The Sci-Fi List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[therewillbeblus]

While a revisit of Gremlins didn't hold up to say the least, going back to Gremlins 2: The New Batch far exceeded my already fond memories. Dante plays to all his strengths here and channels the masters of old school visual gags in his scene construction to build a versatile world of pure unfiltered imagination. It's as if he and Haas had devised a series of possible paths to take a sequel down, and just decided to throw everything in the writer's room together and mix it into one film. The social commentary on navigating the corporate ladder, urban group functioning, and office politics offer a snarky unveiling of shallowness to complement the madcap antics, and all the manic energy is balanced with situational or interpersonal comedy to form a rollercoaster rhythm of pizzazz.

When the science-fiction/horror components only barely eclipse the absurdity of the familiar, we get a nice look at how ridiculous our systems of living already are, as well as how unprepared our rigid solipsistic modes are to face unexpected chaos! Thankfully Dante and everyone involved are having so much fun that they fully embrace the cinematic playfulness of their conceptions (including a literal dissolve of the celluloid that merges into a Matinee self-reflexive preview), and so we do too. The film is so full of life it's just bursting at the seams, combining satire, silent gags and milieu-specific jabs to concoct a eclectic palette of joy. I feel like I appreciate it even more now than I did as a child.

Now, is it really sci-fi.. probably not in the way I'm approaching this list.

[Never Cursed]

Triangle (Christopher Smith):

Spoiler

This is one of the most nauseating and anxiety-provoking viewing experiences I've ever had the displeasure of sitting through, and I mean that as the highest form of praise. Triangle is a perfect existentialist nightmare film, a skillfully made and infinitely plastic allegorical tale about the utter inability even the most determined human has to change what they're hurtling into. One can apply that message into basically any form of human behavior, from mental illness to compulsive behavior to the desire to extricate oneself from one's fate, but I was most taken with the Sisyphean imagery, and I eventually read it the most as a depiction of and response to the arguments in the related Camus piece. I don't think I should say much more about the film's plot or where it ultimately heads, so I'll instead stress how remarkably well this film is constructed. Anyone who has suffered through enough bad horror or sci-fi knows the dangers of playing fast and loose with reality in the way this film does: a half-baked central idea or veering just a little too far away from a film's internal logic can leave a viewer alienated if not completely appalled. This film, though, doesn't fall into those traps, and indeed manages to use a lot of narrative and filmic crutches in novel ways. For the first ~20 minutes, I was rather annoyed by the film's shaky cam stylings and quick-paced bordering on frenetic editing, but to my disgusted delight, these are all employed for a couple specific tonal and thematic functions: the shaky cam is intensified and relaxed to viscerally signify perceived losses and gains of control, and the entire third act of the film, with all its twists building on the central circular twist, depends on the frequent jarring elisions and cuts towards the start (especially those during the opening credits). This is an incredibly impressive and efficient trigger factory of a film (at least for me, in terms of the philosophical concepts I consider the most unpleasant) and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in exploring those depths.

To those who haven't: see this one while avoiding anything about it till you've seen it.

[domino harvey]

Ha, I coincidentally just posted about deleted scenes to the film in the Horror thread! Welcome aboard Team Triangle

[Never Cursed]

Glad to be aboard (ha), though I think I was happier on Team A Song Is Born or Team Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical. Hell, I just got my region-free player today along with the German blu-ray of Anguish, and I'd wager that film (which of course I also love) inspires more warm feelings in me than this one

[Slaphappy]

Two of my pre-WW2 favourites:

Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella / Cosmic Journey (1936)
Kind of Jules Verne meets early Soviet era enthusiasm. No political themes in spotlight like in Aelita, but more just plain joyous belief in technological progress and human spirit. I don't remember any other movie that has portrayed space travel as this much fun.

Chandu the Magician
Love the old school wise man vs. modern evil genius -plot! Chandu's powers are not supernatural in nature, but represent ancient wisdom.

