I was thinking of Contact when I read Jowibou’s posting. It’s one of my all-time favourite films. While I agree about McConaughey, I’ve always thought that without violence, sex, battle scenes or anything else to get their Hollywood teeth into, they had to settle for a love-interest at minimum. I don’t remember it from the book, but then it’s so long since I read that … one of my projects for when I return home this summer is to get a copy.
Then of course it’s a SF book by a scientist, who was also involved in the script … maybe Jowibou’s right and that’s why I understand it wasn’t a wild success at the box office … too cerebral.
I could have enjoyed the whole movie if not for the “Unobtainium” bit. The things that bugged you the most, like not explaining the floating mountains, were refreshing to me. There was very little technobabble, so instead I got to imagine explanations, speculate on what was going on in the background. I guess that distracted me from paying attention to the plot. But even then, I brushed off the stereotypes as evidence that the parties involved were retreating to their respective corners because none of them could really communicate with the others. Business people weren’t seeing results from the scientists. The scientists were trying to make progress studying the planet before full-scale mining was under way, and they were being forced to accommodate a military type. And the mercs were getting pissed off because these civilians (mostly the scientists) cared too much about stuff that was trying to kill (and had killed) the guys out there protecting the base.
As for not explaining the floating mountains… it seemed that the stupidly named Unobtainium was necessary for space travel, so it’s properties must be common knowledge. “Oh, there’s Unobtainium in those floating “mountains”? shrug It’s pretty, but inconvenient.”
But I guess I brought a lot more imagination to the movie than was actually present in it, so I’m being charitable. Except for the “unobtainium” bit. Someone should be shot for allowing that into the dialogue. Google translate “Unobtainable” into swahili or something and use that + “ium” for *****'s sake!
Oddly enough when I first heard “Unobtanium” I had a brief moment of hope for the film. “Lame joke,” I thought, “but at least this blockbuster tech demo isn’t taking itself too seriously.” Of course the rest was entirely devoid of humour; it turned out the word was instead intended as a hint that this was an action film that wasn’t going to waste our time with logic of any kind.
Hollywood has carefully trained its audience’s expectations on this issue, lowering the logic bar more and more with each generation of viewers. The best I hope for is a scifi movie that sends up the genre. I loved that Serenity knew that we knew it was just a cowboy movie set in space, just as Outland did or the awfully funny “Battle Beyond the Stars,” which was essentially a comic “The Magnificient Seven” in space. Now and then you get a “Solaris” or “Moon” that doesn’t expect you to park your brain entirely at the door, but these are small movies designed to appeal to the remains of a niche demographic.
Very occasionally you get something that works for more than one public: the Star wars movies up until the teddy bears appeared, Aliens 1 (scariest horror movie) and 2 (best action picture). It’s interesting to see the future given a new coherent “style” in films like “Blade Runner” “2001” or the “Mad Max” pictures. And parodies like “Galaxy Quest” certainly have their place. But on the whole mainstream SciFi that work on a lot of levels is pretty rare - for me, “the Fifth Element” did the job.
But the biggest problem with SciFi, IMHO, is that it’s a misnomer: most SciFi movies are actually Fantasy movies and betray not only a distrust of science (which is fair enough) but a disdain of it. Scifi thinks sci is boring. Almost every film gives up on the science and turns instead to some form or other of mushy “spirituality”. Rutger Hauer’s symbolic doves, Contact’s Quantum Ghosts, The fricken Force (personally, I think the line should have been "Use the Try Harder, Luke"), BSG’s terribly unsatisfying and unresolved mumbo jumbo, and of course Avatar’s own pseudo-druidic tree worship. It’s as if the producers were trying to flatter the audience by saying: don’t worry about not understanding all those big scientific words, what really matters is faith - and guns of course, really big guns. Praise the lord and pass the ammunition.
As for the 3D, as far as I was concerned it made the whole thing LESS real, by dragging me into some variant “uncanny valley.”
Stalker. Tremendous film, one of the best ever made in my opinion, out of any genre. Two very interesting pieces of trivia: This film was originally shot on an experimental negative. The entire movie was finished and sent off to develop—and destroyed by an error in the developing process. It was a demoralising blow to everyone involved, as you can imagine, but they went back and scraped together enough cash to do it again. So what you are seeing is, as far as I know, the only instance of a complete reshoot of a movie by the original people involved.
A sadder piece of trivia, as you see the actors and invisible crew working amongst the streams and exotic scenery, keep in mind that many of the people that worked on this film, including the director, died of cancer from working on this movie. The area they were working in was toxic with industrial waste and they were not informed of this until far later. Tarkovsky, like Kieslowski, died too young, in his early '40s, and suffering through the illness as his last film was produced Offret. In both cases, the loss to cinema’s pool of directorial talent was immeasurable.
