Author: Michael W Jackson

Interstellar (2014)

IMDb meta-data is an excruciating runtime of 2 hours and 45 minutes, rated an incredible 8.7 by 1,934,705 of the credulous. 

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: Yankee.

Verdict: Alas.

Tagline: It’s the end of the world, again, and only one man can save us, no not James Bond (sigh, I wish) but….

It is the same old connect the dots plot.  Our heroic pilot ferries the scientists to their deaths one-by-one with his trick reverse parks. Hundreds, thousands have been trained but he is the only one who can do that.  Though twelve did go first.  Sure that makes sense. Tarkovsky is not the only director who treats audiences with contempt.  

Watching this was the first time I have even felt bored by the representation of space, though plenty of high priced weightlessness. There was much talk of gravity that reminded of the superb film of that name with another good ole boy in it.

‘They’?  Didn’t find out and didn’t care.  Liked the domino robot computer

Exhaustingly researched by watching other movies it seems. The claim is also made that it is based on S C I E N C E.  Sure. Whatever.  Based on science, the science of speculation. All the hallmarks of this director’s work.  A serial disaster movie as the action moves from one to another.

Bladder-busting length, mountainous clichés, solitary heroism of a unique genius, and a gargantuan production in which no expense was spared.  What was spared was intelligence, insight, and imagination.  The acting is fine. I was surprised by MM’s credibility, but honours go to John Lithgow who delivers a fine supporting performance. Michael Caine was sleepwalking, at best, but then he didn’t write the lines, one of which posits is, by implication, that the solution to an intractable mathematical problem is simply more time, like learning conjugations. Goldbach conjecture and Riemann hypothesis are next!  Anne Hathaway’s part was underwritten, leaving her little to do.  

Thought they chose MM for his previous experience with aliens in Contact (1997).

These people have never seen a dust bowl and evidently did no research on the subject since the representation of a dust storm here is nothing like as ominous or ferocious and seemingly endless as the real thing.  DUST BOWL PICTURES. Instead we have a long pointless scene of MM staring at the dust on the floor.  Get a broom! Sweep it up man! There are a lot of those, long and pointless scenes. 

There is a far better description of a dust storm in Sidney Courtier, Softly Dust the Corpse (1960), a marvellous krimi.  

Gigantic wave over 12 inches of water is not possible. Check the science on that.  Not even on a strange new world, about which no curiosity is ever shown. Check with your local science advisor. 

We know the daughter is smart because when she left the house window open to the known threat of the elements, we see that her room have floor-to-ceiling fully loaded book shelves.  Who needs a computer or Kindle when you have these tomes gathering dust. Yet she is supposed to be a tweenage wizard.  While on tech, there are a lot of computer screens on display but whenever anything important comes up, it’s on a whiteboard, blackboard, or piece of paper..

My finger was never far from the fast forward button.

Maybe those who rated it highly haven’t yet seen these clichés as often as I have, but they will, I am sure.  

Albeit, less preachy than I expected given the plot kickoff.  

Magellan (2017)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 43 minutes, rated 5.2 by 1694 members of the producers’ extended families.

Genre: Sy Fy

DNA: Yankee

Verdict: Meh

Tagline: Me, myself, and I.

In sum, the one-man crew sets off on a ten-year mission and talks to the camera in close-up for about half the runtime. There are actors who could make that engaging, but none of them were available for this film.  The only explanation for the one-man crew is the producers’ budget. Why the mission must take ten years is anyone’s guess.  

Here is the set-up: SETI has received and tracked three radio signals. (See, overkill.  One would be enough. And overkill leads to boring repetition in lieu of development.) Off Hero goes, leaving behind for those ten years a wife and child after five-minutes of thought.  No one will go with him but he loves his own company, so fine.

Like the audience, he passes much of the time asleep, repeats three searches on three heavenly bodies – two moons and a dwarf planet.  We see each wake-up call. We see each search. Each time he finds an opaque glass orb tennis-ball size that seems to the origin of the signal.  He reports this by instantaneous communication from Neptune.  Sure.  But he himself shows little interest in them since he is a pilot not a scientist. Yep, perfect man for the job. When he touches a ball with his bare hand, he has LSD visions of the cosmos which he does not report, least somebody tell him not to play with the specimens, I guess. (Confession, finding the dialogue so trite I turned down the volume for a lot of the runtime, especially when I hit fast-forward.)

