Interzone 252 May-Jun 2014

by Andy Cox, Editor

  Ultimately, though, all this is incidental, because what the film is all about is Gwen and the film-long will-they-won’t-they tease over whether Marc Webb and his team will go ahead and do it. Long before the film opened, the signs were pointing both ways: on the one hand, Emma Stone is a key asset who plays very strongly off Andrew Garfield and they’d be nuts to let her go; on the other, Shailene Woodley was cast and shot as Mary Jane Watson before the cutting-room floor got the better of her, and no easy explanation is available for her inclusion other than setting her up as a replacement. But this is a new universe, and things could genuinely go either way or another. The film knows we know this, and that we’re thinking of nothing else: it opens with Gwen’s high-school valedictorian speech, packed with ominously closural lines about mortality and choice, and showed us in the trailer that she gets dropped from a height (no fewer than four times, as it turns out, in what proves an extended homage to the climax of Castle of Cagliostro). So place your bets: is the snap of the neck too potent an attractor to be resisted in this iteration of the narrative; will studio imperatives save her after all for a newly post-canonical franchise existence; or is Gwen’s scholarship to Somerville perhaps setting something up that will honour the canon but keep her in play for the franchise? (“They got crime there, in England,” says Peter, who has evidently been paying keen attention to Morse.) It’s not the film’s fault that the solution they opt for is a less inventive one than some fans may wish for; it’s part of the costing of the new universe-based superfranchises that everyone will have their own favourite narrative dimension. Across the multiverse is a whole probability wave of Schrödinger’s Gwens, each alive and dead in a state of mighty Marvel quantum superimposition until her box is opened. It truly is a whole new web.

  Disney’s preemptive counter-strike from the main Marvel movieverse is Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which weaves the Bucky thread of Ed Brubaker’s 2005 run into an otherwise all-new plot which stands as the first to be built organically out of the MCU continuity itself, and which ambitiously projects a present-day crisis back to the beginnings of Captain America himself. Marvel are clapping themselves on the back over this one, and you can readily see why. They’ve found a present-day story that centres precisely on what Captain America means as a piece of Marvel and cultural history, while still building directly on the events of the first film, blowing up half of DC, and working in a part for Scarlett Johansson in her leathers. As the iconic survivor of Marvel’s greatest generation, Steve Rogers is the thread linking America’s present-day geopolitical ambiguities and crisis of control to its moral zenith and reference-point when you knew who the good guys and the bad were. The narrative engine is a genuinely bold, radical, and game-changing twist woven from deep Marvel mythology extending back to the sixties (and in retcon to the Nazi-biffing days of Cap himself); Robert Redford taunts us from the top as Colonel Obvius Baddey; and a major character with a multi-film contract goes (old-canon) Gwen Stacy on us. It’s true that the Winter Soldier storyline doesn’t really have much to do with the film they’ve actually made, and that some bits of canon (such as Emily VanCamp’s Sharon Carter) seem there more for investment purposes than actual function. But both the topline stars will be back below in much wilder films they could afford to do because Marvel has them on a comfortable earner; and if this year’s Spider-Man is old-school chemistry, this is shiny superhero cinema for now, using a potent comic-book symbol of America’s conscience to reflect our world back at us in ways that have only got more topical since shooting – almost as if that nice Mr Snowden was being run by Marvel all along. Just before the film came out we lost Lorenzo Semple Jr, architect not just of the Batman series and film and the 1980 Flash Gordon, but also of the classic seventies conspiracy thrillers The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor, to which the Russo brothers’ film pays extended homage. Sometimes it seems as if our entire universe is part of the Marvel promotional machine.