[therewillbeblus]

Triangle (Christopher Smith):

Spoiler

This is one of the most nauseating and anxiety-provoking viewing experiences I've ever had the displeasure of sitting through, and I mean that as the highest form of praise. Triangle is a perfect existentialist nightmare film, a skillfully made and infinitely plastic allegorical tale about the utter inability even the most determined human has to change what they're hurtling into. One can apply that message into basically any form of human behavior, from mental illness to compulsive behavior to the desire to extricate oneself from one's fate, but I was most taken with the Sisyphean imagery, and I eventually read it the most as a depiction of and response to the arguments in the related Camus piece. I don't think I should say much more about the film's plot or where it ultimately heads, so I'll instead stress how remarkably well this film is constructed. Anyone who has suffered through enough bad horror or sci-fi knows the dangers of playing fast and loose with reality in the way this film does: a half-baked central idea or veering just a little too far away from a film's internal logic can leave a viewer alienated if not completely appalled. This film, though, doesn't fall into those traps, and indeed manages to use a lot of narrative and filmic crutches in novel ways. For the first ~20 minutes, I was rather annoyed by the film's shaky cam stylings and quick-paced bordering on frenetic editing, but to my disgusted delight, these are all employed for a couple specific tonal and thematic functions: the shaky cam is intensified and relaxed to viscerally signify perceived losses and gains of control, and the entire third act of the film, with all its twists building on the central circular twist, depends on the frequent jarring elisions and cuts towards the start (especially those during the opening credits). This is an incredibly impressive and efficient trigger factory of a film (at least for me, in terms of the philosophical concepts I consider the most unpleasant) and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in exploring those depths.

To those who haven't: see this one while avoiding anything about it till you've seen it.

Great writeup- I find it oddly comforting that we were likely both watching this last night at the same time- these are the kinds of Covid connectivity I look for these days!

Since I feel pretty much the same about it I’ll just post my thoughts from the horror thread slightly truncated:

Triangle

I went into this blind and thought it was terrific. Melissa George (unrecognizable from “the Girl” in Mulholland Dr.) hooked me right away amidst a group of dramatically weaker performances in a seemingly paint-by-numbers plot setup with dynamics and potential dynamics in place and obvious. These perfs and plotting were clearly intentionally downplayed and overly specified as much to heighten George’s aura as to manipulatively fasttrack our reversion to complacency in the horror genre. Of course all elements of this film get better, and stray further from comfort until we’re lost at sea from any tangible bearings.

Spoiler

Not only are all initially developed characters completely forsaken prematurely, but our protagonist becomes the most unreliable narrator. She was already unreliable based on her suspiciously unexplained emotional dysregulation at the onset of the film, but at a certain point I wasn’t even sure which version I was watching, splitting this already unsafe character into undefined shades. When all trust goes out the window, some may disengage completely, and I wouldn’t fault anybody for having that reaction to this, which admittedly is a tough film to like because it’s easier to dismiss, based on the film’s own dismissal of the participatory expectations of film (and this is not an attack on the viewer- I watched this with a group of horror fans whose tastes I respect and none liked it but me).

While not as dangerous in uprooting deep-seated core beliefs in the existential, this film presents a very kinetic allegory for the disintegration of reality orientation and the futile attempts to crawl out of the hole of a trauma cycle.

This film has many details in its design that should be fun and escapist, but I found myself completely uncomfortable and lost throughout, hardly enjoying myself during the experience as much as a burst of pleasure following the experience once my senses were resorted to equilibrium, which was probably fitting for a film that’s as much a nightmare in structure as it is in content.

The one thing I’ll add in response to your post specifically

Spoiler

is how the Sisyphus allegory functions in the context of drowning in confusion from trauma reactivity. George’s displacement from her own condition is what drives the intensity of this film, which would be far lesser if she was more self-aware of her trauma. So it’s not really a film about living with trauma as much as living with trauma without the ability to recognize it as such. I often think of the power to reframe the Sisyphean journey as stemming from viewing it as either an isolated process or one with opportunities for support and life beyond the task. George’s pervasive loneliness and disconnect places her firmly in the camp of dysregulation and hopelessness, reinforcing the trauma without peripheral vision to find a way out.. other than to just keep moving forward in a fugue state.