In his communication things seem to be changing at Mission Control, but that hint is not developed. His spiffy controller slowly deteriorates into a ragged and haggard man.  Ditto he seems to lose internet in wife and home.

It goes on, and on.  

On the plus side, I am always intrigued by first contact that isn’t a shoot ‘em up. And the glass balls were a surprise but the novelty wore off by the third time. The Space Odyssey visions of the cosmos were fun but had no meaning and might just as well have been drug-induced.

On the other side, with a one-man crew there is no interaction, no second opinion, no tension, no teamwork, just sleep and awake.  By the way, in the ten years his hair did not need to be cut, since there was no other member of the crew to do it, apart from Siri and Alexa. The repetition of searching for and finding the balls was a killer. Someone should have introduced him to his wife: in their few scenes and interactions before departure, they seemed to be strangers.

Some reviewers excuse its faults because of its low budget but the problems are in the story not the colour of the walls of the space ship.  

Helga: A Human Requiem (2022) 

Meta-data is a runtime of 20 minutes, unrated because it is not listed on the IMDb. (Strange but true.)  

Genre: Sy Fy

DNA: Brazil.

Verdict: Olé!  

Tagline: A Love Story.

Amadeus Klein is a robotics genius, fated to live in a brutal military dictatorship, who takes army funding to develop mechanical warriors and diverts it into making a robotic simulacra of the women he loved, until soldiers killed her. 

Nearly silent, it conveys great emotion without a word. But it does make demands on the viewer to stick with it. Doing so certainly pays off. The sound track is, yep, a requiem from the enfant terrible Mozart.  

Helga is derived from Metropolis with a touch of Frankenstein thrown in. Tin face CGI though she is, she, too, has feelings.

A marvellous short film from Caio Alves and Gabriel Gadiman for Kinelux Studios.  It is on DUST and that is widely available. A one-minute trailer can also be found on the Kinelux Studios (São Paulo) website. I could not find many graphics in my two-minute search.

The Glass Fortress (2016) 

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 29 minutes, rated 6.9 by 24 cinematizens.  

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: France.

Verdict: Interesting. 

Tagline: My name is Daniel. 

In black-and-white, it starts at the end and backtracks. That gives it a zippy kickoff. Still photographs carrying the story. What follows is a free adaptation from Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We (1921).  It is accompanied by a marvellous soundtrack.  

I did find this couple too young and too happy in the beginning of the flashbacks. Smiling, cavorting, dancing does not mesh with the grey uniformity of the One State.  Well, that is nit-picking.  

It will remind viewers of La Jetée (1962) for its short, spare story in black and white, still photography, and also the retrospective take. A soundtrack carries it as much as in The First and Last Men (2020). It is far superior to the feature-length adaptation for West German television  production reviewed elsewhere on this blog. Check it out.  

Projet-M (2014) A 1000 Days in Space

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 38 minutes, rated 4.7 by 403 cinematitizens.

Genre: Sy Fy, Species: Nuke and more. 

DNA: Québécois 

Verdict: A gripper with a double twist.

Tagline:  Did we do that?

Four astronauts are aboard ‘M’ a vast spaceship in a low Earth orbit to test it and themselves for a mission to far Europa, a moon of Jupiter.  Why Europa? Not for the Euros they may find there to fund a sequel but to find water since Earthlings have just about used all of theirs up. No, it doesn’t make a lot of sense but it is the kick-off.

The 1000 day mission is in Earth orbit, round and round, while they test all the equipment and endure each others’ company, bad jokes, personal hygiene, and airline food, though the catering was done in Québéc and therefore might be superior, well better than Qantas.  In the opening moments we see them smoothly cooperate to avoid the scriptwriter’s old friend: meteors.  

There follows some tedious backstories but not too much.  It is a work of fiction and in it Québec is a major power and Montréal is the centre of the civilised world, or so one might infer from the absence of mention of any place else. Jeez, you’d think in the eternal north, Québec would have plenty of snow and ice for their drinks, but evidently it is all gone, leaving just the Polar bears. Tabernac!

Cynical viewers know something has to go wrong by 20 minutes, and it is does, but nothing that I expected.  Indeed, for once I am hesitant to reveal what goes wrong, but it is necessary to make sense of the story.  

