sci-fi

Equals (2016)

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fourstar

Is it all transgressive or radical anymore to point out that Kristen Stewart is a divinely talented actor? Have her Twilight days been sufficiently been wiped out by the ever-expanding wealth of killer onscreen work she’s put in outside that franchise? I hope so, because it’s becoming tiresome starting reviews like this (my third defensive preamble for her talents after American Ultra & The Clouds of Sils Maria). Kristen Stewart’s main problem, if she has one at all, is that the film industry often seems confused about exactly how to utilize her detached onscreen cool, a visible lack of urgency that lands her presence somewhere between James Dean & Lauren Bacall in its smooth, smoky, effortless charm. Although it nearly approaches the YA romance territory that has threatened to pigeonhole her career, the dystopian sci-fi drama Equals does know what to do with Stewart’s detached cool. Besides indulging in an always-welcome, heartachingly sincere story of sci-fi romance, Equals presents a future where emotion has been outlawed, a perfect platform for Stewart’s own emotive talents, which are typically communicated through subtle body language & small shifts in tone. It’s not my favorite Stewart performance by any stretch, but it might serve as a convincing argument on her behalf for those still on the fence in regards to her immense, underappreciated talent.

As much as I’m rambling on about the many merits of Kristen Stewart here, the true protagonist of Equals is a man named Silas, played by Nicholas Hoult. Silas navigates a cold, clinical world in which war has been eradicated by outlawing human emotion. As a member of the emotionless Collective, Silas lives & works in a society of Spocks. Everything is bland, uniform, and designed for logical, streamlined function, the entire world an Apple Store. Silas’s peaceful life as an illustrator of “speculative non-ficiton” is threatened when an outbreak of the disease S.O.S. (or “switched on syndrome”) starts to trigger “behavioral defects” (emotions) in members of The Collective, including our protagonist. Silas dutifully takes his prescribed pills, but continues to feel anyway (likely a comment on the effectiveness of anti-depressants), and eventually finds himself dangerously infatuated with a coworker, played by Stewart. His love interest is dealing with her own rapidly-progressing S.O.S., however undiagnosed & unmedicated, and initially treats his advances like the unwanted attentions of any other workplace creep. Their attraction is inevitable, though, and sets up an achingly sincere, doomed-to-fail romance full of secretive, tender sexual encounters that put both Hoult’s & Stewart’s characters at risk for correctional “defective emotional therapy” at the hands of The Collective’s governing elite, a “treatment” that often ends in encouraged suicide.

Equals is mostly a slow, sensual drift through a cold, calculated future defined by its clean lines & blue lighting. Its romanceless dystopia most closely resembles the surrealist fantasy of this year’s The Lobster, but it approaches the subject from a more sincere, open-hearted place that recalls the sci-fi romance of titles like Her & Upside Down. There’s a metaphor to be found in the way this future society values “productive” lives over genuine mental health, but its true bread & butter is in the nervous, trembling touches Hoult & Stewart share as two young lovers unaccustomed to intimate human contact. The film finds its own visual language in the way it zooms in on actors’ bodies & faces in search of the tiniest of emotive responses, shrinking even the subtle bodily flirtation of Carol to a more microscopic stature (until, you know, it becomes full-on boning). There’s a little dose of subtle comic relief mixed in with this chest-heaving sensuality in the emotionless delivery of lines like, “You’re going to live, pal,” and [upon witnessing a coworker’s suicide] “That’s unfortunate,” but the film works best for those easily won over by sincere romance juxtaposed with a clinical sci-fi setting, an aesthetic I’ll admit I’m a huge sucker for.

Nicholas Hoult does a great job of selling the heartbreaking sincerity of this futuristic love connection (and, speaking of underappreciated actors, The Diary of a Teenage Girl‘s Bel Powley shows up to support the main cast), but Equals is Stewart’s show, not only because it fits the detached cool of her already established persona so well. As much as I appreciate the cold, clinical future presented here, it mostly makes me wish for a not-too-distant future where Stewart’s recognized for the full scope of her talent, not for being the girl from Twilight. Equals is a welcome step in that direction as well as a great, self-contained love story heightened by an oppressive air of emotional restraint.

-Brandon Ledet

High-Rise (2016)

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fourhalfstar

One of my favorite movie genres is something I’ve dubbed the “Party Out of Bounds,” a kind of storytelling structure where guests at an initially civil social event are compelled beyond reason to stay once polite society de-evolves & things get primally nasty. The exit is open, but they decline & instead choose to duke it out with their fellow “party” guests. As much as I enjoy the realistic examples of this (admittedly made-up) genre like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Boys in the Band, and this year’s A Bigger Splash, I really get excited when the “Party Out of Bounds” story gets supernaturally twisted, like in the genre’s crown jewel The Exterminating Angel or in the recent dystopian period piece High-Rise. High-Rise is a particularly interesting case because its party starts from a seemingly dangerous, chaotic place and gets even more wild & savage from there, expanding the scope of its hedonism & cruelty to a months’ long, seemingly supernatural descent into the darkness of the human soul. It’s a sight to behold, a sinisterly amusing & deeply unsettling sight that stands as one of the best “Party Out of Bounds” stories I can remember ever seeing onscreen (and in subsequent nightmares).

Adapted from a novel by J.G. Ballard, the madman who penned the source material for Crash (1996’s incredible Cronenberg provocation, not 2004’s shameless Oscar bait), High-Rise is a reflection of 1970s anxieties about “luxury lifestyle” commodity & spiritually-erosive consumer culture as funneled through an aggressive, vague menace of existential dread. The film posits the modern consumer as a “bio robot,” a soulless machine who cannot function without their various gadgets & devices of “convenience.” Tom Hiddleston’s relatively well-adjusted protagonist begins his journey into a bleak, 1970s version of the future when he moves into a high-rise condo complex, a towering work of architectural Brutalism. It’s easy to believe you understand where the film is headed in his early interactions with the high-rise & its inhabitants. The building is a self-contained class system that matches the rigid haves-vs-havenots societal structure of works like Snowpiercer; the wealthy live on upper floors while the middle & lower class fight for their crumbs on the bottom. As the Talking Heads would put it, the building “has every convenience,” from a grocery store to a gym to a rooftop terrace complete with gardens & horseback riding (that only the upper floor wealthy can access, of course). The rich divert & hoard the best of the building’s resources, setting up an anti-capitalist uprise that we’ve seen play out in many (if not most) dystopian sci-fi works in the past. High-Rise begins its journey into human depravity from this familiar place, but completely unravels & sets fire to the genre expectations that accompany its starting point. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything exactly like it before, which is what makes it such an exciting, terrifying work.

