space travel

Starchaser: The Legend of Orin (1985)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

Let me tell you a story. A human boy comes into possession of a bladeless sword hilt that only he can control and which only has a blade at his command. He teams up with a rogue pilot whose rough exterior belies a heart of gold and, alongside a sassy computer intelligence, they meet a space princess. They visit exotic locales like the desert, a swamp, and a hive of wretched scum and villainy. Before the end, the boy learns that he is part of a long line of people who wield a mystical power and who can appear after death as spectral guides in this metaphysical art, and he defeats an ancient evil in a dark cloak. Sounds like Star Wars, right?

I really didn’t know that much about Starchaser: The Legend of Orin. I’m not even really sure exactly when I managed to acquire a digital copy, or when I transferred that file to my phone for a potential future viewing (I’m not an Apple user so I’ve had the same phone for 4 years without a forced upgrade occurring as a result of planned obsolescence). I’m traveling at present and I did foresee that while journeying I might grow weary of the beautiful but nonetheless antiquated and challenging prose of Jessie Douglas Kerruish’s 1922 novel The Undying Monster: A Tale of the Fifth Dimension, and had planned ahead by downloading a couple of episodes of Peacemaker while I was on Wi-Fi. I did not foresee that the HBO app would simply not load at all once I was in airplane mode, and thus after failing to simply sleep on the flight, looked at what I had in my videos folder, and there Starchaser was, waiting for me to finally give it my attention. Many worse things have happened on airplanes recently than watching Starchaser, but I still nonetheless failed to be engrossed. 

The eponymous Orin is an enslaved human miner living beneath the surface of the planet Trinia, where he and other humans toil with laser diggers for volatile crystals, which are then “fed” to a giant dragon-like face when the slaves are visited by their god, Zygon. One day, Orin finds a sword buried in the rock, and when he frees it, the grandfather of his girlfriend Elan tells him that it may be part of an ancient legend about a liberator, before the sword projects an image of an old man who speaks a muddled prophecy, then the blade disappears. Elan’s grandfather is killed, prompting Orin and Elan to take actions which eventually result in them climbing into a crystal shipment and travelling through the dragon’s mouth, where the scales fall from their eyes about the nature of their enslavement, and Elan is killed by Zygon. Orin manages to dig his way up to the surface, where he meets a smug smuggler named Dagg Dibrimi and his smart-mouthed ship’s AI Arthur, although Dagg doesn’t believe Orin’s claims that there are slaves beneath Trinia’s surface. Dagg completes a hijacking of some of the crystals from one of Zygon’s freighters, and in the ensuing firefight, ends up in possession of an administrative fembot named Silica, whom he reprograms (through a not-very-funny scene in which we learn that the relevant circuits are in her posterior, and it’s very uncomfortable to watch), causing her to immediately become devoted to him. 

Along the way, the travelers are occasionally annoyed by a sprite-like “starfly,” which eventually directs Orin to discover a bomb hidden within the payment that Dagg receives for his services, eliciting Dagg’s loyalty, and the two of them eventually meet Aviana, the daughter of the local interplanetary governor. She recognizes the hilt from her historical studies and accesses a library file that reveals that the hilt belonged to the “Kha-Khan,” a group of legendary heroes from eons past who vanquish threats to humankind, although the last of the Kha-Khan disappeared from history after defeating a robot intelligence known as Nexus who sought to enslave humanity, at which point the hilt disappeared. And wouldn’t you just know it, it turns out that Nexus wasn’t really defeated; he simply rebranded as Zygon and got a new job as the overseer of the robotic underground miners of Triana, although he quickly replaced his initial automaton workers with human slaves so he could then reprogram the mechanical miners into warriors, and uh-oh, here comes the invasion fleet! They’re defeated by the ragtag group, of course, and the starfly reveals itself to be the Force, um, I mean the spirit of the Kha-Khans past, who appear to Orin and the others as Force ghosts, I mean, uh, regular ghosts, I guess. 