Beautiful film, surrounding by an immense degree of ill fortune, but like I said, I’ve only come across a few other films (mostly other Tarkovsky) with the same level of deep impact on the mind.
Indeed, I believe I already mentioned it up-thread as one of the best sf movies of the past few years. In a similar vein is the Spanish film TimeCrimes, which is low budget and pretty clever - and also a lot of fun. You start off thinking it is very predictable, then feel vindicated when everything you expected to happen did happen, and then you find that there’s a whole other layer been playing out in the background too. (TimeCrimes is slightly let down by a second sequence in which the protagonist seems to act entirely out of character just to service the plot, though.) Sadly I hear they are turning it into a Hollywood remake…
Talking of remakes, I can’t believe they are remaking Total Recall. I mean… What is the point? Total Recall has to be the perfect combination of completely dumb science fiction action move and a really cool idea that leaves you wondering whether it was all real or whether Quaid was in the lab having an embolism all along. It’s an action movie with some good twists, too. A remake will either lose the fun and play it po-faced (please don’t get Christian Bale involved), or ditch the great ideas and only keep the big dumb action movie. Actually, the original Terminator film was another good example of a big dumb action movie that had a great idea behind it - simple, but effective. So all credit to Cameron for that. It’s just a shame he ruined it with the bilge that was Terminator 2 (everyone loves T2 because it had groundbreaking effects, but its story was dumb and sentimental).
Oh no, that’s the attitude that let Ron Moore get away with the bilge that was the ending to Battlestar Galactica! But let’s not go there…
Actually I’m no fan of technobabble either. If I had a time machine, for instance, I’d go and slap George Lucas around the face at the moment he came up with the idea of mitochlorians.
I think this a bit of an over-generalisation, if on the whole true. (Oh, and yes, Serenity was great - except for Wash, sob!) Moon was a character piece, for instance, with a really great idea at its core - not an original idea, but done in a refreshing way. Simply making it a character piece is what set it apart, in fact. When Sam hammers the back of his cab after speaking to his daughter, with the Earthrise beyond and him sobbing, “That’s enough, that’s enough,” with Clint Boon’s score swelling up in the background… Well, I get a tear in my eye every time. Now that’s great sf, regardless of the medium.
In fact, for me, too many sf books are so focussed on the science that they lose sense of the fiction. I’m reading Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl at the moment, for instance. He’s a great writer with an incredible imagination, but for the first two chapters I was struggling to keep going as I guess I’m just not that interested in a “kink-spindle” factory and its inner machinations. In fact, if I come across too many made-up words on the first page of a novel I tend to back away sharp-ish. Previously I put Greg Egan’s Permutation City down in the second chapter. I loved his short stories in Axiomatic - he is amazing at fictionalising reductionist ideas such as those of Derek Parfit - and Permutation City had a great first chapter, but after ten pages of description on how futuristic biologists could manipulate virtual atoms in the “Autoverse”, I wearied… Not that any of them can come close to Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. Now there’s a book in which the lead character goes to the library, and then you are forced to read dozens and dozens of pages of textbooks “over his shoulder” on the nature of the planet’s surface.
Mind you, Tarkovsky’s film of Solaris somehow managed to make it even more tedious. I know it’s heresy to say it and that Tarkovsky’s film is supposed to be a classic, but blimey it was boring and long. I didn’t make it to the end in fact. In fact, I preferredy the Clooney version - I’ll duck now! (Talking of overblown classics - I watched 2001 again recently. The effects and atmosphere are stunning, and Hal is as chilling as ever. But over all, it’s long, ponderous, inscrutable and is all style, no substance.)
Uh, after slagging off everything, I ought to say something positive! I think it’s just a matter of taste - I’m just not a fan of “hard” sf (unless it happens to be a cracking good story too). I absolutely understand that there are plenty of readers out there who enjoy reading novels full of scientific facts, researched for years and extrapolated magnificently, choc-full of neologisms and technobabble; readers who think science fiction should be about half-and-half - half science, half fiction. And I have seen some sf writers go so far as to argue that unless a novel is predominantly concerned with science, or technology, then it has no right to call itself science fiction. But for myself, I like science fiction that is predominantly fiction, in which the science just provides a means of exploring something in the story that couldn’t be done in any other way. By the “hard” sf definition, this isn’t sf at all, as it is usually more concerned with exploring ideas about what it is to be human than exploring scientific ideas. I recently read a book of short stories called the Turing Test by Chris Beckett which was brilliant for this. And Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life is sort of hard sf in many ways but the hardcore maths and science are all used to explore human ideas. Flowers for Algernon is a classic work of sf that isn’t about the science at all, too, or anything by Philip K. Dick. And Joe Haldeman’s Old Twentieth was one of the best novels I read last year.
