Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #223 (24 page)

Set seven years after Richard Kelley's
instant classic,
S. Darko: A Donnie Darko Tale
arrives on DVD/BD (6 July). It's mid-1995, and Donnie's sister Samantha (Daveigh Chase, TV series
Big Love
) is driving to California with her ‘wild child’ friend Corey (Briana Evigan,
House Of The Damned
). With car trouble in the desert, they're stuck in a Utah community where Sam's surreal dreams warn of impending disaster. Then a meteorite crushes a windmill, a church is gutted by arson, glowing feathers emerge from television, and crazed war-veteran ‘Iraq Jack’ sets a date with destiny for all on 4th July ... Directed by Chris Fisher, mistaking a torpid pace for brooding atmosphere, this time-warp drama has none of the uncanny suspense or appealingly weird charm of
Donnie Darko
and, even when a night-storm of tesseracts falls on the town, it fails to generate interest in its unfortunate characters or the unfolding of tragic events. A local cinema marquee lists those touchstones of millennial anxiety,
Twelve Monkeys
and
Strange Days
, but such a double-bill of genre references only serves to underline the weaknesses of this unnecessary sequel.

Predictions of doom also concern Alex
Proyas’
Knowing
(DVD/BD, 3 August), in which Nicolas Cage's dour scientist finds dates/death tolls of disasters—both recent and future—were scribbled by a child 50 years ago for a school's time capsule. This is a great visual effects blockbuster if you enjoy spectacular catastrophe-movies (plane crash, train wreck, astonishingly well-realised set-pieces), but when it blurs the sharp lines between science fiction images and religious iconography, the initial realism and apparent intelligence is sadly eroded, by unsophisticated scriptwriting, into a clash of ‘what if...’ and ‘if only...’ subjects. Chilling scenes of ‘alien angels', neither intruders or abductors but interventionists, seem to promise that ‘something wonderful’ will soon occur, but the foresight of this film's mankind's prospective ‘saviours’ is not matched by the cosmic-engineering abilities, or visionary imagination, of whatever ET powers resurrected Dave Bowman for
2010
. Instead, here's another straightforward fathers-and-sons drama winning sci-fi acclaim via filching the mothership finale from
CE3K
, and the ending from
When Worlds Collide
(being remade soon by Stephen Sommers) for its feel-good coda.

It's ridiculous, I think, to call joke-merchants behind Robot Chicken: Star Wars episode II
(DVD, 27 July) ‘creators’ because there's precious little creativity in this lame parody. Whereas films and skits from the likes of Mel Brooks, the Zucker and Abrahams (ZAZ) team, and comedy legends of Monty Python were—and still are—genuinely witty or irreverently absurdist, the quality of humour in
Robot Chicken
is about as welcome as a floor sander on new carpeting. To paraphrase: “this is not the cartoon you're looking for.” Compared to David Lynch's crudely animated yet bleakly hilarious series
Dumbland
(DVD, 22 June), Seth Green's rather vacuous effort looks like geeks playing with merchandised toys, and lacks any satirical invective and social relevance, or anything of artistic merit. Despite its childish drawings, savage violence, annoying repetitions in eight brief episodes, and lack of any sympathetic ‘characters’ (except for ants?),
Dumbland
remains abrasively critical and patently surreal.
Robot Chicken
merely heckles—smugly—from the gallery and is too boring to offend.

Copyright © 2009 Tony Lee

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Forget what the mice tell you. The key is right there in your hand. Behind the forbidden door is a wormhole to a perfectly rebooted version of your world in which everything will be exactly as you'd want to dream it. The performers in your story will unzip their ancient, bloated forms to reveal themselves as young and beautiful as they never were in the life you know. The past and future of their entire universe will be overwritten with zeroes; everything will be a surprise, as the albatross of predestination falls away into the sea and clashes and slashes that never were will happen before your eyes. All the narrative legacy code of canonicity will be swept away in a bottom-to-top rewrite of the system in which there is no future but the one we make. There's just one tiny thing we need in return. It won't hurt a bit. Think of it as an upgrade; our gift to you.

