Dystopian Sci Fi Movie Face/Off! (Babylon A.D.)

As mentioned yesterday, exposure to the brain-lacerating horrors of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel The Road has left me in a bit of an emotional state. His command of image and mood is been used to conjure up something even more terrifying than Anton Chigurh and Judge Holden combined and multiplied; a vision of a world turned to ash by nuclear war, with no sunlight and no plant life, the survivors pretty much waiting to die or banding together to eat their fellow man. McCarthy is ruthless and relentless, and by the time I was done with it, even the small glimmers of hope found within (and the beautifully rendered relationship between the protagonist and his son) are not enough to dispell the cloud of doom hanging over my head. Stupid genius writer.

In an attempt to cheer myself up I have watched comedies and quality contemporary drama, but neither did the trick. So, in an attempt to vaccinate myself (after the fact, but still), I decided to watch some dystopic sci fi set in post-apocalyptic future worlds, except this time I figured I should go for something less brutal, more fluffy. There are grades of awfulness within the genre, with The Road being at the top of the awfulness chart, and everything else seeming jolly in comparison. Several contenders came to mind, including Richard Stanley's Hardware, the 2000AD comic strip "adaptation" (i.e. the rip-off that caused a lawsuit) that came out in the 80s. It was shown on Zone Horror a week ago (not long after they screened Stanley's second film, Dust Devil), and I watched it to see if it was as bad as I remembered. Amazingly, it was even worse, being little more than a clumsy barrage of noise and image and embarrassing dialogue and silly acting. Just appalling, and quite hideous. It's so bad that I'm beginning to suspect that his version of The Island Of Doctor Moreau might have been just as bad as John Frankenheimer's version, and it might not even have been as entertaining. That would equal total fail.


So which films to watch? Thankfully Neil Marshall's Doomsday just hit DVD and Blu-Ray in the UK, and Mathieu Kassovitz' Babylon A.D. came out last Friday, so it seemed logical to try those out for size. I will say that, in their own way, they made me feel better about the forthcoming end of the world, but were they any good on their own terms?

Actually, Babylon A.D.'s only real gift to my tortured psyche was to show a plausible future world that wasn't a landscape of mere ash and death, but was a well-designed cyberpunk-style amalgam taken from various different sources, most notably Alfonso Cuaron's magnificent Children Of Men. Of course, as we're talking about cyberpunk here, there is also the unavoidable influence of William Gibson, godfather of the sub-genre, whose Neuromancer remains unfilmed while his ideas pop up in other movies all the time. And yes, I'm still bitter that Chris Cunningham never got to make his version of that book.

Babylon A.D. is based on a French cyberpunk novel called Babylon Babies, by Maurice G Dantec, whose hyper-aggressive website has to be seen to be believed. I'm sure I read somewhere that he is a contemporary of noted humorist Michel "Monsieur Happy" Houellebecq, which makes me want to read his books even more now (thanks to the lovely chaps at Aphrohead Books, my copy of Babylon Babies is on the way). From what I gather from this MIT Press synopsis, Dantec's book sounds pretty dissimilar to the movie I saw on Monday.

Set in the hidden "flesh and chip" breeding grounds of the first cyborg communities and peopled by Serbian Mafiosi, Babylon Babies has as its hero a hard-boiled leatherneck veteran of Sarajevo named Thoorop who is hired by a mysterious source to escort a young woman named Marie Zorn from Russia to Canada. A garden variety job, he figures. But when Thoorop is offered an even higher fee by another organization, he realizes Marie is no ordinary girl. A schizophrenic and the possible carrier of a new artificial virus, Marie is carrying a mutant embryo created by an American cult that dreams of producing a genetically modified messiah, a dream that spells out the end of human life as we know it.

Inspired by Philip K. Dick, William S. Burroughs, Gilles Deleuze, and other extrapolationists [OMG my new favourite word! - Neck] of the future, Babylon Babies unfolds at breakneck speed as Thoorop risks his life to save Marie, whose brain—linking to the neuromatrix—loses all limits and becomes the universe itself. Exploring the symbiosis between organic matter and computer power to spin new forms of consciousness, Maurice Dantec rides Nietzsche's prophecy: "Man is something to be overcome."

It sounds like a Gallic version of Gibson's Count Zero, but with a focus on Catholicism instead of voodoo. While the movie is set in the Russia of the future, and presented as a broken society filled with barely functioning ghettos, black marketeering, and militaristic mercenaries, it ends up in New York, which, according to this excellent review, is not how the book ends. It features hints of a virus bomb, ineptly expositioned by Vin Diesel during one of the many slow dialogue scenes (a shame as this hastily explained plot point is the engine that powers much of the later half of the movie), and the young girl ferried by his character Toorop is indeed a genetically engineered faux-Messiah created to give credence to a new religion formed by Evil Charlotte Rampling (the one idea in the movie that I liked), but there is nothing about a Neuromatrix, nothing about Jeremy Narby's theory of conscious communication with DNA itself (which is a damn shame), and barely anything about trans-human or post-human theory. Instead we get The Transporter, transposed to the grimy future, and without even a greased-up Jason Statham to entertain us.


Of course, as I've discussed before, Mathieu Kassovitz has publicly disowned the movie and called Fox a bunch of assholes, for which I will always kinda love him. The movie I saw on Monday is apparently nothing like the vision he had originally, and so maybe in the version there would have been a Neuromatrix, and a woman who is one with the universe, and ayahuasca visions, and a proper ending. Instead, the film is a framework of setpieces and locations, with talented performers moving from place to place and having conversations that mean nothing. Emotionally the film is dead in the water, and with budget cuts and other tamperings evident throughout, the action set-pieces slam and crash and oof but mean nothing. It's your actual "sound and fury signifying nothing", except in a credibly realised, if unimaginative, dystopian future.


The world Kassovitz has created is fun for the most part. The Russian scenes (filmed in the wintery cities of the Czech Republic) look convincingly desolate, with the locals dressed in either warm winter coats or Euro-trash tracksuits and bling, which was another touch I loved. The few shots we see of the country from the air show few lights, the odd enormous crater, cities broken and jerry-rigged. It's all great, and the industrial settings in "Vladivostok" are convincingly depressing, as are the scenes of cramped markets, crowds of refugees, and the odd bit of chaotic and ill-explained ultra-violence.


Nevertheless this cheered me up way more than McCarthy's bleak vision, because at least in that world there is still a semblance of society, with a barter system and entertainment and a version of community spirit that is brutal (i.e. Diesel punches the odd person while growling), but still better than the terror of The Road. I would hate to live in Babylon A.D.'s world, but it's better than McCarthy's alternative.


In contrast to the grungy desolation of Eastern Europe, when our band of heroes arrives in New York, we see it looks like it's doing just fine in the future, which struck me as strange. I'm sure any economist would predict America would not be thriving in a future that sees Europe fall so far towards the brink of anarchy, but I guess New York would certainly thrive (certainly in the centre of the city) while the rest of the country suffers. We don't get a chance to see what the rest of the US looks like at this point. It does seem to have a very strict passport policy (it involves implants in the neck), and outside Manhattan the roads are messy enough to allow for some ineptly edited car chases, so maybe it's falling apart there too. Still, at least New York has the obligatory futuristic talking adverts covering the sides of skyscrapers, though sadly it merely makes it look like Jean-Michel Jarre's concert in Houston taken to the Nth degree.


The onscreen world is pretty much all I liked about the movie. I've defended Diesel in the past, but he's on the verge of parody in this movie, posing as a tough guy in an unconvincing manner and merely hinting at an inner life of regret and courage. Again, perhaps a longer version of this will make a difference, and it is possible his performance was gutted by the editing as Kassovitz has hinted, so forgive me for being rude when in fact he might have been better in the original cut, but in the version I saw, he did not convince. He spends most of the movie with Mélanie Thierry (playing the Virgin Mary-esque Aurora) and Michelle Yeoh, whose role as a kung-fu nun should have been the best thing about the movie, but sadly wasn't.

