Tag Archives: science fiction

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

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Star Wars: The Clone Wars movie poster

 

After writ­ing and direct­ing three pre­quels between 1999–2005, it’s easy to for­get that Star Wars god­fa­ther George Lucas opted out of direct­ing Episodes IV: The Empire Strikes Back and V: Return of the Jedi back in the 1980s. Now Lucas appears once again to be ced­ing con­trol over his most famous baby. He’s back to shep­herd­ing along splin­ter projects like The Clone Wars from the more aloof role of Exec­u­tive Producer.

For any­one else con­fused, as I cer­tainly was, Star Wars: The Clone Wars is a feature-film sequel to the 2003–2005 Car­toon Net­work tele­vi­sion series “Star Wars: Clone Wars,” in turn fol­lowed by a sec­ond series with the same name as the movie. Got that? There are much big­ger dif­fer­ences than swap­ping a colon for a defin­i­tive arti­cle, start­ing with the visual look itself. The best thing about the orig­i­nal series was its bold, strik­ing visual style, real­ized in a hand-drawn line-art look sim­i­lar to Gen­ndy Tartakovsky’s pre­vi­ous show Samu­rai Jack. From what lit­tle I under­stand of the process, CGI ani­ma­tion cre­ated in 3D can still be ren­dered in a flat 2D style, giv­ing it the look of tra­di­tional hand-drawn cell ani­ma­tion. So the char­ac­ters in the orig­i­nal at least appeared hand-drawn even though they prob­a­bly weren’t.

Ashley Eckstein and Matt Lanter in Star Wars: The Clone WarsAnakin trains a young propellerhead

How­ever, the fea­ture film sequel looks like direc­tor Dave Filoni opted to skip that step and ren­der the char­ac­ters with full 3D shad­ing. The result resem­bles a rough ani­matic or a throw­away videogame cut scene. Filoni gets kudos for not aim­ing for pho­to­re­al­ism, which becomes very creepy when approach­ing the uncanny val­ley — the point where ani­mated char­ac­ters look almost, but not quite, like real humans. Look with fear upon the night­mar­ish zom­bie hor­ror­shows Final Fan­tasy: The Spir­its Within, The Polar Express, and Beowulf (the lat­ter being a huge step for­ward, but still not quite there yet). But The Clone Wars’ par­tic­u­lar brand of styl­iza­tion just seems cheap to me; I would have pre­ferred the cool-looking 2D char­ac­ters as they appeared in the TV series.

The Clone Wars is canon within the Star Wars uni­verse, but no one (prob­a­bly not even Lucas him­self) would ever con­sider it as pri­mary as its six older sib­lings. One advan­tage to being rel­e­gated to the sec­ond tier is a free­dom to vio­late ven­er­a­ble Star Wars tra­di­tions. The clas­sic open­ing crawl is gone, replaced with a Cit­i­zen Kane-style news­reel catch­ing the audi­ence up with the key facts needed to make sense of what’s going on in between all the ‘splo­sions. That par­tic­u­lar change is a shame, but brace your­self for some heresy when I admit I find another change rather wel­come: Kevin Kiner’s very non-John Williams-esque score. As much as Williams’ music was the sound­track of my child­hood (my entire gen­er­a­tion can sing the Star Wars, Jaws, and Indi­ana Jones themes a cap­pella, on cue), I had long since tired of him. The point at which I lost it was the wall-to-wall blan­ket of redun­dant music that threat­ened to drown out the already almost over­whelm­ing Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan.

The Clone Wars series and movie are both set chrono­log­i­cally between the events of Episodes II: Attack of the Clones and III: Revenge of the Sith, a razor-thin slice of time in which noth­ing of import really hap­pened in Star Wars con­ti­nu­ity. The movies already showed us how the war began and ended, so The Clone Wars movie and series are basi­cally war sto­ries. This is actu­ally a good thing in light of how the pre­quel tril­ogy often became bogged down in tedious polit­i­cal pro­ce­dure involv­ing inter­plan­e­tary trade routes. The series was by its nature a string of vignettes, but the fea­ture film still feels like an episodic tour through a num­ber of spec­tac­u­lar bat­tles. A par­tic­u­larly grip­ping and excit­ing bat­tle takes place on a ver­ti­cal cliff face, “shot” with a hand-held “cam­era.” Lucas was sure to con­ceive of his two armies as droids and masked clones, allow­ing for car­nage and huge body counts with­out a drop of blood (not to men­tion the eco­nom­i­cal reuse of cos­tumes, and now, dig­i­tal mod­els). I remain puz­zled, how­ever, how clones and droids can have names, ranks, and vary­ing skill sets. This Dork Reporter grew up with the orig­i­nal tril­ogy, and still has trou­ble accept­ing stormtroop­ers being on the side of the good guys.

Tom Kane in Star Wars: The Clone WarsYoda’s look­ing more “kit­ten” than “tur­tle” today

The TV series focused mostly on the bat­tles, but the movie squeezes a frag­ment of a plot in between the action set pieces. Anakin Sky­walker is incon­ve­niently charged with train­ing Ahsoka Tano (Ash­ley Eck­stein), an annoy­ing teen “padawan learner” (a Luca­sism for “appren­tice” that still sounds very much like a George W. Bush mala­prop­ism). I still find it dif­fi­cult to accept that the Anakin we see here and in Episode III is so close to the tip­ping point to absolute cor­rup­tion that he will soon betray the Rebels and become the embod­i­ment of evil, Darth Vader. At this point, he still seems a merely moody and impetu­ous kid horny for the girl­friend he left behind on Naboo. Being respon­si­ble for the spunky, good­hearted Ahsoka cer­tainly does lit­tle to help him attain the state of emo­tional detach­ment Lucas equates with goodness.

Even though there’s no doubt a great deal of very expen­sive tech­nol­ogy behind this kind of ani­ma­tion, it’s still cheaper than mount­ing a live-action pro­duc­tion. Ani­ma­tion, where any­thing is pos­si­ble, is also the best way for the Star Wars fran­chise to expand the sto­ries of its exist­ing char­ac­ters, when the orig­i­nal actors have aged, become too expen­sive, dis­in­ter­ested, or passed away. So why focus only on the pre­quel char­ac­ters? Why not tell more tales star­ring the trin­ity that every­body really loves: Luke, Leia, and Han? Is Lucas afraid that mess­ing with the canon­i­cal heroes gen­er­a­tions of fans have taken to heart is to risk fatally wound­ing their deep emo­tional con­nec­tion to the mythos? Or to be cyn­i­cal, he may always uti­lize the var­i­ous masked char­ac­ters (Chew­bacca, Boba Fett, Jabba the Hut, Darth Vader, C-3PO, R2-D2) in any­thing at any time with­out clear­ing actors’ like­nesses. That said, some of the orig­i­nal cast do lend their voices to The Clone Wars, includ­ing Samuel L. Jack­son, Anthony Daniels, and Christo­pher Lee. James Arnold Tay­lor does an excel­lent impres­sion of Ewan McGregor’s excel­lent (in turn) impres­sion of Alec Guinness.

One last thing: it wouldn’t be Star Wars with­out at least one offen­sively char­ac­ter­ized alien. Jabba’s uncle Ziro the Hutt (Corey Bur­ton) is inex­plic­a­bly voiced as an old South­ern queen.

Offi­cial movie site: www.starwars.com/theclonewars

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

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The Day the Earth Stood Still 2008 movie poster

 

If the least one expects of the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still is that it merely ful­fill the promise of its title, then please move right along, for the earth stands still only a few moments. It is, how­ever, a far big­ger pro­duc­tion than the 1951 orig­i­nal directed by Robert Wise (read The Dork Report review), even account­ing for the infla­tion of film­mak­ing tech­nol­ogy and audi­ence expec­ta­tion for spec­ta­cle. As if to over­com­pen­sate for the original’s now admit­tedly amus­ing implau­si­bil­i­ties and the silly giant robot and fly­ing saucer, it tries too hard to impress with too many uncon­nected ideas and exces­sive hus­tle and bus­tle. It’s even rather inap­pro­pri­ately macho, with more uncon­vinc­ing dig­i­tal heli­copters and mil­i­tary hard­ware than a typ­i­cal Michael Bay movie. At least it’s much, much bet­ter than the dis­as­trous Inva­sion (the third offi­cial remake of The Inva­sion of the Bodysnatchers).

It does get off to a good start with a pro­logue in which a lone moun­tain climber (Keanu Reeves) dis­cov­ers a glow­ing orb in 1928 India. The sequence is mys­te­ri­ous and inter­est­ing, but ulti­mately unim­por­tant to the plot. We later learn that the orb was an alien probe that copied the climber’s DNA, from which to grow a sur­ro­gate body for the alien Klaatu (Reeves again) decades later. Even the most basic plau­si­bil­ity is vio­lated as humans dis­sect his alien body with­out bio­suits or any kind of quar­an­tine at all. One won­ders if ear­lier drafts of the screen­play involved Klaatu’s cap­tors ini­tially misiden­ti­fy­ing him as a miss­ing per­son from 1928. A missed oppor­tu­nity would be a scene in which the aged orig­i­nal adven­turer comes face-to-face with an alien mim­ic­k­ing his youth­ful self. But as it stands, this whole sub­plot acts as a dis­trac­tion. The orig­i­nal movie sim­ply pre­sented the alien as humanoid (if a lit­tle unusu­ally tall and angu­lar) and that was enough. The notion of a alien being reborn in a new body is inter­est­ing but an unnec­es­sary com­pli­ca­tion, one that only raises ques­tions unre­lated to the cen­tral themes. Klaatu is lucky his tem­plate was the hand­some Reeves (at one point, he steals a schlumpy guy’s suit and it fits as if it were tai­lored for him). Sup­pos­edly this body is human, but he exerts super­pow­ers includ­ing the trans­mu­ta­tion of elec­tric­ity into some kind of sketchily-described life force. In this respect, the orig­i­nal is bet­ter; Klaatu out­wardly looks like us, period, end of story. Isn’t that enough? Another extra­ne­ous idea, super­flu­ous to the core story: Klaatu’s giant omnipo­tent robot com­pan­ion Gort is now com­prised of a swarm of nanobots. Why have both a giant robot and itsy-bitsy nanobots? Pick one idea and run with it.

