto the brothers rediscover the power of family in time to prevent the apocalypse, and their partial emergence from the ninja shadows is welcomed by Laura Linney’s NYPD chief: “I think you should give people more credit. They’ll accept you now.” Perhaps, perhaps not, but if they were proper ninjas we’d never know their films had even been released.
A human orphan finds her place in the world in WHEN MARNIE WAS THERE: Arrietty director Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s sweetly melancholic adaptation of Joan Robinson’s wistful 1967 timeslip fantasy, in which the mono no oware found in Robinson’s adolescent fable becomes fused with the film’s own pathos of transience as the swansong feature from Studio Ghibli. The novel’s setting of Burnham Overy on the Norfolk coast has been something of a pilgrim destination for Japanese fans of the novel, in the same way as Tomonoura or Tama Hills are for Ghibli fans overseas; but the film version transplants the story to the waterlands of Hokkaido, where painfully introverted orphan Anna finds an eerily kindred spirit in the mysterious blonde westerner Marnie who seems to glide in and out of reality from the decaying Marsh House along the water. As their bond deepens and the solitary, withdrawn, self-hating Anna comes out of her shell to learn that Marnie’s dreamlike life is perhaps even less to be envied, the history of landscape and lives in which both are wrapped returns to complete Anna’s own journey of social and personal healing.
Despite the bold geographic and cultural transhumance, it’s the most faithful of all Ghibli’s literary adaptations, defying Miyazaki’s own advice in keeping the mysterious Marnie fair and foreign, and conveying the novel’s delicate interiority through the happy congruence of classical anime techniques of stillness with the book’s focus on Anna’s inexpressively “ordinary” face. Anna’s emotional sickness is ramped up rather needlessly with asthma, despite the fact she never seems to remember her inhaler, but for the most part the film tracks the novel closely, pruning some secondary characters and complications but retaining some key moments despite some cultural and narrative bumps in their alien setting. Robinson put a lot of her adolescent self into Anna, and Yonebayashi has reciprocated by making Anna an artist of landscapes and backgrounds in her own right, neatly tying into an existing strand of the plot as well as of Robinson’s own career. It’s an appropriately personal and bittersweet farewell from the studio that’s offered the most sustained and enduring alternatives to Hollywood notions of what fantasy film can be, and an encouraging launchpad for Yonebayashi’s post-Ghibli career.
Matteo Garrone’s TALE OF TALES travels back in time to the roots of fairytale itself, braiding together a trio of bonkers seventeenth-century fables from Basile’s Pentameron in a lusciously location-shot triple serving of Pasolini on magic mushrooms with sauce of Angela Carter. Avoiding the better-known stories like Sleeping Beauty and Puss in Boots that have spread through Perrault and Grimm to become panto and Disney staples, Garrone has picked three of the most flamboyantly barmy of the original tales and studded them with fragments of others, then woven them around one another so that their strange beats of associative story logic wrap into a surreal composite metanarrative which comes together in a grand ensemble finale without actually joining up in any banausically Aristotelian sense. Our royal protagonists are Salma Hayek, magically impregnated with an heir by a river monster while her servant-girl finds herself mother to his identical twin; Toby Jones, who grows a flea to the size of a sheep and marries his daughter to an ogre; and Vincent Cassel, seduced by a girlish crone whose discovery and rejection sets in motion a bizarre sequence of skin-changing twists. The wonky English dialogue, imperfectly translated from Italian, only adds to the sense of a fantasy logic recuperated from a different age of the world, an archaeology of the fantastic before the narrative imagination found itself forcibly strapped into the corsetry of character journeys, plot points, and universe rules: a kind of story where anything can happen at any moment for any reason or none, and the world is an encyclopaedia of such dream-logic improvisations all happening at once. Jones is terrific, and the vfx camera technicians are credited to Rome-based outfit Interzone Visions. With its final shot of a flaming tightrope, it’s a film that will never have much in the way of siblings; but for lovers of all that Hollywood’s not, what’s not to love?
LASER FODDER
TONY LEE
THE 5th WAVE
THE CALL UP
ENEMY MINE
Approaching adulthood means apocalyptical changes of body and mind, so it’s no big surprise that for a bunch of orphaned kids in THE 5th WAVE (DVD/Blu-ray, 16 May) some anti-intellectual and over-emotional rigours of suddenly imposed maturity in a cruel world compares to the acid-test of an alien invasion, complete with viral infection and body-snatching parasites. “You made me wanna be human again.” This movie is also an opportunity to rock ‘n’ roll through the militarily irresponsible fun of helicoptering into a shoot ’em up videogame scenario.
Japanese movie Parasyte is vastly superior in every respect and o
ffers a slickly imaginative comedy, intriguing SF-horrors, and genuinely likeable characters instead of simplistically laudable role models. Also, if you have seen TV series Falling Skies – well, that’s obviously a lot better in terms of narrative complexity than this formulaic exercise in teenage catastrophism. A fatal flaw here is the cringe-inducing sappiness of its inevitable romance for our blonde heroine (coy Chloe Moretz), who must grow-up super-fast to become big-sister enough to save her lost little brother from a grim fate worse than death, and then choose (with Twilight inspired sighs of exasperation) between the heartthrob appeal of the hunky stranger who saved her life, and the more familiar lure of her prospective high school sweetheart.
Is such orthodox sentimentality meant to counterbalance the overwhelmingly nihilistic perspectives that so easily dominate genre cinema? Why is true love versus doomsday the only story in tinsel town? As expected, following the trendy vacuity of the Hunger Games movies and its rival the Divergent/Insurgent/Allegiant franchise (which, so far, makes Hunger Games, and everything else like it, redundant!) there’s some dog-eared storybook scraps for our heroine: Learn to question any authority, of course. Develop self-reliance, evidently. Or else, simply fail at everything in life. Wake up kids, your WTF world’s about to end!
Stacked alongside fan-fiction varieties of remake, reboot, sequels, and the franchising of corporate-owned properties, it’s no wonder that far too many new American studio movies deliver only empty action spectacle and wholly/hopelessly derivative content. The standard quality of which is appallingly unimaginative and completely lacking in any measure of originality, so that even with above average production values the vast majority of the latest Hollywood offerings are unsatisfying at best, or painfully boring at worst.
We might think indie movies would stand out from the crowd but too often they are just crudely imitative of their expensively tricked-out cousins, and so lacking much individualist, let alone exceptional, appeal.
Like a refurbished product from the arcade junkyard of sci-fi, THE CALL UP (DVD, 23 May) is glaringly banal. “It’s like I died and went to gamer heaven.”
There is real pain or no gain for a group of unsuspecting recruits challenged as software testers in an unconvincing mix-up of holography-augmented/virtual reality that’s neither like Matrix/Tron or Avatar/Gamer mode, as it plugs together notions from Last Starfighter and Ender’s Game but without obvious benefits of space-forces spectacle. Blunderingly inept as a sci-fi conscription-critique, it ventures much closer to awkwardly unintentional comedy about unfunny jingoistic propaganda that’s more crazily violent than The X-Files episode ‘First Person Shooter’ (2000) though never as much amusingly cheesy fun.
A flatly unambitious effort, The Call Up opts for doing nothing interesting with bogus gunfights involving a blatantly dreary bunch of under-achieving ciphers played by a cast assembled from over-actors anonymous.
Writer and director Charles Barker betrays his SF novice status with simplistic game designs, zero artistic finesse, and no creativity whatsoever. Viewers might well feel as if they too have just been drafted.
Made in 1985, Wolfgang Petersen’s ENEMY MINE (Blu-ray, 20 June) was based on a Barry Longyear story, and plays out like a sci-fi variation of John Boorman’s classic castaway drama Hell in the Pacific (1964). There is also no avoiding a comparison to Robinson Crusoe on Mars (Interzone #262). Despite its muddle of genre and literary borrowings/references, German director Petersen’s stylish adventure of interspecies tolerance and unlikely friendship is still an entertaining movie. It is quite emotionally intense without becoming overly sentimental or melodramatic.
Military astronauts from opposing space fleets are stranded on an unexplored and inhospitable alien planet. The human Davidge (Dennis Quaid) inevitably tries to kill his reptilian foe Jeriba, alias Jerry (Louis Gossett Jr), both following the dictates of prejudicial propaganda that their respective superiors forced upon them. However, the bitter enemies manage to overcome a language barrier that hinders co-operation, and they work together to ensure mutual survival. Antagonistic jibes of “toadface” and “irkman” are set aside when frequent storms and indigenous life threaten them both.
Quaid had starred in psychic thriller Dreamscape (1984), and went on to his breakthrough role as a cop in The Big Easy (1986), before returning to genre SF for Innerspace (1987). Although Quaid is on great form here, his best efforts pale beside the performance from Gossett, who does an excellent job playing the hermaphrodite creature. The actor’s hissing and purring to suggest a weird language grants this film a mystique of profound otherness – as untutored human attempts to learn the alien’s culture and philosophy – that Star Trek and especially Star Wars too often lacks.
The climactic sequence has a rushed quality that’s at odds with the slower pace of earlier scenes, and this detracts from all the thought-provoking SF elements. What makes Enemy Mine unforgettable is the excellent design and cinematography, with a rich colour scheme (enhanced on this hi-def edition) that helps create such a freestyle fantastic milieu.
***
There are many more reviews of DVDs/Blu-rays/VoD in our sister magazine Black Static, written by Gary Couzens and sometimes with easy-to-enter competitions to win new releases. (Visit our website regularly, competitions sometimes appear there too.)
Like Interzone, Black Static is available in a number of different formats, including print, ebook and PDF, from all the same places.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Contents
Editorial
Future Interrupted
Time Pieces
Ansible Link
Black Static 53
All Your Cities I Will Burn
The Eye of Job
Crimewave 13: Bad Light
Belong
On the Techno-Erotic Potential of Donald Trump
Coming Soon
The Inside-Out
A Man of Modest Means
Book Zone
Mutant Popcorn
Laser Fodder
Back Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Contents
Editorial
Future Interrupted
Time Pieces
Ansible Link
Black Static 53
All Your Cities I Will Burn
The Eye of Job
Crimewave 13: Bad Light
Belong
On the Techno-Erotic Potential of Donald Trump
Coming Soon
The Inside-Out
A Man of Modest Means
Book Zone
Mutant Popcorn
Laser Fodder
Back Cover
Interzone #265 - July-August 2016 Page 17
