sci-fi

The Lathe of Heaven (1980)

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The recent career-overview documentary The Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin is a decent enough introduction to the sci-fi author’s big-picture concepts & beliefs.  The posthumous doc unfortunately highlights Le Guin’s Earthsea series as a source of inspiration for Harry Potter, of all indignities, but it’s a faux pas I’m willing to forgive since it also indulges in some transcendent Loving Vincent-style animation that illustrates her ideas beautifully.  I’m also willing to forgive it because there is so little visual, extratextual material to pull from when marrying images to Le Guin’s words.  Goro Miyazaki’s condensed anime adaptation of the Earthsea series also felt like a lazy cash-in on the popularity of Harry Potter in the 2000s, mixed with generic Games of Thrones-style fantasy tropes.  Tales from Earthsea certainly didn’t engage with the meaning behind the story of its source text in any authentic or substantial way, so it makes sense that The Worlds of Ursula K Le Guin would have to re-illustrate its central concepts instead of licensing Miyazaki’s imagery from Studio Ghibli.  There wasn’t much else to pull from beyond the Goro Miyazaki movie either – a noticeable void of extratextual illustration that becomes exponentially unignorable the further the documentary digs into Le Guin’s legacy. 

It’s outright absurd that there are only four direct film adaptations of Le Guin’s work listed on her official website.  Half adapt stories from Earthsea – including the Ghibli movie and a Syfy Channel miniseries.  The other half are TV movie adaptations of The Lathe of Heaven – one for public access and one for A&E.  That’s a shockingly thin catalog for an incalculably influential author with dozens of novels and hundreds of short stories to her name.  Luckily, there’s at least one great work lurking among these meager titles, one that eases the bitterly bland aftertaste of the middling Earthsea anime.  The very first film adaptation of Le Guin’s writing was also credited as the first made-for-Public-Access-TV movie ever.  The 1980 Lathe of Heaven is something of a cult curio for New Yorkers who happened to catch it on WNET Channel 13 in its original broadcast, and its scarcity on home video has only intensified its status as a niche object of sci-fi nerd affection in the decades since.  Made by experimental video art weirdos from the NYC area (David Loxton & Fred Barzyk), the 1980 version of The Lathe of Heaven is much more stylish than the A&E version from the 2000s.  Le Guin also had so much direct involvement in the production that she earned an official “creative consultant” credit, which is something you won’t find in the other adaptations of her work. 

The Lathe of Heaven stars Bruce “Willard” Davison as a troubled citizen of near-future Portland (Le Guin’s home city), a suicide attempt survivor who’s assigned to a “voluntary therapy clinic” to assess the mysterious sleep disorder that’s tanking his mental health.  He’s isolated by his suffering, since he is being plagued by phenomenon he describes as “effective dreams”: dreams that alter the fabric of reality in waking life, unbeknownst to everyone but him.  Against all odds, the patient convinces his new sleep therapist that the “effective dream” phenomenon is real in just a few sessions, but instead of working towards a cure, the doctor immediately exploits his fantastical power.  Using suggestive hypnosis, the therapist influences the content of his patient’s dreams, attempting to improve society and the planet through the unwieldy power.  After a couple minor successes transforming the famously rainy city of Portland into “The Sunshine City” and dreaming his way into a bigger office, the therapist quickly starts dreaming bigger – to the entire world’s peril.  His patient effectively has a cursed Monkey’s Paw for a brain, leading to a series of Twilight Zone style ironies in dreams fulfilled.  Dreaming the planet’s relief from over-population leads to genocide.  Dreaming for world peace leads to global suffering under alien invaders.  Dreaming the end of racism leads to oppressive cultural homogenization; etc.

There’s an overt philosophical conundrum at the heart of Le Guin’s story, stemming specifically from her interest in Taoism.  Although the therapist is relatively well-intentioned in his efforts to improve the world by exploiting his patient’s effective dreams, he’s constantly violating the natural flow of life & the universe, suffering grand-scale consequences for the transgression.  The dreamer, by contrast, is much better suited to a proper Taoist lifestyle, gradually accepting that there is no grand purpose or meaning to Life, explaining to his doctor, “It just is.”  The philosophical clash between those opposing forces would only be enough material to cover an hour-long block of Outer Limits, though, so it’s for the best that Loxton & Barzyk bring some much-needed visual flair to the dream sequences & sleep study experiments to translate Le Guin’s written ideas into cinema.  The directors’ video art psychedelia shines through on the display screens of the retro-futurist lab equipment and in the film-negative illustrations of invading UFOs.  It’s an effect that’s only been amplified by the film’s degenerated imagery.  Since its original production materials were lost, its most current DVD prints were remastered from time-damaged video elements – leaving it with a “ghosting” effect that smears all rapid movement onscreen in a transparent trail.  That would be a frustrating limitation in most archival contexts, but it’s appropriate to the film’s deliberately dreamlike visual style in this particular instance.