Keanu Reeves in The Day the Earth Stood StillKeanu Reeves in The Day the Earth Stood Still

But we’re get­ting ahead of our­selves; first we must ful­fill another genre cliché. The Day the Earth Stood Still lines up after the likes of The Hap­pen­ing, The Day After Tomor­row, A.I.: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, Deep Impact, Watch­men, and Clover­field (the list goes on, and on…) to take another stab at dec­i­mat­ing poor New York City. When human­ity detects an uniden­ti­fied object set to strike Man­hat­tan, Dr. Michael Grainer (Man Men’s Jon Hamm) assem­bles a crack team of diverse experts includ­ing astro­bi­ol­o­gist Helen Ben­son (Jen­nifer Con­nelly) to fly around in black heli­copters and gawp help­lessly at all the spe­cial effects. Luck­ily, for the moment at least, the object turns about to be a space­craft. In 1951, alien emis­sary Klaatu (Michael Ren­nie) went to Wash­ing­ton like Mr. Smith. In 2008, this Klaatu fig­ures the place to make a grand entrance is Manhattan’s Cen­tral Park (never mind that the United Nations head­quar­ters is on the East Side). Fans of computer-generated destruc­tion of the sort in which Roland Emmerich traf­fics will be pleased to see Cen­tral Park forcibly land­scaped before the movie is over. Dur­ing the final cli­max in the Park, I’m pretty sure the prin­ci­pals hide under the exact same bridge as the sur­vivors at the end of Cloverfield.

Like the orig­i­nal, it’s cred­ited as being based on the 1940 short story “Farewell to the Mas­ter” by Harry Bates. Its cin­e­matic touch­stones include The Brother From Another Planet and The Man Who Fell to Earth. But it shares a crit­i­cally flawed plot ele­ment with the more recent Watch­men (read The Dork Report review). In the lat­ter, mor­tal hero­ine Silk Spec­tre must con­vince Dr. Man­hat­tan, an ambiva­lent non­hu­man that couldn’t care less, to save the world. Klaatu arrives on Earth to receive the report of an ear­lier agent, who con­firms humans are self destruc­tive by nature. That’s enough for Klaatu to begin to purge the planet, but the agent goes on and tries to impress upon him human’s com­plex­ity. Klaatu is unswayed. Helen and her son Jacob (Jaden Smith, son of Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith) try to do the same and suc­ceed just as Silk Spec­tre did, but in both cases the audi­ence can’t quite under­stand how their argu­ments go through to supe­rior beings one step away from god­hood. Because she’s pretty, and her kid whines so much that Klaatu caved in just to shut him the hell up? Per­son­ally, if I was an alien judg­ing human­ity, and I met such an insanely annoy­ing kid, I would purge the planet too. The movie would merit at least one more Dork Report star if the kid hadn’t been in it.

Jennifer Connelly in The Day the Earth Stood StillJen­nifer Con­nelly in The Day the Earth Stood Still

Jen­nifer Con­nelly is sadly wasted, again. As in Ang Lee’s oth­er­wise under­rated Hulk, she’s rel­e­gated to second-billing below the com­puter effects. The great Kathy Bates fares even worse in a role any­one could have played. As for the leg­endary John Cleese’s cameo as a mad sci­en­tist, I assume the idea was to cast a slightly kooky per­son­al­ity with a British accent to project intel­li­gence to dumb Amer­i­can audi­ences. But the for­merly manic Cleese has mel­lowed out so much in his later years that they could have just cast any old Brit.

The orig­i­nal Day the Earth Stood Still was quite obvi­ously a Cold War para­ble, if a lit­tle mud­dled in its par­tic­u­lars. This ver­sion skirts the pol­i­tics of war, choos­ing instead to recast the basic premise as an eco-parable. Much like M. Night Shyamalan’s Hap­pen­ing (read The Dork Report review), New York’s Cen­tral Park is ground zero for an eco­log­i­cal cat­a­stro­phe. Part of Klaatu’s mis­sion is to save sam­ples of the Earth’s bios­phere, which the Sec­re­tary of Defense (Bates) explic­itly equates to the Bib­li­cal tale of Noah’s Ark.

Wikipedia notes the film was a largely green pro­duc­tion, in which the crew recy­cled or donated props and cos­tumes, and uti­lized a cen­tral intranet to reduce paper waste. But within the story itself, for an alien con­cerned about clean­ing up the Earth, Klaatu is quite con­tent to ride back and forth from Man­hat­tan to New Jer­sey in a gas-guzzling SUV (the man­u­fac­turer of which no doubt pro­vided prod­uct placement).

Finally, some ques­tions: exactly how much of the world is dec­i­mated in the end? How does Klaatu expect human­ity to clean up the planet when he’s already destroyed most of the infra­struc­ture? Imag­ine all the home­less­ness, star­va­tion, chaos, riot­ing, and loot­ing that must be dealt with before any gov­ern­ment could even begin to think about ozone holes or car­bon col­lec­tion. Also, Klaatu’s species has the tech­nol­ogy to dis­in­te­grate all man­made mate­ri­als on an entire planet, but he totally dis­misses out of hand the idea of clean­ing up our pol­lu­tion for us, or at least lend­ing us the tech­nol­ogy? The orig­i­nal Klaatu had more faith in humanity.

Offi­cial movie site: www.dtessmovie.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

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The Day the Earth Stood Still 1951 movie poster

 

Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still is one of the few essen­tial sci­ence fic­tion movies that has lasted, over­com­ing dated spe­cial effects, act­ing styles, and the end of the Cold War (provider of sub­text for many a hor­ror story). In the com­pany of For­bid­den Planet (Shakespeare’s The Tem­pest in Space), The Blob (an inva­sive species con­sumes the pop­u­la­tion), and Inva­sion of the Body Snatch­ers (small­town Amer­ica suc­cumbs to the ulti­mate con­for­mity), it con­tin­ues to res­onate decades later, even being reimag­ined in 2008 as an ecoparable.

Imme­di­ately strik­ing is the dis­so­nant score by Bernard Her­rmann, of Psy­cho fame. The evoca­tive piece over the open­ing cred­its sounds just like an out­take from Brian Eno’s ambi­ent album On Land, thirty years early.

Michael Rennie as Klaatu in The Day the Earth Stood Stillevi­dently they have Bryl­creem in space

Wise shows us humanity’s first alien con­tact through the quaint fil­ter of period radio and tele­vi­sion; rest assured, “sci­en­tists and mil­i­tary men” are on the case. Klaatu (Michael Ren­nie), a suave cau­casian humanoid male alien, and his pet robot Gort (Lock Mar­tin) park their UFO on a base­ball field on The Mall in Wash­ing­ton D.C. His polite request for an audi­ence with the United Nations goes rebuffed, for dur­ing the height of the Cold War, not even a fly­ing saucer, an alien in a sil­ver jump­suit, and a giant robot is enough to con­vince the nations of the world to sit down and talk. Klaatu’s fly­ing saucer is sur­rounded by hilar­i­ously lax secu­rity, and he is briefly taken into cus­tody before hand­ily escap­ing into the D.C. suburbs.

Klaatu has learned mid-Atlantic accented Eng­lish from radio and tele­vi­sion broad­casts, and out­wardly appears per­fectly humanoid right down to his slicked-back hair (they evi­dently have Bryl­creem in space), so all he needs to blend in with the masses is to sim­ply steal someone’s dry clean­ing. He checks into a spare room, with some shots directly quot­ing Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 clas­sic The Lodger. He befriends young Bobby (Billy Gray) with­out a hint of sus­pi­cion, dat­ing the film more than any­thing else.

Klaatu tries to get his mes­sage through to a paci­fist sci­en­tist, but he’s dis­cov­ered, shot, and dies. Gort, pro­grammed to acti­vate in such an event, threat­ens to exact an unspec­i­fied vio­lence upon human­ity. But Klaatu has already taught his inter­species ladyfriend Helen (Patri­cia Neal) the robot-mollifying fail-safe code­phrase “Klaatu barada nikto.” Gort ceases his hos­til­i­ties, and instead revives Klaatu using machin­ery on their ship. Klaatu claims his new lease on life is only for a lim­ited time, for true res­ur­rec­tion is only the domain of “the Almighty Spirit”. The remark­able fact that he believes in a God goes unre­marked upon; both he and the humans to whom he’s speak­ing sim­ply take it for granted they’re talk­ing about the same deity. This line stands out for a rea­son; the dia­logue was report­edly inserted at the request of the MPAA, who objected to Klaatu’s god­like pow­ers of res­ur­rec­tion. Fail­ing to reach the world’s lead­ers, he set­tles for the next-best thing: an assem­bled group of sci­en­tists (all, of course, white males). Mes­sage deliv­ered, he leaves Earth in a huff.

Lock Martin as Gort in the Day the Earth Stood StillKlaatu barada nikto! Don’t tase me, bro!

So, let’s recap: an oth­er­worldly vis­i­tor with a mes­sage of peace-or-else is exe­cuted, rises again, and ascends into the heav­ens. Do I have to spell it out?

