Interzone 252 May-Jun 2014

by Andy Cox, Editor

  The one great exception to the humanistic tendency of genre criticism is the work of Mike Ashley whose critical trilogy The Time Machines, Transformations and Gateways to Forever present the history of science fiction in terms of the rise and fall of different magazines. While these books provide a fascinating insight into the personalities of editors who built the genre, their true genius lies in looking beyond individual books and authors in order to see the history of science fiction as a succession of opening and closing markets that welcomed some authors, excluded others and prompted many to experiment with new genres and fresh techniques. Much like the spacers in Heart of the Comet or the mercenaries in New Model Army, people who choose to work in a literary tradition such as science fiction are opening themselves up to the people and institutions that surround them. These institutions may allow individual authors to sell their work and acquire reputations but they also impose limits on how those individuals think and express themselves.

  One of the most insightful writers on this particular topic is the anarchist thinker James C. Scott whose books Seeing Like a State and The Art of Not Being Governed look upon institutions such as states and corporations as forces that reshape both the environment and human nature to suit their own requirements. People often speak about science fiction as a conversation but they forget that this kind of intergenerational conversation is also a form of institution with its own life and structure. By focusing solely on the voices of authors, we are overlooking the fact that these voices are shaped (for good or ill) by social forces that require their own set of tools and their own special language.

  * * *

  LASER FODDER

  TONY LEE

  SPARKS

  SCOPERS

  THE LAST KEEPERS

  ASTRONAUT

  ICE SOLDIERS

  ROBOCOP

  Inspired by Watchmen and Kick-Ass, super-team adventure Sparks (Blu-ray/DVD, 7 April), makes the most of its modest budget and, although many opportunities for knockabout comedy are obvious, this indie actioner is played commendably straight.

  Essentially it’s a love story and a tale of vengeance with pulp noir style flashbacks to frame an elaborate mythology about New York mutants spawned by radiation from a 1920s meteor strike. There is nothing in its comic book content very likely to surprise or impress fans of TV’s Smallville or the X-Men series, and the movie’s twin tones of urban darkness and lightweight charm barely avoid being corny at times, but Sparks is often deliberately kitsch and makes good use of its period setting with a distinctive Dick Tracy vibe, sometimes offering an effective pastiche of Sin City themes without all the visualised sleaze.

  The front-liners are Ian Sparks (Chase Williamson, John Dies at the End) and his street-fighting partner Lady Heavenly (Ashley Bell, Last Exorcism). There’s also a shape-shifter girl (fond of bedroom antics) and a fire-starter heavy. The super villains are named Ringmaster Jesus and serial-killer Mantanza (William Katt), while Clancy Brown and Jake Busey guest star as the senior protagonists. Sparks is wholly original material – despite obvious allusions (J.S.A. comics) and tribute scenes (D.O.A, 1950) – but, from the hero’s typically tragic origin event to an inevitable training montage, it’s hardly ground breaking stuff. It’s just an enjoyable time waster, with somewhat limited cult-worthy appeal. But it’s always good to see filmmakers trying something different, and Sparks deserves a share of the audience for today’s superhero movies.

  Writer-director Evan Oppenheimer’s Scopers (aka The Speed of Thought), on DVD 14 April, is a psi thriller in which Nick Stahl (Terminator 3, Mirrors 2) plays Joshua Lazarus, a telepath working for the NSA. He meets mind-reader Anna (Mia Maestro, Alias) and falls in psychic love, while his US agency handlers fret over the potential security risks of losing their apparently compromised asset. Made like a low-budget TV movie from the late 1980s/early 1990s, this is only concerned with the first, and most juvenile, ideas that might pop into your head when you think about telepathy in movies now.