The trio of characters certainly evoked memories of Children Of Men, which is a comparison Babylon A.D. just doesn't need, especially as, in the original novel, Toorop is joined by an Israeli army vet called Rebecca and Irish assassin named Dowie, and not a kung fu nun who spends most of the movie denying her kung fu nunniness, much to my disappointment. Why Kassovitz and co-writer Eric Besnard thought that echoing Cuaron's superior movie by paring the group down to three (and eventually two) was a good idea escapes me. Okay, so changing up Pam Ferris for Michelle Yeoh appeals to me as a dedicated Yeoh fan, but Ferris was great, as were Clive Owen and Clare-Hope Ashitey. Plus, Kassovitz is utterly unable to replicate Cuaron's imaginative action scenes and visual trickery, falling back on little more than the CGI effect of making cameras go through closed windows over and over again. He did this numerous times in Gothika as well. Can someone stop him from overusing this trick, please?


Mélanie Thierry is fine; she has to play vulnerable and messianic, and does those two things reasonably well (i.e. she shrieks and looks calm at different points of the movie), with the bonus challenge of feigning sexual interest in Diesel despite that being out of character, but Yeoh is utterly wasted. Her natural gravitas, maturity, and grace are barely in evidence here, replaced instead with almost mute fear and sporadic outbreaks of poorly shot kickassery that happen without explanation of how a nun from a Mongolian monastery is able to beat the crap out of anyone standing in her way. This is one of the cardinal sins of the movie, as Yeoh's presence was one of the deciding factors when debating whether to see this or not. She is the hardcore goddess of kung fu cinema, and keeps getting stuck in choad like this. Adding a bunch of free runners jumping around a cramped warehouse does not mitigate the side-lining of the formidable Yeoh.


The rest of the main cast are almost as wasted. Mark Strong appears wearing yet another unappealing wig, playing a smuggler who may or may not be trustworthy (hint: he's not, obviously). He gets little to do other than be friendly and then deceitful, and missed a trick by not cackling maniacally when his easily predicted betrayal happens about ten minutes after he is introduced. Lambert Wilson pops up as a geneticist who is also the father of Aurora. Entertainingly, he is covered with plastic wires to denote his part-cyborg nature, and is appropriately benevolent and tragic.


It's a bit of a nothing role, and his hasty departure from the movie leaves about a million questions unanswered. Compared to his memorably oily and hammy performance as The Merovingian in the Matrix sequels, this is forgettable stuff. Gerard Depardieu is also featured as Russian bigwig Gorsky, almost unrecognisable under a bad wig and a prosthetic face. He resembles Al Pacino in Dick Tracy, to be honest.


Why they did this is beyond me, and his low-wattage performance also disappoints. This is the guy who played the definitive Cyrano de Bergerac? Who acted De Niro off the screen in Bertollucci's 1900? Still, at least he's not playing Obelix again, even though anyone could have played this part. Hell, I could have done it. Slap a fake nose on me and I'll tyalk with Rhoshyan accent forrr pennies if necessary. Film producers, contact me via email if you need cheap acting in a hurry.


Worst of all, Charlotte Rampling's appearance as the High Priestess of the Noelite cult is utterly mystifying. She's only on screen for a little while, but she makes a hell of an impression. At first her cold and steely demeanour are de riguer for this kind of impassive and sinister religious nutjob, but as the film enters the incomprehensible final act, she starts twitching her head like a robot, delivering her lines with a mixture of artificial flatness and bad-guy posturing. It makes very little sense. Though it's not up there with Fiona Shaw's unmissably berserk appearance in Brian De Palma's The Black Dahlia it's still the kind of eccentric acting that makes you wish there was more of it. Certainly a longer cut might give us more fun, though it could also explain what the hell is going on with her, and in a perverse way I don't want to know. It stands alone as a kind of curio; further exposition will merely remove the fascinating mystery.

Still, for the most part I was pleasantly bored, less than excited by the slow-moving plot and appallingly badly edited action scenes, but held in my chair by what I will have to refer to from now on as the Genre Baseline, which is the automatic amount of forgiveness and pleasure I will have for any film or book that is of a genre that I love (I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels this way). I've said it before, but just once more for the record, I love sci fi so much that even crappy sci fi holds a grip on me, as long as it has the odd good idea or gimmick. I'd much rather see the good stuff, obviously, but I'll be more forgiving of the not-so-good (example; Equilibrium is derivative tosh, but it's derivative tosh featuring GUNKATA and Christian Bale breaking bones and so therefore is automatically awesome).


For most of its running time, Babylon A.D. is kinda dull, with the odd interesting setpiece to distinguish it. I especially liked a mad scramble across an icy expanse to get onto a submarine, though sadly not long after that we're given a shoddy action scene with Diesel's stuntman flipping his snowmobile through the air and shooting down missile-laden drones. Where did they get the snowmobiles? Why are these dangerous drones vulnerable to pistol-fire? Bleh.


It continues in this manner until about fifteen minutes before the end of the film, with Aurora saving our hero by shooting him (?!?!?), doing something mystical with a big exploding missile (apparently the immaculately-conceived twins she is carrying are able to manipulate reality), and then disappearing. Lambert Wilson rebuilds Diesel using some plastic, and then hacks his memory to find out where Aurora is hiding. Diesel goes to find her with a couple of Wilson's men, while Wilson gets shot by the High Priestess, who then disappears from the movie and is never mentioned again.


Diesel finds Aurora, battles with some of the Noelite redshirts in a boring and badly edited car chase that involves Diesel using grenades and his brand-new enhanced arm to generate some extra 'splodey, and then several months later hangs out with Aurora as she is about to give birth. Look after the twins, she says, and so we fade to several years later. The twins (one black, one white, both girls) are sitting in a pretty garden as a white-clad and benevolently smiling Diesel walks up to them, tells them a storm is coming, and then takes them into the nearby house. The End.

I'm not kidding, that is how it ends. Now, I don't mind obscure finales, and have passionately defended many films with impenetrable final acts, but that is ridiculous. There is no line of dialogue anywhere else in the movie that sets up this finale. There is no way of interpreting it because there is no possible logical interpretation. It just ends, with characters dropping out for no reason (did Aurora die? Did she turn into a ball of light and vanish? Did the High Priestess just give up?), and no hint of what it is that the "storm" represents. Once more I assume Kassovitz and Besnard knew what they were doing originally, and had their cut changed by Fox suits, and apparently the French release has a different ending with no car chase and more chat between Diesel and Aurora, but who the hell thought this was an acceptable way to end a movie? Did some bean-counter at Fox get assigned to the film and think, "Fuck it, it's sci fi, we can just make the ending completely impenetrable and they'll make up excuses for it, cuz sci fi fans are stupid"? Did they get Richard Kelly to re-edit the ending? It certainly seems that way. Intentionally creating an ambiguous and incoherent ending in the mistaken belief that not making sense is the same as generating profundity and post-movie debate is his bag, after all (if you don't believe me, bite the bullet and watch the criminally terrible Southland Tales).