But if Klaatu is anal­o­gous to Jesus, let’s take a closer look at his mes­sage. He claims Earth­lings’ war­like behav­ior is of no inter­est to the space­far­ing species of the uni­verse, as long as it’s con­tained to one planet. But the inter­stel­lar com­mu­nity is begin­ning to fear that Earth­lings are about to dis­cover inter­stel­lar travel, and they will not per­mit human­ity to bring their atomic weapons with them. Klaatu is the rep­re­sen­ta­tive of other soci­eties that have already passed through this phase, whom, unable to curb their vio­lent impulses on their own, came up with a solu­tion to police them­selves: a fleet of lethal robots pro­grammed to erad­i­cate any­one that vio­lates the truce. So they use weapons to deter the use of other weapons? What kind of mes­sage is that to a Cold War audi­ence liv­ing under the night­mare of Mutu­ally Ensured Destruc­tion? To the 21st Cen­tury viewer, the imme­di­ate worry is whether or not we could ever trust an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence with impar­tially keep­ing the peace. Indeed, whole sci­ence fic­tion fran­chises have been built upon that very theme, includ­ing 2001, Blade Run­ner, The Ter­mi­na­tor, The Matrix, and Bat­tlestar Galactica.

But per­haps I’m being too lit­eral. It’s a sim­ple movie, but is it a sim­ple anal­ogy? Is the army of Gorts a sym­bol for Earth’s nuclear arse­nal? No, because that’s exactly what Klaatu wants humans to put away. Accord­ing to The New York Times, pro­ducer Julian Blaustein “told the press [the film] was an argu­ment in favor of a ‘strong United Nations.’” But the U.N. is den­i­grated as petty and inef­fec­tive in the movie; they won’t deign to gather to merely lis­ten to Klaatu’s speech. The over­all mes­sage is very cyn­i­cal: even more advanced aliens aren’t able to curb their vio­lent impulses on their own. Klaatu is here to threaten, not save us. If we embark out into space bear­ing weapons, we’re toast.

The Day the Earth Stood Still is based on 1940 short story “Farewell to the Mas­ter” by Harry Bates. Wal­ter Tre­vis’ 1963 novel The Man Who Fell to Earth (filmed in 1976 by Nicholas Roeg, star­ring David Bowie) shares some plot ele­ments (the alien Thomas New­ton too bears dia­monds as seed money), but veers off into another direc­tion alto­gether. New­ton has no inter­est in steer­ing humanity’s course. He’s here on a secret mis­sion to save his own peo­ple, but falls prey to his own all-too-human weaknesses.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Set Phasers to Awesome: Star Trek

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Star Trek movie poster

 

Like the 1966 Corvette a reck­less young James Tiberius Kirk com­man­deers in an early sequence, the new Star Trek is precision-crafted for speed, sex appeal, and total awe­some­ness. Kirk launches that beau­ti­ful machine off a cliff, but thank­fully direc­tor J.J. Abrams never does the same with the movie. Star Trek (the first in the fran­chise to go by the per­fectly terse name of the orig­i­nal TV series) joins the rar­i­fied ranks of the few other mod­ern block­busters that thrill and enter­tain (not to men­tion cost and earn mas­sive piles of money) yet have last­ing merit. Make room on the DVD shelf for a new entry in the canon, along­side Jaws, E.T.: The Extrater­res­trial, The Lord of the Rings tril­ogy, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, and Spider-Man 2.

Trek has a long tra­di­tion of uti­liz­ing the sci­ence fic­tion con­ceits of time travel and alter­nate dimen­sions to play­fully sub­vert its char­ac­ters and mythos. The orig­i­nal series intro­duced the Mir­ror Uni­verse, giv­ing the cast the chance to rein­ter­pret their goodly char­ac­ters in hairier, eviler alter egos. Two of the best movies brought the Enter­prise back in time, first to save the whales in the 1980s (in the light­hearted Star Trek IV: The Voy­age Home), and later to wit­ness Earth­lings’ first con­tact with an alien race in 2063 (in the under­rated Star Trek VIII: First Con­tact). Two of my per­sonal favorite Next Gen­er­a­tion episodes “Yesterday’s Enter­prise” and “All Good Things” tasked Cap­tain Picard with course-correcting an Enter­prise skip­ping through time, no mat­ter the sac­ri­fice. The fun in these kinds of sto­ries comes not just from their brain-teasing sci-fi con­cepts, but in enjoy­ing new twists on the estab­lished char­ac­ters fans love. But any real inno­va­tions were always only tem­po­rary, the sta­tus quo always quickly restored in time (so to speak) for the next episode.

Anton Yelchin, Chris Pine, Simon Pegg, John Cho, and Zoe Saldana in Star Trekall hands on deck

Thus, the Star Trek fran­chise has man­aged to main­tain a sin­gle (albeit mas­sively com­pli­cated) time­line across six TV series, ten movies, and count­less nov­els and comic books. There’s even a niche mar­ket in the con­ti­nu­ity data itself, as evi­denced by pop­u­lar wikis like Mem­ory Alpha and ref­er­ence tomes such as Star Trek Chronol­ogy: The His­tory of the Future. Such cat­a­logs of the incred­i­bly com­plex future “his­tory” in which Trek is set are use­ful not only to obses­sive fans, but also to the writ­ers charged with cre­at­ing new sto­ries that don’t con­tra­dict what came before, at least too badly.

A cer­tain degree of renewal was already built right in to Star Trek. When any one premise ran out of ideas, an ensem­ble aged beyond plau­si­bil­ity, or rat­ings dipped, the pro­duc­ers could always start over with a new ship, a new space sta­tion, or in a new year. The most rad­i­cal depar­ture yet attempted was the ulti­mately dis­ap­point­ing final series, Enter­prise. The pre­quel, set years before Kirk would take the helm, got off to a great start with a Starfleet crew a world apart from any we had seen before. As many have pointed out over the years, Star Trek cre­ator Gene Rod­den­berry may have mod­eled Starfleet on the Navy, but the orig­i­nal 1960s series was basi­cally a West­ern set in space. The 1980s The Next Gen­er­a­tion recon­ceived Starfleet as kind of trans-species peace­keep­ing fleet, a kind of U.N. of The Milky Way. So, set between Earth­lings’ rough-and-tumble early space­far­ing years and the later ide­al­is­tic inter­galac­tic coöper­a­tion, Enter­prise fea­tured a bunch of cocky cow­boys brazenly tak­ing their val­ues out with them into space, base­ball caps firmly screwed on heads, and phasers defi­antly set to kill. The series seemed poised to be a some­what obvi­ous but fruit­ful metaphor for an arro­gant, George W. Bush-era United States forcibly spread­ing democ­racy where it wasn’t wel­come. But its qual­ity (both in writ­ing and in spe­cial effects bud­get) bot­tomed out in just a few episodes, and even the smoking-hot, well-endowed Vul­can T’Pol (Jolene Blalock) couldn’t keep the show on the air.

Zoe Saldana in Star TrekUhura mod­els the lat­est in 23rd Cen­tury Blue­tooth fashions

The entire Star Trek fran­chise seemed all but dead after Enter­prise’s can­cel­la­tion, not unlike the no-win sce­nario Spock devises as a test to tor­ture Starfleet cadets to see how they cope with fail­ure. A cher­ished part of Star Trek lore is that Kirk doesn’t believe in no-win sce­nar­ios, and thus cheated in order to win Spock’s unwinnable test. Para­mount evi­dently learned a les­son from Kirk’s lat­eral think­ing, for the first they they have given the OK to an irrev­er­ent new cre­ative team to per­ma­nently reboot Trek from top to bot­tom. Nearly all of Trek’s metic­u­lously main­tained con­ti­nu­ity (except­ing, iron­i­cally, the failed Enter­prise, set chrono­log­i­cally before any of the events of this movie) has now for­ever been rede­fined as belong­ing to an alter­nate time­line. At least, that is, until the next reboot. As the heavily-advertised appear­ance of Leonard Nimoy as the orig­i­nal “Spock Prime” attests, noth­ing nec­es­sar­ily pre­cludes the reap­pear­ance of any beloved orig­i­nal actors or other kinds of crossovers between time­lines (any­thing in pos­si­ble in sci­ence fic­tion). But Star Trek does mark a very clear end to Star Trek as we knew it.

After 40 years of unre­li­able qual­ity con­trol and dimin­ish­ing box office, such dras­tic mea­sures were arguably essen­tial to pre­serve Trek as a viable fran­chise. But I do sym­pa­thize with the grum­bling of long­time fans upset at scrap­ping every­thing and start­ing over. And this is not even to men­tion the many writ­ers, direc­tors, and actors that cre­ated the no-longer canon­i­cal sto­ries. All of which hasn’t dis­ap­peared from our real­ity, and will be enjoyed for­ever on DVD, but this film does ren­der pretty much every­thing that came before it as second-class Trek. I can’t help but won­der how all future spin­offs are now going to be han­dled on a prac­ti­cal level. For instance, if there are to be future comics or nov­els fea­tur­ing the char­ac­ters from The Next Gen­er­a­tion, are the phys­i­cal prod­ucts going to have to be labelled as tak­ing place in the now-depricated orig­i­nal fic­tional uni­verse? How does “Trek Clas­sic” and “Neu Trek” sound?

Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto in Star TrekSpock has had enough Kirk and can’t take it anymore

But back to the topic at hand: the totally awe­some new movie is packed with glossy art direc­tion, gen­uinely excit­ing spe­cial effects, fight scenes, chase sequences, and attrac­tive young actors young and attrac­tive enough to strut about on the big screen in their space scant­ies. Despite all this gloss, it some­how man­ages to not be totally stu­pid, which is more than This Dork Reporter can say about your typ­i­cal sum­mer movie (*cough* Trans­form­ers *cough*). How­ever, I can’t help but point out a few, for­give me, illog­i­cal plot ele­ments, espe­cially in the mad rush towards the end:

  • Why does Kirk bother fir­ing upon Nero’s ship as it’s being torn apart by a black hole? The Dork Report’s No-Prize answer: maybe Kirk feared Nero would time travel yet again to cre­ate mis­chief in yet another time­line (hey, there’s always the inevitable next reboot in a few years).
  • Starfleet is busy else­where in the galaxy, so we see the cadets mobi­lized into a strike force to con­front Nero. So why is the Acad­emy still full of stu­dents when Nero’s ship reaches Earth? The Dork Report’s No-Prize answer: maybe they were Fresh­men not qual­i­fied to do more than merely swab the decks.
  • It’s wildly implau­si­ble for young Spock to maroon Kirk on the same planet that Nero did Spock Prime. The Dork Report’s No-Prize answer: nope, I got noth­ing. I mean, really, come on! (but still, the movie is awe­some, just go with it)
  • The hard­est plot point to swal­low is why Spock Prime does not accom­pany Kirk back to the Enter­prise. Would he really risk the fate of Earth because he thinks it’s more impor­tant that Kirk and his young self forge their des­tined friend­ship? The Dork Report’s No-Prize answer: yes.

But enough com­plain­ing. Did I men­tion the movie is TEH AWESOME? There’s not one bad per­for­mance to drag things down (a notable prob­lem with Watch­men — read The Dork Report review). Despite being tasked with recre­at­ing char­ac­ters beloved by fans for over 40 years, no one attempts an out­right imi­ta­tion or car­i­ca­ture. The most faith­ful is Zachary Quinto as Spock. Beyond his eerie phys­i­cal resem­blance to Nimoy (maybe not how he actu­ally looked in 1966, but how he might have), he has a fresh take that plays up the character’s inter­nal strug­gle between emo­tion and logic. Chris Pine art­fully embod­ies Kirk’s blend of right­eous nobil­ity and brash rule-busting atti­tude with­out aping William Shatner’s famously hammy style (for which we all, admit it, love him). Karl Urban nails Bones as a sea­sick pes­simist, and Zoe Sal­dana and John Cho bring wel­come sass and phys­i­cal action hero prowess to Uhura and Sulu, two char­ac­ters often left on the side­lines. Only Anton Yelchin and Simon Pegg come close to over­do­ing it. Pegg mugs and shouts, play­ing Scotty as much more of a mad Scots­man than James Doohan ever did, and Yelchin overex­ag­ger­ates Chekov’s accent for pure com­edy. But that’s not to say both per­for­mances aren’t hugely enter­tain­ing, just like every­thing else on display.

Simon Pegg in Star TrekPegg gives Scotty’s accent all she’s got, Captain!

Star Trek goes much much fur­ther with Spock’s half-human nature than any of the Trek I’ve seen. Spock was such a key ingre­di­ent that almost every ver­sion of Trek that fol­lowed was oblig­ated to include a sim­i­lar char­ac­ter: most obvi­ously the android Data (Brent Spiner) in The Next Gen­er­a­tion. We are reminded the Vul­can species is not nat­u­rally emo­tion­less, as many casual fans assume, but rather a deeply pas­sion­ate peo­ple that holds its war­like nature in check by ele­vat­ing logic to the level of reli­gion. A purely devout Vul­can would be about as dra­mat­i­cally inter­est­ing as a robot (but it must be said that even Spock’s father Sarek (Ben Cross), a high-ranking Vul­can elder, pri­vately admits to being moved by the irra­tional emo­tion of love). The aged Spock Prime is prac­ti­cally jovial, seem­ingly hav­ing come to terms with his dual­ity. It’s actu­ally rather heart­warm­ing for a long­time fan to see him at a place of peace with himself.

I have room for one more small com­plaint: there’s an over­re­liance on clichéd father issues as easy story short­cuts to define char­ac­ter, for which I blame J.J. Abrams. Both Kirk and Spock are torn between rebelling against and own­ing up to their respec­tive heroic, accom­plished fathers. Abrams also built his TV series Alias and Lost upon the same dra­matic crutch, in which seem­ingly every char­ac­ter is pri­mar­ily moti­vated by strained rela­tion­ships with absent and/or bad fathers (e.g. Syd­ney, Jack, Locke, Kate, Miles, etc…). One won­ders, sta­tis­ti­cally speak­ing, how many peo­ple in the world actu­ally do have such com­pli­cated rela­tion­ships with their dads. Maybe those that do are just more likely to make their careers writ­ing scripts for Hollywood.

None of the many Trek sequels, pre­quels, or spin­offs to date have ever reached the mythic sta­tus of the orig­i­nal series and its core dynamic duo Kirk and Spock. Star Trek makes a bold bid to reclaim what made the orig­i­nal such a phe­nom­e­non: it goes back to the orig­i­nal sce­nario and char­ac­ters, and thor­oughly remas­ters, rein­vig­o­rates, rein­vents, and gives them a swift kick in the ass. It restores the names Kirk and Spock to the realm of leg­ends and icons.

Offi­cial movie site: www.startrekmovie.com

Battlestar Galactica: Caprica

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Battlestar Galactica Caprica poster

 

UPDATE: Read our revised and expanded review of the Caprica pilot, writ­ten after the pilot aired on television.

The recently con­cluded series Bat­tlestar Galac­tica (2003–2009) was crit­i­cally acclaimed and much beloved by a rel­a­tively small group of fans and crit­ics that appre­ci­ated the sexy, brainy show’s bleak, pes­simistic view of human­ity. It will cer­tainly live for­ever as a clas­sic achieve­ment in tele­vi­sion, but the com­mon con­sen­sus is that it failed to reach the wide audi­ence it could have. Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer Ron Moore told Vari­ety “‘We had view­ers say that if they were able to trick their wives or girl­friends into watch­ing Galac­tica, they loved it. But with the name Bat­tlestar Galac­tica scream­ing sci­ence fic­tion,’ he adds, ‘there was just such a high hur­dle to get female view­ers to even try it.’” So comes Caprica, a pre­quel osten­si­bly engi­neered from the begin­ning for greater appeal.

The series proper will not air until early 2010, but in an orig­i­nal move, its unrated (read: blood ‘n’ boo­bies) movie-length pilot episode pre­miered day-and-date on DVD and dig­i­tal down­load. It pre­serves some of the sig­na­ture ver­nac­u­lar of its par­ent series: tech­nob­a­b­ble like “Cylon” (Cyber­netic Life­form Node), the trip-on-the-tongue “gods damn it,” the infa­mous euphemism “frak,” and even racial epi­thets like “dirt eater.” The char­ac­ter of Bill Adama (Edward James Olmos in Bat­tlestar Galac­tica) appears as a young boy. Some of the same core themes are still present, par­tic­u­larly reli­gious intol­er­ance and fam­i­lies cop­ing with cat­a­strophic dis­as­ter. But there are sig­nif­i­cantly wor­ri­some signs that indi­cate a fatal mis­cal­cu­la­tion on The SyFy Channel’s part (worse than their aston­ish­ingly stu­pid rechris­ten­ing from “Sci-Fi”): Caprica hinges on two men and three annoy­ing teens, rel­e­gat­ing its only two adult female char­ac­ters to the sidelines.

Eric Stoltz and Esai Morales in Battlestar Galactica CapricaCaprica, like Bat­tlestar Galac­tica, holds that there are no Sur­geon Gen­eral warn­ings in space

It may very well be the case that many women were dis­cour­aged from check­ing Bat­tlestar Galac­tica out, but it’s also true that the show fea­tured a bevy of sig­nif­i­cant, com­plex women: self-destructive fire­brand Star­buck (Katee Sack­hoff), pres­i­dent of all human­ity Laura Roslin (Mary McDon­nell), Dick Cheney-esque war crim­i­nal Cap­tain Cain (Michelle Forbes), and con­flicted Cylons Three (Lucy Law­less), Six (Tri­cia Helfer), and Eight (Grace Park). So far, at least, Caprica includes only two lead female roles, nei­ther of whom fig­ures strongly in the plot: Amanda Gray­stone (Paula Mal­com­son, from Dead­wood) and Sis­ter Clarice Wil­low (Polly Walker, from Rome). But maybe this makes a kind of sense. The core dynamic is clas­sic sto­ry­telling: indus­tri­al­ist Daniel Gray­stone (Eric Stoltz) and lawyer Joseph Adama (Esai Morales) become entan­gled in a plot, while com­ing from oppos­ing philo­soph­i­cal points of view. If one of them had been female, the viewer might nat­u­rally expect a roman­tic sub­plot. Caprica’s cre­ators may have avoided this kind of dis­trac­tion, but the down­side is that the pri­mary nar­ra­tive con­flict is between two men, and the only two female char­ac­ters are solely defined by their rela­tion­ships to their men and kids. Daniel and Amanda’s daugh­ter Zoe (Alessan­dra Tores­sani) is killed in a ter­ror­ist attack, but we never see the icy Amanda mourn as we do Daniel. Her char­ac­ter is sim­ply Daniel’s wife, noth­ing more. Sis­ter Wil­low, at least, is revealed by the end to be more than she seems. Here’s hop­ing we see Amanda and Sis­ter Wil­low sig­nif­i­cantly expanded in future episodes.