It's apt that this extraordinary season of three major franchise reboots has seen J.J. Abrams’ shiny button-eyed other
Star Trek
closely pursued by
Terminator Salvation
, since Abrams’ attempt at the salvation of the
Star Trek
franchise is itself in essence a
Terminator
film—with an assassin from the future of the canonical timeline sent back to the seed moment of the canon on a mission to change the entire course of the franchise, pursued by an anti-terminator on a desperate quest to prevent him and maintain the integrity of the decades-spanning series continuity. The startling twist is that this time, unlike in all four
Terminator
films, it's actually the Terminator who triumphs. Four decades of continuity and a century and a half of densely-storied future history are wiped out for the sake of a single audience-chaser (plus the option of up to three contracted sequels), populated by a cast of attractive youngsters with eyes as bright as buttons. Only a single original cast member survives this casual narrative genocide, which blithely encompasses the entire planets of Romulus and Vulcan. And for what gain? It's hard to say. The official rationale behind this comics-style reset is to make the characters and their fates unpredictable, but apart from a bit of Spock/Uhura fan action the script is actually more timid than the canonical
Trek
films here, which have felt able to kill off and to marry off key cast members; here there's never any danger of the six principals’ failing to settle into their destined roles, despite some decoy moves with the possibility that the Kirk-Spock configuration might shake out differently. The teenage Spock is told “You are fully capable of deciding your own destiny; the question is, which path will you choose?” But this is flim-flam; by the time the paradox kicks in, “creating an entire new chain of incidents that cannot be predicted,” the line has become “our destinies have been changed,” and choice had nothing to do with it. It's fascinating to see film exploring some of the deep poetics of reboot that have become familiar in comics but never really attempted with a canon forged outside the panel medium, and the
Star Trek
franchise, with its huge and massively unwieldy continuity, is an obvious experimental subject. For all its impressive spectacle and charm, this Ultimate
Star Trek
is ultimately too much a
Star Trek
film—with its bridge-bound action, cartoon space-terrorist villain, and ad hoc plot articles (here “article 619")—to exercise the full scope of its Terminator's licence. But we've seen what it can do.

Star Trek
's erased continuity is a place that the
Terminator
franchise has already visited with the divergence of the
Sarah Connor Chronicles
TV series from the timeline of the third film, to which the back-to-canon
Terminator Salvation
now marks a reversion. Despite its copious plot tapes from an uncredited Linda Hamilton,
Salvation
boldly aims to dispense not just with its series star the Gubernator (apart from a few seconds of digitally recycled mugshot), but with the very element of time travel that has driven both the canonical film series and the deviant television plotline. It isn't even about salvation; that was an earlier draft in which Skynet turned out to be a goodie, as the lead writers have been intimating it yet may in a prospective sequel. What terminated that future, at least for the time being, was Christian Bale snubbing the lead role for the John Connor character, who was barely on screen in the original draft, and sending in the unstoppable Jonathan Nolan to take out the existing script and replace it with a new future rebuilt around Connor. Nolan, who lost credit after WGA arbitration, has done as effective a job of this unwieldy assignment as could reasonably be expected, and McG's film of the result is a well-staged future-war spectacle that doesn't feel much like a Terminator film but does at least boast Bale acting off Michael Ironside, something you'd have to be already terminated not to want to see. Sam Worthington's character, the original lead, is now a bit of a spare dinner, but less because of the rise of the Bale machine than because his own ambiguous status between human and weapon was always underexploited, particularly for a viewer familiar with the classic early Dick versions of this theme like “Second Variety” and “Impostor". It's disappointing that Nolan of all people should have passed up the chance of a more radical identity twist than merely treating the character to his personal Architect scene with Helena Bonham-Carter explaining “The human condition no longer applies to you"; and the hastily rewritten ending is particularly preposterous, though possibly no more so than the leaked original in which Worthington's character took over the deceased Connor's identity. “There is no destiny but what we make,” says the ultimate survivor in voiceover at the end; but it certainly helps your chances if you parachute in your own writer.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine is effectively a reboot of a reboot, taking the already heavily reimagined film version of the
X-Men
universe back to its own seed event in the Weapon X project, which at the end of the film is erased from its subject's memory by means of some improvised neurosurgery with adamantium bullets to the head. With the rest of the Marvel universe owned by other people, Fox makes the most of its mining rights to the X-Men hypocosm—using its prequel sanction
Star Trek
-style to bring in newer and younger versions of old favourites alongside discarded or unused characters like Deadpool and Gambit, and disambiguating the relationship between Wolverine and Sabretooth in a way not readily reconcilable with anything in the comics canon. As an X-Men film it struggles to rebuild its fundamentally ensemble franchise around a single lead, though it has to be conceded that Hugh Jackman's version of this character, to which I never particularly took in the original trilogy, is better than it's ever been and just about carries the fairly feeble script. (One would like to think it wasn't David Benioff who turned in a draft with the lines “I think you confused me with somebody who gives a shit", “Well well well, look what the cat dragged in", “Frankly, I'm a little disappointed", and “You know what happens to a man who comes looking for blood? They find it.") But the opportunities afforded by a Wolverine backstory film are sadly unexploited. The Watchmenesque historical credits montage shows our characters cut their way (bloodlessly, this being 12a) through four wars over a century and a half, and yet the film shows no interest whatever in the richness of a 130-year-old character's life experience. That would be a story worth telling.