  The late Charles Segal originally coined the viral term “megatext” to describe the vastly extended narrative system of Greek myth, the largest such continuity in human culture until the Silver Age flowering of the DC and Marvel universes. Now that canon’s first avenger and public-domain superhero zero is himself fissured between universes in different bodies, as Renny Harlin’s The Legend of Hercules seeks to preempt Brett Ratner’s Dwayne Johnson Hercules with a cheaply cast and digitalised origin tale which rewrites Amphitryon as a psychotic tyrant and the hero’s journey as a lazy retread of Gladiator (betrayal, enslavement, ocean transport, combat sports, return in vengeance) with visual nods to 300 – though the generous showers of 3D particulates are wasted on UK audiences, who’ve had to settle for the 2D version. Kellan Lutz plays the hero like a Chris Hemsworth misshape, with an accent that Crowhursts around in mid-Atlantic circles, and the often quite attractive digital backdrops are let down by crowd effects that rarely rise much above game-animation quality. But everyone gives it what they can afford, with Alcmene doing her best to mime sex with the invisible king of the gods, and the obligatory anachronisms in military tactics and modern-Greek-named henchbuddy; and if it sets the bar low for its competitor, it still has a chips-cheap cheesy charm of its own. Originally this one was going to be Hercules: The Legend Begins and its competitor Hercules: The Thracian Wars. At least this one seems to have come to recognise this is one legend that isn’t going to franchise.

  Darren Aronofsky’s magnificently bonkers Noah goes one better in its pursuit of primeval heroic spectacle to the dawn of myth itself, refloating the Genesis narrative as an IMAX disaster movie set in a fantasy Icelandozoic age of the world. Baiting the emerging audience for faith-based filmmaking with a film that refuses to use the G-word, presents climate-change deniers as the damned, and glosses the opening of Genesis with footage of the creation of the Earth-Moon system and the story of evolution, it’s annoyed all the people it needed to annoy, won the hearts and change of many it was predicted not to, and defied doomsayers by turning the man who made Pi and The Fountain into the four-quadrant blockbuster filmmaker he’s always threatened to be. And indeed at heart it’s the comics film Aronofsky has so often dallied with making, after inconclusive flirtations at various times with Batman: Year One, Watchmen, and The Wolverine. Noah surfaced first in French, as a four-volume graphic novel series appearing annually from 2011, and as with The Fountain (which was repurposed as a graphic novel after the Brad Pitt version fell through, only to rise again on film with a pared-down budget) the comic version fills in some of the additional crazy that didn’t make the final film.

  Those who’ve been following the French volumes have long known that this was never not going to be a feast of barmy. Aronofsky remakes Evan Almighty and 2012 in IMAX. Full-scale ark built to God’s own blueprints. Digital animals on drugs. Exploding six-armed Jack Kirby Nephilim. Noah as a preincarnation of the obsessive, self-destructive, vision-chasing Aronofsky hero. The wtf bit from Genesis 9.20 where Noah gets off his face and shows his sons his knob. But still nothing can prepare you for the things that weren’t even in the comic. Kabbalistic McGuffin stones. Angel-killing superweapons. Methuselah spiking Noah’s tea with hallucinogens. Russell Crowe sings, again. Jennifer Connelly weeps. (As well she might, so soon after their uproarious reunion in Winter’s Tale.) Emma Watson also sings. Patti Smith sings too, a self-penned end title song with the Kronos Quartet which includes the lyric “Two white doves, two white wings to carry you away.” (I keep getting four when I run that one on my fingers.) Not to mention the Biblically inspirational dialogue: “We are men, and Man United are invincible!” (Not this season they’re not. Keep up.) Curiously missing from the film entirely: very expensive things like, um, letting the animals out of the ark. How did a nervous Paramount’s disclaimer go again? “While artistic license has been taken, we believe that this film is true to the essence, values and integrity of a story that is a cornerstone of faith for millions of people worldwide.” Believe all they want, but like things that you�
�re liable to read in the Bible, it ain’t necessarily so.

  You might think that “Noah on a train” was the winner of a joke-pitch competition, just beating out Another 47 Ronin and the zombie remake of Bridesmaids. But Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer is pretty much that, albeit with Ed Harris’s Noah figure now the antagonist and Chris Evans stepping into Ray Winstone’s shoes as the leader of the uprising against him. Like Noah, it’s come to us out of the French graphics scene, as a free update of the thirty-year-old first volume of Jean-Marc Rochette’s Transperceneige series about a thousand-car train hurtling endlessly around an Earth frozen by climate apocalypse. Realising that the scenario would never stand up to rational scrutiny, Bong’s version heightens the surreality and allegory with outré performances and designs, as Evans and his dwindling band of rebels battle their way up the class system from the back-of-train ghetto through the increasingly opulent carriages that house their privileged oppressors.