Another thing Bat­tlestar Galac­tica got right was to side­step alto­gether the trap of child char­ac­ters. It was an adult show, for intel­li­gent adults. Caprica obvi­ously also didn’t learn from a les­son from Jeri­cho (2006–2008), a gen­er­ally smart show whose weak­est char­ac­ters were a pair of teens that were thank­fully writ­ten out. Out of Caprica’s trio of incred­i­bly annoy­ing kids, at least two die but unfor­tu­nately come back.

Eric Stoltz, Paula Malcomson, and Esai Morales in Battlestar Galactica CapricaWait, there was a woman in Caprica? Let’s hope poor Paula Mal­com­son actu­ally gets some scenes in the full series

The first 10 min­utes pack in a huge down­load of infor­ma­tion, espe­cially for some­one not already versed in the fic­tional Galac­tica uni­verse. Cer­tain key points are reit­er­ated once things slow down later, but a new viewer tun­ing in cold might get the sense they were sup­posed to be versed in all this stuff already, instead of just get­ting teased with a bar­rage of info to be unpacked later. When a title card reads “58 years before The Fall,” Galac­tica fans will catch the ref­er­ence to the sneak attack by the Cylons that nearly erad­i­cates their human creators.

We then cut directly to the deca­dent V Club, imply­ing its late-Rome-like deca­dence to be one of the direct causes of the com­ing Fall. A fully immer­sive vir­tual real­ity sim­u­la­tion not unlike The Matrix, the V Club is full of teens danc­ing to dated techno, hot les­bians, sim­u­lated human sac­ri­fice, and a fight club. Its banal­ity betrays a fail­ure of imag­i­na­tion not just on the part of Caprica’s teens, but also on the film­mak­ers. A rebel­lious gen­er­a­tion cre­ates a vir­tual world in which they can do absolutely any­thing they want, and all they can come up with is a sin­gle night­club that only spins techno from Earth’s 1990s? No gay boys want to make out? Nobody wants to fly? Nobody wants a body made of jade?

The tit­u­lar Caprica is the cap­i­tal of twelve plan­ets col­o­nized by human­ity. We only caught glimpses of its future on Bat­tlestar Galac­tica, so there is plenty of unex­plored ter­ri­tory for a new series to fill in. Its fash­ions resem­ble 1950s Amer­ica, per­haps meant to cap­i­tal­ize on the pop­u­lar­ity of the Show­time series Mad Men. We’re sup­posed to agree that Caprica is a cor­rupt, deca­dent soci­ety on the cusp of col­lapse. But how, exactly? They’re play­ing god(s) by delv­ing into dan­ger­ous tech­no­log­i­cal areas like robotic weapons and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, or at least a means of record­ing a human individual’s con­scious­ness into a com­puter. They’ve designed vir­tual real­ity sys­tems capa­ble of sim­u­lat­ing any desire. The soci­ety is racist to the core; Tau­rans (from the colony Tau­rus) are called “dirt eaters” and asso­ci­ated with orga­nized crime (although to be fair, the lat­ter actu­ally is true — they seem sim­i­lar to the immi­grant Sicil­ian mafia in 1920s Amer­ica). Like Michael Cor­leone in the God­fa­ther tril­ogy, Joseph is osten­si­bly an upstand­ing cit­i­zen forced to com­pro­mise with his her­itage. Unable to com­pletely extri­cate him­self from the mob, he tries to raise his son as a Capri­can, to the con­ster­na­tion of his grandmother.

Alessandra Toressani in Battlestar Galactica CapricaZoe, genius hacker, goes club­bing in The Matrix

This society’s most dan­ger­ous trait is its ingrained reli­gious intol­er­ance. The pop­u­la­tion is almost uni­formly poly­the­is­tic, and intol­er­ant of the minor­ity monothe­ists. Under­ground mil­i­tants have formed the Sol­diers of the One, a cult that believes in a com­bi­na­tion of monothe­ism and anti-science. Their rep­re­sen­ta­tive Sis­ter Wil­low manip­u­lates ter­ror­ist tot Ben (Avan Jogia) to stage a bombing.

The biggest addi­tion to the Bat­tlestar Galac­tica mythos is a deeper look into arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Like the Ter­mi­na­tor fran­chise, I appre­ci­ate Caprica’s empha­sis that devel­op­ing arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence is a sep­a­rate pur­suit than build­ing robots. Too many sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries seem to equate the two, includ­ing Bat­tlestar Galac­tica itself in its final episode. The Day the Earth Stood Still and For­bid­den Planet’s humanoid robots have minds of its own, but what about being robots makes them so, as opposed to immo­bile com­put­ers? Blade Runner’s repli­cants and A.I.‘s boy robots look human first, and it is never asked what exactly makes them sen­tient beings (unless the ques­tion is how we anthro­po­mor­phize things that out­wardly seem human). Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence is almost always auto­mat­i­cally evil in movies such as Ter­mi­na­tor and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is rarely inher­ently inno­cent, as in A.I.: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence. Caprica fea­tures two dis­turb­ing scenes of a human con­scious­ness wak­ing up trapped in a crude robot body. That’s called overeg­ging your pud­ding. Also creepy: the advances made by Zoe lead directly to Daniel’s clumsy war­rior robots becom­ing the effec­tive killing machines chris­tened Cylons.

Speak­ing of, how could a lumi­nary in the robot­ics busi­ness not know his own daugh­ter was a genius hacker? A par­tic­u­larly hard-to-swallow bit of tech­nob­a­b­ble is the repeated sta­tis­tic that the amount of data encoded in a human brain com­prises only 300 megabytes. Appar­ently work­ing on her own, Zoe comes up with the solu­tion to pre­serv­ing a human mind in a com­puter: sup­ple­ment that 300 MB of data with the dig­i­tal detri­tus that per­son has left behind: med­ical records, playlists, email, searches, etc. Her break­through allows Daniel to res­ur­rect Joseph’s late daugh­ter as well (although we don’t see how he obtained her 300 MB worth of brain mat­ter). The resul­tant dupli­cate quickly goes insane, so Zoe is some­how spe­cial, the only dig­i­tal human mind that doesn’t go mad.

Some awfully big events are revealed in the DVD edition’s deleted scenes: Adama learns early on that Zoe was involved in the bomb­ing, adding an extra dimen­sion to his inter­ac­tions with her father. Also, boy bomber Ben’s mind was also suc­cess­fully uploaded into the V Club by Sis­ter Wil­low, sug­gest­ing that Zoe might not be so unique after all, and that her sci­en­tic break­throughs may have been in part devel­oped by the Sol­diers of the One. Both of these strike me as great lay­ers of com­plex­ity that would have only added to the story.

Offi­cial movie site: www.scifi.com/caprica

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Los Cronocrímenes (Timecrimes)

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Los Cronocrímenes Timecrimes movie poster

 

A grotesquely cos­tumed, knife-wielding creep on the Time­crimes (Los Cronocrímenes) the­atri­cal poster promises an exploita­tive slasher pic along the lines of Texas Chain­saw Mas­sacre. To some degree, con­sid­er­ing the degra­da­tions made upon a breath­tak­ingly beau­ti­ful girl alone in the woods, it is. But Nacho Vigalondo’s Span­ish sci­ence fic­tion puz­zler is a friend­lier sib­ling to Shane Carruth’s Primer (2004), a much more brain-spraining chrono­log­i­cal conun­drum. Both are rare sci­ence fic­tions that rely on a com­plex­ity of ideas rather than spe­cial effect eye candy. Vigalondo’s dif­fer­ent take on the sci-fi tropes of time travel (more on that later) makes Time­crimes a lit­tle eas­ier to follow.

The film opens with Héc­tor (Karra Ele­jalde) dri­ving home from gro­cery shop­ping with the hatch­back of his car ajar, leav­ing a string of gro­ceries behind him (yes, it’s a metaphor). He and his wife Clara (Can­dela Fer­nán­dez) are out­fit­ting a coun­try home as a retreat for the stressed-out insom­niac. We never learn what exactly ails him, or what kind of job affords them such a lifestyle. Lit­tle do we real­ize that vio­lence and chaos is already roil­ing in the bucolic woods around them. Their neigh­bor turns out to be a research insti­tute devel­op­ing a rudi­men­tary time machine. The device is not due to be tested for weeks, but unnamed staffer El Joven (Viga­londo him­self), is hang­ing around the facil­ity to tin­ker with it with­out permission.

Karra Elejalde in TimecrimesTime­crimes’ pink boogieman

Héc­tor encoun­ters an uncon­scious nude woman (Bár­bara Goe­naga) in the woods, and finds him­self pur­sued by what he assumes to be her assailant. Tak­ing refuge at the insti­tute, El Joven vol­un­teers to hide him in an appa­ra­tus that resem­bles a hot tub pre­pared for a milk bath. From Hector’s point of view, the doors open mere moments later, but he finds him­self sev­eral hours in the past. Even though Héc­tor is the first per­son to ever travel through time, El Joven seems pretty una­mazed that the machine works. He’s also assured of the rules: Héc­tor must be sure to stay out of the way as his future self comes to the time machine, after which there will once again only be one Hec­tor in the world. Meet­ing him­self and/or alter­ing events (say, pre­vent­ing his future self from ever pass­ing back to the past), would cause a cat­a­clysmic paradox.

El Joven never spec­i­fies what exactly the results would be, but any­one famil­iar with Doc­tor Who, Star Trek, and the afore­men­tioned Primer would know that a tem­po­ral para­dox could rup­ture the space time con­tin­uüm, reverse the polar­ity of the neu­tron flow, be really socially awk­ward, or… what­ever. More illus­tra­tive is the para­dox at the heart of the Ter­mi­na­tor films: the evil arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence SkyNet sends a cyborg back in time to kill Sarah Con­nor, before she becomes the mother of SkyNet’s mor­tal enemy John Con­nor. Future-John also sends his best friend Kyle Reese back in time, osten­si­bly to pro­tect his mother. As David Fos­ter Wal­lace pointed out in his vicious cri­tique of Ter­mi­na­tor 2: Judege­ment Day, the para­dox is that both time trav­el­ers cause the unwanted future to occur: Reese sleeps with Sarah and becomes John’s father, and the wreck­age of the cyborg becomes the tech­no­log­i­cal basis for build­ing SkyNet.