[domino harvey]

Never Cursed, if you want to feel bad some more with Melissa George, I highly recommend the first season of In Treatment. If you’re anything like me, you won’t be able to binge it because it’s too emotionally taxing, but it’s still one of the great narrative experiments of television (Nine weeks of M-F therapy sessions, one per ep). I’m pretty sure I recommended it to TWBB as well when he first posted about the film, so y’all can coordinate more viewing parties

[therewillbeblus]

You did and I have yet to dive in (though since I'm changing jobs next month to an outpatient clinic I'll be doing the private practice thing seven clients a day/five days a week, so it'll either be very informative or unbearable to go home and re-live my work life). I think I mentioned that many colleagues of mine watched eps during their grad school classes, which means it has at least the BC stamp of approval (though I was down to watch Skins for diagnostics).

[YnEoS]

Not sure I'll be able to do a lot of sci-fi viewings, but I'm considering lightly participating since I think I could put together a list of 50 favorites today, just a matter of if I remember them well enough to feel comfortable with my rankings and I can get around to seeing enough of other people's favorite recommendations. (Partly just to increase chances of musical redux happening >_>). Offhand I'd put forward a recommendation for Karel Zeman's Invention for Destruction, although I'd be curious to know if anyone thinks Jules Verne adaptations and other kinds of steam-punk-y things shouldn't count as sci-fi. (Zeman's The Stolen Airship might be another contender, but that's one I'd have to revisit). If I do have time to re-watch these I might try a more extensive write-up.

I've also been thinking about the theory of what sci-fi is and what a good sci-fi film should do, and am tempted to do a big write-up if anyone is interested in digging into more theoretical discussions.

[bottled spider]

I watched Invention for Destruction recently, and it never occurred to me to question it's classification as sci-fi. But now that you've brought it up, I see IMDb lists it only as 'Animation, Adventure, Fantasy'. Not that I treat IMDb as definitive. I'll be voting for it myself. I found it a little boring in its total length, but wins a place for its amazing aesthetic. It has a couple funny moments, and I wish there were more of those, and that it was shorter -- maybe reconceived as a forty minute faux-documentary, skipping the adventure plot altogether.

[colinr0380]

colinr0380, I'm glad to hear that you're a fan of the Cinema Snob as well. Up until he moved to Chicago, Brad and I lived in the same general area and frequented the same theaters. I never met him there, but got to have a good long talk with him at an Iowa comic book convention that I took my son to a few years back. He was very kind.

I'm glad to hear he was good to meet in person! Its strange to think that I have been watching his videos for a decade now, and he certainly covers a lot of material that I would feel a bit awkward and culpable (as in morally dirty) about supporting myself - not the sex or Nazisploitation films but rather the evangelical Christian films and various Kirk Cameron and Dinesh D'Souza works!

[bamwc2]

I'm glad to hear he was good to meet in person! Its strange to think that I have been watching his videos for a decade now, and he certainly covers a lot of material that I would feel a bit awkward and culpable (as in morally dirty) about supporting myself - not the sex or Nazisploitation films but rather the evangelical Christian films and various Kirk Cameron and Dinesh D'Souza works!

Ha! I bought a copy of his Christspolitation film Jesus Bro from him. I've had it for a couple of years now, but still haven't gotten around to watching it.

[therewillbeblus]

Final Black Mirror revisits:

The Entire History of You doesn't hold up as well on repeat viewings, though the central technological advancement was thrilling to behold the first time. The episode's choice to focus on the ease of locating 'evidence' that nobody needs or wants to know encourages a dissection on whether truth is a behaviorist observation or an intention and feeling that cannot be made tangible. The unlocking of memories only shows one interpretation, still subject to skewed assignment of meaning by our central protagonist (his wife declaring that just because he sees something one way doesn't mean she's "lying" is a great moment on perspective-shifts). This is a more interesting path than the privacy-invasion that speaks for itself just by showing the TSA scene, instead serving as a jumping off point for amplifying paranoia. Still, the wish-fulfillment turning out to have more objectively-affirming merit and the intensity by which human error is disallowed to remain in focus is a flaw in execution.

I can't help but wonder how much more fascinating it would be to go down the road discussed at the dinner party where therapists can indirectly cause a memory to be planted that didn't exist, highlighting memory's fallibility and the potential for these stored files to be altered just as they would be without the technology, with time, space, and personal evaluation as they are in our lives today. That imperfect human component goes hand in hand with the jealousy in this iteration of the concept, but it could've gone a more profound route rather than turning into pure thriller mode.

Be Right Back's similarities to the same-year's Her are notable, but that film's meditation on the desire for connection and validation on loneliness are traded for themes here centered around an already-established love and loss (well, both films deal with loss, but differently). In this episode, that love is repurposed into a different form, putting into question our own blockades and needs that channel the ways we compartmentalize an authentic union, especially when memory is involved in establishing that reality. Once we've had a life of experience with a person, how can we recontextualize that energy into an unrecognizable entity? Or a recognizable one, that contrasts our awareness of an objective truth of trauma directly? Wouldn't that invalidation of our own emotional experience be too existentially-destructive to contest with? Do our partners exist only for us to get what we need, even if part of that need is to feel empathy for another?

More than anything this is a really strong depiction of grief and loss, and how processing those intangible feelings could be made both better and worse by making them tangible. Perhaps they must remain in their inaccessible state in order to help through time and allow one to move on in a healthy way. When her friend says, "this helps" referring to the technological advancement, it encourages the age-old conundrum of technology's assistance: Is this kind of 'help' actually going to be beneficial in the long run, or just make things easier in the short term? Brooker thankfully does what he does when he's at his best and validates both parts of the equation, just as he empathizes with the reading that our needs in connecting with another can be self-serving - telling as that that's okay against our own preconceived preferred narratives that boost the idea of selflessness. On a more direct sci-fi level, this presupposes one of the more eerily likely forms of tech evolution, and is a strong reminder of the authentic imperfections in our lovers' personalities that are irreplaceable and can be reframed to be invaluably wonderful characteristics.

I don't know if I'll be rewatching the terrific Fifteen Million Merits, which I've seen enough to remember vividly, but it's another candidate for the list and one of the better episodes of the series.

[Red Screamer]

Fifteen Million Merits is the only Black Mirror episode I've seen that I didn't find mind-numblingly moronic, off base as satire and unimaginative as sci-fi. I remember liking that one because of Kaluuya's performance and the simple concept that's relayed mostly visually, but now I'm reluctant to revisit it. The series is a constant offender in one of my pet peeves: playing (and replaying) pop songs for a lame pun on the title rather than for the mood, rhythm, or even lyrics ("Heaven is a Place on Earth", "Making Plans for Nigel", &c). It's the worst kind of pop culture trivia as wit.

On another note, I find it weird that hardly anyone has pointed out that Nosedive has the same climax as Parasite.

[therewillbeblus]

Probably because the actual climax of Nosedive is its last scene and the scene you're referring to is just the final breakdown in getting to the cathartic meat. I see the comparison now that you mention it, but I think it's by far the least memorable scene in the episode.

[therewillbeblus]

Alphaville: une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution

There is an announcement at the start of this film that only through legend, or cinema, can one convey some ideas (a reality too complex to be spoken in words). Godard uses noirish themes and expressiveness in approach to highlight the bitter world of technological advancement swallowing humanity’s artistic essence. Lemmy is a hard-nosed individualist, in more ways than one representing a combination of Godard and the artificial heroes of American films he admires, and his one-track mission is gradually unveiled to breed a different aim in existentialist returns. The necessity of poetry, or “the spontaneity of our conscience,” or the intangible “mystery of love” directly counters the sensory-numbers of this society, in the form of palpable tranquilizers in the hotel bathroom, for example. Art and its relationship with critical thinking can awaken us from the monotonous routines of complacency that perpetuate our existence of remaining in our subconscious. As one character who has spent too much time in Alphaville states early on when asked “why”: “‘Why’? What does ‘why’ mean?”

The death of abstract thought, of dreaming about the past or future, is Godard’s own horror movie, and one he senses is already on its way in real life. The path of destruction mankind is on is rooted in a logic empty of contemplative thought, and thus the stale atmosphere will inevitably wither the “plus,” or connection, between man and the kind of reason that goes further than the present. It’s a strange kind of anti-mindfulness, re-defining a present-focused attitude into anesthetized terms devoid of emotion. The idea of executing people for expressing themselves is both ridiculous in its exhibition and terrifying intellectually; and yet the statement is profound amidst the social rigidity and detached administrative rationalizations that already suppress the importance of emotions, even moreso today.

