Interzone 252 May-Jun 2014

by Andy Cox, Editor

  Pleasingly completing a trio of sf films from the Celtic fringes, Welsh venture The Machine is a knowing addition to the canon of robot Pygmalion pictures, with Toby Stephens’ conflicted neuroscientist trying to develop a technology to save his daughter within a weapons programme that has much more sinister uses for his inventions. The actual story is a bit of a Frankenplot, stitched together out of bits that don’t obviously belong together. After a rather effective “Phase One” about restoring brain function to brain-injured combat veterans with the help of Caity Lotz’s AI researcher, the project moves abruptly to an entirely different film which it calls “Phase Two”, in which suddenly Stephens’ neuroscientific expertise enables him to create a Maschinenmensch with Lotz’s face who then becomes caught in a code war between conflicted but decent Stephens and villainous Denis Lawson’s attempt to weaponise and dehumanise her for battlefield use. But the film plays its limited budget well, going even further than Last Days on Mars in using low-visibility settings to mask its unbuilt backgrounds, and with a claustrophobic cheapness that has some of the atmosphere of black-and-white Doctor Who. The three principals are excellent, with Lawson in particular never better, while Lotz works so hard at differentiating her human and android characters (the latter with a full-body fleshtoned outfit by someone called Libidex, who turn out upon googling to provide exactly the services you’d expect) that they don’t actually seem much like one another at all. The ending will probably get mixed responses, but offers a wry tease of the posthuman family of the future. What they’ll be watching is anyone’s guess.

  Canadian animation Escape from Planet Earth offers a more orthodox family take on some of the same territory, as a pair of feuding blue-skinned brothers venture to “The Dark Planet” and fall into the clutches of a Shatner-voiced Area 51 commander who wants to harness their technology to build an omnicidal planet-busting superweapon to cleanse the cosmos of non-human life. (“I’m going to wipe out the alien infestation one planet at a time!”) Ostensibly a film about blood being thicker than sugar-water (“You don’t have to travel hundreds of light years and defeat an intergalactic enemy to find that the greatest adventure is right here with your brother and your family”), it’s deep-down one of those faintly embittered films about filmmaking, with space hero Scorch Supernova hogging all the limelight and credit while backstage boffin brother Gary does all the heavy lifting and damage limitation from back in mission control where nobody sees or appreciates. But it’s also an optimistic and inclusive film about immigration and the phoney war on terror, with the internees busting out of alien Gitmo (“You are now a guest of the US Government”) to forge their own destiny of peace between the worlds. Of course, as Gary notes of the branded Dark Planet cola, it’s 800% sugar; but as his superiors are quick to remind him, “That’s what makes it good for kids!”

  There are at least five contenders for the barmiest film of the season, but even Aronofsky and Bong stand little chance against the return of the master himself in Terry Gilliam’s full-on-batfaeces The Zero Theorem. One of Gilliam’s cherished pet projects for so many years that its arrival in reality takes some getting used to, it’s first-time screenwriter Pat Rushin’s adaptation of his 1999 novella ‘The Call’, which wasn’t actually published till a decade later, by which time Gilliam had the film version all set up with Billy Bob Thornton, only for Heath Ledger’s death during The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus to send him back to the drawing-board to salvage that one instead. Now Christoph Waltz has taken over in the lead, as the “entity-crunching” mathematician-analyst cracking slowly up as he waits for a phone-call that will validate his life while his employers pressure him in the opposite direction: to complete a proof of the Zero Theorem that will show mathematically that life is meaningless.

  Though the cheapest film Gilliam has made (even cheaper than Tideland), its first half-hour is among the most ambitious stuff Gilliam’s ever shot, crawling with physical and digital scatter gags that at one point you can see Rushin continuing to scribble down as throwaways, still writing the film even as it’s filming him writing it. But with the shift to single-set chamber drama there’s a downshift of pace and invention, and the cast find it hard to keep the plates spinning as the conceit wears thin and the holes in the logic widen. It’s clearly the film Gilliam wanted to make, a companion piece more to Tideland than to Brazil, which it otherwise more closely echoes in themes, look, plot, and (not least) ending; and if it continues the raggedness of Gilliam’s recent work, it still makes eight million look like eighty, doesn’t stint on the ducts, and has the killer mission statement “You’re trying to prove that the universe is all for nothing.” Perhaps, as the Marvel macrocosm swallows the sun, that’s a message we need to hear.

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