Director Steven Hahn worked mostly as a production manager on animated TV shows, with eighties juggernaut DIC as well as other studios, after getting his start with Ralph Bakshi working on his seminal work Wizards. During the off season for the various TV series that he was working on (like the Mister T animated series, Care Bears, the anglicization of French series Clémentine, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Star Wars: Droids), Hahn wanted to keep his Vietnamese animators busy. If you just read the Wikipedia page for this film, you might think, “Oh, how thoughtful,” but the quotation that he provided to the now-defunct sci-fi blog Topless Robot reveals that he, like George Lucas, was a man with dollar signs in his eyes more than anything: “I’d been working in television animation and owned a rather huge facility in Korea. I’ll tell you why I came to direct and produce this film. It’s not something you might expect. During the off-season, I had nothing else to do! When you own and run a big studio, it’s difficult to sit around and pay everyone a salary when there’s no work. So, I had to do something, and I thought, why not make an animated film?” There’s nothing artful in that, so it’s not really all that surprising that there’s nothing artful in the final product, either. 

I’m being a little harsh. There’s not nothing worthwhile here. Although all of the character designs for the men are ugly as sin and Princess Aviana looks like she was traced from a He-Man episode, the ship designs are relatively cool, and the robots that we see are inoffensive even if they’re not particularly imaginative. The film also manages to have a couple of cool sequences when it manages to break free from its lockstep dedication to slightly misremembering Star Wars, with the most striking images from the whole film coming close to the beginning and the end. For the former, it’s the appearance of the decomposing “mandroids” living in the Trinian swamps, cyborg ghouls that are creepy and off-putting, and it’s unfortunate that they warrant mention only in the scene in which they appear. For the latter, there’s a moment during the climactic space battle in which Orin accidentally opens a bay door, unwittingly ejecting all of the robotic troops within the hangar into open space, which was a fun visual. The space battles are the most interesting things that we get to witness, and it’s worth noting that this is probably because the film was created to cash in on 3D movies, so it’s clear that all the budget that didn’t go into making Orin and Dagg not hideous to look at went into making Dagg’s ship look cool. Money not exactly well spent, but I suppose it was put where it needed to be the most. It certainly didn’t go into score composition, as there are moments where Luke Skywalker’s theme and the Imperial March are imitated so clearly that it’s shocking that Hahn didn’t get into legal trouble. Not for the faint of heart or short of attention span, this is to be viewed solely if your only alternative is unconsciousness and you can’t seem to sleep.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Voyagers (2021)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

I remember discussing Aniara and High Life as sister films when they first went into wide release in 2019: two ice-cold space travel narratives about the doomed prospects of humanity surviving the next few decades of Climate Change decimation.  And now we have met those sisters’ goofy little brother in Voyagers: a trashy YA space thriller on a similar subject but without their sense of purpose or coherence.  It’s difficult to say whether Voyagers is “about” the same existential concerns as Aniara or High Life.  If Voyagers is about anything at all, it might just be a grim warning that teenage hormones are dangerous for space travel.  Mostly, it’s just a mockbuster echo of themes that have been tackled in much more thoughtful, substantial works before it (including Equals and The Lord of the Flies, among the two already mentioned), ensuring that it will only be exciting to a teen audience young enough to not have seen this exact ground tread before.  Thankfully, genre filmmaking doesn’t have to be entirely novel to be worthwhile; it just has to be entertaining.

Like in Aniara and High Life, Voyagers follows a doomed, decades-spanning mission to preserve the human race in the farthest reaches of outer space, leaving a decaying Earth behind.  It skips over the more complexly philosophical and moralistic conflicts of its smarter sister films so it can quickly get to the good stuff: shirtless teen boys wrestling on a spaceship.  Where Aniara and High Life will ask big-concept sci-fi questions about the ethics of forcibly bringing children into a world that is already ending before our eyes, Voyagers instead rapidly ages those children until they’re hormonal powder-kegs, then smashes them together like Barbie dolls in PG-13 friendly make-out sessions.  It occasionally pretends to be about the chaotic selfishness of human nature or the dangerous appeal of populist right-wing politics, but it’s heart not really in it.  This is not a cinema of ideals or ideas.  This is a thirst-trap movie for teens where everyone involved is their age, horny, inexplicably heterosexual, and the boys among them love to wrestle.  The only reason it’s even set in outer space is that sometimes a hatch will open so the boys’ shirts will fly right off into the vacuum, revealing their abs for the swooning audience at home.