  Bong’s original cut came out in Korea and France last year, but elsewhere has been held at a red signal by one of Harvey Weinstein’s cutting-room standoffs, allowing everyone to stock up on the French DVD instead, ahead of what is now a limited US release for the director’s version in June. You can see Weinstein’s point, because Snowpiercer is a wilfully strange film, with the satirical wit of Bong’s best-known film The Host on display in a much darker form that won’t be for everyone. The tone is uneven, perhaps deliberately so; among all the crazy performances from the up-train characters, Evans’ climactic monologue (the one about what happened to John Hurt’s arm) is an audition piece for the theatre of the undeliverable. But just as Noah survived Paramount’s editing wars to launch triumphantly in the director’s version, Snowpiercer is unimprovably what it wants to be and proud of it.

  Divergent bundles some of the same dystopian themes in a friendlier franchise package, as Shailene Woodley navigates her way to adulthood in a post-apocalyptic Chicago which has been social-engineered into a competitive hierarchy of personality-typed “factions” and an underclass of factionless oppressed. Over the course of three novels and now four films, she’ll find romance, heroism, and the truth about her society and what’s beyond the city wall that shuts out the wider world, as well as rather a lot of tedious conspiracy plotting and bickering scenes as the air goes out of the initial setup in later books. Nevertheless, in the initial flush of relief over the success of what looked pre-release like a Transcendence-level bomb, Lionsgate have now done their usual Deathly Hallows number on the final volume, which will presumably now break in two around chapters 27–8. But they’ll have their work cut out. Not only are the later volumes a bit of a struggle after the vivid and pageturning first, but those who’ve read to the end will know that the split voices of the final volume and Cullenised renarration of the spin-off cycle are part of a very Hollywood-unfriendly narrative turn that Woodley’s Spider-Man role has uncomfortably anticipated.

  Envious eyes wonder how Lionsgate manage to pick the YA franchises that will soar like eagles while all their bigger rivals are buying up turkeys. Nobody else thought Divergent would be a hit; there’s no supernatural element, and no love triangle (or at least none left in the film); the bleak dystopian post-apoc Chicago setting seemed to offer little scope for cinematic whizz; while the premise just looked dumb. An entire society built around psychometric testing? Teenagers sorting-hatted for life into society-wide high-school cliques, depending on whether they’re “smart, kind, honest, selfless or brave?” Pass. But Divergent has defied the doubts to come out punching, and everyone wants to know Lionsgate’s secret – which is that there is no secret, apart from maybe reading the book before you buy it. Anyone can tell immediately from the first volumes of their series that Twilight, The Hunger Games, and Divergent are films, while I Am Number Four, Beautiful Creatures, The Mortal Instruments and the rest simply aren’t. Like Stephenie Meyer, Veronica Roth has a sense of what it feels like to be a sixteen-year-old, and how the tropes of fantastic fiction can distil that feeling into a potent allegory of adult becoming. Heroine Tris is “Divergent” – as the later books reveal, simply a pre-apocalyptic normal teen who doesn’t fit into the Procrustean adult role that society is trying to make for her – and the message to her and to all her kind is “You’re a threat to the whole society. You don’t fit into a category. They can’t control you.” It helps a lot that Woodley is wonderful, living richly up to her thankless destiny as the next J-Law (and in time, no doubt, previous El-Fan; you winced at it here first). It almost makes you look forward to the sequels.

  Jesse Eisenberg is also trying to find out who he really is in Richard Ayoade’s insistently bizarre reading of The Double. The last film of Dostoevsky’s novella was actually Black Swan, though the source got rather buried in the mix when Aronofsky threw in a couple of other writers to repurpose the bought-in script as a ballet pic. Now Ayoade, and his instigator Avi Korine, have restored the bureaucratic setting and put back something of the original dynamic in a determinedly crazy rendering of their own, set in a nightmarish underground workplace where mousy analyst Eisenberg finds his foundering life progressively appropriated by a confident, successful, and unscrupulous doppelgänger while everyone else seems oblivious to the weirdness. Liberally summoning the spirits of Lynch, Kaufman, and Gilliam (there are even ducts), it gives the vivid impression of having been horrible to shoot, but that’s probably just the calculated claustrophobia and lightlessness of the disused basement in Woking doing its stuff. Famous faces swim into view and vanish; the plot spirals into Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. identity psychosis; and the comedy gets darker and darker until you can’t remember the light or whether you were ever exactly having fun. But that’s pretty much the point.