Truth be told, The Lathe of Heaven is more “great for a TV movie” than it is great for a movie-movie.  There are a few flashes of brilliance in its planetarium laser shows, its stage-bound visualization of a global plague, its Ed Woodian stock footage of jellyfish & space rockets, and its stunning montage of Portland landscapes warped by their reflection in skyscraper windowpanes.  Otherwise, the production is glaringly limited by its Public Access TV production budget, and so it’s most commendable for the imaginative & philosophical strengths of Le Guin’s writing.  The most you could say of the 1980 Lathe of Heaven as an art object is that it lands as a more level-headed, made-for-TV version of Ken Russell’s much wilder Altered States, which happened to be released the same year.  Otherwise, it’s a scrappy, serviceable illustration of its much more substantial source text.  That service just can’t be overvalued in this case, since the text’s author is so greatly talented and so strangely underadapted, with only a few relatively puny competitors, all devoid of any discernible visual style.

-Brandon Ledet

Biosphere (2023)

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Mumblecore may be long gone as a moment in time, but the Duplass Brothers are still out there keeping its memory alive.  While mumblecore overachievers Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach made the highest-grossing film of the year—a feature-length toy commercial, no less—The Duplasses are still making low-key, low-profile indies, still putting together dependably entertaining pictures with limited resources.  Even so, their new sci-fi bromance Biosphere feels like a mumblecore throwback stunt in its limited scope, featuring only two actors on a single, sparse, Apple Store futurist set.  That scaled-down approach to movie production made more sense when they were making lockdown-era laptop dramas like Language Lessons, but at this point in on-set COVID safety protocols, it’s more of a flex than a necessity.  In cynical Gen-X 90s terms, the narrative would’ve been that Barbie was a sign that Gerwig & Baumbach “sold out” and that the Duplasses are somehow nobler artists for continuing to slack around on a condemned & abandoned mumblecore playground.  In these post-Poptimism times we’re living in now, though, there’s no such thing as selling out, and all that really matters is that Barbie is one of the best movies of the year, while Biosphere is just the latest example of what its producers have been consistently making for the past couple decades running.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lacking in ambition, though.  Biosphere takes admirably big swings on its tiny playground, and it scores major bonus points for taking those swings early, so that it actually has to fully deal with the social discomforts of its premise instead of saving it all for a last-minute twist. Mark Duplass stars opposite Sterling K Brown as childhood best friends . . . and the only two human beings left alive after a nuclear apocalypse.  Every detail outside the bond of their friendship gets phonier & phonier the further the story spirals out from there.  Duplass unconvincingly stars as the Republican president of the United States and the main instigator of the nuclear shoot-out that ended it all, despite having more of an under-achieving court jester vibe.  Brown is slightly more believable as the politically progressive scientist who built the self-contained biodome they’re riding out the Apocalypse in, but the circumstances of when & why he built it get less credible by the minute.  That doesn’t matter nearly as much as the question of how two cisgender men are supposed to rebuild society without any outside collaborators for procreation, a question made even more uncomfortable by how their dorm-room college bro relationship is tested by their newfound need to be Everything to each other in a world the size of a living room.  Since the movie is most effective when it’s about the specifics of their evolving friendships, it’s probably for the best that there is no world outside their biohome.

I can’t say much more about Biosphere‘s premise without completely spoiling it, which I guess means that you should watch it with your best bro, so you have someone to talk it out with.  It’s thematically provocative in its discussions of the physiology & power dynamics of gender, poking specifically at the most sensitively guarded area of the topic: straight male companionship.  What does it say about the Duplasses’ filmmaking ambitions that Mark already starred in a movie about those exact bromantic sensitivities way back in 2009?  I’m not sure, but I do know that Humpday was received as a substantial entry in the mumblecore canon, while Biosphere feels untethered from anything especially urgent or substantial at all.  Even within the subgenre of movies contained in biospheres, it’s nowhere near as provocative as the eco-terror bomb-thrower Silent Running nor as memorably goofy & inane as the stoner bro comedy Biodome.  It’s just a Duplass Brothers movie that happens to have a sci-fi theme – the kind of low-key, oddly phony drama that makes you wonder why they didn’t just stage an off-Broadway play instead of making a movie.  I appreciate its ambition to challenge its audience in its thematic ideas, while I also question when The Duplasses are going to start challenging themselves with cinematic ones.

