Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013 (26 page)

* *

Based on a Kafka novel, Michael Haneke’s
The Castle
(aka:
Das Schloss
, 1997) – out on DVD, 12
November – is a tale of alienation and a lonely stranger’s
struggles against mysterious officialdom.

‘
K’ (Ulrich Mühe) is a land
surveyor, called to work for a Count at a seemingly inaccessible
castle. The local villagers are an unfriendly lot, refusing K
lodgings at the church or inn. It is winter, and the landscape is
just as inhospitable as the people. K’s two new ‘assistants’ arrive
but prove to be imbeciles, lacking the surveying equipment he
expected them to bring. K lacks a permit necessary to enter the
castle, and none of the peasants can, or will, help or advise him.
However, neurotic barmaid Frieda (the late Susanne Lothar, Mühe’s
wife) is wholly sympathetic and provides K with shelter and sex,
becoming his fiancée. K attempts to meet his employers, any
representatives from the castle, or even their unreliable
messenger, but his communications, like his confrontations, are
blocked, so his progress is thwarted. The ordinary absurdism here
is usually bleak, but occasionally farcical, and the distinctions
between solemnity and satire are arbitrary.

Filmed in German with English subtitles, the
period setting adds even greater unfamiliarity to the impenetrable
illogical moodiness of an otherworldly quality that accumulates
around K, from a patina of grime to a crushing weight on his mind.
The misunderstandings and doubts multiply like rabbits pulled from
a magic hat, and it is hard to find anything that is kept in the
dark, let alone truth. K faces an unfathomable bureaucracy
sustained by idle intermediaries via the uncertainty of twilight
whispers. Offended authority figures are as unforgiving as a napalm
fire. A howling night wind increases outside, as if in dark
symmetry with the internal confusions of K. Subjective betrayals
and escalating weirdness leads to a haunted surrealism like a
conjunction of Ingmar Bergman and Monty Python.

Disc extra: the biographical featurette,
24 Realities per Second
(56 minutes, in French with English
subtitles), about Haneke’s life/works, is illuminating but it has a
studied ‘informality’ that’s somewhat demanding and occasionally
trying.

* *

Previously available as a complete hi-def
boxset,
The Lord Of The Rings
‘extended editions’ are
re-released singly on Blu-ray (3 December), and these movies are,
quite rightly, still acclaimed as the ultimate high fantasy
trilogy. I must confess that I have not read the books but, to me,
this grandiose screen version feels like a legend about
disarmament, a triumph of genuine wisdom over madness, and details
valiant efforts to avert the possibility of catastrophic warfare by
simply getting rid of the doomsday weapon. The One Ring can only be
disposed of in the fires of Mordor, and we can see the notion of
meltdown destruction to put an end to evil (here, the ring is like
a WMD exemplar) reflected in varied genre works: perhaps most
tellingly in the annihilation of a cyborg/ultimate stealth weapon
in
Terminator 2: Judgement Da
y (1991), thus saving the
future for humanity.

Never mind the studied ‘bromance’ between
Frodo and Sam, that “treacherous little toad” Smeagol/Gollum is, by
implication in the prologue of
Return of the King
, very
probably a gay monster. Yet he is largely consistent in his
paradoxically schizoid obsession throughout this epic storyline,
troubled by others suspicions, (self-) doubts, and almost as much
betrayal as loyalty. It was a shame that the likeable feminist idea
to update the character of Arwen into a warrior princess was
abandoned in favour of remaining faithful to the source, while the
trial of battling alongside the men is taken by shield-maiden
Eowyn. A decade or so later, the decisions about changes, or lack
of them, to established lore may seem even more like significant
weaknesses, especially when other alterations made to Tolkien’s
narrative (see ‘purist edition’ fan cuts and scholarly views on a
‘travesty of adaptation’) during the scripting developments and
final editing now look arbitrary or inconsequential.

Despite the glorification of warfare
(referencing the crusades; as ‘halflings’ can be read as children)
where, somewhat perversely, even the long dead are called upon to
fight as ghosts, these are still action movies of repeatedly
astonishing spectacle as the level of threat expands from shire
(village), to fortress (city), to realm (the world). There are many
grotesque fantasy horrors in Middle-earth, but I still find that
Shelob the giant spider is the most nightmare inducing creature of
them all.

With over two hours of excellent footage
added to the 558 minutes total of this trilogy’s theatrical
versions, the scope and the depth of this saga expands into various
unexplored corners of its milieu and is all the better for its
shadings/nuances of main characters, and humorous asides which
thankfully included the best Tolkien joke I’ve heard (the punch
line is “Four”). My favourite bit of newfound trivia is noticing
John Noble, very good as Denethor whose suicidal despair in Gondor
and trouble with two sons foreshadows-in-retrospect the actor’s
recent TV work playing Walter Bishop in
Fringe
. As for the
protracted string of false endings, I still think Peter Jackson’s
opus should have shown the newly crowned king, elf royalty, and
people, all bowing to the heroic hobbits, then faded to black. That
would have been a saner closure. I wonder, will Peter Jackson’s
prequel trilogy (which I think should be titled ‘Bilbo Begins’ and
‘The Dark Hobbit’, etc) actually be any good?