Nacho Vigalondo in Timecrimesdirec­tor Nacho Viga­londo appar­ently wrote his pitch meet­ing into his script

Héc­tor orig­i­nally acts impul­sively and attempts to con­tact his past self by phone, and then in per­son. He makes a series of calami­tous errors, and even­tu­ally comes to real­ize that he must shift his strat­egy to ensure he not dis­rupt what has already hap­pened to him, but will be every­body else’s future. El Joven only sticks Hec­tor into the time machine in the first place because a copy of him that already went through told El Joven he had to do it. Hec­tor kid­naps and abuses La Chica to recre­ate the per­verse sce­nario the past ver­sion of him­self encoun­tered. He com­mits a per­verse crime against her, but not for his plea­sure (to any­one not aware of his predica­ment, his behav­ior is psychotic).

But the increas­ingly crazed Héc­tor tries one last time to change events. He trav­els back in time again, cre­at­ing a sec­ond tem­po­ral loop-de-loop, a third dupli­cate of him­self, and more pro­lif­er­at­ing walkie-talkies than I was able to keep track of. Héc­tor only seems to real­ize near the end of his ordeal that every­thing is click­ing into a pre­de­ter­mined sequence of events, regard­less of his direct or indi­rect inter­fer­ence. Even­tu­ally, a calm­ness comes over him, and he sim­ply sits down and waits for events to fin­ish play­ing them­selves out, know­ing there is noth­ing he can do. So Time­crimes’ notion of time travel is not actu­ally like that in Star Trek or Ter­mi­na­tor, but more like the tele­vi­sion show Lost, whose rules stip­u­late that there is only one unal­ter­able time­line. There is no such thing as a paradox.

Karra Elejalde and Bárbara Goenaga in TimecrimesLa Chica unknow­ingly helps Héc­tor out of two dif­fer­ent car crashes

Héctor’s time loops are straight­ened out by the end, with only one ver­sion of him­self left in the world. But his mis­ad­ven­tures in time have left a trail of destruc­tion behind him sim­i­lar to his spilled gro­ceries in the begin­ning of the film. La Chica lies dead in his gar­den, he’s crashed two cars, and the police are com­ing. La Chica’s neck­lace is in his pocket, and he’s sure to be found guilty for her death. Per­haps worse of all, a work­ing time machine site idle at the top of the hill, wait­ing for more mis­takes to be made.

The DVD also includes Vigalondo’s excel­lent short film 7:35 de la Mañana (7:35 AM), in which he exhibits his prowess with the slow reveal of nar­ra­tive information.

Offi­cial movie site: www.loscronocrimenes.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Mutant Mayhem: X-Men

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X-Men movie poster

 

On a whim, this Dork Reporter decided to rewatch X-Men and found it sur­pris­ingly good, even bet­ter than I remem­bered from my first view­ing almost 10 years ago. I used to be a comics fan, and read most of Chris Clare­mont and John Romita Jr.‘s lengthy run on The Uncanny X-Men series in the mid-80s. Even though I had long since stopped read­ing comics reg­u­larly by the time the movie was announced in 2000, I recall being con­vinced there was no way a live-action X-Men movie could not be a ridicu­lous folly. But I went to see it partly out of mor­bid curios­ity and partly out of a sense of duty as an ex-fan (see what I did there?). As it turned out, writer David Hayter and direc­tor Bryan Singer’s expert adap­ta­tion of the Mar­vel Comics source mate­r­ial turned out more fun, clever, and excit­ing than it had any right to be. Most wel­come of all, it is fre­quently laugh-out-loud funny (in a good way), a key ingre­di­ent unfor­tu­nately lack­ing in the mostly humor­less (but still pretty good) sequel X2: X-Men United (2003).

Hayter and Singer man­aged to dig up every ounce of sub­text baked into the X-Men mythos by orig­i­nal writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby. At its heart, the X-Men series was essen­tially a nev­erend­ing sci-fi soap opera with a noble moral of pro­gres­sive social aware­ness. The weirdo super­heroes that make up The X-Men are “mutants,” born of human par­ents but with super­hu­man pow­ers typ­i­cally man­i­fest­ing dur­ing ado­les­cence. Prior to Lee and Kirby’s inno­va­tion, comics’ super­hero tem­plates were either extrater­res­tri­als like Super­man or ordi­nary humans with arti­fi­cially gained super­pow­ers like Spider-Man (mere mor­tals Bat­man and Iron Man don’t count, no mat­ter how inor­di­nately dri­ven to fight injus­tice). Unlike the phys­i­cal ideal Super­man, most of Lee and Kirby’s mutants did not view their pow­ers as gifts, and some were out­right monsters.

Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen in X-MenThe Royal Shake­speare Com­pany mutants face off

The X-Men for­mula also incor­po­rates deeper themes of racism, xeno­pho­bia, and even evo­lu­tion. Indeed, the entire premise is built upon the the­ory of evo­lu­tion: as mul­ti­ple species of humans walked the earth simul­ta­ne­ously hun­dreds of thou­sands of years ago, so too do humans now find them­selves shar­ing the earth with arguably the next branch of homo sapi­ens’ evo­lu­tion: known in the comics as “homo supe­rior.” Car­ried through to the next log­i­cal con­clu­sion, this mutant minor­ity is feared and demo­nized as freaks by the humans that vastly out­num­ber them.

The X-Men’s sym­pa­thetic antag­o­nist Erik Lehn­sh­err (Ian McK­ellen) is a sur­vivor of a Ger­man con­cen­tra­tion camp. The hor­rors he expe­ri­enced at the hands of those that hated his race (but didn’t yet real­ize he was actu­ally a dif­fer­ent species) in 1944 Poland inform his actions as the supervil­lain Mag­neto. As he lis­tens to con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can politi­cians argue over how to con­tain and sup­press the increas­ing mutant pop­u­la­tion, he dis­gust­edly states “I’ve heard these argu­ments before.” His for­mer friend (and fel­low mutant) Charles Xavier (Patrick Stew­art) hopes to find a way to live in peace, and coun­ters “That was a long time ago. Mankind has evolved since then.” But Mag­neto is unyield­ing. “Yes. Into us.”

Hugh Jackman in X-MenTalk to the claws

The cru­cial fac­tor that had me sim­ply assume the movie would be ter­ri­ble was cast­ing. It’s not hard to imag­ine a young actor able embody Spider-Man’s secret iden­tity Peter Parker as a put-upon geek har­bor­ing tremen­dous reserves of guilt and right­eous­ness. But how do you cast Wolver­ine, a diminu­tive, half-animal Cana­dian super­sol­dier with ridicu­lous hair? Easy! You hire the tall, absurdly hand­some Aus­tralian studly song-and-dance man Hugh Jack­man. Against all odds, he totally nailed the fan-favorite char­ac­ter. The moment in the film when this for­mer X-Men comics fan decided that Jack­man suc­ceeded is a sequence in which he steals an X-motorcycle and dis­cov­ers a handy tur­bo­boost but­ton. The entire audi­ence at the New York Ziegfeld the­ater laughed heartily along with his undis­guised glee at its total awe­some­ness. This doubter was com­pletely sold.

Another cast­ing coup was the double-dose of Royal Shake­speare Com­pany grav­i­tas pro­vided by McK­ellen and Stew­art (both with exten­sive expe­ri­ence in fan­tasy and sci-fi genre mate­r­ial, as Gan­dalf in Lord of the Rings and Cap­tain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Gen­er­a­tion, respec­tively). Bruce Davi­son (as the xeno­pho­bic Sen­a­tor Robert Kelly) also has a long his­tory in sci­ence fic­tion, hav­ing starred in Willard and the influ­en­tial clas­sic The Lathe of Heaven.

Famke Janssen in X-MenJust don’t call her Mar­vel Girl

James Mars­den later proved him­self to be enter­tain­ingly charis­matic in Enchanted, but here he’s a vic­tim to the humor­less char­ac­ter of Cyclops. As Wolver­ine cor­rectly psy­cho­an­a­lyzes him, he’s a dick. Sim­i­larly, Famke Janssen isn’t given a whole lot to work with as the no-fun-please Dr. Jean Grey (known in the comics as Mar­vel GIrl, later to die and rise again as Phoenix in Brett Ratner’s crap sequel X-Men 3: The Last Stand — read The Dork Report review). But together with Jack­man, the trio brings alive the Wolverine/Cyclops/Phoenix love tri­an­gle drawn from the comics, help­ing to make the movie accessible.

The one real weak spot in the cast is Halle Berry. Like Jen­nifer Lopez in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, she seems to have only one real act­ing per­for­mance under her belt (Monster’s Ball, of course). Here she turns in one of her most bland and tone­less per­for­mances yet. For extra amuse­ment, be sure to catch the deleted scenes on the DVD edi­tion in which she can be heard affect­ing a weak pseudo-African accent. It’s a shame, because Storm was a very strong char­ac­ter in the comics around the time I read them. Writer Chris Clare­mont obvi­ously had an affec­tion for her, even pro­mot­ing her to leader of the X-Men.