-Brandon Ledet

Poor Things (2023)

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“We are a fucked species; know it.”
“We are all cruel beasts – born that way, die that way.”
“Polite society is fucking boring.”
“Polite society will destroy you.”
“All sexuality is basically immoral.”

Poor Things is the kind of movie about the total scope of life as a human being that allows characters to voice those kinds of abstract philosophical statements, often with immediate dismissive pushback from the poor souls hearing them.  In that way, it’s the culmination of everything provoc-auteur Yorgos Lanthimos has been working towards since early antisocial provocations like Dogtooth & Alps.  He’s always had a coldly detached fascination with basic human behavior & relationships, but he has yet to dissect & catalog them all in a single text the way he does here.  Every new Lanthimos movie feels like it’s poking at some assumed social norm as if it were a corpse he found in the woods.  Poor Things finds that naive interrogation at its most scientifically thorough & perversely fun, to the point where he articulates the entire human experience through repurposed dead flesh.  In doing so, he’s clearly made The Movie of the Year, and so far the movie of his career.

Emma Stone stars as the repurposed corpse in question: a suicide victim who has been reborn as a Frankenstein-style brain transplant experiment in a mad scientist’s Turn-of-the-Century laboratory.  Her monstrous “Daddy God” creator—played with pitiable Elephant Man anguish by Willem Dafoe—initially keeps his experiment on a short leash, confining her entire life to his grotesque but lavish home.  She eventually breaks free, though, as all Frankenstein monsters do, and ventures into the world as an adult-bodied woman with the mind of a rapidly developing child.  Her resulting interrogation of the world outside her home is intensely violent, as anyone who can picture an adult-sized toddler throwing a temper tantrum would expect.  It’s also intensely sexual, as she can find no joy more immediately self-fulfilling than orgasmic bliss but lacks basic understanding of that joy’s socially appropriate boundaries: assumed monogamy, acceptable dinner conversation, the stigma of sex work, when & where it’s permissible to masturbate, etc.  If she is meant to represent humanity at its most basic & untouched by learned social restrictions, she represents us as insatiably horny, violent beasts who have to consciously strive to learn empathy for each other because it is not innate in our souls.  It’s a hilarious, uncomfortably accurate assessment of the species.

If there’s any one particular social norm that Lanthimos naively interrogates here, it’s a gendered one.  Much of the reanimated monster’s exploration of Life is limited by the men who wish to control her.  First, her Daddy God confines her as a domestic prisoner, the same way all fathers of young women fear their freedom as autonomous adults.  Once she’s loose, a small succession of selfish bachelors aim to trap her again in the domestic prison of marriage: Ramy Youssef as an ineffectual Nice Guy, Mark Ruffalo as a dastardly fuckboy fop, and Christopher Abbott as a sociopathic abuser.  All the men in the monster’s life seek to control her in ways that stifle her self-development.  It’s a movie about male possessiveness just as much as it’s about the absurdities of Life & societal decorum in that way, and the heroic triumph at the center is mostly in watching the creature fuck & read her way out of her patriarchal bonds to become her own person.  At times, that sentiment is expressed through philosophical assessment of what it means to live as an ethical person in modern society.  More often, it’s a crass celebration of women being annoying & gross in public despite the men around them demanding they calm it down.  It’s oddly uplifting in either case.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s films have become more recognizably comedic since he broke through to a wider audience with The Lobster, and they’re all the better for it.  There’s a sense of playful collaboration here where the director allows each contributor freedom to run wild: Stone & Ruffalo in their sketch comedy acting choices, cinematographer Robbie Ryan in his fish-eye lens fantasia, screenwriter Tony McNamara in his violent perversions of vintage humorist quips.  It’s telling that the only work that’s directly alluded to onscreen (besides, arguably, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its James Whale mutations) is Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, another prankishly prurient comedy of manners.  Lanthimos has always morbidly poked at social norms & decorum with this same curious outsider’s perspective, but never before while taking so much obvious glee in the act, nor on this wide of a scope.  I rarely have this much fun thinking about how we’re “a fucked species” of “cruel beasts,” and how our rules of appropriate social interaction are so, so very “fucking boring.”