And maybe that’s the ultimate problem I had with Avatar. It was much more concerned with creating a world than it was with telling a story that made sense, and in 2D the world didn’t seem all that novel. I would have loved to have seen that technology used to film Haldeman’s Forever War. Oh well.
Apologies for the self-indulgent and mostly off-topic rant!
I’d agree with you on that one, actually—well except for the Clooney part! I thought the Soderbergh version of that film was hideous and completely misunderstood the point of the novel (which as you say, isn’t really fit for film at all), but yes. The visuals of the planet were stunning and I like the theme music. I’ll sometimes put that disc in just to watch the planet for a few scenes that I have bookmarked, and then take it back out! Horrible.
Tarkovsky’s version suffers from a few things. It was one of the few times where his artistic vision was being significantly pushed about. The Soviets wanted a counterpart to 2001, and they chose a poet to make a novel—that’s really what happened. It also suffers from dated effects. I mean they had no budget over there for anything like 2001, and it’s a bit of a sad testament to the state of Russia at the time that the futurist high-speed car scene, a thing which was amazing to their eyes, was just stock footage from Tokyo.
It definitely has its moments, some scenes that are profound to me and stick in my mind long after having watched it, but most of them are on Earth as he nostalgically says goodbye to it and his loved ones.
You know, I went back and watched BSG a second time, a bit ago (I know, I definitely tend toward masochism) and knowing the raw sewage of the mind that was to come in the end, seeing the rest of the series made me realise that we really should have seen it coming. Chalk it up as laughing at those silly cylons and their religious obsessions, but the whole series is just rife with spiritual plot conniptions all the way back to the pilot itself. BSG certainly had its moments, a few of them the best I’ve seen on television, but we really should’a seen it coming.
Actually that’s exactly what I thought at first. It would have been amusing if the rest of the film hadn’t taken itself so seriously. They may as well have called it “Macguffinium”. In fact, dammit, forget I said that - I’m using that for my own sf plot!
Although I agree with you in terms of what Hollywood often does with the genre, I think there can be a big difference. There is plenty of science fiction that doesn’t care about the science too much because it’s not really about the science, but just uses it to provide an extreme situation or explore an idea. The science itself may in reality be impossible or unlikely, but that doesn’t matter because it is just there to allow the storyteller(s) to have the character meet himself (Moon), or wonder if he is real or whether all his memories are false (Blade Runner, although this is more left to the viewer to wonder), or to question reality itself (The Matrix or The Thirteenth Floor). You could argue that these are all more fantasy than sf, but I think that’s just semantics, really, and it doesn’t matter as long as a good story comes out of it.
Ha, hadn’t seen that! Quite true… (Still love Star Wars though…)
I said don’t go there! But seeing as you did, I saw the following on a forum somewhere just after the finale, and it pretty much sums it up for me:
This is my idea of the all purpose movie. It is a superficial action movie. It is a whirlwind romance. It has a dark subsurface questioning of “is good and evil relative”. It shows a form of editing artistry that is lost in more recent movies. If DVD’s wore out I would need to buy a few more spares.
I am not sure why FE works and Avatar doesn’t. They share many of the same concepts. Avatar just seems to try too hard to preach a point to the audience. Could it be that we don’t like being “told” and would rather “decide” what to believe?
Yes, I agree there - the parts on Earth at the beginning are moving. Except for that high speed car bit where he just sits in a car and watches the same scenery and tunnels go past for ten minutes.
I agree, Keith. When I boringly bemoan the lack of sci in scifi, it’s not out of hunger for more detailed hard science, but rather that every now and then I’d like to see a movie that seriously, - or comically for that mater - asks how are we affected as humans by science?
What’s it like to meet an alien who doesn’t just have a bigger gun but has a different brain, someone who thinks in a way that is alien to me. Also, what’s it like to be part of a society that has lived with so much scientific knowledge and power for a long time? What’s their social science like? Instead we get all too familiar fables that oppose technocratic dystopias and noble savages in blue skins or homespun - yawn.
My favourite episode of Star Trek - cheesy as it was - was the one where Picard is stranded on a planet with an alien who speaks only in allegorical metaphors drawn from his planet’s epic literature. Picard found himself having to decipher phrases like “Sokath, his eyes uncovered!” and “Shaka, when the walls fell.” At least this was an Alien, with an Alien mind. And it made the point that even if you have a babelfish or a Universal Translator, aliens are different.
AmberV: I’m off to find a copy of “Stalker”. Thanks.
Mirab, his sails unfurled.
It’s funny, even though it is a decent movie, I never really warmed to the Fifth element. It makes no sense that I’m not a massive fan, really. If you’re going to make a big action movie, then Willis is your man, so it scores there; it has a beautiful girl running around, the excellent Gary Oldman as the villain and sets designed by Mézières. I think there are two reasons for my antipathy towards the film, though:
It’s so colourful it’s just a little too camp for my liking - it harks back to Flash Gordon (but then, Flash Gordon is great fun).
When it first came out, David and I went to see it in our home town of Tamworth, and in the few parts that didn’t involve explosions, the gaggle of retarded Tamworthian teenagers sitting a few rows back threw popcorn at us. And Tamworth is not the sort of place where two decently-educated blokes at the cinema on their own ask a gang of teenaged idiots to stop whatever it is they are doing unless you want to spend some time at casualty.
Jowibou - we’re definitely on the same page there. That is what I loved about Moon. Take the clone troopers in Star Wars, for instance. Okay, I don’t really expect any of this from Star Wars, but when I see the clone troopers I can’t help thinking, what’s it like to be them, though? Would they really just be happy to die - just because they’re clones, do they really see themselves as expendable? Maybe they do… But there’s a whole film that could be made out of that one idea, which is usually something just accepted without question or thought in the blockbusters. I know no one expects anything more than a bit of fun out of a Schwarzenegger movie, but when the clone is happy to take off and leave the original with his wife and family in The Sixth Day, I can’t help wondering what is going through the clone’s mind. Right, so he just accepts he is a clone then, and that’s that, he doesn’t fight for the life he thought was his? Moon took those ideas and showed what it might be like to realise you weren’t who you thought you were, to realise that everything you loved might not be real; and then it showed how it might be to meet yourself and realise what an a-hole you are. (One of the most interesting short stories I read in the past few years was just about a guy sitting on his stoop, and out of the past pops his seven-year-old self and his twenty-year-old-self, and he has to explain to them about the choices he has made, how his life has ended up; needless to say, they aren’t best pleased.)
That’s an excellent question. FE is definitely in the category of repeatedly entertaining big dumb scifi movies. I’ve seen that one countless times, literally I have no idea at this point how many times I’ve seen it, I saw it about a dozen times while it was still showing—still love it and enjoy every minute of it when I see it again.
What makes it work? There are so many reasons why. One, Keith has already said at the top: Bruce Willis. Never underestimate the need for a big, dumb, sweaty bloody hero on the set (case in point, Total Recall)! All the better if you have a sweaty, extremely lithe, semi-human super female. Where else did it work, genuinely interesting conflict and nuanced villains. Gary Oldman’s Zorg is brilliantly done at every level—from the acting itself down to the costume and dialogue. He has comedy, evil, and pure class all in one spittingly angry, mind-controlled ball of fun.
It’s all about the thorough, surprising yet light-handed attention to detail - and of course Gary Oldman’s hair.
Keith: Now that I remember, I first saw it with a mixed bag of friends at an alternative cinema in Vancouver - a bit run down but cheap popcorn and a fun crowd. We all loved it and walked out laughing into balmy summer evening. I remember it as one of the best overall nights at the movies I’ve ever had. So maybe context counts. That may be why I bought a big screen TV for the first time when we moved to Cambridge. Paying a fortune to sit with hooligans is just not my cup of tea, I’m afraid. Really afraid.
Badabegboom
Ruby Rod: the classic self obsessed start stereotype that discovers that the real world is much more then they can handle. An infant that grows up a little.
Vito Cornelius: driven by a consuming purpose to fulfill his mission yet is stymied at every side by circumstances beyond his control.
Bangalores: The consummate bullies get their just rewards.
Corbin Dallas: The guy who just wants to get on with life and leave his past behind. The “every man” who saves the world, cool, in control.
Zorg: the spoiled, profiteering, power grubbing elitist who is undone by his own greed.
Lilu: the dream woman. Powerful, in control, beautiful, obtainable to the “every man” if he does everything right.
edit David: What person who has survived puberty does not remember thinking that they were this guy? Dork, no coordination, overlooked, grunt.
The characters are timeless. We understand them. The story sees our hopes fulfilled.
You can not really make those last three statements about Avatar.
“Older self meets younger”: one of my favourite tropes. In Stoppard’s “The Invention of Love” an older (deceased in fact) A.E.Houseman is listening to his younger self prattle on about life and love and after a brief pause the old guy just quietly says “Oh dear”. In what is often dismissed as an over-the-top “intellectual” play, it was a touching, simple, perfect moment that spoke volumes.
In a similar vein is the Spanish film TimeCrimes, which is low budget and pretty clever - and also a lot of fun. You start off thinking it is very predictable, then feel vindicated when everything you expected to happen did happen, and then you find that there’s a whole other layer been playing out in the background too. (TimeCrimes is slightly let down by a second sequence in which the protagonist seems to act entirely out of character just to service the plot, though.) Sadly I hear they are turning it into a Hollywood remake…
Now 
That is what I loved about