  Blair Brown and Wallace Shawn fail to bring any veteran acting abilities to this flatly contrived spy romance that lacks an inspired cross-genre imagination, dramatic subtlety or visual flair. Overall, this is merely a depressingly empty offering. Without sophisticated SF content, artistic merit, or appeal as comic book style action, Scopers simply cruises through its lamentably foggy dreamscapes like some mediocre spin-off of Cronenberg’s extraordinary Scanners. And, sadly, its quite unflappably bland leads (I would not call them stars here) are never more than glossily amateurish in physical or mental realms. It is a failed bid to claim a back bench seat in the psi-division cadres of modern superhero movies.

  A dramatic but clearly Disneyfied version of TV series Charmed, The Last Keepers (DVD, 21 April) is directed with a vaguely science fictional tone by Maggie Greenwald, perhaps best known for 1993’s feminist western The Ballad of Little Jo.

  The movie concerns generations of reclusive witches in the artistically inclined Carver family. Teenage Rhea (Zosia Mamet, daughter of writer-director David Mamet and actress Lindsay Crouse) is the proverbial strange girl – “I don’t wanna be a freak anymore” – in a small town. Rhea gets on well with her supportive dad (Aidan Quinn) but struggles against over-anxious mum (Virginia Madsen on good, if not top, form), and turns to wise granny (Olympia Dukakis in standard matriarch mode) for advice.

  As puberty and the development of her inherited gifts coincide, angsty trainee Rhea is troubled by mysterious visions that are not resolved, either by explanatory wiki-wicca or a psychic bonding from her timely induction in the local sisterhood from Avalon.

  With its backdrop of young romance and clichéd rebellion, this is a somewhat lightweight fantasy that explores a latent/student witch’s wondrous bond with nature – rather than any typical wordsmith-type spell-casting for healing powers. Although it is watchable, unlike magical princess cartoon Frozen (nothing puts me off watching a movie so much as the descriptive category ‘Disney animated musical’!), for its trio of strong female roles, The Last Keepers is a decidedly modest effort – one that borders upon trite, and brings nothing new or fresh to the lore of similarly themed witchcraft movies. In our post-Buffy times, this is sadly just DVD fluff that is aimed ostensibly at family audiences that are practically nonexistent today. It is a little too whimsical and romanticised in its genre inclinations to win much favour with fans of superhero movies.

  Written and directed by Eric Hayden, Astronaut: The Last Push (DVD, 28 April) is about lone spacer Michael (Khary Payton), who is faced with a three-year ordeal of endurance after his mission to visit Europa is aborted. Lance Henriksen generously supports a fledgling filmmaker by playing the billionaire who finances this privatised space launch called ‘Life One’. With cheap graphics, a documentary format details the mission profile for this hugely ambitious project, while the accident that damages the interplanetary spacecraft is merely sketched by shaky-cam and blurred close-ups. Of course, isolation and boredom grind away Michael’s fragile sanity, and the only relief is his commitment to a gruelling repair schedule and time-lagged video comms with a friendly face at ground control.

  Apart from limited but accomplished visual effects (Hayden’s pro background is digital composition) very much in the classical style of Peter Hyams’ 2010, this is rather dull sci-fi, mostly confined to one completely unconvincing set, with nothing to commend it beyond that of an unimpressive solo performance that could easily have been a stage-bound, one-man show for theatre. The movie’s haunted space capsule is lacking even the modest/charming mystery of Duncan Jones’ likeable-but-derivative Moon, and, as happens too often with micro-budget genre movies today, Astronaut is the kind of story that might have made a good episode of The Outer Limits, but it fails wretchedly when its expansive concerns are not matched by its production standards and its meagre narrative is stretched out to a leisurely 85-minute feature. It’s a movie in which the spirit of traditional SF is alive, but the fleshy substance is dead and long-decayed to empty-headed and incre
asingly irrelevant fantasy.