In addition to their addiction to modern convenience, the inhabitants of the titular high-rise are also addicted to partying. As a seemingly well-to-do surgeon (whose professions appears curiously specific to peeling faces off cadavers), Hiddleston’s protagonist is just wealthy enough to get a glimpse of the Victorian-style excess of the parties on the upper floors (as orchestrated by the building’s owner/architect, portrayed by Jeremy Irons), to mingle with the swinging 70s drug orgies of the middle floors, and to kindly visit with the little kids’ birthday parties of the lower working class floors (dutifully lorded over by Elizabeth Moss’s eternally pregnant, much put-upon matriarch). Hiddleston’s role as an entry point to each layer of the literally stratified society within the high-rise is a great starting point for establishing the scenario’s social structure, but ultimately becomes meaningless as the walls dividing these groups begins to break down. After the high-rise experiences an unexplained power outage the entire building devolves into total chaos. In a literal sense the structure begins to crumble: the water stops flowing, the gym is dismantled, the food in the grocery rots & molds, etc. There’s something much stranger going on in this shift, however, something that feels akin to a Persona-style psychological break. High-Rise is, at heart, a mass hysteria horror, a surreal exploration of a weird, unexplained menace lurking in our modern political & economic anxieties. Instead of simply leaving the titular building when things go horrifically sour, its inhabitants instead party harder and their drunken revelry devolves into a grotesque, months-long rager of deadly hedonism & de Sade levels of sexual depravity. The people of the high-rise are portrayed as just another amenity, one that can malfunction & fall apart just as easily & thoroughly as a blown circuit or a busted water pipe. It only takes weeks for the societal barriers that keep them in line to fully degenerate so that the entire high-rise society is partying violently in unison in their own filth & subhuman cruelty. If this is a version of America’s future in consumerism & modern convenience, it’s a harshly damning one, a confounding nightmare I won’t soon forget.

As much as the nastier details of High-Rise‘s eventual descent into cannibalism, rape, and animal cruelty (the majority of which, it’s worth noting, thankfully occurs offscreen) is obviously far outside my own experience with what happens when a party goes out of bounds, I do recognize a little truth in the initial power outage as a source for the mayhem. Anyone in New Orleans (or elsewhere in the coastal South) who’s gotten through the weeks-long power outages that follow hurricanes by drinking gallons of liquor in the darkness & heat should be able to recognize some of their own despair & depravity in the scenario, even if just a little. No matter how much you love the people you ride out a hurricane outage with, the confined space, oppressive boredom, and uncomfortable living conditions of the situation can increase tensions exponentially on a daily basis. The alcohol doesn’t help either (except maybe with the boredom). As I multiply that scenario in my head by the hundreds of people occupying this fictional high-rise & the economic tensions already driving them mad before the outage, this movie’s complete descent into subhuman depravity sort of makes perfect sense. Sort of.

There’s plenty of high art craft that goes into High-Rise‘s trashy version of Cronenberg mania, a marriage of aesthetics represented nicely in its off-putting soundtrack of nervous proto-punk jams & various spooky covers of ABBA‘s “S.O.S.” The film puts a lot of care in constructing its traditional sci-fi dystopia beginnings, distinguished only in details like its The Diary of a Teenage Girl/Space Station 76 faithfulness to its grim 70s era origins and its willingness to ogle at a male actor’s naked body for a change (Hiddleston’s, of course). When the setup gives way to the blindingly chaotic & inhumanly cruel punchline, though, the film finds its own distinctive space of cinematic innovation. High-Rise pushes its initially-familiar story into new, surreally wicked territory that makes for a more memorable experience than what the first act would lead you to expect and then lingers there for an uncomfortably long time. I’ve seen plenty movie parties go out of bounds before, but this is the one that most convincingly sets fire to the path back to civilization in the process. Its an entirely unique obliteration of the thin line that separates the modern consumer from the wild, bloodthirsty beast, a nightmare of a good time that will surely become a strong contender for cult classic status once more people have a chance to fall under its terrifying hypnotic spell.

-Brandon Ledet

Star Trek Beyond (2016)

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fourstar

A few months back, I wrote about the then-upcoming release of Star Trek Beyond and discussed my hopes for the film and the franchise in general. I wasn’t particularly excited after the first trailer, but the second trailer seemed a bit better, and the fact that Simon Pegg was one of the credited writers was certainly a point in the film’s favor, given his actual fondness for the franchise (in comparison to Roberto Orci, which I’ll get to in a minute). A generally favorable early critical response was also heartening, despite the general dearth of any significant marketing push for the film. I did see the same TV spots play before almost every YouTube video I watched in the past three weeks, but I can never tell if that’s marketed to me specifically as a Star Trek nerd scholar or indicative of a larger initiative. And, as a scholar, was I satisfied?

Yes? Mostly? This is definitely a fun movie, and a major improvement over the tone deaf Into Darkness, which was bad on a such a high number of levels that it’s difficult to nail down which one was most absurd. Was it the nonsensical nature of the motivation of the film’s antagonists? Was it the fact that their motivation might actually make sense when viewed through the lens of the particular madness of screenwriter and notable 9/11 truther Roberto Orci (there’s a decent article about this on BirthMoviesDeath, which is pretty great even though I have mixed feelings about Devin Faraci)? Was it the recasting of a character whose name is Indian and was previously portrayed by a person of color with Benedict Cumberbatch? It was probably that.