Voyagers is a bad movie.  It’s also a strangely compelling one.  There are some truly chaotic editing choices in its early stretch when the starbound teens first discover the joys of living horny & unmedicated, their minds’ eye opened to universe in rapid-fire montage of Ed Woodian stock footage.  Not since Lucy has a film so confidently dived headfirst into stock-footage psychedelia on this level of sublime inanity.  It’s too bad that editing-room giddiness cools down once the horny teen violence heats up; if they had worked in tandem this could’ve been worthy of Midnight Movie programming for decades into the future.  Instead, it’s the kind of so-bad-it’s-decently-entertaining novelty that you shamefully watch on the couch alone, shuttering the windows to hide your shame from the neighbors.  I wouldn’t recommend the film so much as I would bashfully admit that I had a fun time watching it – my appreciation crumbling under any scrutiny or pushback against its many, many faults.  If you want a Good Movie, watch High Life or Aniara.  That’s not what Voyagers is for.

-Brandon Ledet

The X from Outer Space (1967)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

The standard complaint about most kaiju movies is that they feature too much human-to-human interaction and too little Giant Monster action. There has never been a single Godzilla movie that hasn’t suffered complaints that there wasn’t enough Godzilla in it, regardless of how that true that is in its specific case. What a lot of people don’t realize is that a pure 100% Monster Action kaiju movie would almost certainly be a repetitive bore. Yes, the heavy metal imagery & cheap-thrills payoffs of watching a giant creature smash buildings to crumbs is inherently more exciting than listening to scientific government types cook up a plan to stop it (expect maybe in the brilliant bureaucracy satire Shin Godzilla), but if kaiju movies didn’t break that mayhem up with something, the spectacle would quickly become a monotonous bore.

What I love most about The X from Outer Space is that it breaks up its Monster Mayhem spectacle with so much on-the-ground human drama that it feels as if it’s actively trolling its audience. If it weren’t for the monster on the poster, there’d be no implication that this was a kaiju movie during its opening hour, two-thirds of its total runtime. In the meantime, the movie putters around outer space to a snazzy samba score – like a hip, jazzy update to vintage Flash Gordon radio serials with a (mostly) Japanese cast. There are a few run-ins with “space sickness,” love-triangle melodrama, and a UFO that’s shaped like a glowing pot pie to drum up some conflict before the monster arrives, but it all registers as lighthearted fluff – deliberately so. By the time the film’s doomed space crew pauses their mission for a fun, carefree holiday at their company’s moon base it’s clear no one is in a rush to fight off any giant monsters, at least not while the party vibes are still alive.

Once “the space monster Guilala” does hatch from its space-spore incubator, he does go full Monster Mayhem on any and all Japanese infrastructure he can smash by hand, laser beam, and fireball. By saving all its kaiju spectacle payoffs for its final half hour, The X from Outer Space can afford to allow Guilala to rampage on uninterrupted for long stretches, as there’s little time for his mayhem to backslide into monotony. Even then, the character design for Guilala has too much Big Goofball energy to be taken fully seriously – falling somewhere between the dorky giant-bird looks of Big Bird, The Giant Claw, and Q: The Winged Serpent. His motivation for smashing up Japanese infrastructure is that he’s just a little hangry. The fictional compound the space cadets synthesize to stop that temper tantrum is somehow even sillier than his motivator: guilalanium. Watching Guilala smash the miniature sets beneath him is absolutely adorable, which might not be the exact effect most kaiju movies are aiming for.