  Michael Polish’s The Astronaut Farmer recaptured something of the inspiring romanticism (of The Right Stuff) far better than this, despite its earthbound plot. “All that’s left to do is fire the engines for the braking procedure.” Unless you’re desperate for another space-movie fix after the excellent Gravity, give this a miss. Just re-watch John Carpenter’s seminal Dark Star (it remains more intelligent fun than this!) and/or Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 (Hayden’s clearest/greatest inspiration) instead. Despite the possibilities for portraying such bold explorers as space-age idols, Astronaut’s bid for a place at the comic book champions’ table is denied. This does not fit comfortably into the spacesuit-as-costume reformatting for superhero movies.

  What if the Cuban missile crisis was just a diversion? Ice Soldiers (Blu-ray/DVD, 5 May) posits a Russian version of Captain America, as three super-troopers are found in arctic Canada during the 1960s. Defrosted to spread mayhem and slaughter leaving just a single survivor, a trio of GM blond sleeper agents are introduced in lively period scenes that strain to evoke the Cold War paranoia of spy-fi Ice Station Zebra and the original The Thing From Another World. Fifty years later, US corporate types led by Jane Frazer (Camille Sullivan, from unrelated TV movie Ice Twisters) are oil-prospecting as a cover-up for a search by the broodingly obsessive/secretive Dr Malraux (Dominic Purcell, Blade: Trinity) for the MIA comrades. The reliable Michael Ironside plays the colonel in charge of a military support team. The presence of a seemingly renegade Russian scientist sketches in the fragile détente between east and west, before another massacre prompts Malraux into solo pursuit of the arisen (again!) and escaped killers across snow country, where he’s aided by a local trapper (Adam Beach, Windtalkers).

  Directed by Sturla Gunnarsson (Beowulf & Grendel, 2005) this stylish sci-fi action-thriller maintains a chilly authenticity throughout both location shooting and studio set-ups, despite the obvious fantasy aspects (perfectly preserved über-Spetnaz corpses, thawed to play Dolph-Lundgrenite triplets in a pre-programmed commando tactical scenario). At a nearby town of oil workers, the spree killing under a polar light is punctuated by various James Bond style stunts and moments of comic book horror. The champion’s story is one of overcoming his genetic destiny, of course. Overall, this is a great addition to the rapidly diversifying, witty and offbeat superhero movies.

  With four or five of its principal cast all having CV credits to varied superhero movies, the comic book appeal of this RoboCop (Blu-ray/DVD, 9 June) remake is assured. It is far less satirical than Paul Verhoeven’s futuristic original, as Brazilian director José Padilha evokes the earnest dramas of his acclaimed Elite Squad policiers for this slick SF thriller, ably reinterpreting the material with a foreigner’s view of America in all of its vainglorious capitalism and congressional paranoia. “Compassion, fear, instinct, they will always interfere with the system!” Post-Iron Man, and a decade beyond I, Robot and Matrix Reloaded, this plays so much like a ‘RoboCop Upgraded’ that it’s immensely satisfying as a 21st century revision, not just of RoboCop (1987) but also embracing spare kit parts from the 1990s sequels and its undervalued TV spin-off.

  Like the astute remake of Dredd, this is an intelligent actioner that redefines the lore of future enforcement, with a more heavily politicised rant about US foreign policies than Verhoeven’s classic managed, brooding upon aspects of our globalised present’s unmanned drone strikes against some browbeaten middle-eastern targets. Although the machine never makes the mecha-evolutionary jump from humanoid to android – as seen in various iterations of the BSG remake, and Indian epic Enthiran (2010) – Omni tech supplies a primal example of state-of-the-art cyborg cinema that keenly recalls Borg-queen embodiment, with queasily-depicted disassembling of the hero, reborn as “a product with conscience” so unlike the corporation that made him. Yes folks, RoboCop is back from the dead again! And his welcome reappearance, on duty in full tactical-black gear (like The Dark Knight), slots neatly and stealthily into the current cycle/mode of superhero movies.