I went into greater detail about my feelings about both of the previous films in this reboot timeline in the previous article, so I won’t get into it here, but I will say that, although this film is being billed as a return to Star Trek’s roots or a real “classic style” Star Trek story, that’s not entirely true. Of course, given that the same thing was said about Insurrection back in 1998 (and, for better or worse, that’s a more or less true description of the film’s premise if nothing else), that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This is still a film that takes characters from a fifty year old television series where most problems were solved within an hour and attempts to map them onto a contemporary action film structure, which works in some places and not in others. Other reviews of the film have also stated that Beyond is a more affectionate revisitation of the original series than the previous two films, which is also mostly true. The film does suffer from the fact that the opening sequence bears more than a passing resemblance to a scene in Galaxy Quest, which is a stark reminder of the kind of fun movie that can be made when someone loves Star Trek rather than simply sees it as a commercial venture. Overall, though, you’d be hard pressed not to get some enjoyment out of this film, Trekker or no.

The film opens 966 days into the Enterprise’s five year deep space exploration mission, and Kirk (Chris Pine) is beginning to feel the weight of both the mission and the impossibility of living up to his father’s legacy. When the ship docks at Starfleet’s newest starbase, Yorktown, a ship appears from a nearby nebula containing one alien astronaut, who says that her ship crashed on a mysterious planet within said nebula and asking for assistance. In true Federation fashion, Kirk and Krew jump at the chance to help out, but are immediately attacked as soon as they penetrate the nebula; the crew is forced to abandon ship, ending up scattered and/or captured by the villainous Krall (Idris Elba), who seeks a doomsday MacGuffin in order to exact violence against the concept of peaceful unity in general and the Federation in particular because of its idealization of these virtues. Along the way, Scotty (Pegg) meets a woman named Jaylah (Kingsman’s Sofia Boutella), who helps him reunite the crew and to plan a rescue and escape.

There’s a lot to love here. There are references peppered throughout to other parts of the franchise, and instead of feeling hamfisted or forced as in previous installments of the reboot series, they feel natural here. There are more overt connections, with the basic plot about a dangerous planet that acts as a graveyard for various interstellar travelers and their ships being somewhat reminiscent of the animated Star Trek series episode “The Time Trap,” as well as one of the proposed fates of a starship lost a century previous being that it was snatched by a giant green space hand, which happened to the original Enterprise in “Who Mourns for Adonis?” Kirk’s opening log even references the fact that there’s a lot of shacking up going on aboard the ship during its mission, which is undoubtedly a reference to the fact that NBC balked at Gene Roddenberry’s proposal that the coed Enterprise crew be composed of roughly half men and half women; the story goes that one exec stated that this would make it seem like there was an awful lot of “funny business” going on. Likewise, Roddenberry’s original script treatment was about a starship that bore the name Yorktown, not Enterprise, leading to the starbase in this film being named for the former. Those are pretty obscure references to pull out and use for the plot of this movie, and that’s pretty indicative of how much this film cares about the fandom. More obscure references, like discussion of the dissolution of the MACOs and the Xindi and Romulan Wars (all of which are references to Star Trek: Enterprise), the possibility of accidentally splicing two people together with transporters (transporter accidents are fairly common in the franchise, but this is probably a shout out to the Voyager episode “Tuvix” in particular), Kirk’s birthday melancholy and even some of the lines he uses in his toast (from Wrath of Khan), and the appearance of a Commodore Paris (the Parises being a family with a long history of Starfleet ervice, most notably Tom Paris of Voyager) are scattered throughout and are, frankly, quite welcome.

Of course, references do not a great Star Trek film make. There are some things that don’t quite work, and given that the film runs just shy of 2 hours and that there has been some discussion of what was cut (mostly backstory for Krall and Jaylah, but smaller moments like Sulu kissing his husband as well), there are some things that don’t quite read as well on screen as they likely did on the page and/or before the film was edited down. I’m also never going to be completely on board with the use of high speed land-based chases in Star Trek; I know that Justin Lin comes from the Fast/Furious franchise so that’s really his wheelhouse, and as a result these sequences at least work better than previous attempts (I’m looking at you, Nemesis). And I know that it’s nitpicky to point this out, but there’s a lot of Hollywood science going on in this movie. First of all, nebulae are not composed of giant rocks; they’re made up of mostly dust and ionized gases. The film presents the nebula surrounding the mystery planet as being more like the Hollywood imagining of what an asteroid belt looks like, with city-sized rocks knocking into each other; real asteroid belts are mostly empty space with some rock throughout (in space, such a small area with such large pieces of debris would mean that the rocks the Enterprise works so carefully to navigate would pulverize each other into dust within a very short time, relatively speaking).

But, this is still a good movie. There is a classic Star Trek idea here, in that Krall hates the idea that the galaxy is uniting under a banner of peace instead of strength/valor and will do terrible things to demonstrate his devotion to his anti-Federation ideals, as well as the fact that he is opposed and ultimately defeated by the strong bonds that the crew of the Enterprise have and their devotion to the ideals of unity and exploration. It’s not a terribly deep humanistic ideal, and is so faintly traced that the film could be accused of paying lip service to that idea more than actually exploring it, but the fact that this film actually bothers to have this idea means that this movie is actually Star Trek, and not just JJ Abrams’s Star Wars demo reel wrapped in Star Trek’s clothes. The new additions to the cast are very engaging as are the old standards, and there’s a lot of story here that makes it well worth investing in a visit to the theatre. The end of the film legitimately left me with damp cheeks (for those of you who have already seen it, I’m talking about the photo that nuSpock finds in Spock Prime’s possessions), and I can’t wait to see it again. It’s not a five-star movie, but it has my seal of approval.

