Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013 (25 page)

* *

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.

* *

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.

* * * * *

Copyright © 2013
Nick Lowe

* * * * *

TONY LEE

•

DEATH WATCH

•

THE ARRIVAL OF
WANG

•

THE CASTLE

•

THE LORD OF THE
RINGS

•

U.F.O.

•

CONTINUUM

•

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.

* *

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.