The ASBO-YOBS that filled the cinema when I saw it took great pleasure in hooting at the screen (prior to stabbing it with their knives), and I felt like joining in. I'm sure the source material has a peculiar ending, but it must have made sense to someone. This, on the other hand, is a debacle. I don't blame Kassovitz and Diesel for disowning it; I would have done the same thing. No matter how generous you feel, or how much you wanted it to succeed (and I certainly did), this is a failure. Once international box office is taken into account, perhaps the movie will make a tiny profit (it's not like Fox can be expected to add much to the surprisingly small $70m budget in terms of advertising, as the film got almost no promotion). If so, Fox will inevitably milk the teat with a director's cut, if Kassovitz is willing. If so, I look forward to it, and I can't wait to read Dantec's novel. That doesn't mean I think the world desperately needed to be told this story, but I'm willing to wait to see if there is a version of it that justifies this movie's existence, because this version sure as hell isn't it.

Sci Fi Through Space/Time: The Last Mimzy

(Apologies to anyone who read an early draft of this and thought it was poorly edited. It was, partially because I'm a terrible idiot, but mostly because the computer I'm using is massively unreliable and I had to just post and walk away or it would have gone out of the window. Hopefully things are fixed now.)

My plan to chronicle my adventures in sci fi cinema pretty much foundered not long after I started, a long-gestating plan to talk about Southland Tales falling by the wayside. That said, I still do intend to inspect that, as it is a fascinating project (which is not praise, BTW), but it will be in a different, more combative format. I've still been experiencing good and bad sci fi since my last Sci Fi Through Space/Time post, but never got around to talking about them. In fact, I woke up today fully intending to talk about a movie I saw recently and fell in love with, but instead, while trying to eat a bowl of penne (aka the worst pasta shape in the world), I decided to watch Bob Shaye's The Last Mimzy, and it's such an oddity I just had to bring it up here. The other movie will have to wait until another time (hopefully not next September).

Ostensibly a kids’ movie owing a debt to ET, The Last Mimzy is actually a mash note to Buddha that will doubtless be picked up by New Agers the world over, portraying as it does a post-Age of Aquarius world filled with flowers and telepathy and flying children in stark contrast to the nasty now, which contains nothing but hate and gadgets and fear and other deeply unpleasant things. I got a hint of that from the trailers, and it made me curious to see it when it had a feeble release last year, but mainly it stuck in my head because Charlie Brooker used to use the word "mimsy" as a slang word for the lower ladyparts, and the thought of a kids’ movie about that amused me greatly.

Instead of weird and surely illegal child-friendly porn, it's based on this short story, Mimsy Were The Borogoves, by sci fi writers Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, operating under the pseudonym Lewis Padgett. Originally (as you can see if you read that handy version of it linked to above), it was a dark tale of children coming across a box from the future, filled with toys (to be used as markers and nothing more) which educate them enough that they learn a new language and a form of multidimensional geometry that enables them to translate the Lewis Carroll poem Jabberwocky (written by Carroll's muse, who was in possession of another future toy sent back earlier). With this knowledge at hand, the children create a wormhole taking them from our dimension, much to the horror of their booze-drinking jerk parents. It's quirky and clever and kind of sinister. It was previously adapted as a TV series on French TV as Tout spliques étaient les Borogoves. I have no idea how that turned out.



The Last Mimzy ignores the intellectual and atmospheric (even quite cynical) tone of the story, going instead for something much more optimistic and woolly, but with incidental details that held my interest throughout. As I said when I started this project, I was looking for sci fi films that were not of the norm, that were as inventive and original and peculiar and stimulating as the best of sci fi literature, and though this falls far short of those expectations, it represents a collision of sci fi tropes, cultural markers, and potential corporate fiddlings that fascinated me.



Beginning in a cuddly tunic-wearing pastoral future of much lazy sci fi, a teacher mind-melds with her young students and tells them the history of their civilisation, beginning with the travails of a scientist attempting to save humanity from itself. The world soul and the gene pool have become so corrupted that humanity faces extinction. Nothing in that world is pure enough to save us, and so he sends objects back in time using a complicated and interestingly visualised Einstein-Rosen Bridge in the hope of educating the recipients enough to reconstruct the mechanism and send back the living computer (known as a Mimzy, and yes, I did smirk) with a sample of their DNA, which, compared to that of his fellow man, is pure. Knowing that adults would not be able to understand such a concept (an idea taken from the short story), he packages the Mimzy as a toy rabbit, in the hope that it would be handed to a child, who would then communicate with the Mimzy, learn from it, and save the future.


There's a hodge-podge of ideas all over this plot, and that's before I get into the meat of the movie (the previous paragraph accounts for 3% of the movie's length, and about 75% of the interesting ideas). There are many influences here, more than I could find right now, so I'll just go through the ones that came to mind while watching.

Sending things to the past to save the future = The Terminator franchise (and Harlan Ellison's Soldier primarily please don't sue me Harlan!!!).

Using the past to save the future = John Varley's short story Air Raid and the subsequent movie Millennium, which also reminded me of The Last Mimzy due to its unorthodox effects and ugly, muted pallette.

Children targeted by peculiar force =
John Wyndham's Chocky, as well as the kids’ TV show from the 80s, which also featured tunnel effects and crystal shapes.

Children taught to use advanced technology during dreams = Explorers, which was one of my favourite films when younger.

Humanity transformed to a higher state of being thanks to powers that appear to be paranormal = Phenomenon, one of the most New Age movies ever made.

Future jeopardised by the death of the world soul = Final Fantasy - The Spirits Within, as well as the seventh installment of the game that inspired the movie.

Future society as utopian, peaceful land of plenty = Star Trek.

Well, there are lots of examples of utopian sci fi, but that's the one that sprang to mind, mostly because The Last Mimzy is filled with the kind of New Age sentiment and imagery beloved of the more extreme Star Trek fans, the ones who believe Gene Roddenberry was providing a template for humanity to live by (similar to the goals of Scientology, though without the Church and the structure and financial power). The film definitely posits that we will one day be saved by the potential of the human race (a potential which is contained within an object of such unbelievable sentimental significance that it threatens to drown the movie in a sea of cynicism from the more sceptical viewer, but I'll get to that soon), and living in a utopian society that makes Roddenberry's vision look like Baltimore in The Wire, but prior to that it has to cast us as lost souls missing out on realising our full potential, and it leads to some amazing anvillicious moments.

Shaye and his writers Bruce Joel Rubin and Toby Emmerich (from a screen story by Carol Skilken and J.M. Barrie fan James V. Hart) go to great lengths to show us how the modern world is in the process of enormous FAIL. Metal detectors erected in schools, kids using technology to cheat at exams, a populace disassociated form itself; it's horrible! Except not really. My favourite shot is of a bus full of people ignoring each other because they're listening to iPods, texting, typing on laptops, and playing PSPs (which appear throughout, though I can imagine Sony is really pissed at how the machine is used as a symbol of youth corruption). I weep for humanity!


Except that might work in an idyllic area like the one this film is set in (the outskirts of Seattle and some lovely looking areas of British Columbia), but everywhere else, there is no way people want to be talking on the bus. Just a couple of days ago, while trying to get home and read a book I was really interested in, I had to wait for the driver to argue with a guy who crashed into our vehicle, and then bitch at some passengers who had a go at him a bit later. There was no one on that bus I wanted to talk to. Yay distractions that stop me from having to communicate with my fellow man who are often quite hostile and unpleasant!

After setting up this horrible world of soullessness, we are introduced to our two protagonists, Noah and Emma Wilder, played by Chris O'Neil and Rhiannon Leigh Wryn. He's older and is truly obnoxious and nasty, she's cutesy and innocent and cloying. Noah is a pretty unpleasant kid at the start, deep in an existential fugue so powerful he lashes out at everything around him, hating himself and his life, cutting himself off from everyone by incessantly playing evil computer games, and picking on his sister. By the end he is a little hero helping to save humanity, but in the early stages he is tough to associate with. That's fine. I get what the goal was there, but showing him using games to cut himself off from everyone else is a bit rich coming from a film co-written and directed by men whose company, New Line, licences out its film properties to gaming companies for adaptation. Perhaps Shaye resents this, and doesn't want the money. If so, it's news to Peter Jackson. As you can see, I had trouble reconciling the nature of the filmmakers and the message they were trying to sell.