Final thought, though: The Franklin is said to be the first ship capable of achieving Warp Four; on Star Trek: Enterprise, the NX-01 Enterprise is said to be the first ship capable of achieving Warp Five, even though the Franklin seems to have come later in the timeline given that her captain’s service record includes participating in the Xindi conflict, which followed shortly after Enterprise’s first few years of service. I’m not saying that this can’t work (the Franklin could actually be older than the Enterprise but Captain Edison took command of her later, like how OG Kirk took over command of the Enterprise from Christopher Pike, took command when Robert April was promoted to Commodore). I’m honestly just pointing this out because if I don’t mention it, someone will call me out on it.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Resident Evil (2002)

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three star

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I’m not a video game nerd. The last legitimate gaming system I got excited about was the Nintendo 64. The only one I’ve bought since was a used Wii and that beaten-up relic served exclusively as an emulator for NES games. As such, I’ve never had much interest in the Resident Evil film franchise. My limited knowledge of the series, based entirely on vague hearsay about its video game source material, has been that it’s about a lady who shoots zombies in some kind of underground bunker. While I’m not over the moon about video games as an entertainment medium, I do actively seek out eccentrically inane movies, but there was just never anything about yet another zombie action horror starring a sexy lady with a pile of guns that had much promise for Super Mario Bros. levels of potential silliness in a cinematic video game adaptation. There are now five Resident Evil movies in what has become a decade-long franchise, however, which lead me to suspect that there was more going on here than just a walking dead genre pic with little to no distinguishing features in a crowded field of zombie media. It’s true, too. Resident Evil is more than just a zombie-filled shoot-em-up featuring a beautiful woman with a giant gun. In fact, it actually kinda holds its own as one of the sillier & more entertaining video game adaptations out there, much to my surprise.

While I wasn’t exactly wrong in assuming Resident Evil centered on a widespread epidemic of generic zombie mayhem, I did the movie a huge disservice by reducing its setting to a mere underground bunker. The symbolically named Umbrella Corporation (a detail I assume was carried over from the video game), which periodically deals with very normal corporate modes of money making & privately makes most of its profit off of biochemical weaponry, is the owner of said underground bunker, known as The Hive. The bunker’s underground employees, blissfully unaware of the company’s warmongering, are transformed into the aforementioned zombie horde when one of the more volatile chemicals they work on is released through the bunker’s vents (supposedly) by mistake. As the infected, undead Umbrella Corporation employees transform into monsters, they also become moving targets for a team of leather-clad supersoldiers & a Borne Identity/American Ultra type badass who can’t remember her past but seems to know more about the facility than she should. As her memory slowly returns, our hero must piece together whether or not she’s responsible for the initial outbreak or if there’s some kind of other, larger betrayal unfolding before her. Meanwhile, The Umbrella Corporation’s surveillance cameras seem to be recording these supersoldiers’ every move as they become unwitting participants in a zombie-killing, viral experiment. Also, some strange, not at all human creatures & a childlike AI hologram pop in to push the movie past its zombie-stomping roots into some strange sci-fi horror territory. Its all a lot more fun & complex than I expected, however corny & hamfisted.

Resident Evil comes from a time when video game adaptations were attempting to move on from children’s movie fare like 90s productions Street Fighter & Double Dragon into something more violent & “adult,” like Doom. Director Paul W.S. Anderson splits the difference & lands the film halfway between PG-13 & R (not that the MPAA saw it that way) in terms of sensibility. There’s a violence & grittiness in the film’s nonstop parade of zombies on fire, exposed muscle Rottweiler demons, undefinable The Thing-type mutants, and flashbacks to a blurred sexual encounter the film appears to find very important to the plot, but something about the way they’re handled makes it play like kids’ stuff, just like Anderson’s surprising violent (and even more surprisingly competent) Mortal Kombat adaptation. This is a teenager’s sweet spot in terms of maturity level, a tone easily recognizable in the film’s choice to dress its star, Milla Jovovich, in a post-apocalyptic negligee for most of its runtime & two sheets of paper-thin hospital gauze at its climax. Jovovich’s ass kicking commitment to the role, combined with similar sincerity from Fast & Furious “family member” Michell Rodriguez, cuts down on some of that teenage boy booby-ogling, though, to the point that it mixes with the intense body horror, George Romero brand zombie mayhem, and stray notes of otherworldly sci-fi (an aesthetic Anderson accomplished a lot more with in his film Event Horizon) to make for a fairly decent, amusingly campy action cheapie I would’ve loved had I seen it when it was haunting theaters & I was 15. I appreciate Resident Evil‘s teen nerd immaturity & casual adoption of weird video game ideas in its matter-of-fact silliness. At the very least, its a far better adaptation than the Rock vehicle Doom, which aims for a similar aesthetic, and it got me curious enough about where the series could go from such a ludicrous starting point that I just might check out Anderson’s five gratuitous followups now that I’ve finally been initiated.

-Brandon Ledet

Super Mario Bros. (1993)

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fourstar

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There are few films, campy or otherwise, that better exemplify the fine wine rule than Super Mario Bros. The first & only live action Nintendo adaptation continuously gets better with age & I fall further under its intoxicating spell every time I watch it. This is a box office bomb critics have long slammed as definitive proof that video game adaptations are an inherently bad idea, but those marks against its character matter less with every passing year. Super Mario Bros. is a cartoonish fantasy comedy that somehow, unfathomably marries elements of Blade Runner, Jurassic Park, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? into one unholy cacophony of cinematic cheese & bloat. I marvel at this film’s sheer audacity every time I watch it, just as I find myself continually reeling from its grocery store joke book humor in the exact same breath. Without the pressure for Super Mario Bros. to prove or disprove that a video game adaptation could possibly be worthwhile (there’s now a crowded field of examples to swing that conversation either way you want it to go), the film has found a nice, comfortable space of its own as a cult-worthy camp fest. It’s thoroughly ridiculous, but it’s ridiculous in a fun & above all memorable way that dares you to sour on its 90s relic antics, but never gives you a solid reason to. Super Mario Bros. is a great film. It’s a little sad that three decades later it still feels a little transgressive to say so.

The only video game imagery that graces the screen in Super Mario Bros. is an opening prologue featuring pixelated dinosaurs in a fictional version of reality where the force of the meteor that extinguished the dinos & started the Ice Age created an alternate dimension in which humans evolved from reptiles instead of apes. If that doesn’t sound like a video game to you, much less the plumber-and-princess adventure game that iconically defines the medium, that’s because this movie is floating in its own bizarre orbit lightyears outside the property it’s supposedly adapting. There are video game-type dinos in that opening prologue, though, which proves that the husband-wife directorial team that helmed this major studio disaster are aware that Super Mario Bros. previously existed as a game with its own characters, motivations, and basic aesthetic. They just chose to ignore all that in favor of their own bonkers sense of whimsy, a fantasy realm that calls into question whether or not they’re also aware that there’s no possible way that the dino-killing meteor crash site could’ve been in Brooklyn or that a reptilian-evolved humanity would be so different from our primate selves that they’d be almost entirely unrecognizable as humans at all. No matter. This is a big budget kids’ fantasy adventure at heart, so its faithfulness to video game lore or basic science is almost entirely beside the point in the question of its entertainment value.

There are, admittedly, a few details of the Super Mario Bros. film that vaguely resemble their video game source material. They at least included some of the same characters: Mario & Luigi are Italian plumbers from Brooklyn, NY, which feels about as faithful to their video game visages as you can get. Princess Peach is now Princess Daisy for some unexplained reason, but it’s a mild change at best and the boys still have to venture out to rescue her from the reptilian clutches of an evil monarch named Koopa, which is more or less where the video game’s narrative begins & ends. Other details begin to get a lot fuzzier, though. Instead of being a giant, scary turtle-dragon motherfucker that lives in a castle full of lava, Koopa looks an awful lot like Dennis Hopper doing a dead on impersonation of Donald Trump (complete with the gaudy tower & political grandstanding). Toad is the furthest from his original form, ditching his miniature guru looks from the game in favor of a delightfully out-of-place, full-sized Mojo Nixon singing dumb protest songs about King Koopa on street corners. Staying faithful to the video game can be a double edged sword, though, as is exemplified by the baby dino Yoshi, who is cute as a button in this film, but also much more along the lines of Jurassic Park-type dinosaur puppets than what his video game creators likely intended. One of the reasons Super Mario Bros. stands out as such enjoyable schlock is that it embraces this damned if you do, damned if you don’t mentality whole-heartedly and just runs wild with the freedom adapting a video game with a very thin backstory affords it. It includes just enough characters & visual cues to resemble the Super Mario Bros. game at a glance, but does anything but keep it safe in the way it fleshes out their universe.

The most common argument against cinematic video game adaptations is that they necessitate a backstory where none is truly needed. No one playing the Super Mario Bros. game is likely to care exactly how or why the princess they’re rescuing was captured by an evil dino turtle dragon; they just hop in the green pipes & smash the mushroom-shaped baddies that get in the way of saving her. A movie requires a little more narrative coddling & a lot of the fun of Super Mario Bros. is in tracking how it either stays faithful to the game’s basic layout or disregards it completely on a minute to minute basis. The film is confident enough in its own right to exist as a standalone property that it ditches the fantasy genre brick & mortar castles of the video game for a distinct Blade Runner-style of urban dystopia. However, it also bends over backwards to include a way for Koopa’s guards to shoot the video game’s fireballs or make sense out of the role mushrooms & fungus have to play in all this (in the shape of a hideous fungal life form that would give Cronenberg nightmares). In some ways the film completely runs wild, like in its creation of an alternate dimension where the entire globe is one vast desert outside a single metropolis or in its de-evolution weapons that can turn people “back” into lizards. There’s also a few areas of compromise between the two extremes, like an inclusion of goombas that makes them out to be de-evolved lizard people instead of tiny mushroom monsters so that both properties can get equal representation. Super Mario Bros. plays along just enough to pass as a video game adaptation, but takes tremendous glee in constructing its own over-the-top fantasy realm where lizard people fight over a dino dictator’s crumbs & dance “Thriller” video-knockoff routines to bullshit like “Everybody Do the Dinosaur.” It’s an insane spectacle from front to end and because it feels little need to stay close to its source material’s limited backstory beyond its basic sketch and it’s a pleasantly unique spectacle at that.

Divorced from its source material, Super Mario Bros. is barrels of vapid fun. I honestly believe there are few children’s films from its era that match it in terms of ambitious set design, campy humor, and pure, directionless inanity. A lot of the film’s charms are a credit to the performances of Bob Hoskins & John Leguizamo as Mario Mario & Luigi Mario (speaking of video game background info that didn’t need to be developed), as well as Hopper’s Koopa-Trump & Harry Potter’s wicked aunt, Fiona Shaw, as his soul-sucking sidekick. Hoskins in particular is pretty great as the titular plumber & I honestly believe this film is his best work outside his iconic turn in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. It’s way too easy to buy Hoskins as a spaghetti-slurping Brooklynite, to the point where I’m never truly convinced that the now-deceased actor actually hailed from Britain. Besides the cartoonish performances from the cast, I also appreciate how intricately detailed its production design can be. There’s a consistency in the leather spikes fashion wear that seem so popular in Koopa’s alternate dimension Brooklyn & I’m always picking up on new, small details hiding elsewhere in the fake city’s dingy nooks & crannies: Mario’s NYC apartment features a plunger rack instead of a gun rack; there are tiny lizard rodents fighting over the city’s plentiful trash; the de-evolution chamber is operated by a Duck Hunt controller; Mario & his girlfriend have plans to attend WrestleMania; a run-down cinema is screening I Was a Teenage Mammal, etc. Then there’s the now-disturbing shot of the Twin Towers partly dissolving thanks to Koopa’s evil deeds, an image that looks strikingly similar to a real life tragedy from a decade after this film’s release. As much fun as these grimy details can be, however, this is still just a silly children’s media fantasy, a fact that becomes apparent when everything magically, inexplicably reverts back to normal once Koopa is defeated (in a moment punctuated by Mario delivering the glorious one-liner “Later, alligator” to the evil, reptilian brute).

It’s a shame that Super Mario Bros. was scorned for its absurd deviations from its paper thin source material in its time. In the decades since it’s become increasingly apparent that devotion to its video game roots would have left the film far more mild & forgettable that it ended up being by learning to cut the kite strings & float on its own over-the-top, over-budget inanity. This is one remarkably silly movie and it’s amazing that it ever managed to reach theaters in the first place. My only complaint at this point is that it teased a sequel that never arrived because audiences were more than eager to let it die on arrival. Continuing down this absurd path could’ve lead to something even more amusing & special had audiences given it the chance.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #10 of The Swampflix Podcast: Top Ten Time Travel Movies & Martyrs (2008)

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inaworld

Welcome to Episode #10 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our tenth episode, James & Brandon discuss their top ten time travel films of all time with author/blogger/friend Bryan Perkins. Also, James makes Brandon watch the French-Canadian “extremist” horror Martyrs (2008). Enjoy!