* *

Having made a disaster of his last effort,
the deplorable
Airborne
(
Black Static
#29),
writer-director Dominic Burns (alias Alexander Williams) turns his
Tourette’s brand of amateurishness to vapid sci-fi tale of alien
invasion
U.F.O.
(DVD/Blu-ray, 24 December). With stars
Jean-Claude Van Damme, Julian Glover and Sean Pertwee in support
roles, this looks like someone watched
Skyline
and
Battle: Los Angeles
and thought they could make a trashy
British version on a Derby estate with a credit card budget.
Honestly, this tawdry mess makes other low-budget modestly
effective flicks, such as microcosmic London comedy chillers
Attack the Block
and
Storage 24
, seem like
CE3K
scaled, grandly spectacular classics.

A showcase for boring stereotypes,
U.F.O.
sinks to levels of shameless ineptitude that are
usually reserved for crap home videos. It evinces all the dramatic
tension and simplified suspense of a coin toss, and it is a
brow-furrowing migraine of annoyance waiting to happen. Even when
trying to emulate the sweary irreverence of Tarantino, Burns just
proves how terribly unimaginative his uninspired approach to
subgenre is, and this feeble nonsense sinks, inevitably, beneath
the overwrought but vacuous self-indulgence of its unintentionally
comic action scenes. If you find a copy of this DVD, I would
suggest that you run away. Save yourself. Warn your friends. Like a
signal from outer space that heralds a doomsday of boredom,
U.F.O.
spells out dismal prospects for any future homegrown
movies of this ilk.

* *

Alcatraz
was set in present day San
Francisco, where a lady cop was chasing baddies from the past.
Simon Barry’s
Continuum
(Season One, DVD, 28 January) is
about a female detective from the future in today’s Vancouver,
where she tracks down some villains from her own time. After
playing a spy for TV show
Alias
and the heroine of
G.I.
Joe
, Rachel Nichols must have been a casting shoo-in as Kiera
Cameron for this series. Bottled-lightning set-ups of
Terminator
,
TimeCop
and
Trancers
are flipped
on political/gender lines, and juggled into fairly coherent sci-fi
cop drama. Frequent action scenes rattle along with plenty of
energy, although
Continuum
does lapse into sentimentality –
complete with melancholy song tracks – for many episodic
epilogues.

Among the terrorists, Lexa Doig
(
Andromeda
,
Jason X
) as Sonya Valentine is the only
one of the Liber8 gang who really looks like she’s from the future.
Cameron’s aided by young genius Alec (Erik Knudsen), an
inventor/hacker who eagerly adopts his official sidekick role.
Except for flashbacks to the future, SF elements are reduced when
Cameron stops wearing her glitchy catsuit of invisibility. But it
is amusing to see fresh visualisations of com-tech concepts,
recycled from early-1970s TV movie
Probe
and its follow-up
series
Search
, updated with HUD for the heroine’s augmented
sensorial arrays that are generated by her cyber-cop implants.

The story arc veers sideways, from standard
24
antics (kidnappings, robbery, terrorism) to Occupy style
protests, and routine character subplots led by an idealistic but
crazy professor, involving anti-government radicals and gizmo
MacGuffins. There is VR shoot-em-up game play that’s dangerous to
certain users, and the hostage crisis at Alec’s family’s farmstead
brings several conspiracy elements to a violent, ultimately tragic
conclusion, just as the superhero imagery is reasserted when the
heroine gets her damaged biotech ‘protector’ suit working properly
again.

“
What happens in the future
stays in the future.” Seeing how the revolutionary movement starts
– 65 years earlier – changes the heroine’s views about her own
time’s rewritten history. But, even as one loose timeline thread is
tied off, quirky references to Gilliam’s
12 Monkeys
become
particularly relevant to some ‘dystopian destiny now’ themes of
economic collapse and the social upheaval in its aftermath,
championed by a bitterly aged fanatic who corrupts easily confused
and suicidal kids into martyrdom.

Although never as thrillingly intense as the
similarly constructed
Terminator: The Sarah Connor
Chronicles
, this is a very enjoyable sci-fi action series that
deploys its nanotech in layers of sophisticated info-media that
enables cyborg agent Cameron to function as an ideal super-cop
model. Nichols makes the most of humorous scenes (such as having to
mask her character’s virtual telepathy), and is quite appealing as
a quick-study detective whose futuristic investigative techniques
are readily interpreted by present day police officers as uniquely
advanced insight.

* * * * *

Copyright © 2013 Tony Lee

* * * * *

Tony
also reviews many DVDs and
Blu-rays for our sister magazine
Black Static
– 14 in the
new issue #32, out now in print, with easy to enter competitions to
win great films.

In
Black Static
you’ll also find
Peter Tennant’s
Case Notes, several pages of in-depth book
reviews, supplemented by the occasional author/ editor
interview.

Black Static
is also the home of
regular comment columns by
Stephen Volk
and
Christopher
Fowler.
Not to mention a lot of world class fiction…

A convenient subscription to both print
magazines is highly recommended! Please visit our website
(ttapress.com) for all the options available. The Endnotes include
links to Black Static as an Ebook.

Black Static
is
available in E book editions. You should find live links in the
Endnotes.

* * * * *

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