The kids are taken to a beach house by their mother, Jo (played by Joely Richardson), while their father David (played by Timothy Hutton), can't make it because his law job keeps him from spending time with his kids blah blah, While playing on a beach they find the mysterious box sent from the future by the scientist. Inside it are weird mineral artifacts, a blue blob thing (which I thought would come to life and start interacting with the kids, though it thankfully doesn't), and a toy rabbit that talks to Emma and educates her. Noah fixates upon a slab of green crystal, which his mother only sees as a rock. Oh adults, your wonderless minds are impermeable as steel!


After spending time with the objects, the kids (especially Emma) realise they have properties that appear magical, much as Arthur C. Clarke said future technology would appear like magic to us. Fragments of a broken rock, when thrown at the floor, will hover and rotate, creating a localised field that temporarily undoes objects on a molecular level. Mimzy communicates with Emma and unlocks her telepathic potential, as well as predicts the future for her. The crystal slab improves Noah's vision, as well as teaches him how to access a lattice of connective energy in reality that can be used to open small wormholes, and shows him how to generate sound waves on a frequency that can be used to manipulate insects and spiders into doing his bidding. Using that, he makes a mindblowing science fair entry, using spiders to create a bridge structure that could revolutionise the construction industry. This is what would happen more regularly if computer games and Facebook were banned obviously.


This was my favourite section of the movie, pulling weird concepts and effects out of the ether even though many of the ideas would come to nothing later. I particularly liked the scene with Hutton showing his son how to play golf, and Noah using his wormhole power to send the ball 300ft. So, you know, yay for humanity, but bad news for Titleist. I guess the future contains no sport. (Wow, can I go there tomorrow?)

Sadly, the film goes off the rails in a peculiar way at that point, and by peculiar I mean predictable, but featuring plot developments I really thought I would never see in a kids’ movie. The growing power of the kids scares their parents, who react badly to the presence of the objects. Richardson in particular has an unpleasant freakout, after which the family starts to fall apart. At around this time the crystal slab merges with the weird blob artifact, creating a new object in an electromagnetic pulse explosion that wipes out Seattle's power grid.


This is enough to attract the attention of Homeland Security, headed up by Michael Clarke Duncan, who barges into their house under the authority of the PATRIOT Act (yes, in the middle of a kids’ film), and detains the family, impounds the objects, and generally acts like a bit of a dick. It's at this point that we can add Poltergeist (family unit threatened by outside force) and ET (family unit exposed to otherworldly thing detained by government) to the list of films mimicked.


Poltergeist was strongly on my mind during the scenes with Noah's science teacher, Larry (played by super-awesome Rainn Wilson), and his fiancee Naomi, played by Kathryn Hahn. Noah's accelerated braingrowth attracts Larry's attention, as does his doodling of complex Tibetan mandalas. While Noah and Emma's parents are wary of their children now that they have begun to change, Larry and Naomi see the potential of the two, Larry because of the science angle, Naomi because she is a big Buddhist hippie type. They try to convince Jo that the kids are special, in a scene similar to one in Poltergeist, when benign paranormal investigators attempt to help the Freeling family. However, in that film JoBeth Williams is receptive to what they say, but here Joely Richardson's character freaks out.

To be honest, I don't blame her. She has put the weird behaviour of her kids down as just growing pains, and then suddenly two hippies show up blathering on about mandalas, tulkus and palm reading. This is especially bogus as, except for the mandala idea (mandalas being maps of the universe, as well as being a pretty pattern that shows up throughout the movie), none this litany of Buddhist folklore has any bearing on the film whatsoever.


Which is one of the reasons the movie baffled me so much. Here I was watching a very optimistic movie (almost to the point of parody) that had been made by guys I thought were nothing more than suits, as well as being co-written by someone who appeared to be the most downbeat person in Hollywood. In the past I have resisted watching movies by Bruce Joel Rubin as they are entirely humourless and self-consciously obsessed with death. In an interview with Premiere magazine conducted prior to the release of Jacob's Ladder, Rubin spent a lot of time talking about how fascinated he was by death, and how it was his muse. A quick look at his IMDb page shows him working almost exclusively on this topic for years. Brainstorm is the bonkers tale of a machine that records what happens to Louise Fletcher after her death. Ghost is obviously about Patrick Swayze stalking his girlfriend after death. Jacob's Ladder is about a Vietnam vet who doesn't realise he is dead and in a Hell populated with Francis-Bacon-esque fellas with the rapid shaky head thing that's been ripped off repeatedly ever since. My Life is about a terminally ill man coming to terms with his impending doom. Deep Impact is about an entire planet coming to terms with its impending doom. Even his adaptations of books, Deceived and Deadly Friend, are about death in some way (faked death and implanting a brain into a robot after death, respectively). Only Stuart Little 2 seems to have escaped that, though I haven't seen it. Perhaps the whole family dies at the end, after trying to come to terms with it for a while.

I don't know. It's an impressive sight, someone who has managed to corner the market on an entire subject, but his obsession with it always smacked of self-importance, as if this was his badge of profundity, not helped that his scripts have often been horribly depressing. Deep Impact in particular made me miserable for weeks after seeing it. Of those movies, I only really enjoyed Brainstorm, and I don't even think it's that great. I just liked the concept, and Doug Trumbull's weird decision to turn it into a slapstick comedy whenever he could.


Turns out I misunderstood where Rubin was coming from, and poking around the internet today has shown me the error of my ways. His obsession with death is not the morbid and ostentatious thing I thought it was, but rooted in his belief in Buddhism. He's been a believer for twenty-five years, and though the theme of dealing with death has been prevalent in his work, The Last Mimzy is the first film of his that I've seen that deals with his Buddhism. Seems I was wrong about his interest in death all along. That's not to say I suddenly like his work. I still don't enjoy any of the films I listed earlier. I just think he's not as pretentious now, is all.

Sadly, considering this is the first time I've seen Rubin's belief system represented within a film, it's via the characters of Larry and Naomi, who are almost the comic relief. Perhaps it's just that Rainn Wilson and Kathryn Hahn are light and likeable (and of course Wilson is Dwight Schrute, which tends to hang in the head even when he plays someone completely different), but their Buddhism isn't taken very seriously. Rubin isn't the last name on the script; the last draft of the script appears to belong to New Line Head of Production Toby Emmerich, who might have rewritten them a bit. I suspect this is definitely the case as Emmerich's only other screenplay credit is on Frequency, at the end of which a secondary character become a multi-millionaire by investing in Yahoo! thanks to a stock tip from the future. In The Last Mimzy, Naomi obsesses over a dream Larry had where he accurately predicted lottery numbers that he never played, and at the end of the film he has another prediction. Emmerich has a big boner for characters coming into unearned money, it seems.


The thing that really grates about that scene, though, is that Naomi reads Emma's palm and sees that she is indeed a tulku, and has great potential to change the world. This turns out to be the case, but what has her status as a tulku got to do with the future? Why is she the chosen one? She discovered the box by accident, and there's no hint that it was aimed at her. It's just a weird shout-out to Buddha that is shoe-horned in with extra palm-reading thrown in (or is part of a larger plot that was removed in the final draft). Even the mandala stuff is half-heartedly explained. It's a map of the universe? Or a nice design for a rug? You decide. It's all such a peculiar hodgepodge of religion, superstition, and science.