Production note: The musical “bumps” between segments were also provided by James.

-James Cohn & Brandon Ledet

Timecrimes (2008)

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threehalfstar

The only thing I knew about the Spanish sci-fi thriller Timecrimes going in is that people often accuse the time travel horror Triangle of blatantly ripping it off. It’s easy to see how that accusation gets tossed around. Both films feature a similarly-masked killer and a tortured/confused protagonist stuck in a Groundhog Day-type time loop that becomes increasingly inevitable each time it plays out & progresses. Although Timecrimes beat Triangle to the punch in some ways I found myself less in love with what it delivers than the much more supernaturally bizarre film that followed. It’s probably best for Timecrimes‘s sake to ignore that comparison entirely & enjoy it for its own small scale, economical thriller charms. It works perfectly well outside that context & is a must see time travel thriller for sci-fi junkies on its own terms.

Timecrimes begins with a fairly typical horror film setup: a married, middle-aged man is violently punished (stabbed in the arm) for ogling a young topless woman through binoculars while he is supposedly bird-watching with his wife. Things get much stranger form there once he’s tricked into entering a time machine that brings him back to that exact same time of day. In order to avoid altering the trajectory of time already established he forces the young woman, a kind stranger, to disrobe so his alternate version can ogle her through binoculars. You can already see where this is headed, I’m sure. A lot of the fun in Timecrimes is in watching the ever-complicating plot set up its Rube Goldberg machinations & to scratch your head over its self-creating paradoxes. You know exactly where the plot is headed, but expect many twists & betrayals to be revealed in the process and it’s fascinating to watch a character climb into his own grave and then retroactively dig it. As the time machine operator puts it, “The machine doesn’t solve problems. In fact, it creates them.” As these “problems” stack up to an insurmountable fever pitch Timecrimes finds a nice little groove for itself, like needle slowly spiraling inwards on a record.

Although nicely layered, Timecrimes‘s plot structure is a lot less complicated than similar time loop features like Triangle or Groundhog Day or, the most complex of them all, Primer. What I most appreciated about the film, though, was not its structural complexity, but its interest in constructing a moral dilemma. It’s difficult to tell for sure if the film’s protagonist is an objectively bad person or just a victim of circumstance doing objectively bad things in order to maintain the integrity of his preferred timeline. It’s also interesting how the film turns the passive ogling of a stranger’s body into something much more violent & predatory. By the end of the film when he proclaims, “I had no choice” in regards to his escalating mess of questionable offenses, it’s all too easy to call bullshit. He had plenty of choices. He just chose to be selfish & self-preserving at every turn.

Timecrimes was obviously made on a shoestring budget, which often shows in the acting & script (I’ve never seen anyone so goofily trick a stranger into a time machine outside a UCB sketch before), but it makes the most out of its resources. Time-marking talismans like Blondie’s “Pictures of You” & the masked killer’s Darkman-esque getup are brilliant uses of simple tools at the film’s disposal and it really does get a lot of mileage out of the moral crisis of its plot despite its trashier impulses. If Triangle “borrowed” heavily from Timecrimes, I’d say it improved on its formula significantly, but the film really is an enjoyable, efficient sci-fi thriller in its own right and there’s more than enough room in this world for both works to be their wonderfully strange, independent selves, regardless of when they were released in time.

-Brandon Ledet

Primer (2004)

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threehalfstar

In some ways Primer is the film The Martian was only pretending to be. The Matt Damon sci-fi action “comedy” (well, comedy by the Golden Globes’ measurement, anyway) was a hit last year that had people praising its supposedly ultra-scientific nerd-speak for not talking down to its audience & constructing a plot around basic old-fashioned problem-solving. Personally, I had a hard time seeing The Martian as much more than a crowd-pleaser balanced between a rescue mission drama & a big budget disaster pic, maybe with a little found footage thriller tossed in for flavor. Shane Carruth’s dirt cheap time travel paradox Primer, on the other hand, feels like truly authentic problem-solving nerd-speak. I can tell it’s authentic because I have no idea what’s going on and will probably need several more viewings & a notepad to catch up. The Martian may have charmed audiences into thinking they were getting the pure, uncut nerdy goods, but Primer was the real deal primo shit. I don’t think that it’s necessarily a better or more admirable movie for not speaking to a wide audience in a more toned-down, accessible version of nerd-speak, but I do think it was much closer to the intricate, intelligent movie a lot of people seemed to think they watched when they describe the much more audience-friendly The Martian.

Shane Carruth writes, directs, produces, scores, edits, and stars in this cerebral sci-fi cheapie about two tech world bros who accidentally discover a closed circuit version of time travel that allows them to loop into the future & back into their temporal starting point. It’s a little like a microwave that makes an instant, self-contained Groundhog Day experience. Before they realize what they’re even working on (it’s initially referred to as “the thing” & “the device”) the film pokes a little insider fun at the in-the-garage tech startup world of properties like Steve Jobs & Silicon Valley. Ancient analog equipment & other corner-cutting attempts to save money are played for subtle humor. All tech bros wear a Mormon-like uniform of a white dress shirt & striped tie. Corporate lingo is casually tossed around in a condescending tone. Carruth obviously knows this world intimately & it shows on the screen, but Primer doesn’t really come alive until it leaves the tech startup world behind & dives head first into the unknown. It’s about 30min into the film’s very slim runtime when mutliple timeline paradox versions of our unreliable narrator bros start constructing a mind puzzle for the audience to tinker with as they pull rugs, reveal betrayals, and get too comfy with a powerful force of nature they have no business manipulating in the first place: time.