Godard has fun building the internal logic of his dystopian environment though, where “why” causes a brain malfunction, and when Lemmy tells a scientist questioning him an answer via inference, the man replies perplexed and regurgitates the lack of meaning in the concept of knowledge obtained by (even simple) deduction. His presentation of these ideas in practice are as snide and humorous as they are eerie and uncomfortable, but Godard has no problem laughing at the absurd with his intellectualized defense mechanisms, even if his target haunts him in actuality. Lemmy as a protagonist isn't even a stereotypical art-enthusiast, but it's his innate independence that channels free-thinking DNA, and so he becomes a threat by promoting the position of unique resolve and embrace for the indistinct. After all, love is enigmatic in spirit.

I love the film for its manic energy and wild form, reconstructing fatalistic ideas from corporeal ends to the extinguishing of vague terms like love, emotion, and art. The bleak milieu comes alive in all the right ways, and oozes Cool through contrived bliss (the gunshot lighting the cigarette lighter as Karine happens to enter; mentions of fictional characters like Dick Tracy to dictate the artificiality of this world) just as it intellectualizes the stakes of losing Art, which drives meaning in life. Godard’s use of a political lens, across an imaginative blend of original and borrowed details for his landscape, to draw forth his argument, is fitting for the eclectic filmmaker. He breathes energy into a vacant space to exploit its vacancy as well as the potential to fill it; reflexively demonstrating the possibilities of art to inspire life, just as his art is undoubtedly sparked from the fears that incited this film into being.

[Never Cursed]

The Toxic Avenger is one of the most repellent films I've seen in some time, and unlike with Triangle, I don't mean an ounce of that negative description positively. Almost every second of this film is concerned with being as disquietingly gross as possible, and while variations on through-and-through trashiness in an exploitation context can be interesting (see: the earlier half of John Waters' oeuvre), none of the creativity or meaning or novel presentation needed to make something special of an exploitation film is present here. No characters behave in remotely recognizable human ways, everything is filmed in the cheapest and cheat-iest way possible (it is a, uh, bold choice to film 95% of the main character's post-transformation scenes as though he is Lugosi's chiropractor and to dub all his lines in A Night To Dismember-level quality) with ridiculous continuity errors abound, and the film's sexual politics are loathsome in the more rotely expected ways (was the world really lacking in a scene where criminals robbing a taco joint kill a blind blonde's dog, strip her, and almost rape her, after which she is frequently cut to shrieking in bra and underwear?). I've seen the defense proffered that the film is a satire of z-grade monster shlock, and there is the the hint of that in how the mutated killer main character becomes something of a local superhero, but practically all of the heroic deeds which we see him undertake involve the brutal killing of various clearly or nebulously bad guys. At no point does the film try to undercut or subvert any of the things one would expect of z-grade monster shlock; the film is not magically more self-aware just because it shows our hero helping an old lady across the street or because it includes a couple Elephant Man jokes. I know there are at least a couple fervent defenders (sorry for trashing your darling!) of this film here, and I'd like to hear their cases for the film, but I absolutely hated this, and I'll certainly never seek out a Troma film again unless I hear that others are radically different from this.

[domino harvey]

I absolutely hated this, and I'll certainly never seek out a Troma film again unless I hear that others are radically different from this.

This is a lesson we all have to learn at some point

[Feego]

The Invisible Ray (1936, Lambert Hillyer)
Sets, footage, and music from previous Universal movies are recycled to give us the patchwork we have here (and footage shot for this movie would be utilized later still). It begins as Gothic horror, becomes a jungle adventure, and ends as a revenge thriller. Boris Karloff plays the requisite mad scientist who discovers a powerful ray that will do some such or other, and after too much exposure to it, he becomes a glow-in-the-dark, radioactive fiend. The nature of his discovery is never made truly clear, but we know it has the power to heal blindness when beamed at someone’s eyes but also melt solid rock when beamed at a boulder? Bela Lugosi is surprisingly subdued as Karloff's archrival. Following the path of Frankenstein and The Invisible Man before it, this is another entry in the don’t-tread-on-God’s-territory cautionary tales Universal churned out throughout the decade. But Lambert Hillyer is no James Whale, and while there are some nice-looking shots (particularly the first glimpse of Karloff at his giant telescope), this is never anything more than assembly-line filler.