When Homeland Security finally storm in and arrest the whole family, they take Mimzy from Emma, who is already freaking out about her friend dying in a total lift from ET designed to add some artificial suspense to what has been aimlessly flicking back and forth between genial sci fi exploration and shrill family drama. After the scientists have had a chance to poke around with it, they discover it is in fact an enormously powerful sentient computer, and an electron microscope shot of part of it unveils the most bizarre bit of product placement since Evolution turned into a huge ad for Head and Shoulders shampoo.


Yes, Mimzy is built using an Intel processor. Again, not the best product placement as Mimzy is dying by this point, but it's okay. Using their new powers, Noah and Emma escape the building and meet up with Larry and Naomi (who gets contacted via dreamail), before heading back to the beach house to send Mimzy back. While on their way there, Emma cries about Mimzy's increasing feebleness (not as emotional a scene as Elliot crying over ET's corpse, but then it is an inanimate toy that occasionally chirrups that we're talking about), and a tear falls on the rabbit/supercomputer. You know where I'm going with this, don't you.

In a burst of effects, Noah and Emma manage to use the future tech to send Mimzy back to the future, with all the adults present. Michael Clarke Duncan's Homeland Security boss is turned into a pussycat and forgives everyone, the family reconciles, and Larry gets those lottery numbers. Better still, the future scientist uses the DNA included in the tear to heal humanity, and the benevolent future-teacher finishes her story, at which point her students lift into the air and fly off. Very satisfying, though utterly mechanical.


At this point the film goes into code-overdrive, with image after image of New Age significance appearing. Just like Republican presidents are good at filling their speeches with coded lines that can only be picked up by their hard-Right Christian followers, The Last Mimzy resonates with New Age symbolism. In ET the film ended with a resurrection and a rainbow, two things that chimed with Christian viewers. Here we have mandalas, greys (or rather future dwellers wearing environment suits that look alien), doorways of light, and vortexes, all of which would excite those viewers who think The X-Files is a documentary in disguise.

That's not a criticism, but it's something you would expect from a filmmaker operating on the fringe of Hollywood. Instead it's directed by the CEO of a major motion picture production house, written by an Oscar winner and the head of production of that same studio, and given a hard sell and wide opening on over 3000 screens (an opening it didn't capitalise on; it only grossed $26,702,770 worldwide). It's not a good enough movie to justify the time I've spent talking about it except that it is such a peculiar movie to come out of Hollywood, pretty much qualifying as ET meets What The Fuck Do We Know?


Shaye seems like a hard-ass in his business dealings, and has a reputation as someone less in touch with their inner child than most New Agers, and has created many controversial and violent films that could be considered damaging to the innocence of his fellow man (scroll down this list of New Line movies) but if this interview is to be believed, he is quite serious about the message of this movie. It's a shame his arguments are often so ill thought out.

I’ve shown this movie to a lot of people and most people don’t think twice about televisions in the family house all the time. That, a little bit more heavy-handed way at the beginning of the movie – that bus scene where the two kids are riding, there was a lot more stuff about people working on computers; it’s beautiful outside in the middle of Seattle, the mountains are incredible, the mist and all that stuff – and all people can do is watch their video screens, or listening to music, or stare off into space.

Staring off into space is pretty much analogous with looking out of a bus window at the pretty trees, Bob. I too like looking at pretty things, and it definitely makes me momentarily happy, but working on a laptop, playing a handheld game, or surfing the net is a form of interaction far deeper than passively staring at stuff. The mind is working, not idling. Still, I do think he believes in what he's talking about, even though I think he's horribly wrong. Moving on, I especially like how he rationalises making horror movies and then railing against modern civilisation.

So, am I worried about humanity? Well, I am worried about humanity, but there’s more to it than that, and this does make you count after a while when you don’t recognize this stuff. When I was making Nightmare on Elm Street, I had two daughters, who at that time were 10-12 years old; and I actually showed them early cuts of the movie – ‘Is this scary? Do you like this?’ They gave me good ideas and they were really delightful. When I came home after work, I would turn on the television and the news would be on, and they would get up and walk out of the room, every time; and it finally dawned on me what was going on – it was just too bloody scary.

Or, as Canyon pointed out, it's because the news is horribly boring to a teenager. Yes, Bob, even your brainy kids. To be honest, fair enough. I do not hold to the theory that modern culture and media are responsible for the alienation of children and the breakdown of society, so I'll give him a break on that (especially as some of my favourite movies are on that New Line list), but his complaints about technology are ill-served by the movie. He seems to think they're part of the reason our society is so fractured, but anyone who uses the internet on a regular basis, and interacts with people over it, knows what a wonderful connective technology it is. One of the movie's utopian ideas is that eventually we will become telepathic. Great! Less strain on our vocal chords. Otherwise, it would bring people together in much the same way that the internet does now.


But people who use the internet are not interacting with the people around them, I hear you cry (using my telepathy)! Fine by me. When I'm at work and using the internet to communicate with people, that's because I don't want to talk to the people around me. Better than any form of communication yet devised, the internet brings people with similar interests or mindsets together, and that's a wonderful, inclusive, joyous thing, and being done via a laptop or iPhone or Nintendo DS doesn't make it any less valid. Canyon and I know all about this, having met online.

What's worse is that no matter how cleverly the objects sent from the future are made to look like natural objects (slivers of crystalline mica, sea-shells with crystals embedded in them, floating rocks), they're still forms of technology. Human potential appears to be unlocked in a New Agey way, but how much of that is because of the presence of the technology? Will the kids keep their powers once the tech is sent back to the future? Even if they do, it's all down to the machines we make. Worry all you like about technology, but right now, email and message boards and talkbacks and online gaming (yes, even the kind where 12 year olds call me a faggot and then teabag me) bring us together. Sorry, personal bugbear. I'll move on now.

Oh, and that future tech is used to fix those awful problems and save the world. So how can he really hate it? Right, sorry, now I'll move on.


Thanks to all of this research, I realise now that Shaye and Rubin and Emmerich really seem to believe in what they are doing, and have committed themselves to sending a message, using the film to teach kids about New Age philosophy in much the same way the artifacts teach the kids. Creepy, but I guess they're honest about it. Shaye in particular is very happy with the idea of a child's tear saving the world, an idea so schmaltzy it could actually kill a person. I'm serious. His explanation of why that was included is almost more entertaining than the film itself.

So, that is ultimately what this is about; is it possible, and it happens to be scientifically feasible, that there are a set of genes that actually together are responsible for behavior that we would call innocence. And there is good scientific evidence that there very well might be; and as we do carry junk DNA around in our body, nobody knows what this is doing there – this is DNA that doesn’t operate, it doesn’t turn on other genes, it doesn’t do anything. They don’t know what that DNA used to do, and it is possible that over time, whatever the kind of ‘quote, innocence, unquote’ that we carry around us today, because of disuse, they may ultimately turn off, and that’s the underlying theme.

An interesting story, I don’t know if it’s press worthy, but I’ll tell you anyhow; so, the little voice over at the end where the teacher is talking about Emma’s tears and all that stuff, there was a line in the film that ‘The precious gene of innocence was returned to humanity.’ It may be a little overly arch, but notwithstanding that; so at the last test screening, when we were in the middle of mixing the film, it got very good test reactions. They said, the guy who was running the test, the focus group, how many people rated the film ‘excellent’ – I don’t know, half the group did; how many rated it ‘very good,’ and another third, and how many rated it ‘good,’ and that’s what they would get. So just to sort of get a perspective on what’s going on, he asked one of the guys who rated it very good, ‘Why didn’t you rate it excellent,’ cause that’s what they do. He said, ‘I was about to rate it excellent, until that teacher, or who ever it was, talked about the gene of innocence; I said enough of that stuff.’ So we actually went into the mixing studio the next day and took the line out and changed it. So as I said, it’s a fine line to tell a story, but not really tell the story; but I do believe we are getting isolated, more and more isolated.