  MUTANT POPCORN

  NICK LOWE

  THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2

  CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

  THE LEGEND OF HERCULES

  NOAH

  SNOWPIERCER

  DIVERGENT

  THE DOUBLE

  UNDER THE SKIN

  THE LAST DAYS ON MARS

  THE MACHINE

  ESCAPE FROM PLANET EARTH

  THE ZERO THEOREM

  It’s not often that we get front-stalls seats to watch universes at war, flowering and dying as they multiply and clash. But cosmogony has become the chief business of cinema since the Marvel Cinematic Universe became the standard model for creation in this age of the world, and all the other studios are inflating their properties to universe scale in an attempt to emulate, compete, and clean up. On its debut five years ago it was far from clear whether Marvel’s cosmogonic model even made sense, and even now that the game has been changed, the actual structure of the Mighty Marvel Movie Multiverse is still unfolding, with a lot of the maths in MMMM-theory remaining to be filled in. The reference to Stephen Strange in their latest suggests that they already have it in mind to scale the high-level multiversal metaphysics of which the Sorcerer Supreme is a key component. But already the new model is under interesting stress with the fragmentation of the MMMM into the three hypocosmic dimensional streams of the MCU Disneyverse, the Spider-Man Sonyverse, and the X-Men/Fantastic Four Foxverse, with DC building a Snyderverse over at Warners and a renascent Star Wars universe taking shape back home at Disney.

  For those who people these vast new dimensions of narrative space, life and death are newly plastic conditions. Of course comics have always treated death as an essentially reversible process; but in the century before this one, Marvel nevertheless held fairly solidly to the doctrine that the three deceased characters who stayed dead were Bucky Barnes, Ben Parker, and Gwen Stacy. Since those simpler times, however, Marvel’s comics have been tampering with the protocols with all three; and the canon fates of two of the trio now find themselves up for simultaneous renegotiation in rival Marvel universes on screen.

  Of the three Marvel hypocosms, it’s Sony’s franchise larder that seems the most dangerously understocked, and can least afford to let a character go. They have the top-ranking hero, but there’s only the one of him, which means at most a film every two years to Disney’s six. Sony’s plan seems to be to fill the biennial spaces by exploiting the Spider-Man villain roster, probably the strongest in the Marvel canon, which is why The Amazing Spider-Man 2 sets up a Sinister Six sequel as its next step. How the film-a-year plan can work with Spidey himself on half-time remains a bit of a conundrum, but in the absence of other in-universe plot engines, Oscorp has been reinvented on the Stark Industries model as an all-purpose provider of villainisable technologies and secret histories (including a new backstory for Richard Parker), and some famous outfits are lingered on in the Special Projects lab, so there’s clearly some attempt to get ducks in line.

  In key respects, though, Amazing 2 remains a deeply conventional superhero film, with two villains teaming up (and just a walk-on for Paul Giamatti’s Rhino) for reasons that never make a great deal of sense and may have been recut to fit. “Once you shut down the grid,” says the Goblin to Electro, “Spider-Man will come to you, and I will make him bleed,” despite the fact that he doesn’t actually need Spidey’s blood by that point. But then there seems to have been quite a lot of hasty replotting in post, as a surprising amount of material in the trailer has not only been dropped from the theatrical cut (including Peter’s killer line about web design) but in some cases is no longer compatible with it – as with Harry Osborn’s revelation to Peter that Oscorp had him under surveillance. None of this inspires a lot of confidence that the film knows entirely what it’s doing. Felicity Jones’ part seems to have been cut to the point of why bother, and there’s an extraordinary double montage at the midpoint where Peter first puts toge
ther an investigation wall on his dad, then carries out a series of battery experiments, only for us to learn in the next scene that all that was apparently managed in a single night. Most of the cast are better this time around (particularly Sally Field, who was a bit of a bust on the first one), and Dane de Haan’s career-making cold stare gets its finest workout yet; but the writing credits, which still award a story share to James Vanderbilt, show how messy the franchise maintenance continues to be.