  Lynchian sound design is used to similarly unheimlich effect in Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin, whose heavily improvised storyline riffs freely on the premise of Michel Faber’s novel: a female alien cruising Scotland picking up hitch-hikers who won’t be missed and consigning them to a monstrous offscreen fate whose nature is revealed in progressive glimpses. The novel stuck to the heroine’s perspective but gradually irised out to reveal more of the aliens’ activity, background, and purpose, while at the same time going deeper into her increasingly conflicted consciousness and mission. But where Faber’s heroine was a painfully mutilated simulation of humanity with an amputated tail, forced bipedalism, gigantic false boobs, and huge thick glasses to hide her alien eyes, Glazer’s, much more cinematically, is a gorgeous blue digital effect in a Scarlett Johansson skin who lures marks into derelict houses and does something dark and incomprehensible to them with her kit off. After many attempts at a more faithful and conventional rendering, Glazer’s film has ended up performing a similarly drastic surgery on the novel’s narrative (and the significance of the title), amputating all the alien plot and leaving the skin of mystery intact, while retaining the resonant estrangement of viewing the mundanities of our world through incomprehending alien eyes. So we watch alien Scarlett riding the escalator in the Buchanan Centre and fielding directions to the Maryhill Tesco’s; alien Scarlett eating Black Forest gateau very slowly in a highland tearoom and boaking it up again after; alien Scarlett trying to make sense of Tommy Cooper reruns and getting quite into Deacon Blue.

  One of the disappointments of Faber’s novel, for all its effectiveness overall, was that when all the mystery has been stripped away the abductees turned out to be merely farmed for export to a glum dystopian world as an edible delicacy: a bathetic and rather silly reveal after all the evocative mystery. But Glazer’s film is careful to withhold these cognitive comfort foods, relishing the viewer’s destabilising inability to tell scripted scenes from improvised, staged action from secret filming, actors from members of the public, and (in one unforgettable sequence) special makeup from neurofibromatosis. The narrative is a bit sketchy, and Glazer has had to impose an artificial sense of direction by starting in Glasgow and moving to the scenic desolation of Lochgilphead, so that the film has
the feeling of a damp Scottish holiday in the company of Tsathoggua. But Johansson, at least, is having a vintage year in posthuman performance, having already knocked one out of the park with her invisible turn in Her before leathering up for Winter Soldier, and she still has Luc Besson’s Lucy as a kind of fusion of all three roles. Who wouldn’t want to be in a vehicle with her?

  Now: here’s a rather sweet story. In 1975 the prolific British fictioneer Syd Bounds published an inconspicuous eleven-page short called ‘The Animators’ in the anthology Tales of Terror from Outer Space. It was then forgotten by everyone else, but lodged sufficiently in the affection of veteran TV animator-turned-writer Clive Dawson for him to turned it into a spec which hoop-jumped its way through the platform game that is UK film production, to see the dusty red light of day as an odd little Irish co-production called The Last Days on Mars. The late and ill-fitting title notwithstanding, it’s set in the last nineteen hours of the first team’s tour on a manned Mars base, where the original zombie virus that wiped out the Martians turns the team one-by-one into living dead who work against the survivors to ship the organism home to infect the Earth.

  It’s an unassuming tale that’s been made more so by the combover budget, which has taken out a big space-set finale and maximised the use of Martian dust-storms to obliterate anything that might cost money. But it’s animated by a visible affection for Bounds’ story, which it tracks with an unsolicited fidelity that even extends to the inexplicable roster of heavily British names (though three have been rewritten as female, whose kill order can be surmised from their distribution as one ethnic, one annoying, and one blonde). Undeterred by the likenesses to John Carpenter’s ill-received Ghosts of Mars, it was never going to beat the commercial and critical jinx on Martian films; but the casting punches above weight, with Liev Schreiber, Romola Garai, Olivia Williams and Elias Koteas among the expendables lining up to be rebirthed as shambling mummies, and it’s refreshing to see a fondly-remembered author commemorated with a homegrown interplanetary thriller.