I haven’t seen Carruth’s sophomore film, Upstream Color, since it left the theater in 2012, but I found that work to be an unmitigated masterpiece, one I mentally return to often just to mull over its many cerebral pleasures. In that context Primer feels like a young director with a limited budget just getting his legs. Much like Patrick Brice’s dual 2015 releases Creep & The Overnight, Primer is an exciting example of just how much a filmmaker can accomplish with a great script & a near-nonexistent budget (reportedly $7000 in Primer‘s case). The acting isn’t quite up to snuff with the writing here. The leads have a tendency to read their lines in a mumbled, stabby attack that often makes them difficult to decipher, especially in early scenes when they’re constructing & tweaking “the device.” However, the film has a lot of fun both tangling up a plot that would take hundreds of viewings to fully unravel & in delivering weird time travel one-liners like “Are you hungry? I haven’t eaten since later this afternoon,” and “It’s going to be a long day,” (meant literally). Primer makes a virtue out of telling, not showing and I feel like a lot of true-nerd science geeks probably would get the most out of its paradoxical conundrums & moral dilemmas.

Personally, I enjoyed & appreciated the film’s small-scale, verbal pleasures, but found a whole lot more to unpack in Carruth’s followup that was a hell of a lot more interesting than just mapping out what transpired plot-wise (which apparently is a thing entire fan sites Primer has inspired to do). Folks who enjoyed the nerdy step-by-step problem solving of The Martian would probably get even more out of it than I did. However, be forewarned. This movie is actually the real deal.

-Brandon Ledet

Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)

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twohalfstar

Several years ago when Rob Zombie’s Halloween remake was first announced, I asked my neighbor and fellow horror fan Drew if he thought it would be worth seeing. In his trademark bombast, he declared that there was no point; the original Halloween had spawned so many imitators and copycats over the ensuing decade that the movie had essentially been remade dozens of times.

I couldn’t help but think about the autumn afternoon that conversation took place while sitting in the theatre watching Roland Emmerich’s latest cinematic outing, Independence Day: Resurgence last week. Why should we revisit the world of Independence Day when there have been so many imitations, parodies, and virtual remakes of that movie in the twenty intervening years between the original and this too-late sequel? Especially given that many of the attempts to recapture ID4’s success were made by that film’s director? After early career success with cult film Universal Soldier and the big-budget sci-fi flick Stargate (which I rather like, although I understand and accept that I’m in the minority on this one), Emmerich hit the film world with comparable force to one of the ID4’s flying saucer beams. The 1996 film was the highest grossing movie of the year, with a box office take of $817.4 million (for comparison, Twister was the second highest grossing film of 1996, raking in $494.4 million, about 60% of ID4’s total), and led Time to declare that science fiction was back in the mainstream. Comparative quality aside, Independence Day was essentially the Star Wars of the nineties: a surprise blockbuster success that catapulted almost everyone involved into another level of Hollywood starpower.

There are those who argue that Independence Day is a dumb movie, including most internet reviewers like (my personal hero) Lindsay Ellis, although even the hardest-hearted nitpicker can admit that there’s nothing wrong with loving a dumb movie. I have an unabashed fondness for ID4 even after all the times that I’ve seen it, and I can’t even find it in my heart to consider it a dumb movie, for all of its flaws. The characterization is generic and bland; as a result, most of the audience investment in the film rides on the charisma of its leads, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Pullman, and (especially) Will Smith, even more than the show-stopping effects work that turns DC, LA, and NYC into smoldering ruins. The film is unabashedly patriotic and jingoistic, but in a largely positive way; it’s not pro-America to the extent that non-Americans are portrayed as chaotic evil monsters, as in films in the vein of Emmerich’s later film The Patriot. What I love most about ID4 is that the stakes feel real and tangible, because the world of Independence Day is, for all intents and purposes, our world.

Resurgence’s biggest flaw lies in how it fails to understand the simple appeal of that reality. Because all the reviews that you’ve seen talking about how Resurgence is an awful piece of shit aren’t really accurate: Resurgence is a perfectly serviceable modern science fiction film. That’s faint praise and I know it, but it’s the truth. Resurgence is not a good movie or a bad movie, it’s just a moderate, middle of the road, mediocre film. It’s just as “dumb” as ID4 but without the charm. It’s basically a Syfy Channel original but with actors who can recite dialogue like they’ve met a human being before (minus Brent Spiner) and a budget that accommodates the spectacle that Emmerich wants to put on display. It’s as bland and inoffensive as a film can possibly be, and it would be as quickly forgotten as comparably unmemorable sci-fi time-passers like 2013’s Oblivion and 2014’s The Signal were it not for the fact that it’s a follow-up to a movie that people have intense nostalgic fondness for.

But before I spend any more time deliberating on the differences between the sequel and the original, a brief plot outline: 20 years after the “War of 1996,” the various nations of the planet are largely unified into a single governmental body and with a singular planetary defense force. Doctor Ian Malcolm David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) is director of Earth Space Defense, and his father Julius (Judd Hirsch) wrote a self-aggrandizing book and is living off of its profits on an apparently indestructible houseboat. Former President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) is tended to by his daughter Patricia (It Follows’s Maika Monroe taking over for Mae “Her?” Whitman, because the latter is “not pretty enough” I guess), who is also a former space jet pilot and current staffer in the White House under President Sela Ward, who may have been given a character name but damned if I can recall it. Dylan Dubrow-Hiller (Jessie Usher replacing Ross Bagley), the stepson of Will Smith’s character in the first film, is the leader of a squadron of “legacy” pilots, including new characters Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth) and Charlie Miller (Travis Tope), who have been busted down to menial work after Morrison endangered Dylan in a practice flight. Also, Charlotte Gainsbourg is in this movie for some reason, as a researcher who thinks that a very simplistic icon that repeats itself in the drawings of people who were psychically connected to the aliens is important before disappearing as soon as the plot no longer needs her. Oh, and Brent Spiner is back as Dr. Okun, only this time he’s a major part of the plot in addition to service as one of the film’s four(!) comic relief characters. The plot follows the new generation (Hemsworth/Monroe/Usher) teaming up with the old (Spiner/Pullman/Goldblum) to destroy a new alien threat, which is the same as the old alien threat but bigger.