The X from Outer Space is too purposefully, flippantly campy to be taken seriously as the pinnacle of the kaiju genre (at least not while Godzilla vs. Hedorah outshines it in every conceivable way). Between its adorable miniature space rockets, its goofball bird monster, and its willingness to pause any conflict for a jazzy soiree, the movie’s overall tone is decidedly Cute. The movie only makes vague gestures towards the Horrors of the Atomic Age that usually concern the genre, while it mostly busies itself by having a swinging good time. Still, I do think there’s something to the peculiar way it withholds all of its kaiju action for its third act, where it unloads its rubber-suit monster mayhem in one continuous, concluding flood. That choice sidesteps the usual complaint about lack of kaiju action in kaiju movies by leaving the audience with the strongest dose of the stuff at the very end, making for a potent final impression. This particular kaiju action just happens to be very, very goofy – adorably so.

-Brandon Ledet

Ad Astra (2019)

/ swampflix / 1 Comment

I don’t know if it’s entirely fair to judge an Okay movie against its potential to be Great (as opposed to appreciating how decent it already is), but I can’t help doing so with Ad Astra. If this were a direct-to-VOD space travel thriller featuring nobody actors and a shoestring budget, I might be more forgiving towards it as a sci-fi mediocrity. As is, the film has all the building blocks needed to achieve something great; they’re just arranged in a confoundingly dull configuration. Worse, there’s literally not one thing about its combination of vintage sci-fi pulp & faux-philosophical melodrama that Interstellar didn’t already achieve to greater success, so there’s constantly a better viewing option hanging over its head. Ad Astra never does enough to justify its own existence, much less its Major Studio budget, which makes its momentary flashes of greatness all the more frustrating.

Brad Pitt is a near-future astronaut who’s tasked to retrieve his war-hero father (Tommy Lee Jones) from the furthest reaches of our solar system, as he’s assumed to have become a radicalized domestic terrorist, attacking Earth’s power supplies from afar. If that sounds like a trashy space thriller, that’s because it kind of is. The video game style obstacles that obstruct Pitt’s path to his deranged father include Moon pirates, feral space baboons, and mutinous astronaut crews who’d rather fight to the death following company orders than do what’s obviously right. Ad Astra seemingly wants to be a fun, swashbuckling space adventure – a Flash Gordon for the late 2010s. Instead, it somehow comes across as microwaved Malick leftovers.

Through a godawful, entirely unnecessary narration track, Pitt continually steers the focus away from the B-picture Moon Wars thrills towards a shallowly introspective story about toxic masculinity. His dangerously emotionless protagonist prides himself on maintaining a calm, “manly” control over his feelings – despite the obvious heightened emotional stakes of chasing down a father who abandoned him (by the length of an entire solar system). In theory, this opens the film to some interesting themes about the emotional prisons of gender. In practice, it steals screen time away from the much more enticing trash-thriller beats that actually make the film entertaining for short bursts – replacing them with purposefully emotionless voiceover announcements like “I always wanted to become an astronaut, for the future of mankind,” and “I’ve been trained to compartmentalize. It seems to me that’s how I approach my life.” What a bore.

I very much want to like this movie, which only makes me harsher towards its faults. I’m drawn to its cosmetic near-future speculation about interplanetary commercial flights and crowded Moon Malls, as much as I am to its more somber speculation about a future where Macho Men are forced to regularly seek therapy for psych-evaluations. These touches never quite match the thrills of its video game action sequences, though, which only makes them feel like annoying distractions instead of the main drive of the text. I want to enjoy the film as a big-budget B-picture with exquisite visual compositions that far outweigh the heft of the killer space baboons & Moon Pirate conflicts they serve. Unfortunately, its function as a sub-Tree of Life stargazer frequently gets in the way of that indulgence, and I spent most of the film wishing I had just rewatched Interstellar or Aniara instead.