-Brandon Ledet

The Marvels (2023)

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It’s been a long time since one of these movies was good, hasn’t it? It’s been four and a half years since Endgame, and since then even I, longtime superhero movie proponent-turned-apathetic-turned-detractor, have grown tired of talking about how this franchise had degenerated into serviceable if dreary (Guardians 3), effective if propagandistically nostalgia-driven (No Way Home), and even ugly and miserable (The Eternals, which I/we never even bothered to review, and Quantumania). I couldn’t quite bring myself to finish Shang-Chi, never bothered with Love and Thunder, and only watched the Doctor Strange sequel because I will watch anything Sam Raimi does, but again, there’s no hyperlink for that because no one around these parts could be arsed to write one. Not even me! But sometimes you get an invitation that you can’t (or don’t want to) reject, and you find yourself drinking a milkshake and looking at Brie Larson’s face and really enjoying yourself. 

The big joke going around about this one is that, in order to understand it, you’ll have had to done a ton of homework, including not only watching all of the films but also the TV series Ms. Marvel and WandaVision (which, full disclosure, I did see), and perhaps the universally reviled Secret Invasion, which was so far from my radar that I initially typed out Secret Wars and then had to correct myself after a quick Google search. One of the great things about the Alamo Drafthouse is that, for these movies, they often edit together a quick homemade “previously on” segment to introduce the film for audience members who may not be trying to pass the MCU SATs (the voiceover of which is slowly sounding more and more acerbic, which I cannot object to). Even without that, however, I think this one is actually an easy entry point, with the only truly required “reading” is Captain Marvel, and I think it’s fair to say that if you care about this movie at all, you’re probably caught up. The character introductions to one another in this one serve as functional introductions for the audience as well, and they handle the “who’s who” as deftly as is possible for dialogue that is expository, both in and outside of the text. 

Brie Larson returns as Carol “Captain Marvel” Danvers, who is shown to be working for Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) in checking out various disruptions that he’s now detecting from his satellite base. Also on said station—or technically just outside, as we first see her performing EVA—is Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), who picked up some various light-based powers like being able to phase through matter and shoot light blasts in WandaVision. She and Carol have a past, specifically that “Aunt Carol” was like her second mother before disappearing in the 1990s with the (unfulfilled) promise to return; further, she was one of the people who disappeared during “the Blip,” and returned to learn that she was just a few months too late to be able to say goodbye to her mother before she succumbed to cancer. Meanwhile, planetside in Jersey City, teenaged Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), Captain Marvel superfan who has styled her own superhero identity of “Ms. Marvel” after Carol’s, is drawing her fanfic of getting to team up with her hero, when she suddenly disappears. It seems that elsewhere, a woman named Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) from the resource-depleted planet of Hala has discovered the location of a seemingly magical gauntlet/bangle, which she plans to use to restore her world to its prior glory. Because of wibbly-wobbly spacey-wacey quantumbabble, this leads to Kamala, Carol, and Monica becoming “entangled,” such that any time two of them use their powers, they physically exchange places. 

This fairly absurd premise introduces a freshness and a spontaneity to the proceedings that makes it fun and frenetic in a way that this franchise hasn’t really managed to elicit in a while. When the MCU goes cosmic, that’s generally where it has the most room to play around and be weird and fun, as evidenced by the first two Guardians and Rangarok, and this one takes a page from the playbooks of those movies to visit some novel backdrops for interesting action sequences in vibrant color—and it’s been a while since you could say that about one of these. This includes a sequence of hand-drawn animation of Kamala’s comics that feature her fighting alongside Captain Marvel, complete with onomatopoeic “booms,” as well as an extended scene  in a palace on a world where the language is song, but the highlight for me comes at the climax. This is the kind of movie where there aren’t enough undamaged escape pods to flee a deteriorating space station, but there are a few dozen kitten-like aliens with secretly tentacled mouths and which have previously been demonstrated to be capable of swallowing people whole and spitting them back out again. As a last ditch effort, these “cats” are let loose to devour the remaining 150 people on board as they run in terror before adorable kittens, so that the cats can be put in the last escape pod and then vomit everyone up later once they’ve escaped. All of this literal cat herding is set to “Memory” from Webber’s Cats. It’s the kind of fun that these movies should be having/inducing, if they must continue to be made. 

What really makes the movie work, however, is the chemistry between its cast members. The three women, whom Kamala dubs “The Marvels” even though Monica claims no such moniker (in the movies, at least), play well against each other. Carol and Monica’s estrangement makes for easy relationship shorthand, but that’s not a criticism, since this film could (as its detractors have assumed) be too lore-dense for its own good. Kamala’s hero worship of Carol makes her fulfillment of that fantasy a lot of fun to watch, and although it would be very easy for a different performer to fail to stay on this side of the line between endearing and overbearing, Vellani is doing stellar work as the younger Marvel; she’s not even close to going out of bounds. Her energy is infectious, and her realistic reactions to things that the other characters (and we who have been watching these movies for fifteen years) have become jaded to make it all feel fresh and new again. 