Hugh Jackman and Anna Paquin in X-MenFero­cious mutant super-soldier Wolver­ine can really relate to Rogue’s teenage angst

Aside from cast­ing, I imag­ine the second-biggest obsta­cle fac­ing the film­mak­ers was how to intro­duce the com­plex X-Men uni­verse to main­stream audi­ences while pre­serv­ing its integrity to appease long­time fans. Hayter and Singer came up with the excel­lent solu­tion of hav­ing us meet Pro­fes­sor X and his X-Men through the eyes of new­bies Wolver­ine and Rogue (Anna “That’s my mother’s piano!” Paquin). Both are very dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters that share key com­mon expe­ri­ences that allow them to bond in a big brother / lit­tle sis­ter rela­tion­ship: Wolver­ine is a loner amne­siac unaware there are oth­ers like him, and Rogue is a young run­away iso­lated by par­tic­u­larly extreme pow­ers that pre­vent her from expe­ri­enc­ing nor­mal human inter­ac­tion. Almost any­one can iden­tify with the painful com­ing of age that comes with her exag­ger­ated ado­les­cence. A star­tling moment of pathos occurs between them when she sees him wield the fear­some metal claws sheathed in his fore­arms: “When they come out, does it hurt?” “Every time.”

On an even more prac­ti­cal level, the film­mak­ers came up with an inge­nious solu­tion to the comics char­ac­ters’ silly cos­tumes by hav­ing the movie X-Men wear more pho­to­genic uni­forms. Cyclops’ joke about yel­low and orange span­dex is an easter egg for fans: Wolver­ine sports such an ensem­ble in the comics. Best of all, the req­ui­site action set pieces are jus­ti­fied by the char­ac­ters, not just the plot. For exam­ple, a big blow-out staged at a train sta­tion is the result of a heart­break­ing mis­un­der­stand­ing that causes Rogue to flee the longed-for safe haven she had only just discovered.

The fran­chise is now set to con­tinue with a tril­ogy of pre­quels includ­ing this summer’s X-Men Ori­gins: Wolver­ine, and rumored projects X-Men Ori­gins: First Class and X-Men Ori­gins: Mag­neto. But with the first of these wrack­ing up some notably awful reviews, it’s clear the first in the series will still stand as the best for some time.

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Orifices in Place of Faces: The Flaming Lips: Christmas on Mars

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Flaming Lips Christmas on Mars poster

 

The Flam­ing Lips are an odd band to have achieved main­stream suc­cess. After years of non­com­mer­cial psy­che­delic art-rock exper­i­men­ta­tion like the four-disc Zaireeka (1997), they broke through to mass appeal with The Soft Bul­letin (1999) and Yoshimi Bat­tles the Pink Robots (2002). The lat­ter fea­tures the finest exis­ten­tial love song to ever become the offi­cial rock song of Okla­homa:

Do you real­ize that every­one you know some­day will die
And instead of say­ing all of your good­byes, let them know
You real­ize that life goes fast
It’s hard to make the good things last
You real­ize the sun doesn’t go down
It’s just an illu­sion caused by the world spin­ning round
     – Do You Real­ize??

Wayne Coyne in Christmas on MarsThe Alien Super-Being gets great reception

The Lips also have more ambi­tion than most of their con­tem­po­raries when it comes to the audio­vi­sual aspects of a rock group’s respon­si­bil­i­ties. They were inspired by how some of their fore­bears did more than con­tract third par­ties to film them live in con­cert or to direct hagio­graphic doc­u­men­taries. The Bea­t­les (A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, Yel­low Sub­ma­rine), The Who (Tommy, Quadrophe­nia), and Pink Floyd (The Wall) all made fea­ture films that deserve to be con­sid­ered among their canon­i­cal audio-only discog­ra­phy. As Lips front­man Wayne Coyne told Pitch­fork:

we’d always talked about how the Flam­ing Lips should have a movie, like the Ramones have a movie, or the Bea­t­les. Not in a pre­ten­tious way, just like, “Yeah! We should have a movie!” We thought, “Well, why not? We’ll just sort of make one and see what happens.“

They began talk­ing up Christ­mas of Mars years ago, and the longer the delay, the greater the leg­end. It was rumored to be either an expen­sive folly on the scale of Axl Rose’s album Chi­nese Democ­racy (in pro­duc­tion for 14 years for a bud­get of $13 mil­lion) or an elab­o­rate meta joke. But in fact, the Lips did in all seri­ous­ness work on the project off and on for about seven years. They pro­duced the whole thing in their stomp­ing grounds of Okla­homa City, mostly around Coyne’s own home. For bet­ter or for worse, it’s entirely their vision, writ­ten and co-directed by Coyne, with Bradley Beesley (who directed sev­eral of the band’s music videos) and George Salisbury.

Surely Coyne & co. must have been famil­iar with the infa­mous b-movie Santa Claus Con­quers the Mar­tians (1964) (in the pub­lic domain and a free down­load). The spec­tac­u­larly awful movie was hilar­i­ously mas­sa­cred on both Mys­tery Sci­ence The­ater 3000 in 1991 and by Cin­e­matic Titanic in 2008. Like this igno­ble pre­de­ces­sor, Christ­mas on Mars is sad­dled with long sequences of bad dia­logue deliv­ered poorly by ama­teur actors. Even cameos by the Lips’ pals Fred Armisen and Adam Gold­berg are really awkward.

Partly inspired by the psy­che­delia of Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (read The Dork Report review), Christ­mas on Mars actu­ally owes more to the blue-collar atmos­phere of Rid­ley Scott’s Alien. The humans in Christ­mas on Mars are ordi­nary peo­ple in an extra­or­di­nary locale, strug­gling to sur­vive. One year prior, human­ity has estab­lished a dilap­i­dated space sta­tion on Mars. Worse, the crew mem­bers are slowly going mad and suf­fer­ing hal­lu­ci­na­tions. As they con­clude, man is not meant to live in space. The sole pur­pose of the colony, other than con­stantly repair­ing its decay­ing infra­struc­ture, seems to be to sup­port a test-tube baby due on mid­night, Christ­mas Eve. The only woman on the sta­tion lives in a bub­ble, feed­ing the baby through a tube grafted into her belly.

Wayne Coyne and Steven Drozd in Christmas on MarsThe Lips dis­cretely invite you to enhance your view­ing expe­ri­ence in what­ever man­ner you choose

Major Syr­tis (Lips mem­ber Steven Drozd) has taken it upon him­self to orga­nize a Christ­mas Pageant to raise morale. He is in fact par­tially respon­si­ble for their cur­rent predica­ment, as he appar­ently sac­ri­ficed stor­age space to cart some Christ­mas accou­trements to Mars, a deci­sion that has near-fatal con­se­quences for the colony. The colony’s only source for hap­pi­ness is very nearly ruined when his cho­sen Santa com­mits sui­cide. The Alien Super-Being (Coyne) lands nearby in a spher­i­cal space­craft, which con­ve­niently shrinks to a size suit­able to be swal­lowed until he needs it again. Even though Coyne wrote the script, and is quite a talker if the DVD’s bonus inter­views are to be judged, the role he assigned him­self has no dia­logue. He fills Santa’s shoes and repairs both Syrtis’s busted snow machine and the colony itself. He saves Christ­mas and allows the baby to be born.

Far more inter­est­ing are the beau­ti­ful opti­cal spe­cial effects (at least, I assume they’re opti­cal — if they actu­ally are dig­i­tal, they’re uncom­monly beau­ti­ful). Some of the abstract psy­che­delia was so freaky I feared it might burn out my aging tele­vi­sion. Most curi­ous is the strange pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with vagi­nal imagery. The Alien Super-Being passes in and out of his space­ship through a vagi­nal por­tal. Syr­tis hal­lu­ci­nates a vis­it­ing space­man with a pul­sat­ing vagina for a face, and later dreams of an entire march­ing band with sim­i­lar ori­fices in place of faces (say that ten times quickly).

A pre-movie sequence advises view­ers to have sex, smoke pot, or just do what­ever they like while watch­ing the movie. This bor­ing Dork Reporter dared to dis­obey these instruc­tions and sim­ply watched it alone at home, stone cold sober. Not to put too fine a point on it, I sus­pect Christ­mas on Mars is one of those things best expe­ri­enced in an altered state.

Offi­cial movie site: www.flaminglips.com/content/film

Buy the DVD and sound­track CD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

Blindness

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Blindness movie poster

 

Direc­tor Fer­nando Meirelles has exam­ined des­per­ate pres­sure cook­ers City of God) and insti­tu­tional cor­rup­tion (The Con­stant Gar­dener) before. Blind­ness proves per­fect to meld both themes, with a sci­ence fic­tion twist imag­in­ing the down­fall of civ­i­liza­tion itself.

Blind­ness is part of a spe­cial sub­set of the horror/sci-fi/disaster genre: the dystopian end-of-civilization night­mare. Whereas the typ­i­cal entry works by intro­duc­ing a dis­rupt­ing ele­ment into the sta­tus quo (typ­i­cally a mon­ster), a few instead sub­tract one fun­da­men­tal fact of life that we take for granted. The basic recipe is sim­ple: flip one switch, and watch civ­i­liza­tion fall in short order. In Chil­dren of Men (read The Dork Report review), human­ity becomes infer­tile. In the Hap­pen­ing (read The Dork Report review), the bios­phere starts pump­ing out poi­son. In the comic book series Y: The Last Man, all males on the planet sud­denly die off. In innu­mer­able zom­bie flicks (read The Dork Report’s George A. Romero Zom­bie Cycle), death is no longer absolute. It may not be a coin­ci­dence that at least two mem­bers of the Blind­ness cast already have rel­e­vant expe­ri­ence on their résumés: Julianne Moore in Chil­dren of Men and Alice Braga in I Am Legend.