There are some tensions among the crew – two men and two women – but their time is finishing, when…observing the Earth – well, Montréal – wrapped in a mantle of clouds from their orbit they see flames of light erupting through the obscurity like flares, a number of them. It is beautiful for an instant. Neither they nor the viewer realises what they are at first. These are the strikes of a nuclear war and in seconds, even as they scramble to make contact with the Flight Centre more and more erupt around the globe.   

Now it becomes a study of individual and collective reactions to this singular event.  They have no further communication with Earth and know no more and neither does the viewer. There are others in orbit and the first problem is whether to contact them, the Germans, the Russians….   In the absence of either orders or knowledge the Captain wants radio silence for the time being.  This causes conflict with his three colleagues.

As the silence from the Earth extends for days and days, it is too much for one crew member who takes a one-way spacewalk.  Captain Queeg himself beaks down but with a dose of Prozac later recovers.  Bones, the medical officer, keeps her head while these two crack.  It is she who decides to permit a Russian to dock and enter, partly in the hope of learning more information.  

This Russki has been exposed to solar radiation and is dying, slowly, and he knows it but he knows nothing more than they do about the war below, but he does know something else that they do not know.  

Again came another big surprise to this jaded know-it-all. Their scans of Europa, when subjected to secondary analysis on Earth, have revealed more than water, a lot more….   Could that discovery have been what triggered the nuclear war is a question that arises but is not developed in the narrative.  

It is not often I get two whopping great surprises from a space opera but I got two here.  

The film was prepared as a You Tube series but was converted into a feature in the hope of a commercial release.  The acting by the two principal astronauts, Capn and Bones is superb, and the stage craft excellent, the more so when one reviewer estimates its cost was less than one day’s shooting in Hollywood.  

On the acting, I have seen Capn before playing farces and comedies, to see him here, ramrod stiff and serious took me aback, rather like seeing rubber face Rowan Atkinson as the repressed Maigret. The fourth crewman, the science officer, was one of the scriptwriters.   

Wir (1982) We

IMDb meta- data is a runtime of 1 hour and 38 minutes, rated 6.1 by 118 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy; Species Dystopia.

DNA: West Germany.

Verdict: Blah.

Tagline: Replicated in Florida!

Fraternity Brothers Advisory: repeated nudity.  

The united state of quadratic harmony and blue-grey conformity is über alles. Freedom has been eliminated in favour of one, oneness, sameness in the drab world where the number of chews of gruel is regulated.  

The population lives and works in transparent glass cubicles to warm the heart of Jeremy Bentham’s progeny in McKinsey managers. Privacy breeds freedom and freedom undermines order, ergo there shall be no privacy. Wait, it’s starting to sound like Florida where the state regulates the activities in bedrooms and bathrooms, libraries and bookstores, and everything else (except guns) in the name of small government.

There are dissidents even in this crushing world, and a secret passage through a wardrobe (cf C S Lewis) that gets through the Green Wall that separates this Oneness from untamed nature including that Édouard Manet painting, Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863).

The story centres on D-503 who starts as a happy citizen, joyfully denouncing his freedom, happily slaving on a major project to release others from dreadful freedom, who begins to have, well not second, but the first thoughts of his own. This ignition is kindled by sexual love pace Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four.  But he readily and happily submits to a lobotomy to have his pesky conscience removed while condemning his paramour to torture and death with a Gestapo smile.

In this 1982 television production there are some nice touches as when D-503 dictates to a Siri selectric typewriter (remember those?) that types out the text.  

The screenplay is talkie and the direction is theatrical and expository rather than dramatic. It is a long time since I (re-)read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We (1921) so I cannot say how closely it resembles this source material. By the way, its shelf-mate has to be Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938).   

I usually ignore dystopian films because they are so simple-minded and repetitive that they show little or no imagination, even less than the typical SyFy film.  ‘The world went to hell because of … [name the villains].’  Zamyatin is an exception because of the time and place of his novel and his own personal backstory. There is a French short film based on Zamyatin’s novel that I will try to track down – Glass Fortress 2016 France 29 minutes.

The glass cells in which everyone lives and works reminded me of the new social science building. The rallies and oaths spouted must have echoed much of Nazism for German viewers in 1982.  They certainly did for me.

Invasión (1969)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2 hours and 3 minutes, rated 7.2 by 919 cinematizens

DNA: Argentina

Genre: Spy Fy more than Sy Fy, Species: Jorge Luis Borges

Verdict: All style. 