Black Friday (1940, Arthur Lubin)
A crime programmer with a sci-fi twist -- mild-mannered professor Stanley Ridges is critically injured when a gangster accidentally rams his car into him. The professor’s friend, scientist Boris Karloff, secretly conducts an illegal brain transplant, replacing Ridges’ damaged brain with the gangster’s healthy one. Soon, the professor finds himself transforming, Jekyll-and-Hyde style, into the gangster and seeking vengeance on his murderous cohorts. The “science” here makes no plausible sense, even within the world of the film. If the gangster’s brain was placed in the professor’s head, how does it still retain any of the professor’s memories? The focus is primarily on the crime machinations, with our vengeful hood seeking out the men who betrayed him and killing them one by one. Ridges does a great job in the Jekyll-and-Hyde role, easily drifting from benign to sleazy and dangerous with little more than a change in hair style. He completely outshines Karloff and Lugosi, the latter wasted in the insubstantial role of a crime boss. As with The Invisible Ray, this is a standard, B-level clunker that moves quickly but disinterestedly through the motions.


Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957, Edward D. Wood, Jr.)
I didn’t seriously re-watch this for our List Project, but I’ve been making my way through the Ed Wood Box Set and decided to write it up. I’ve always thought this film’s reputation among both its fans and detractors to be rather inflated. It is by no means the worst movie ever made. Not by a longshot. But even in Wood’s filmography, it places right smack in the middle for me. It’s less of a chore than Jail Bait and Bride of the Monster but lacks the delirious fun of Glen or Glenda and Night of the Ghouls.

For the uninitiated, the film concerns a race of aliens that have decided that Earth, with its violent impulses, is too great a threat to the universe and must be destroyed. They set about doing this by following Plan 9, which entails resurrecting the dead to kill the living. I think.

A clear rip-off of The Day the Earth Stood Still, the movie is of course chiefly celebrated for its technical awfulness. The wobbly flying saucers, the cemetery with its gravestones that fall over when someone walks by, the lifeless acting. It’s all displayed here with boundless confidence. I’ll admit that I’m not a huge fan of “so-bad-they're-good” or “hilariously bad” movies, and generally I find the notion of laughing at a film's expense a bore. I get the appeal, but after 30 minutes, I’ve seen all I need to see, and the rest is just a slog. That’s certainly the case for me here.

To bring this back to topic, if there’s one thing this movie has going for it in terms of science fiction, it’s that Wood exhibits the kind of gee-whiz awe of the genre that children of the 1950s must have had. This often does feel like the kind of movie a group of kids would make if they had the time and resources. It blends familiar scenarios, Atom-Age fears, and characters (Vampira) from film, TV, and comics into something totally unoriginal but enthusiastic. This film truly is the inverse of the Universal films I reviewed above. They had a major studio behind them but little heart on display. Plan 9 from Outer Space was made for no money but with zeal and passion from Wood. His go-getter, who-cares-if-it-looks-like-shit-as-long-as-I-get-it-on-camera attitude is endearing even if I find the result underwhelming.

[knives]

I absolutely hated this, and I'll certainly never seek out a Troma film again unless I hear that others are radically different from this.

This is a lesson we all have to learn at some point

Not me. I adore their output.

[domino harvey]

See

[Dr Amicus]

Oblivion (Kosinski, 2013) Now this is an odd one. On the one hand it looks back to the SF films of the late 60s / early 70s in its slow, reflective approach to the story (Tom Cruise and Andrea Riseborough are the last humans on Earth monitoring energy gathering stations as the rest of humanity moves to Titan) and has some stunning shots of long rusted tankers in the desert which brings back memories of pulp SF covers; on the other hand it is also a star vehicle and Cruise needs some proper action sequences. The result is an intriguing curiosity which doesn't quite work but has some nice reveals as the film progresses. We are effectively told from the beginning that Something Is Not Quite Right which alerts us to expect a few surprises (clearly the film is NOT going to be just Tom Cruise fixing failing drones for 2 hours) but, as I said, the reveals are quite decent.

The Wild Blue Yonder (Herzog, 2005) And another oddity, with Brad Dourif as an alien (obviously!) narrating a tale of alien arrival and human spacegoing over re-purposed footage alongside freshly shot material with Dourif in a seemingly deserted small town. Footage of a shuttle mission is used for humanity's first interplanetary mission and undersea diving in Antarctica for scenes of exploration of an alien world. The result is an oddly disconcerting film - we know what we are seeing is not actually what we are being told we are seeing (true, I know, of most cinema but doubly so here) but it also makes us look at the footage in a different way: underwater Antarctica really does look alien. Not as impressive as Last and First Men perhaps, but definitely worth a look.

Once There Was Brasilia (Adirley Queirós, 2017) This rather mystified me I have to say, and my guess it's a lack of familiarity with current Brazilian social and political issues that is the issue. An alien comes to Brazil to kill the founder of Brasilia (in a low tech spacecraft that is clearly just a van with blacked out windows) but mistimes his arrival and arrives during the Roussef impeachment process. The film seems to argue for a collective resistance to authority and groups together various marginalised characters as the basis for a revolutionary force - at least this is how I read it. It didn't quite work for me, but was interesting enough that I want to give it a second chance (it's currently on MUBI UK if anyone else is interested).

Elysium (Blomkamp, 2013) Another 2013 non-franchise SF film that I somehow missed at the cinema and had decidedly mixed reviews. Following a longstanding tradition in the field of using the future to comment on the present (if you're not aware of the Puppies, google Sad / Rabid Puppies for an example of those who seem to not realise that this is as old as the genre) the rich in the future live on an orbital habitat, the poor on a damaged, ruined earth. This navigates the Star Vehicle and Serious SF requirements more successfully than Oblivion, and shares with the above film the belief that organised (possibly violent) resistance by the masses is a necessity to social justice. Hang on, that can't be right (checks notes) - oh yes it is. And further:

Spoiler

the whole system is corrupt, not just one or two rotten apples, and there appears to be enough for all if only there was more equitable distribution based on universal citizenship.

Unlike the above, the resistance is largely male and, yes, the star gets to do more than his share of action - but even so, for a big budget mainstream genre film, this is remarkably activist.

[bottled spider]

The Wild Blue Yonder (Herzog, 2005) And another oddity, with Brad Dourif as an alien (obviously!) narrating a tale of alien arrival and human spacegoing over re-purposed footage alongside freshly shot material with Dourif in a seemingly deserted small town. Footage of a shuttle mission is used for humanity's first interplanetary mission and undersea diving in Antarctica for scenes of exploration of an alien world. The result is an oddly disconcerting film - we know what we are seeing is not actually what we are being told we are seeing (true, I know, of most cinema but doubly so here) but it also makes us look at the footage in a different way: underwater Antarctica really does look alien. Not as impressive as Last and First Men perhaps, but definitely worth a look.

I don't know how I never heard of this before. It's Herzog. Looks like it has had mixed reviews, but it sounds right up my street. I'll definitely watch this.

[therewillbeblus]

More revisits:

Frau im Mond: Apparently I’m mostly alone here, but I’ve always thought this to be one of the better silent Langs apart from Spione, primarily for its final act that is still nothing short of astonishing in Lang’s mastery over crafting suspense and awe simultaneously. The first half does drag a bit amidst the love triangle and spy-blackmail plot devices that are far too familiar, but the commanding shot choices make even the banal scenes photographically gratifying. Reading up on the authentic scientific mechanics predicted here, I’m impressed considering the film functions on the surface as much less of a sci-fi story and more of a romantic adventure film, but I suppose that earns its placement as an early entry in the genre. The entire last hour, from the beginning of the journey to the moon through the end of it, is sublime entertainment, and if gold really was on the moon I suspect we’d have gotten there earlier!


Hard to Be a God: It’s science fiction in plot only, and otherwise an exposition on medieval brutishness and aversive ambiance. After seeing Khrustalyov, My Car! I much prefer that film's more contained funnel of surrealism, but this ambient collection of oppressive apathy and soiled human nature has its moments of ferocity and power.