Julianne Moore in Blindness“The only thing more ter­ri­fy­ing than blind­ness is being the only one who can see.”

All of these sto­ries bleed over into the genre realms of sci­ence fic­tion and hor­ror. Blind­ness, how­ever, is based on the mag­i­cal real­ist (if it’s accu­rate for me to call it that) novel by José Sara­m­ago. The novel is set in a generic city, fea­tur­ing unnamed char­ac­ters (the movie, filmed in São Paulo, Brazil, effec­tively pre­serves both con­ceits — I didn’t notice until the cred­its rolled that the char­ac­ters did not have names). With­out get­ting bogged down in pseudo-scientific details, Zara­m­ago posits a highly con­ta­gious “White Blind­ness” that rapidly sweeps the globe, affect­ing every­one but one ran­dom woman. The movie’s expla­na­tion is a far more lit­eral highly com­mu­ni­ca­ble dis­ease, diag­nosed for the audi­ence by the unnamed opthamol­o­gist “Doc­tor” (Mark Ruf­falo). By sheer coin­ci­dence, The Doctor’s Wife (Moore) appears to be immune. The obvi­ous chal­lenge for the film­mak­ers is how to ren­der a prose story about blind­ness into the most visual sto­ry­telling medium of all. Cin­e­matog­ra­pher César Char­lone (who also shot City of God and The Con­stant Gar­dener) meets the chal­lenge by cre­at­ing stun­ning visu­als which para­dox­i­cally obscure. The pic­ture fre­quently flares into a burned-out white­ness, often a relief from the ugly filth in which the char­ac­ters find them­selves liv­ing as the safety net of soci­ety collapses.

The story bru­tally details a basi­cally pes­simistic view of human nature. Right from the start, humanity’s inher­ent greed and avarice make a cat­a­strophic sit­u­a­tion worse. The very first vic­tim of the dis­ease is imme­di­ately exploited by a car thief (ironic, as auto­mo­biles are shortly to become the most futile of valu­ables to steal). As the blind­ness dis­ease spreads, the author­i­ties (rep­re­sented by The Min­is­ter of Health, in what amounts to a cameo by San­dra Oh) attempt to con­tain the infected in iso­la­tion wards, a weak euphemism for con­cen­tra­tion camps. As The Man With the Black Eye Patch (Danny Glover) states in a nicely writ­ten but implau­si­bly elo­quent mono­logue, “the dis­ease was immune to bureaucracy.”

Dany Glover in Blindness“I know that part inside you with no name, and that’s who we are, right?”

The infected are made up of char­ac­ters from many cul­tural and eco­nomic back­grounds, much like Ale­jan­dro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006). Left alone to self-organize, two oppos­ing soci­eties coa­lesce around two very dif­fer­ent nat­ural lead­ers. The Doc­tor and his Wife cre­ate a frag­ile but func­tion­ing democ­racy, but the King of Ward Three (Gael Gar­cía Bernal) forges a depraved Sodom built on exploit­ing their few resources for short-term base plea­sures. Inevitably, the two fledg­ling states go to war, as much out of ide­ol­ogy as for want of resources. As the ward denizens’ cir­cum­stances get worse and worse, the movie itself becomes a pun­ish­ing expe­ri­ence to watch (an imi­ta­tive fal­lacy). In terms of depic­tions of vio­lence, it is no less explicit than, say, Chil­dren of Men, but wholly lacks that supe­rior film’s dark wit and essen­tial thread of hope. Whereas Chil­dren of Men had no real vil­lain (Luke, Chi­we­tel Ejio­for, was actu­ally more of a Che Guevarra-type rev­o­lu­tion­ary), there is lit­tle or no sub­tlety of char­ac­ter in Blind­ness’ wholly evil bad guys. Would the cen­tral alle­gory be more inter­est­ing to pon­der if the vil­lains were not so unam­bigu­ously mon­strous? Even I Am Leg­end dropped hints that its vampire/zombie-like mon­sters pos­sessed crude intel­li­gence, a will to live, and empa­thy for their own kind.

The frag­ile com­mu­nity in the wards dis­in­te­grates into a hell of gang rape and open war. Then, amaz­ingly, it gets worse. But as the walls of the prison burn, the pris­on­ers dis­cover the doors have actu­ally been left open. If any­thing, the world out­side has become worse off than the pres­sure cooker in which they were impris­oned. After a har­row­ing trip through the dev­as­tated city, they expe­ri­ence one fleet­ing moment of joy as they bathe in the rain. After­wards, they set up an eden in the Doc­tor and his Wife’s for­mer home, like a less-satiric ver­sion of the for­ti­fied sub­ur­ban shop­ping mall in George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (read The Dork Report review). The Doctor’s Wife’s newly extended fam­ily embraces her as their “leader with vision.”

Offi­cial movie site: http://blindness-themovie.com/

Buy the novel or DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe

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The first X-Files fea­ture film Fight the Future (1998) was so tightly bound to the com­plex mythol­ogy of the orig­i­nal tele­vi­sion series that it was mostly incom­pre­hen­si­ble to any­one not already a deeply com­mit­ted fan. I myself had only seen the odd episode over the years, and as such could barely fol­low what was going on. This unex­pected sequel, belat­edly com­ing about six years after the con­clu­sion of the series and a full decade after the last fea­ture film, is a stand­alone adven­ture almost entirely decou­pled from the series’ uni­fy­ing story arc: all that jazz involv­ing an inva­sion of body-snatching aliens col­lab­o­rat­ing with the gov­ern­ment, all of which may or may not have some­thing to do with sticky black goo.

David Duchovny in The X-Files: I Want to BelieveDon’t eat the yel­low snow

Freed of the weight of years of con­ti­nu­ity allows this new film to dig into the true core of the series: the rela­tion­ship between Fox Mul­der (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Ander­son). These are two peo­ple who not only deserve each other (their idea of pil­low talk is to dis­cuss tox­i­col­ogy reports) but are actu­ally each other’s yin and yang. Their believer / skep­tic dynamic fueled the addic­tive sci­ence fic­tion aspects of the show, but also the sex­ual ten­sion that helped make it a hit. They each need each other in order to not self-destruct.

Scully, a know-it-all red­head like a grown-up Hermione Granger, is every geek boy’s crush. In the inter­ven­ing years, she has vol­un­tar­ily left the FBI to toil with­out reward as a doc­tor at the aptly-named hos­pi­tal Our Lady of Sor­rows. As a prag­matic woman who does not oper­ate on faith, a Catholic Church-operated insti­tu­tion is the last place she ought to be. Her coun­ter­part Mul­der, since last we’ve seen him, has become the stereo­typ­i­cal bearded recluse. With­out the medi­at­ing influ­ence of Scully, it’s clear he’s only a few cranky let­ters to the edi­tor away from becom­ing the next Unibomber.

Gillian Anderson in The X-Files: I Want to BelieveScully is, as usual, the life of the party

Mean­while, next-generation FBI Spe­cial Agent Dakota Whit­ney (Amanda Peet) inves­ti­gates the alleged visions of a con­victed pedophile Father Joseph Criss­man (played against type by wacky come­dian Billy Con­nolly). Need­ing agents with a cer­tain exper­tise in the weird, she gets the old X-Files band back together. In an unfor­tu­nately dropped sub­plot, it’s evi­dent she crushes on an endear­ingly obliv­i­ous Mul­der. In fact, her entire char­ac­ter is unfor­tu­nately dropped too soon — dropped down an ele­va­tor shaft, that is. Sorry for the snarky spoiler, there, folks.

The plot is a mélange of hot but­tons ripped from the head­lines, Law & Order style. Tick­ing the boxes, we have lung can­cer, gay mar­riage, Catholic church pedophilia (the mur­derer turns out to be the hus­band of a grown altar boy that the Father bug­gered years ago), stem cells (Scully attempts to cure a boy’s rare brain dis­ease with research she cun­ningly finds via Google), grotesque sci­en­tific exper­i­ments (a plot point refers to an actual Cold-War era Russ­ian exper­i­ment that has been mak­ing the rounds on the inter­net recently involv­ing arti­fi­cially sus­tain­ing a dog’s sev­ered head). To top it all off, the movie also fea­tures cinema’s most extreme sex change oper­a­tion since The Silence of the Lambs.

Amanda Peet in The X-Files: I Want to BelieveSpe­cial Agent Dakota Whit­ney has an appoint­ment with an ele­va­tor shaft

The X-Files: I Want to Believe was poorly reviewed, and worse, a com­mer­cial fail­ure (although, granted, much of the lat­ter was the fault of open­ing oppo­site Bat­man: The Dark Knight — read The Dork Report review). The most rad­i­cal inno­va­tion to the X-Files for­mula is the new ver­sion of the famous theme music by elec­tron­ica out­fit UNKLE, so per­haps audi­ences and crit­ics wanted some­thing new. But it’s an enjoy­able film, largely because it’s not with­out some humor, and against all odds, fea­tures a happy end­ing for the long-suffering couple.

A note on the DVD: I watched the “Extended Ver­sion” cut, so I can’t com­ment on how sig­nif­i­cantly it may dif­fer from the the­atri­cal ver­sion. Among the bonus fea­tures is an inter­est­ing fea­turette in which Chris Carter dis­cusses the “green pro­duc­tion” for the movie (the use of hybrid cars, recy­cling of set mate­ri­als, etc.), and how he abhors the waste that typ­i­cally goes into tele­vi­sion and movie pro­duc­tion. An anti-smoking pub­lic ser­vice ad is included on the DVD, mak­ing one won­der if the recur­ring theme of lung can­cer in the plot was grafted on or an organic com­po­nent to the plot.

Offi­cial movie site: www.xfiles.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.