-Brandon Ledet

Aniara (2019)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

Among the big-city dwellers who were lucky enough to see it on the big screen, Claire Denis’s High Life proved to be one of the year’s more divisive films. That work’s stubbornly esoteric allegories about climate change & humanity’s isolation in an uncaring universe could either register as captivating or exhaustively boring depending on its audience’s sensibilities – an effect Denis only amplified by rooting the story in prolonged, systemic cruelty. Even the Swampflix crew was divided on the film’s merits, with Boomer filing a negative review for it the same week CC & I sang its praises on the podcast. In some ways, I wish that same awe-and-vitriol divide had been afforded to this year’s other brutal space travel allegory, Aniara, which shares a lot of thematic ground with High Life when considered in the abstract. Instead, Aniara has been suffering the much worse fate of not being talked about at all. Ever since it premiered at TIFF last year, Aniara has been damned with faint praise as a decent-enough, 3-star sci-fi yarn, which naturally stirs up a lot less critical conversation than the wild, alienating swings of Denis’s film. That’s a shame, since it covers similar thematic territory as the more divisive, attention-grabbing work in a way I think a lot more people would be receptive to. And it’s just sitting right there on Hulu, largely unwatched & undiscussed.

Maybe it’s only genre nerds who’ve spent hundreds of hours watching SyFy Channel reruns of venerated series like Star Trek & Battlestar Galactica who would be greatly excited by Aniara’s melancholy space travel mood. It shares existential climate change themes with High Life, but its story is much more linear & traditionally structured than its arthouse counterpart. At least, it appears that way in the early goings. As the boundaryless void of outer space and the meaningless of time for those drifting across it becomes increasingly apparent, the movie gradually blossoms into its own blissfully bizarre object. No matter how familiar the film’s storytelling structure & spaceship setting may first appear, it’s ultimately a surreal, existential descent into despair that processes the horrors of climate change through a deep-space travel narrative. It features a bisexual female scientist as the lead, dabbles in the psychedelia of futuristic space-cult religions, and argues that maybe bringing new children into a dying world isn’t necessarily the best idea – a tough, but worthwhile topic given our current path to extinction. No film that embodies all those potentially alienating elements should be brushed off as “conventional,” no matter how familiar its tone & setting might feel to sci-fi television storytelling ritual. It’s just that it’s more adventurous & ambitious in its ideas than it is in its formal structure, which could be said about plenty sci-fi classics of the past.

A massive spaceship ferrying a routine transportation haul of human passengers from Earth to Mars is unexpectedly thrown off-course by space junk debris. The captain of the ship informs his horrified passengers that their trip will now take months instead of hours. Those months turn into years as it becomes increasingly unclear whether the ship will ever return home at all. The organic supplies that generate fresh food & oxygen gradually start to rot. Drifting through space with no hope or purpose, the passengers search for higher meaning & easy escapism in their severely limited environment. This mostly entails visits to Mima – a machine that broadcasts holodeck-style images of Nature into the minds of its users. Even before they were stranded on this spaceship, this imagery belonged to a nostalgic past before Earth was wrecked by climate change. Through Mima, it’s now twice removed from its original source, and becomes an addictive tool for mental escapism in what’s essentially a prison ship. Of course, this shipwide abuse of Mima is not sustainable in the long run; the demands of the passengers far outweigh the supply. As the passengers search for other, grander ways to find meaning in their endless drift into the void of deep space (and wrestle with the morality of bringing newborns into such a nihilistic environment), we experience daily life on the titular ship through the eyes of Mima’s operator – who suffers the full spectrum of love, loss, labor, and search for purpose while her years adrift endlessly accumulate.

I’d readily recommend Aniara to any & all sci-fi nerds who’ve ever gotten hooked on a long-running space travel series. I’d especially recommend it to those who were intrigued but frustrated by High Life earlier this year. Personally, both films hit me in about the same way on a thematic level, but I found it easier to buy into the linear, structured drama of Aniara on an emotional one (not least of all due to a stunner of a lead performance from Emelle Jonsson). I appreciated High Life more for its arthouse craft, whereas Aniara left me gutted and terrified for our inevitable near-future doom as a species. Both works are worthy of attention & discussion, even if you end up falling in love with neither.

-Brandon Ledet