Ignoring the fact that someone with Shaye's fierce reputation is worrying about other people losing their childlike viewpoint is a bit rich, I guess even the most committed of storytellers will be afraid to go all out and just use phrases like "Gene of Innocence" in their movies, but I'm quite pleased that Shaye thought that idea was important but was willing to not use it because of a test screening. If he had ignored it, after using test screenings to judge his studio's movies, I would have cried havoc and let slip the Dogs of War (they're outside right now, in the Kennel of War, chewing on a Bonio Dog Biscuit of War).

So, I find myself in an odd position, tentatively welcoming a personal vision of the world from a bunch of multi-millionaires who would normally be considered to be the enemy of personal visions, and in one case has been instrumental in screwing over a filmmaker who just wanted to know how much money his movies had made (which is not exactly advanced future ethics at play there). A project like this that is willing to run as counter-programming to the Christian monopoly over message movies is rare enough, but I guess when you're as rich as Croesus and have a studio at your beck and call you can make whatever the hell you want. Shame The Golden Compass had its balls removed though, eh Bob?

So what about the film itself? It qualifies as occasionally intriguing sci fi even though it often feels like a mixture of ideas from other better works, but is it actually any good? For the most part, no. The performances are quite indifferent (and the kids are not that well handled by Shaye), though I enjoyed watching Wilson and Hahn, who seemed to be the only cast members trying to force some life into the movie. It's also a strikingly ugly movie, lit poorly and blocked incompetently, with some scenes featuring a hand-held camera so badly operated that it masks what is going on and interferes with the tone being set.

What makes that especially irksome is that the DoP is the usually excellent Jim Muro, whose work on Roll Bounce and Open Range was so impressive, and who was responsible for the classic horror-comedy Street Trash. For some reason, his work on this is murky and hard to watch. It annoyed me greatly. Even worse is the insipid and repetitive soundtrack by musical genius Howard Shore, whose work on the Lord of the Rings films was so beautiful, and whose ongoing collaboration with David Cronenberg is one of the most fruitful joint ventures in cinema history. His "discography" is littered with classics, and many a poor movie has been saved by his work. Here, however, I wanted to mute the movie.

Horribly disappointing stuff, and that's before we get to the big song, Hello (I Love You) by Roger Waters. Quick disclosure: I hate Pink Floyd and cannot understand the appeal of their dreary prog noodlings. Only a couple of tracks from Dark Side of the Moon would get onto my iPod, and then I'd probably delete them after one listen and then hate myself for spending 79p on them. When I realised that Pink Floyd references kept cropping up throughout the movie I was annoyed, but as it seemed in keeping with the New Age ethos, I let it go. And then, over the credits, plays the most insipid piece of sentimental doggerel I've heard since Ringo Starr's Liverpool 8. Apologies if you feel compelled to click on this video and are rendered diabetic by the cloying sentiment within.



That video encapsulates why I ended up not liking the movie. For all of the stuff I liked, and for all of the boldness of the concept (especially as this is meant to be a kids’ film), and ignoring the shoddiness of the filmmaking on show, the pompous and self-important tone of it was alienating. Didacticism in movies is bad enough when the thing you're being lectured about isn't even a concrete thing. Bitching to kids that playing games is no way to live your life is one thing (and as a gamer I resent that already), but not having anything to replace that is pretty rich. Is the film telling kids to put down their games and master the ability to warp reality? If so, is there something about today's youth that we don't know about? Screw knife crime, I want to make sure I don't get teleported into a volcano, Jumper-style.

For a kids' film it's not very entertaining, and for adults it's too light, so it ends up pleasing no one, despite the positive things it has. Compare that to Joe Dante's Explorers, which features three kids getting dream messages that contain plans for a force-field generating circuit that, when plugged up to a PC and car battery, allows them to fly into space to meet the aliens who beamed the information to them. Whereas The Last Mimzy features desperate scientists contacting children to save the future, in Explorers the aliens are just teenagers who are bored, have stolen a spaceship from their dad, and are looking to make friends and watch TV with them. It's the tonal opposite to The Last Mimzy, and is flawed, but works beautifully anyway just by being so willfully odd and eager to flout convention.



That said, there is one thing The Last Mimzy has over all of the films I've mentioned here: Rainn Wilson walking around in his pants!


I'll let you decide if this is a good or a bad thing.

Lost Countdown: No. 7

These reasons for loving Lost are entirely too pretentious, but it's my brain and adrenal glands responding to this, so you'll have to suck it, Lost haters.

Complexifying (?) the universe with easter eggs and real-world Alternate Reality Games:

*Warning! This post contains many uses of the nebulous word, "metatextual"*

Did you know that the man who discovered electromagnetism was called Hans Christian Ørsted? Did you know that The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien (seen in the Swan Station) features an underground complex in which can be found a substance called Omnium, which can transmute itself into anything you can wish for? How many Wizard of Oz references have there been? Or Alice in Wonderland? Were you aware that the mark on the tree to point Juliet towards the case of "vaccine" is the same as that of the planet Ummo? Do you know that the guy who got sucked into the engine in the first episode was not only dating the flight attendant Cindy (kidnapped and brainwashed by the Others), but wrote a tell-all book about the Hanso Foundation that got banned, leading him to "write" the novel Bad Twin, which also exists in our world (and is a detective story about The Hanso Foundation and evil twins and isn't actually as bad as Carlton Cuse has made out)? Do any of these things matter to the plot? Not at all. In that case, why keep them? Just to make me happy, I'm tempted to say. Because I love Easter eggs even when they're pointless, and even more when, as I suspect with Lost, they add up to more.


A few years ago I went crazy with anticipation for the release of the sequels to my favourite movie, The Matrix. Warner Brothers and Silver Pictures went into hype overdrive, and I lapped it all up and asked for seconds. I rewatched the original over and over again, devouring books explaining the symbolism of every object, name or event on screen. The first sequel was everything I ever wanted from an extension of the first movie and more, expanding the mythos and throwing out numerous allusions to real world (or Matrix, depending on your viewpoint) religious and scientific ideas and motifs. I saw that movie so many times during that summer, building my excitement for the finale into a frenzy that was horribly shattered when Revolutions came out and seemed to be telling an entirely different story than the one I had expected (which was my fault), as well as sucking on a narrative and pacing level (which was the Wachowski's fault). I've given it a break since (and still maintain Reloaded is excellent), but at the time I was gutted. And yet, the experience of picking apart the dozens of textual and metatextual details still made me happy, and I don't regret it for a second.


It was around that time that I got heavily into The Invisibles, Grant Morrison's complex metatextual diary/call to arms that had finally been collected in its entirety by DC and Vertigo. My first runthrough was done through a perpetually confused squint. So many of his references made no sense to me that I had to get a primer to get the most out of it. Thanks to those two complex works, my library became much more esoteric.

Lost has the same effect on me. The references to real world books and people sends me scurrying to the internet at the end of each episode, to absorb facts about them not just to see how they fit into the Lost experience, but why the showrunners thought them interesting enough to get a mention. Sometimes the books are included just because the writers like them and want to promote them (Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume), because of a cool fact they like and want to include (Desmond saving Our Mutual Friend so that it is the last book he ever reads is actually based on John Updike's plan to do the same thing), or because the book has some thematic connection with the plot (The Fountainhead's protagonists are world-changing individuals not unlike the ambitious Alvar Hanso).