I’m sure there is good faith criticism of this movie that doesn’t focus solely on the product so much as its perceived “wokeness” or its box office performance. This is a show that follows the maxim of MST3K: “repeat to yourself it’s just a show” (and at this point, this is more of a fun, not-too-serious episode of a long-runner show than it is a movie unto itself; it’s time we all stopped kidding ourselves about that), “and you should really just relax.” For a lot of extremely online people who have a hyperfixation on this franchise and experience no joy outside of taking it away from others, I’m sure they’ll also find no end of faults to complain about here. I can already sense them opening their microblogging platforms; I can already hear the deep inhale as they prepare to unleash an incogent rant about how Disney is trying to ram something down their throats (it’s always about throats with those guys). I’m not here to carry water for that monopoly, I assure you, and the company’s failure to invite the director to the premiere is outrageous. If anything, though, Thanksgiving season is a time when a lot of people end up cooped up with their families for extended periods of time, and sometimes the best way to get everyone to shut up for a while is to let the local Regal play babysitter for a while. There are worse things to do. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Star Trek – First Contact (1996)

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For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer, Brandon, and Alli discuss the Next Gen Star Trek time travel episode First Contact (1996).

00:00 Welcome

06:54 Anatomy of a Fall (2023)
16:46 L’immensità (2023)
19:17 Priscilla (2023)

23:11 Star Trek – First Contact (1996)

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Fire in the Sky (1993)

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After checking out recent release No One Will Save You, my appetite for extraterrestrial abduction content was whet, and the streaming service formerly known as HBOMax was there with a cleanup hitter in the form of 1993’s Fire in the Sky. The movie is based upon a book written by an Arizona logger named Travis Walton that purports to recount his encounter with aliens in 1975. Walton’s is one of the more noteworthy cases in that his alleged abduction was witnessed by five other men who were with him when they all saw the same strange phenomena, the standard light/energy/noise “emanations” that are common for UFO witnesses. Walton himself remained missing despite a few search parties before reemerging from the wilderness some five days later — starved, dehydrated, and seemingly traumatized to near-catatonia. 

The film plays with committing to the reality of Walton’s claims from the outset and does so rather cleverly, as it opens with the other five men arriving at the local watering hole disheveled and rattled and talking amongst themselves about the importance of getting their stories straight and other pieces of dialogue that maintain ambiguity about their relative guilt/innocence. From there, an out-of-town lawman named Watters (James Garner) arrives at the scene to assist in what’s being treated as a missing persons case. The foreman of the crew, Mike Rogers (Robert Patrick), recounts the events of the day, up to and including his future brother-in-law Travis (D. B. Sweeney) getting out of the truck to investigate an inexplicable light show and being struck by something invisible. The other loggers in the truck insist on fleeing whatever is out there, but Mike eventually insists that they go back for Travis; when they return to the spot where he collapsed, there’s no sign of him. 

For most of Act II, the film plays out more like a small town drama about people’s lives collapsing under the collective weight of the presumption of guilt heaped upon them by their community, with some investigative procedural elements thrown in for good measure. Watters believes that Travis was killed by one of the other loggers, Dallis (Craig Sheffer), a “drifter” who didn’t get along with Travis, and that the rest of the crew were helping to cover it up. Desperate to prove his innocence, Mike commits himself and his crew to polygraph tests, all of which seem to indicate that the men are telling the truth with the possible exception of Dallis, whose test is inconclusive. Suddenly,Travis reappears, and from this point, the film no longer plays coy with whether or not the abduction story is true within the film. Even as Watters adjusts his hypothesis to include the men pulling a publicity stunt that wasted time and resources, Travis is tormented by the remembrance of the events of his abduction as they slowly resurface. 

This is one of those movies that got significant airplay on Sci-Fi Channel in my youth, although I had never actually seen it; the commercials advertising its upcoming airings always included the iconic image of Travis Walton cling-wrapped to an alien operating table, which frankly scared the shit out of me. It was one of those childhood terrors that remained tantalizingly unresolved until this first viewing, and as such I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Unfortunately, the opening credits spoil some of the ambiguity pretty early on, given that there’s a huge wall of text declaring that the film is “Based on the book The Walton Experience by Travis Walton,” dulling the impact of the question of whether Walton was murdered by his co-workers. Still, a lot of pathos is wrung out of the disappearance, and that’s something that you don’t normally see in this kind of media, so it was a pleasant surprise. If alien abductions are your personal horror preference, this one might not exactly live up to every expectation, given that there’s less of that in the finished product than what trailers and clips might imply, but what is present is harrowing and memorable. Give it a shot. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond