Interzone #244 Jan - Feb 2013 (25 page)
Read Interzone #244 Jan - Feb 2013 Online
Authors: Various
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After del Toro parted ways with
The Hobbit
he took a consultant gig at DreamWorks, where he’s been particularly closely involved with
Rise
of the Guardians
: an animated project originated by the great illustrator William Joyce, who has since produced his own
Hobbit
esque multi-part prequel epic in a rapidly-unfolding series of novels and picture books (five in the space of a year, with further volumes to come). The books are far stranger, wilder, and more deeply felt than the distinctly tame and formulaic film, if at the same time much less certain of their narrative and audience – threading a serial storyline that might kindly be called dreamlike around a fantastic interplanetary steampunk mythology about the war between bogeyman Pitch the Nightmare King and an alliance of heroic children with origin-story versions of Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and the Sandman. (
Rise
’s lead Jack Frost is scheduled for a future volume, but hasn’t yet made his print debut at all.) The film version, set centuries later in the present day, retains only the superhuman leads and versions of some of Joyce’s character designs – though the books’ Lyraesque human heroine Katherine, a warmly imagined version of the author’s late daughter, has been curiously parachuted instead into Blue Sky’s rival Joycean animation
Epic
. Instead, the film presents us with a high-concept superhero team of public-domain fantasy figures in what one gradually realises is essentially an unsettling family reimagining of
American Gods
.
Screenwriter David Lindsey-Abaire has done this public-domain metamashup before on the film version of
Inkheart
, and has another in the oven with
Oz the Great and Powerful
. But
Guardians
is the most interestingly confused mythology, based as it is on a cast of invested lies: the fabrications that adults knowingly inflict on children, and the awakening from which constitutes an irreparable loss of innocence and abandonment of faith in adult authority. Pitch’s plan is to undo the visitations of Toothiana and Bunny so that children worldwide will no more believe in the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny than they currently believe in Jack Frost, leaving only the boogeyman as childhood’s true object of living belief: “No Christmas or Easter or little fairies that come in the night; there will be nothing but fear and darkness and me” – or, as we know it in this life, adulthood. Fortunately Jack, who has never been an object of active faith, is insulated against not being believed in, and can hold it together where the rest of them fail, sprinkle fun (“That’s it! That’s my centre!”) around kids so their eyes light druggily up and they attempt high-risk winter stunts you should absolutely not try at home unless there’s an invisible folk superhero looking out for you. It’s certainly the prettiest DreamWorks animation to date, its very strong visual design shot in warm illustratorly colours with Roger Deakins advising on the cinematography. But the film has underperformed domestically – perhaps because it’s a Christmas film set at Easter, which is, well, unexpected, but perhaps because it’s fairly nakedly about the survival of religion in a secularising world as essentially an infantile nostalgia for falsehood, a message further complicated by the tactical unbranding of Christmas and Easter as spiritual festivals for all faiths and none. “Easter is new beginnings, new life; Easter is about hope” – dispersing any illusion that it might be about the resurrection of a Judaean cult leader and agitator, or failing that about chocolate. Hope again, boys and girls.
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As one literary franchise rises afresh and another stumbles to likely oblivion,
The Twilight Saga
pulls its covers around it and kisses goodnight in
Breaking Dawn Part 2
. Spinning 169 minutes from six chapters of
The Hobbit
is nothing to the challenge facing Bella’s happy-forever-after finale, which has had to come up with an exciting way to cinematise a story whose defining, indeed climactic, feature is that nothing whatever happens. Stephenie Meyer’s disarmingly fannish relationship with her own creation largely forbids that characters cared about should come to harm, extending the grace of invulnerability and reluctant forgiveness even to series villains; and the second half of
Breaking Dawn
is essentially the final season of
Buffy
without the last episode, as the Cullens old and new assemble an army of sympathisers to square up against the Volturi legions for a huge, promiscuously cinematic battle-of-Hogwarts finale, only for a truce to be talkily negotiated that allows everyone to go home without a blow struck. Whatever one’s feelings about the book quartet – and no account can satisfy that doesn’t give due weight to their deep emotional empathy for their readership’s anxieties and dreams – it’s difficult not to admire the sheer perversity and refusal of infantile Hollywood comforts in this radical anticlimax, and more difficult still to see how it could ever translate to film. But the solution found, through some light replotting using established powers and characters in a slightly redirected way, is so elegant, ingenious, and effective at making the same point about the same outcome while giving the film the big
X-Men 3
ending it craves, that one can’t but admire its craft. The preceding hour and a half are taken up with yeastless pre-plotting, an increasingly outré series of guest appearances as the Cullens host a protracted houseparty for silly vampires including ginger Irish ones (Thranduil pops up in this one too), and some extremely unsettling acceleration of Bella’s transition through the adult lifecycle as her progress from bride to mom is further speeded up by little Renesmée’s digital transition through a series of fantastically creepy vales of the uncanny from infancy to premature betrothal. But at the end everyone kisses and Bella lets Edward, who’s been surprisingly fun in this episode, into her head at last and flashbacks the whole trilogy for his benefit; and the last shot lingers on the book’s last word “forever”, before the aptly neverending credits wind back through the many versions of Sir and Lady Not Appearing in This Film. It’s been a bloody long journey there and back again with Bella and Edward, but like the cliff-dangling scenes in
The Hobbit
it only feels like we’ve been watching them forever. As the ring-bearing Bella now passes over sea to her
Huntsman
sequel in a future filled with dwarves, we shall unexpectedly miss them.
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Copyright © 2013 Nick Lowe
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TONY LEE
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Shortly after TV series
The Six Million Dollar Man
(see
Interzone
#240), Bertrand Tavernier’s
Death Watch
(Blu-ray/DVD, 5 November) presented us with a fresh interpretation of the cybernetic eye, one with a fear of the dark that is both practical/symbolic, as low lighting damages the video camera implant, while nothing on the receiving screens means losing the audience. This is a far bolder SF movie than that bionic action show’s genre content. Based on a novel by David G. Compton, it weaves a tale of mortality and speculative media that riffs upon themes of corporate cynicism from Sidney Lumet’s classic satire
Network
, although it must be said that Compton’s book
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe
(US title:
The Unsleeping Eye
) actually predated Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for
Network
.
Shooting in gritty modern Glasgow, director Bertrand Tavernier (recently the maker of
In the Electric Mist
) rebels against the traditions of shiny futurism so that, in its look, this is the antithesis of stereotypical SF cinema. Instead of cool hardware, it offers a subjective narrative of romantic tragedy, screened through a distorting lens of reality TV. In a Britain where fatal illness is increasingly rare, an emotive storyline hinges upon cruel subterfuge that only a highly decadent society on the verge of quiet dystopia could enact. Among the film’s other genre ideas: Harriet, the computer that writes novels! Katherine (played by Romy Schneider, from Orson Welles’ adaptation of Kafka’s
The Trial
), is the ‘doomed’ woman, promoted as a new celebrity in a world of legalised euthanasia: “They pay you to die in public”.
It’s a future where privacy is diminishing alongside the targeted victim’s rights, when corporate programmes and prurient interests coincide – as amoral TV producer Ferriman (Harry Dean Stanton) notes, death is “the new pornography”. Katherine, of course, is on to the company’s scheming and, with “only one life to sell”, she milks the contract, apparently to fund her final big adventure. Although the main plot and the backstory mirror each other, the middle-class but still a bit kitchen-sink dilemmas of broken or failing relationships manage to avoid falling into the pits of a standard telly soap opera. There is a widescreen sketch of grim poverty found on a Strathclyde dock location, from where the heroine goes on the run as if she is trying to escape from her ignominious fate. Holed up with cameraman Roddy (Harvey Keitel) at the riverside cabin in vividly green Mull of Kintyre countryside, Katherine’s reminiscences of love and life continue, further embellishing already polished character studies. The finale exposes the stunt/hoax, to challenge our perceptions of all that we have seen so far, but it’s more than just a clever double-twist ending, it adds layers of poignancy when “Everything is important, but nothing matters”.