Tagline: On and on it goes.

In a fictional city of Aquileia a number of men and women, middle class and working stiffs, young and old, men and women respond to the enigmatic signal from an old man – ‘It’s today.’  There are discrete nods, weapons are secretly passed from a woman to a man, a group of men playing cards in a cafe seem to be talking in code, some impatient youths lash out, these are members of the resistance who are pursued by men in light coloured suits. Most of the resistance members wear black.  

The invasion has already started and most of the population either hasn’t noticed or doesn’t care, and gets on with life, but not these resistors. Like a communist cell, each member of the resistance only knows a small part of the puzzle. Those apprehended by the Lights are beaten and tortured with cattle prods in the ear (off camera).  The Darks murder prisoners on camera. 

One by one the resistors are killed, but eager new recruits replace them, and it goes on and on.  The old man from the beginning makes new plans.    

There is little dialogue, and what there is mostly is clipped and coded.

I came across it on a list of Science Fiction films and the description there implied that the invaders were otherworldly in some way. Not so. Yet the IMDb tags it as Sci-Fi but I can’t see why. Moreover, it had that magic name associated with it – Jorge Luis Borges.  Superb acting by one and all.

So it goes without much rhyme or reason, just like the latest war reported in the evening news.  It prefigures a good part of Argentine history, as the Montonero terrorism precipitated the Dirty War and on to the Falklands War.

Irene and her husband Herrera are both resistors but only she knows that. Herrera thinks she is a stay at home wife. They both have assignments independent of each other. How little husbands and wives know of each other is the stuff of drama, comedy, and life.

Perhaps its contemporary resonance caused it to disappear like so much else in Argentina.  The prints and negatives were seized and destroyed during the Dirty War. Or more likely, it was a mindless act of destruction. This version was reconstituted from four different sets of partly burned prints and negatives in 2007.  That explains the oddities on the soundtrack.  

It is as enigmatic as L’armée des ombres (1969) and has the pace of Compartiment tueurs (1965). That is good company. At two plus hours, it is way too long for the story it offers. The reconstructors may have wanted to include everything they found, but a producer could easily have cut thirty minutes.  

The Ninth Gate (1999)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 2 hours and 13 minutes, rated 6.7 by 189,000 cinematizens. 

Genre: Thriller.

DNA: Pan European.

Verdict: 

Tagline: The Eighth Gate was closed. 

The unscrupulous bookman takes a commission with a blank cheque to examine some very rare books for a languid Langella.  Heretofore, reading the reactions of others and playing to them have been Bookman’s tools of the trade on the principle that he only cheats the cheaters.  

To track down the books a travelogue takes us from New York City to Portugal, Spain, and France where we meet book collectors: Twin brothers in Portugal, a donnish recluse in Spain, and a bitter, one-armed, wheelchair-bound Grande Dame in France. His negotiations with each are handled well both by Bookman and the director. There are no cardboard fools here.  

The underlying question that finally comes to the surface is whether to believe what is in these books of the occult.  Speaking of fools, Heinrich Himmler nodded in agreement.  

These books have self-appointed acolytes and some of them are murderous fools like Himmler.  But they also have henchmen who begin to hench on Bookman.  A guardian angel comes to his rescue and the two form an uneasy partnership.  

From this point the film descends into a mixed buddy road movie until it gets to the sex scene. Much of the mystery is boiled away.

As a series of tableaux it is masterful, from the opening suicide, though I wondered what was written in the note and never found out, to the lip-licking of the those conned, the clenched hands of the silent seller, to Langella who stole every scene but none more so than when he said ‘Boo!’  Lena Olin was a succubus to remember. John Depp disappears into his role as usual.

Travelogue and tableaux were delivered, but the air went out of the mystery about half-way through. By the way, the ‘gates’ of the title are drawing, not the number of airport gates Bookman went through on his travels. Since he got where he was going he must not have chosen Qantas. 

Derived from the prolific Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novel The Club Dumas (1993) but changed a lot in the last third to accommodate that angel. Apart from that variation, it put me in mind of Mikkel Birkegaard’s novel The Library of Shadows (2009).  

I came across it in my collection by accident and watched it again, while reading a selection of reviews. These days when the power of books has frightened so many people, it is timely to see how books are portrayed in film. The books in this film have not been banned in Florida or Texas.