Similarly, the naming of the characters delights me, though I also regret not paying more attention while studying for my philosophy degree. John Locke, Rousseau, "Desmond" David Hume, and the most over-the-top one yet, Mikhail Bakunin. There are other connections, less obvious. Anthony Cooper, Kate Austen (okay, different spelling, but still), James Ford, Ben Linus (bit of a stretch, that one). I love that the actual character names are real people who lived in our world, but the aliases used by some of the characters (Sawyer, Henry Gale) match up with fictional characters. I think there might be some significance to the name Christian Shephard but it eludes me right now. The showrunners say that there is a point to this name-linking, but whether it is connected to the mystery or is merely another way to increase the complexity of the thematic web is not yet clear.

I love all of that detail, and think it enriches the narrative and gives the show an air of seriousness. I won't say it gives it an air of intelligence because I think it's plenty intelligent already without namedropping, but it does put the events in the context of the world of ideas as much as the onscreen drama makes it a show about action. It's an understatement to say that not everyone is convinced. John Patterson, the formerly brilliant and now increasingly curmudgeonly film columnist in The Guardian, recently railed against Southland Tales for its aimless complexity, and he had a point. That film meant nothing, probably on purpose. His main thesis, though, is complex works of pop culture and why they're "not as good as the films of the 70s, when Robert Altman blah blah, and Bert Schneider yada yada". You get the drift.

It joins a number of similar pop-culture artefacts, like John August's The Nines and the TV shows Lost and Heroes, among others, whose ambitions are not equalled by execution, and whose immense complexity often proves self-defeating. These are not stand-alone items either. Sprawling and expansive, with multilayered storylines and timeframes, most feature huge casts and, in the case of the television work, are possessed of enormously complicated "Show Bibles" (the ever-expanding encyclopedia of a show's mythos). Their stories spread everywhere, linking every character in a web of coincidence and interrelatedness.

Sounds great to me. He criticises Heroes, saying it had failed because of the same overcomplexity. I'd say it's more to do with the writers forgetting how to pace their show, but whatever. Then he started in on The Nines (which I've yet to see), and then Lost:

Made up of three interlocking stories using the same actors - Ryan Reynolds is, successively, an actor, a screenwriter in a reality show, and then the star of his own TV show, ie inside the show's fiction - it piles inspired weirdness upon witty conceit upon many layers of pop-culture and TV in-jokes, to the point where the resolution to the story can only be a letdown; where the answers retroactively ruin and discredit all the questions. When all is tidily resolved in the final moments, you feel like an idiot for hanging around so long.

This seems likely to be the fate of many Lost viewers as well. Remember, the show's writers have almost as little idea as the viewers about where the show can go next. They might be 10 episodes ahead of us, but that's all. Beyond that, they're as clueless as we are. Each season sees another desperate opening out of the plot into another dimension, answering some questions but foreclosing other possibilities forever. As with The X-Files, the final explanation can only be a disappointment.

So why bother? Why even make anything that is ambitious or filled with metatextual references? Has he no idea what these things do? Firstly, the internet games such as The Lost Experience give valuable information about many aspects of Dharma Initiative's and Hanso Foundation lore, such as the Valenzetti equation, the Life Extension Project, and Magnus Hanso's New World Sea Traders company.


I admit, it's sad that less obsessive viewers of the show don't know of these aspects of the beautifully detailed Lost universe, and probably missed out on the subtly revealed news that the polar bears are on the island to be used for genetic testing by Dharma, in an attempt to keep them alive following drastic climate change. Without the urge to delve deeply into the show, information like this eludes viewers, but that's fine. It's their choice and I respect that. However, I do get mad when stupid TV critics who have no respect for the show bitch about it not even giving up any information about that one thing from the pilot just because they don't have enough respect for a heavily layered sci-fi show to do some research. They're genetically modified to survive a different climate! Get over it! Move on! Other stuff has happened since!

Secondly, as I said above, it nods to the viewer that Lost is about ideas and theories and allegories that aren't spelled out implicitly within the show. The characters don't debate philosophy and theology out loud, but their actions and their beliefs dramatise this debate implictly. The philosophical detail points us to that and provides a contextual framework for the attentive viewer.


As for the little touches like the brand names (Apollo chocolate bars, MacCutcheon whiskey), businesses (Widmore Corporation, Paik Heavy Industries, Herarat Aviation), and research organisations (Mittelos Bioscience, the Global Welfare Consortium, and of course The Hanso Foundation), having these things crop up within the universe over and over again (with connections revealed in-show or in-game) creates that sense of having a functioning, coherent fictional world, as well as giving the show context (it's as much about the scientific research world as it is a world where big business leads). Patterson might be convinced that storytelling only works when confined to the 90-180 minute duration of a movie, and anything else is time-wasting, but with the internet and long-form storytelling coming of age, we can tell stories of much greater complexity, with connections being made between characters, events, themes, organisations, etc., that could never be touched on in previous formats. These connections might seem like frippery, but they mean something to the viewer willing to invest time in finding out about these things.

A story told in a film can be a world. A story told in a complex narrative form like that of Lost can be a universe, and within that universe we can have that cathartic feeling of coming to a conclusion over and over again. The finale might suck and leave the viewer disappointed, but the outcome of the Lost Experience ARG satisfied people, and the scene where the mystery of how Locke broke his back was incredibly satisfying, and Charlie's sacrifice was satisfying, and over and over again we get moments of closure within the Lost universe that resolve things we needed resolved without finishing the story. It's not your parents' storytelling, Patterson. We've moved on. Come join us.

Sci Fi Through Space/Time: La Planète Sauvage

As I've said in a previous post, screen sci fi has recently left me unsatisfied, rehashing the same ideas and stylistic tics, as well of repeatedly offering up lukewarm martial arts sequences as an extra crime against cinema. In an effort to renew my love of the genre, I've resolved to cast about in an effort to find something new and challenging, and I'm betting on looking away from contemporary American cinema. Of course, upon deciding that, Richard Kelly's notorious Southland Tales was released today, and if nothing else, it's certainly original (while being massively derivative. More on that in a little while).

In the meantime, to France in the 1970's! René Laloux' La Planète Sauvage, based on a novel by Stefan Wul, is a movie that's haunted me since I was a kid, even though I never saw it. I was an avid reader of the sci-fi magazine Starburst, and they ran a feature on Laloux' pre-production sketches for his final movie, Gandahar. The imagery for that movie was odd enough, but the few pictures from La Planète Sauvage were even more outside my sphere of reference. What the hell were these bleak hellscapes, sporadically dotted with organic shapes that resembled nothing on earth? Why did the Draags (the technologically superior race living on Ygam) look so peculiar, with the breasts and the dead eyes? Even the humans didn't look right. I was looking at things I couldn't possibly understand, and it creeped me out. Luckily I was not in a position to see that movie, so my easily baffled young mind was safe from the freaky Frenchness of those films.


It was only recently that I found out that the oddball DVD distributor Eureka had released it, and my reticence caused by my childhood fear was finally conquered, now that I had become so disillusioned by modern sci-fi movies, what with their simplistic Manichean conflicts and Campbellian hero dynamics. My dim memory of those disturbing images, and the incomprehensibility of this trailer, led me to believe I was in for an experience unlike any other.



And I was, to a certain extent. The setting (the planet Ygam, orbited by the moon of the title) is unique, filled with nightmarish flora and fauna, and populated by alien creatures of a civilization so advanced that their customs and technology are inexplicable. Laloux has great fun depicting these bizarre rituals of meditation and communication, as well as offering samples of the workings of the (un)natural world. Those are the most appealing sections of the film, even though I spent a lot of it squicked out. The sleazy 70s chicka-bow guitar soundtrack didn't help. God knows why I have such a visceral reaction to French prog rock mixed with images of squirming organic shapes. Did I have an early exposure to some bad 70s porn? Other than Barbarella, that is?


So far, so unlike contemporary sci-fi. However, through no fault of its own, La Planète Sauvage had a plot that has been reused again and again by other writers and filmmakers, stymieing me in my search for a wholly original movie. Humanity has lost its way to such an extent that it is in a primitive state, ready for mass abduction by the towering Draags, who take the humans to their home planet. I think I missed the reason for that, but the upshot it domesticated Oms (the name for humans in this movie; we're considered so separate from our current existence that we're given a new name) are kept as pets, and wild Oms live and forage in parks filled with surreal and hostile plants and animals. The pet Oms are kept on a futuristic leash, and Draag children use them as playthings. It sounds silly, but is quite chilling.


In a touch that was obviously very topical at the time the film was made, the Draags get high a lot and meditate, sending their minds out of their bodies to float around in the air. Just say non, Draag losers! This involves them putting their consciousnesses inside bubbles which float around, which seemed like yet another peculiar detail added merely to enhance the alien nature of the Draag culture, but turns out to be super-important later on.


Sadly, it's not all free love and tripping; they also like to exterminate Oms using machines that dispense what look like urinal cakes that emit a deadly gas, so the choice is servitude and no dignity, or trying not to get killed in a park but feeling free. They also have remote craft that project white circles on things (I have no idea how that works, but the Oms sure dread it), and best of all, spheres that roll around picking Oms up, like some kind of hellish space version of Katamari Damacy.


Eventually the Oms learn enough about the Draags to band together and escape Ygam, flying to the moon known as the Savage Planet, where they find the Draags' meditating consciousnesses have floated there to meet with other races from other planets, who have meditated as well. So I guess if this movie were to be made now, the allegory would be that meditation is the internet, and La Planète Sauvage is the personals section of Craigslist. In a mean touch, the Oms go nuts and destroy Alien Facebook, which shocks the Draags enough to change their ways, creating a new moon for the Oms to live on in peace. Awwwww!


While alien invasion is a common plot template for sci fi tales, as is human rebellion against oppression, the mixture of the two, alien conquest and subjugation of humanity, crops up less often. Our overlords are often ourselves at our worst, or the products of our ignorance and hubris. 1984, We, The Matrix, Brave New World, Alphaville, Zardoz, etc. etc. You know the drill. I'm sure that if I put my mind to it for a few hours I could come up with as many sci fi tales about human enslavement by alien overlords and our subsequent rebellion, and any hardcore sci fi fan would probably think me a fool for not coming up with a dozen right away, but seriously, they just don't come to mind as readily. I guess those tales don't resonate as much as the stories I've listed above (not counting Zardoz, which is despicable anti-penis, anti-Vortex, pro-death propaganda). The only thing that pops into my head right away is the superb Porno for Pyros single, Pets.

Children are innocent
A teenager's fucked up in the head
Adults are even more fucked up
And elderlies are like children

Will there be another race
To come along and take over for us?
Maybe martians could do
Better than we've done
We'll make great pets!

::hugs Perry Farrell:: This song kept running through my head all the way through La Planète Sauvage. I'm sure Laloux was attracted to the project to some extent by the perversity of the subject matter. I have no idea what his politics were (though he was interested in psychology), but I wondered if the movie was an allegory for the French presence in Algeria, but then I might be reading too much into things.

Most horrifying of all, during La Planète Sauvage, the film that kept coming to mind was the most unintentionally entertaining movie ever made, Battlefield Earth, especially as the Oms come to steal a teaching device and learn enough to get to an intellectual level where they can hurt their captors. In Battlefield Earth, the heroic Johnny Goodboy Tyler uses a brain training device (obviously the inspiration for Dr. Kawashima's popular DS game) to overthrow the evil kerbango-drinking Psychlo scumbag Terl, played by John Travolta and a large leather codpiece containing a spare copy of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics. Again, no fault of Laloux and co., but my experience was sadly compromised by the memory of the other movie.


Even the most notable aspect of it, the resolution, was very similar to that of The Matrix Revolutions. This is no bad thing. Too many sci fi tales involving the subjugation of one race by another (or themselves) are resolved with the destruction of the enslavers. I'll admit to finding that satisfying from time to time; who isn't glad that the Rebels bring down the evil Empire at the end of Return of the Jedi? Still it's heartening to see a diplomatic resolution, even if it's backed by force; the Oms are only able to convince the Draags that they are more than dumb animals by interfering with their meditation rituals, and the humans in Matrix Revolutions only reach a détente with the Machines after much carnage and the sacrifice of Neo.


I feel terribly churlish criticising La Planète Sauvage for not being 100% original. It is, after all, at least visually unique (it's the only feature length movie filmed using cut-out animation. Even the cut-out South Park movie uses digital animation, heavily disguised as analogue), and is set on a world with a varied and imaginative ecosystem, atmospherically depicted.


It's more likely that my frustration with the film is a symptom of the growing sense that my quest for a truly original science fiction experience is a Quixotic one. I started off with La Planète Sauvage because I thought it would represent a highwater mark of quirky, visionary uniqueness, all the better to compare everything else to, but it still echoes other movies. Plus, it's based on a book; as a standalone work of art, it already falls short of my criteria.

I'm loath to call this self-imposed project a bust already, though. A truly original idea is an impossibility. There are always going to be influences and references. Even in a movie as pointedly different as this, even if Laloux has no intention of making connections to historical and cultural events or motifs, the audience might make them. Some lazy bloggers (not naming any names, of course) might even try to make a comment about France and Algeria that was inspired by a recent viewing of Gillo Pontecorvo's masterpiece, The Battle of Algiers, hoping it would make him look like he knows something about French history that doesn't involve Waterloo or Trafalgar. Ahem.

Also, La Planète Sauvage has all the hallmarks of a subset of science fiction; tales of the subjugation of humanity, with all its attendant biblical resonance. This is a mark against it, but then even before we get into the whole "There are only seven stories to be told" thing, biblical tales tend to crop up a lot in sci fi, so it's bound to happen.

Actually, even then it might not count. Laloux's determination to eradicate all possible recognisable human cultural influence in order to create a plausibly unfamiliar alien world means that there are no direct visual cues to religion or politics within the movie, which saves it from that easy kind of reference. That insistence on peculiarity is one of its strengths. The Draags eat food by sucking on blobs of matter from a pulsating white globular thing in their domiciles, Even the fight scene in the middle of the movie is as bizarre as the rest, with weird mouthy aliens strapped to the Oms' chests and then forced to bite at the opponent. The first rule of Om Fight Club is you do not feed the bitey alien before you fight, apparently.


So, perhaps from now on, I should be focusing on being grateful for any experience which has any originality, whether it be narratively or stylistically. Maybe I should set myself some parameters, now that I've embarked on my journey. Praise the movies that do something new, that isn't just a rehashed space opera or a Matrix rip-off or a misunderstanding of what makes Philip K Dick's writing so appealing. While La Planète Sauvage tells a tale that has occurred in science fiction many times before and since, the execution is utterly unique, and creates a fascinating world that somehow remains plausible.


Maybe that's the best I can hope for, and though I wasn't sold on the movie entirely (the anti-septic storytelling and the disposable nature of the Oms means it's hard to relate, other than to be creeped out by the weirdness), there was enough unique content to still make this something of a success for my project, and certainly if you're interested in a different filmic experience, this is pretty much where it's at.

Next up, hopefully in the next few days, a movie that steals from dozens of pop culture artifacts and yet still erroneously considers itself unique; Richard Kelly's extraordinary movie-spoodge, Southland Tales, featuring a lipsynching Justin Timberlake, Nora Dunn tasering John Larroquette's balls, and yet another magnificent turn by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.