The HD transfer looks superb, and disc extras include a 40-minute interview,
The Morality of Filmmaking
, with Tavernier, whose revealing comments about the differences between European/Hollywood approaches to solving technical problems (much more than just an economical inventiveness versus studio production overkill) are often wryly amusing, and occasionally hilarious.
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It’s a broad generalisation, but the differences between cinema and television are that cinema is largely concerned with spectacle of scope/scales in a format that appeals to artists and designers, while TV is usually all about the characters of a piece, presented with a cosy intimacy and tangled plotlines that provide regular work for many writers (and actors) to unravel. The current problem for genre in the media dichotomy is that while blockbuster movies can happily be one-hit wonders and, as such, get away with their limited stories, entertainment for small screens needs a formula, whether it’s for a serial narrative or an anthology format. I have always been a fan of shows like
Outer Limits
and
Twilight Zone
because they are creative outlets not unlike nursery farms. They form a welcome bridge between artistic vision that demands a high budget, and TV work that highlights prolific writing. As long as they adapt short fiction into short movies, those sci-fi programmes could continue with variable success, so it is terribly sad that recent TV schedules have a lacked any such genre series. It is a situation that forces many novice filmmakers, struggling to break into even low-budget movies, to stretch basic TV resources or 40-minute plots into feature-length works, often at the expense of a taut pace and briskly convincing character arcs. In a word: padding. It is a contrivance that almost ruins
The
Arrival Of Wang
(DVD, 12 November) as good ‘first contact’ drama, or SF satire on realpolitik themes.
What begins as a variation of
K-PAX
meets Spielberg’s
E.T.
in Rome turns into near farce when the interrogation of a mysterious alien becomes a torture session – all because paranoid local officials cannot see the difference between an ambassador for peace and a scout for invaders. As ‘Mr Wang’ speaks only Chinese, government agent Curti coerces civilian girl Aloisi to translate. Obviously, their conflicted characters are like odd socks in the laundromatrix of life. The octopus spy acts meekly but withholds vital details about his mission to Earth, until it’s too late. The writing/directing team of brothers Antonio and Marco Manetti (the makers of
Paura 3D
) do a good Corman styled job of cranking up suspense during intro scenes, but it all drags on far too long, with repetitions and insufferable delays before each revelation about this situational/cultural time bomb.
Eventually, the doomsday clock is wound backwards to the 1950s for a
WOTW
ending. Perhaps it would have worked better with more of the ambiguity hinted at in those early scenes. As it is, this offbeat UFOlogy flick simply lacks the cult appeal of
Brother From Another Planet
and
X-Tro
, while its competent deployment of a CG character for Wang strains to evoke sympathies for the captured alien’s plight only to soften us up before the abrupt, and tongue-in-cheek, delivery of a closing twist in a finale that borrows its trick from Kubrick.
There is, however, something missing. Like shampoo without conditioner, a tingle without a kiss, it’s all sizzle but no steak. I liked it, but was left thinking there should have been a lot more to it for a 21st century sci-fi movie. A much shorter version could have made a fine episode of
The X-Files
, and I vaguely recall an episode (
Voice of Reason
?) of the 1990s
Outer Limits
revival which had some kind of an alien interrogation story. According to the PR blurb,
Arrival of Wang
was a hit when screened at Frightfest, but I have seen reviews of such events that suggest there is a strong tendency for some overly enthusiastic genre fans to be a bit too forgiving of mediocrity, just because they are getting a sneak preview of brand new stuff.