One of Emmerich’s trademarks is that his films (that aren’t the least historical historical pictures ever committed to film, like The Patriot and the utter garbage Anonymous) usually open with one character finding out about something, then that information being communicated to several other people before being disseminated to one of our protagonists. Stargate opens with a child in Egypt discovering something that becomes her life’s work, and then James Spader is eventually brought in to translate the hieroglyphics that kickstart the plot. In ID4, a signal is detected and the information is eventually escalated to the point that the president is awoken to be told this information. Often, someone of import will be in the middle of a party and then be called away to answer a phone call. As lazy as it is to repeat this trick over and over again, it’s a decent filmic way of using a gigantic cast of characters in order to convey a sense of scale. That’s part of what helped ID4 feel so global, but here the world of the film feels very small, and we see characters that we already know almost immediately. A lot of this has to do with the film’s world-building, which is another element that alienates this sequel from the original. The appeal of Independence Day is that it took place in our world, whereas Resurgence takes place on an Earth with antigravity helicopters, interplanetary “tugs” that can shuttle to the moon and back in a matter of minutes, a building that you don’t even realize is the rebuilt White House at first, and soldiers carrying around Halo-esque pulse rifles. Everything in the film is futuristic because it’s been reverse-engineered from alien tech; this needn’t inherently detract from the film, but it does mean that the world of Resurgence isn’t ours, and it’s hard to care about the stakes in this film when compared to the original. This entire film could take place on Alderaan or Arrakis for all that it resembles the 2016 we’re all living in. And when we live in a world where 9/11 imagery is used to “sell” the audience destruction on a massive scale in everything from Man of Steel to Transformers, Independence Day’s relatively tasteful and understated destruction and use of practical effects seems dated now, but Resurgence goes too far in the other direction, with the over-the- top devastation looking like outtakes from 2012 that were put back in the box for being too unbelievable.

There’s honestly too much to say about why this film fails as a sequel, so divorcing it from that context and viewing it as a run-of- the-mill sci-fi flick that combines absurd schlock (Judd Hirsch outrunning a tidal wave on a tiny boat is some ‘98 Godzilla shenanigans) with occasional tenderness (Monroe and Pullman pull off some damn fine interfamilial love) is the best way to enjoy it Resurgence, should you want to do so. There are interesting ideas aplenty: post-singularity life forms that exist elsewhere in the universe, an insular nation where a ground war against survivors of a crashed alien ship went on for a decade after the invasion proper was thwarted, and the haunted dreams of post-invasion survivors are all woefully underdeveloped in comparison to subplots that are useless and forgettable, like Charlie’s crush on the Chinese pilot, the tagalong auditor comic relief character, the busload of kids that Judd Hirsch rescues, and pointless rivalry between Dylan and Jake. The attempts to recreate the personal relationships of the first film fall flat, and it would have been better not to try at all.

Overall, Resurgence is too little, too late, and it doesn’t have the heart and charm that the original did to cover its flaws. But it exists now and we all have to live with it, so my advice is to either not bother or try to enjoy it as an Asylum flick that somehow got a big-screen budget.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Hands of Orlac (1924)

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three star

The 1920s sci-fi horror The Hands of Orclac holds quite an impressive pedigree. Directed by Austrian filmmaker Robert Wierne, who also helmed the infamous silent era classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and starring Conrad Veidt, whose visage in The Man Who Laughs partly inspired the DC Comics villain The Joker, this modest silent horror has spawned two separate remakes & nearly a century of admiration. You can see The Hands of Orclac‘s imprint on schlocky titles like Idle Hands & Manos: The Hands of Fate as well as more prestigious horror milestones like the way Bela Lugosi manually hypnotizes women in the 1930s Dracula. The movie has a challenging runtime in terms of ancient feature lengths (a lot of the silent horrors I’ve watched recently have been barely over an hour; this one doubles it) and a lot of what makes its special is unfortunately undone in its closing minutes, but I still found it fascinating as an old world relic & there were some really strong, dreamlike images that made the experience memorable even if it couldn’t quite stick the landing.

Much like with the 1940s cheapie The Monster Maker, The Hands of Orlac centers on a concert pianist who suddenly, horrifically finds himself unable to use his hands. Instead of being maliciously inflicted with a glandular disorder by a mad scientist, however, our man Orlac loses his money-makers in a near-fatal train wreck. Because of the special effects limitations of the time the train wreck occurs off-screen, a necessary choice that pays off nicely as the audience watches Orlac’s wife stumble into the chaos of the wreckage in search of her beloved. While Orlac is recovering she begs for the surgeons to save his precious ivory-ticklers and they reluctantly oblige . . . sort of. Orlac’s hands are replaced with those of a convicted killer who is to be hung that same day. He can feel the murderous hatred shooting up his arms & into his very soul as he winds up walking around with his arms stretched out like a zombie, doing his hands’ evil bidding. Casting must’ve been essential in selling the horror of this scenario onscreen, as Verdt’s huge, veiny hands really do look like they’re controlling his body & bending his will for malicious purpose.

Like I said, a lot of what makes The Hands of Orlac special is retroactively undone by a lackluster finish involving a police procedural and a criminal caricature that plays about as broad & goofy as a Bobby Moynihan sketch. The film finds a lot to work with before it allows itself to unravel, though. It has a The Red Shoes quality in its fantastical ideas on how an object or a body part can possess you to act or hallucinate. There’s also impressive attention paid to the romantic falling out of such a bizarre situation. Because Orlac cannot play piano, the married couple suffers newfound debt & subsequent crisis. Also, Orlac refuses to touch his wife with his new murder hands, but the hands themselves have no qualms with seducing/being seduced by other women, which leads to one strikingly odd, fetishistic exchange with a maid. There’s a lot of great, weird imagery & ideas that top even that moment of bizarre seduction, including a giant, God-like hand descending from the ceiling over a hospital bed, a reference to head transplant experiment, and an army of wicked bankers mechanically shaking their heads no while Orlac’s wife begs for an extension on their debts. The Hands of Orlac also makes great use out of what’s becoming one of my favorite silent era tropes: impossibly enormous, bare interior spaces that feel like something out of a dream. I don’t think the film is anywhere near wholly successful, especially in light of its total cop out ending, but The Hands of Orlac is still fascinating in it smaller moments & details.

-Brandon Ledet