Dark City: For neo-noir sci-fi, this film bests those with all the accolades. Its expressionist visuals and moody atmosphere are exacerbated by a confounding narrative that leaves us just as much in the dark as the city itself. Like the best of ‘wrong-man’ (or the often worst amnesia-oriented) noirs, the continual revealing of information is layered, as anything we discover is almost certainly also a lie. So we are searching for two truths: One superficial grasp on the nature of the plot in an orientation to our milieu and characters; and the second a deeper mystery into what all of it means.

This isn’t only a clever film, but an exercise in tone, and it succeeds across all fields. I actually felt quite repelled by this one when I first saw it as a kid, because its attitude was too sour in delivering its eccentricities for my blood, but I’ve come around to completely embracing its imaginative spree through nightmarish mise en scene. The implications of the actual intentions behind the experiment are possibly the most harrowing alien fear-induction in film history, manifesting the most unnerving hell of those who treasure their recollections above all else in defining themselves,

Spoiler

by concocting a prison of distorted realities through the thievery of our memories. I appreciate how the illusions of truth, and never knowing who you are, spreads like a disease from our protagonist to everyone else throughout the narrative- taking the tropes of this kind of film noir and subverting the focus on one man externally to fulfill his paranoia in actuality; forcing an idea rooted in oppression of an outlier into indiscriminate space across the entire population in our vicinity.

“Are we more than the sum of our memories?” Sutherland asks in a didactic exercise on what erects the soul; but for the briefly optimistic take on the human resilience to persist and harness their individuality regardless of circumstantial repression, the question’s haunting gravity still echoes.


A Clockwork Orange: What used to be hands-down my favorite Kubrick is now second-string on a good day, but as a science-fiction dystopia that predicts the dissolve of morality as ideology fails to inspire youth, it’s a poignant and comically absurdist work. Even the institutional logic, reverting to euthanize agency for the sake of faux-utilitarianism, is desperate and exhibits a detachment between human connection perpetrated by the faces of society; a lack of empathy that hypocritically affirms the behavior of these deviants. How can one possibly change if their leaders don’t even possess the tools for humanistically evaluating the social concern?

So lying, cheating, and manipulating your way in and out of situations is the brand that we are taught by the accepted socialites, and the characters follow in their own ways. To deprive one of those now-socially-enforced behaviors is like telling a person not to speak at all when you want them to stop swearing, while the rest of the world continues on conning others with polite tongue. The final line of the film is cheeky but true; to be “cured” in this case is to be able to have free will, while there was no actual resolve in artificiality suppressing harmful behavior, other than to treat people as functional vessels. However, the film’s psychological experiment doesn’t seem so bold anymore - and it’s more of a commentary on how ideological state apparatuses already engrain expected attitudes in us, and how the structure of society helps us develop ego functions to contain our impulses- only exaggerated to the extreme here. It’s a version of Hobbesian sociopolitical philosophy, but where our leaders have dropped the ball on creating a foundation for a considerate solution, and instead are putting scotch tape on the leaks. Removing moral choice for political ambitions to show the numbers go down? Why not!

In terms of just the set design and futuristic dressing, this is a spectacular milieu to be enveloped in, cold and sterile and artsy without feeling. The comedy can offer contrast between scenes (like a zany consensual sped-up sex scene where people keep putting on clothes in boredom only to be redirected like lab mice, to contest with the rapes) or within them. In the latter examples, the humor is so dark that it comes from scenes of horrific murder or other illicit acts where props or music or the blocking of actors mimics paintings, sparks commentaries on art, or conveys slapstick gags in gang fight setpieces, etc. mirroring as a game of ping pong between silly and repulsive. These bits can’t fully distract from the main events of disgust, but do intrude just enough to cause an uncomfortable juxtaposition of humor and horror. In that sense, Kubrick is pulling one over on his audience reflexively, aligning an audio/visual gag with painful repellent, giving us a taste of our own associative experiment not too much different from the one Alex has thrust upon him in the film's most infamous scene!

[L.A.]

What are your thoughts of Body Parts (1991)?