Author: Michael W Jackson

U.F.O. The birth of S.H.A.D.O. (1970-1971)

26 episodes of 45 metric* minutes each, rated 7.9 by 3,690 televisualistas. 

Genre: Sy Fy; Subspecies: The Andersons. 

Verdict: ssslllooowww.

Tag line: ahead of and behind the times simultaneously. 

This is episode 1.

One-expression Ed convinces the world to fund S.H.A.D.O., well the Western European world. Though Russian food is labeled in one scene no reds were part of this stellar NATO.  Then there are the Arab, African, and Asian worlds more or less omitted.  Defending Earth is the white western man’s burden.

By the way, that is the Supreme Headquarters of the Alien Defence Organisation.

Instantaneous passage of ten years to or from (I forget which) 2056 and after an evident truce, it is now game on.

Neat idea to HQ it below a film studio that will explain the oddities. But we never see Stone-Faced Ed being his cover as movie mogul. Nor any movie sets used by the aliens to infiltrate humanity.

Neat idea that the aliens have come to harvest organ donors. Their brains got bigger than their other parts and they can no longer reproduce. Alan Jones often has said too much reading leads to impotence. Could he be one them! That would explain a lot.

That no relatives can ever know the truth of the incident from which their offspring disappeared. See organ donors above. 

No communication and no negotiation. Nor any effort at either.

The result is a humourless melodrama that is directed at a snail’s pace.

All the signatures of the Andersons are displayed. 

Actors whose cannot act like Ed Bishop and many others. Stuck among this dross is one superb actor who slums his way through, George Sewell, remember him from Special Branch, or Smiley’s People where he briefly stole the show from Alec Guinness.

In one scene stone-faced Ed berates a carefully selected, highly trained other rank for sticking chewing gum on a computer screen. The other rank hangs his head like an immature schoolboy. It’s a trifecta of bad writing, bad acting, and bad directing. 

The Andersons always thought, I have read, that the toy models and fashions were the stars. The actors were there to point to the models while wearing the clothes. They achieved their goals with the puppets in Thunderbirds. Wooden actors and plenty of toys.

In SHADO all the important stuff is on paper. Everyone smokes constantly even on Moonbase. Whiskey is free and on tap at the office, so none of the sots ever leave which helps security. 

Outlandish costumes in garish primary colours. For men style ranges from onesies with Nehru jackets to open weave mesh pullover shirts that reveal hairy chests.  For women it was aluminium foil micro skirts, oh, also those Moon-base purple wigs which are never explained, remarked, or otherwise integrated. Speaking of wigs, Ed’s decade transformation in one scene is by changing wigs from boyish blond curls to the ash grey of responsibility was cute and unconvincing.

Notably in one scene a man fetched coffee for a woman rather than the other way around. He was a West Indian and not a European so maybe it was colonial servility and not egalitarian courtesy in the dark ages of the 1970s. 

The camera is constantly on women from the back: up and down hips to heels, and from the front: up and down chest to head.  Sexism at its 1970s best. The fraternity brothers gave this show 10.0. There were no crotch shots of the men that I noticed, and I was looking! 

Model craft is an end in itself. In this case they are pretty good, though I can almost see the elfin Gerry Anderson pulling the invisible strings.  

Having watched with pleasure the French OVNI (UFO) a few months ago when this came up on You Tube, I watched it.  It is as bad as I remember it to be. Age has not improved this film.  

*As a meter is longer than an Anglo yard, so a metric minute is longer than an Anglo minute by 15 seconds with a total of 75 seconds in every minute. This fact can be verified at the World Institute of Time website. 

Abducted (2022)

IMDb runtime is 9 minutes and 34 seconds, rated 5.6 by 47 cinematizens.

Genre: Sly Sy Fy

Verdict: Atta Girl! 

The internet date turned sour, but, well, there is more to this than originally met the eye.  All those stories about disappearances gotta mean something, and they do.  

A masterclass in plot and character in less than 10 minutes with a big finish.

From DUST via You Tube.  

Expiration Date (2022)

IMDb is runtime of 6 minutes and 39 seconds with no ratings by anyone!

Genre: Sy Fy, Species: Comedy, Sub-species: realistic. 

Verdict: amen!

The merciless bounty hunter spots his quarry looming in the distance and raises his sonic blaster to ….  Good idea, cause its big and mean-looking brute.  Hunter checks the wind, sights the alien, looks over his weapon, and….

As he turns on his really big gun, a screen appears announcing that a software update is required before it can murder anything.  After many futile attempts to skip this update – Not Permitted! – delay it – Not Permitted! – reschedule it – Not Permitted! – the hunter sits down to wait for the update to download and install.  Since he is on a distant planet after an alien, it takes times. But when it is complete the update requires a patch!  Ugh!  

In desperation, using his interstellar phone, he calls the help number for crisis situations.  It rings the 800 times necessary and then a computer answers with a menu to direct the call about: planetary destruction, genocide, star demolition, personal weapons (for blaster press 4, for rifles press…) and then blasters (press 1 for disrupter, press 2 for neural,…. 5 for sonic).  Then he has to key in his user name and number.  Whoops only to discover his service contract for patch update care has lapsed and he is returned to the opening menu to renew his contact by keying in everything again with a Galactica credit card number of Google length, as the prey, now aware of his presence, targets him with a more primitive weapon. Poof! 

War of the Worlds (2019+)

IMDb is 24 episodes of 49 minutes, rated 6.4 by 15,000 cinematizens and counting. 

Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: Yuk. 

H. G. Welles is at it again. This time it is played as a disaster movie with scattered survivors trying to keep alive, and over the very long and slow story arc they come together for better and for worse.  There are no Hollywood super heroes here. Nor is either Tom Midget or Tom Everywhere in it. That much is good. 

It starts off in the French alps near Grenoble and cross cuts to Lille and London. It is scenic and there is much outdoor travelogue. I liked those scenes in the woodlands on the slopes of the Alps. The dialogue is bilingual and the acting is superb. The UHD is crisp even in the motion shots with depth of focus.  In short, a first class international production. 

That is the molasses, now the vinegar.  The narrative is attenuated and repetitive, the latter being a function of the former over these episodes which amount to about 18 hours of screen time.  Every character goes through the same experience of fear, dislocation, primacy of family, and confusion.  The child is brought along only to be killed. Gratuitous. In the opening episode we get that played out six times.  If you watch the war news from the Ukraine every night, by the end of the week it no longer registers, does it.  Same here. 

Yes, the characters are varied, but their situations and reactions are not. And in the crisis, too few of them are focussed on the crisis, and more on the last argument a wife had with a husband, or long standing grievances that seem as important as the end of the world.  The crisis managers did not do their jobs.  Hobbes’s state of nature became instantly the state of me and mine period.  Yet when disaster struck the Ukraine many people stuck together and stayed on the job. Go figure. 

Although I did rather like the unintended irony in that after the invaders killed 90% of the population, the remainder set about killing each other in suspicion and fear.  That was Hobbes and the insanity of it seemed about right. The invaders were counting on not finding intelligent life on Earth and they were right. 

The dog, birds, cats survived. As I only made it to episode 4 that may or may not be significant.

There is far too much blood and guts as a substitute for a story, character development, or even a sense of place. We are spared nothing – mutilation, rape, infanticide, incest, score settling, cannibalism, and worse along with countless exploding heads (but not one of the elite troops in the Alps musses his hair do with a helmet).  And speaking of those troops at least they (mostly) stay on the job.  

I quit after four bloodbaths. If I wanted to watch senseless slaughter I could watch the evening news on television.

Of course the invaders intel before the invasion was none too great either, as readers of Wells’s novella will remember.  Maybe they should have watched the news. 

Although it cannot compete with the production or the acting, I prefer The Great Martian War 1913-1917 (2013), but it is hard to find. It is inventive. Or even the 1953 Cold War version when the common cold saved the world when rockets couldn’t.   

The End of Eternity (1987)

Konets vechnosti

IMDb runtime of 2 hours and 17 minutes, rated 6.0 by 242 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Red; Sub-species: Asimov. 

Verdict: Excellent!

Harlan works at the AllWhen Council with the Eternals who regulate TIME to ensure smooth sailing from Past to Future to Past again for the Timers who live and die there.  Dr Who is a stringer for this organisation. 

Viewers gradually piece this puzzle together because there is no numbing exposition at the beginning.  Hurrah!  It just goes…..  

Harlan is so inexperienced, so cloistered, so innocent, so naive that of course he thinks he knows everything until Woman. The first one he sees drains all the blood from his head and sends him over the edge. Adam when he saw Eve was sober and restrained compared to Harlan whose drool is embarrassing. She is a Timer who somehow works for the Council, too, and together….they do what men and women have done since time began.  This is strictly forbidden twice over, once because Eternals cannot do this period, and they certainly cannot do this with a Timer. I heard an echo of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four here about waist down rebellion. 

It was made in the USSR in 1987. Yet much of it seems criticism of a regimented society so dedicated to good that it makes things bad in its clumsy efforts.  The AllWhen Council parallels, it would seem, the Politburo, removed from reality, devoid of empathy or sympathy, and in reality dedicated more to preserving itself than doing any good. In the Council zone, which looks like a giant factory, there are black-uniformed police frowning every hundred meters. Informers work among the time-tinkering Technicians to be sure discipline remains perfect. Creativity is stamped out as dangerous. Iron discipline, sacrifice for the greater good, and pitiless discipline are the watchwords of the Eternals.  The only thing lacking is an external enemy in the evil capitalist west.   

The Eternals are just that and so have an eternity of committee meetings, budget reports, and cantankerous colleagues with which to contend.  One of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, perhaps Green Mars, is really good on this trade-off, more and more life….with more and more meetings with the same irritating people doing that same damn dumb things for centuries. 

What follows is part mystery and part science fiction as the coupling couple takes flight and discover the corruption endemic in the all-powerful and unaccountable AllWhen Council, read Politburo. For those that want the Cliff’s Notes version, eternity ended for Harlan when he fell in lust. In that emotional state he could not longer be an eternal – cold, detached, judicious, uninvolved, disinterested – and all those qualities of a Platonic philosopher-monarch. Although it might be remarked that Dr Who seldom manifested these qualities.  

In the film three distinct periods are presented, first, is the timeless AllWhen Council zone, then the 48th Century where music emanates from wine in glasses, and the Twentieth Century. Each was done very effectively even if the sets are small and repetitive.  What matters is that they are distinctive and resonate of what they are supposed to be.  There is no big budget in sight. Better, no Anderson fashions or toys.

This film is on You Tube in poor quality video (in two parts) and I cannot find it anywhere else.  Perhaps because of the rush of history in 1989 this movie may never have been shown at the Moscow Film Fesitval, or the one in East Berlin, and so was not seen by Western producers looking for cheap fodder, because this would surely have been snapped up. Maybe glasnost killed it. Irony check.  

There is also an earlier Hungarian version on You Tube but it does not have subtitles and our three days in Budapest a few years ago did not leave any Magyar behind.   

The film derives from, but doubtless paid no royalties for, the eponymous 1955 novel by Isaac Asimov.  While I have read many of his works since a teenager, this title was unknown so I did what we evil western capitalist do and went shopping.  Lo, I could not find it for the Kindle and I tried, believe me.  Yes, I know it listed as Kindle on the Amazon US web site but with a sidebar that says Unavailable. Very few of his titles are available for Kindle.  Odd that for future man to find his books in the past format alone.  

In the end I gave up.

Solaris (1972) 

IMDb meta-data is Hollywood runtime of 2 hours and 47 minutes, rated an astounding 8.0 by 92,000 victims of the Stockholm syndrome.  

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Endurance. 

Verdict:  Ho hum.  

Tag line: Are we there yet?

The prolific Pole Stanislaw Lem wrote the novel (which I have read more than once, I seem to recall) but this production is from the USSR. It seems largely faithful to the novel apart from wisely cutting all the background about Solaristics, i.e., the study of the watery planet called Solaris somewhere off in deep space.  (In the novel this ‘ology’ allows Lem much sardonic commentary for many pages on the ways of academics which is mildly amusing but turgid.)  

Things are bad on the research space station in orbit around Solaris, very bad.  Most of the crew of eighty have decamped and clammed up about why. Well, I guess, though that and much else is not made clear. There remain three persons on board: Snaut, Sartorius, and Gribarayn.  However, we first meet Pilot Berton testifying to an inquiry into the earlier death of one of the researchers scouting the planet.  It is a superb performance that adds nothing to the film….  Well, there is an echo of it at the end, but very faint. 

The planet is a single, roiling ocean and there is some nice footage of its currents and tides.  If they are studying it, [spoiler ahead] it seems the ocean is also studying them. It does so by producing from their memories the most vivid person in their past. This selection is made clear in the book, the most vivid memory, but not in the film. This drives the crew members nuts for some reason.  

Pop quiz! Who would that be in your memory? Answers below. 

To deal with the problem a psychologist comes to investigate and report. He arrives – poof – to find the station in rack and ruin. No one has swept the floor in a long time.  It looks like the frat house. Nor does anyone greet him. Turns out his old buddy Gribarayn who evidently owed him money has committed suicide rather than wait for him and pay up but he has left an incomprehensible video of warning to get even.

In no time at all Psychologist’s dead wife is holding his hand and he accepts this far too quickly and easily.  Yes, I know the first time he tries to dispatch her, but he never seems shocked, surprised, revolted, repulsed, repelled, or disturbed by this simulacrum usurping and desecrating his deceased wife. He wanders around the derelict station for about three hours with her – the end. The sleeper awoke, or did he?

A wonderful special effects scene occurs when the station’s orbit is adjusted for 30 seconds and 0 g follows, but it adds nothing to either character or plot.  Well, it could not add to the plot since there is not one there to begin with.  And the psychologist, despite all the screen time and accolades from critics, never comes alive to this viewer.

It is has some of the qualities of post-modern philosophy.  The narrative is oblique, reflexive, unreliable, disjointed, and pointless.  Trying to understand it is the mistake.  It is another turkey from Tartovsky, Andrei whose contempt for the audience is palpable. The more he reviles the viewers and reviewers, the more they laud him in a Stockholm Syndrome.  Even that doyen Roger Ebert succumbed to this abusive treatment and praises the film to the skies. I re-read his essay on this film after I watched it on You Tube. Intransigent I remain. 

Yes, I know it is supposed to be a mediation on reality and identity with the ghostly wife, on what it means to exist for her, on what we love in another person, what they are, or what we think they are, and so on; and also how would we react to an alien intelligence so different from our own as to be unintelligible. But little, if any, of that is conveyed in this montage.  That is all post hoc intellectual justification for sitting through this three hour film.

I saw this version at the Sydney Film Fesitval shortly after I got to Australia, and found it as unpalatable then, as I do now.  In comparison, Last Year at Marienbad is fast moving and exciting, ahh… [thinks of Delphine Seyrig] with eye candy. However, seeing Solaris the first time introduced me to Stanislaw Lem and I read a number of his novels later. When I noticed that the local Dendy was screening a 35 millimetre print on Wednesday night I was tempted, but upon remembering that runtime decided I would settle for the You Tube version because I could sit in the recliner, shoes off, with a glass in hand and tap out caustic comments on the iPad, stopping and starting as needed. Watching it for three hours in a chilled theatre unable to move was out of the question.  

One mystery is how a committee of comrades invested in this film in the first place in the early 1970s. What did they think they were getting?  Better, what did they think of what they got? 

By the way, there are at least three films based on this Lem novel.  There is an earlier one made for Soviet television in black and white (1968) of 2 and 1/2 hours (available on You Tube) and the American remake of 2002 which is a merciful 95 minutes.  Take your pick. 

P.S. At least I could tell what Last Year at Marienbad (1961) was about, even if it was boring. The characters all have rich and luxurious but empty lives, so empty that there is nothing worth doing, still less remembering and certainly not love or sex.  It was a common theme in post war Western European movies about the vacuous idle rich. Without the evil Nazis to contend with, there was nothing to do but self-indulgence. See a host of especially Italian movies like L’Avventura (1960). This nihilist self indulgent ennui was one response to the absurdity of life. Another response was to commit to the cause de jour vide Sartre. A third was to take up golf. 

Per aspera ad Astra (1981) (To The Stars the Hard Way) (Cherez ternii k zvyozdam)

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 2 hours and 28 minutes, rated 5.9 by 1,400 cinematizens.

Genre: Sy Fy; Species: Endurance

Verdict: TMI

The several titles above seems appropriate when considering the sprawling and disconnected stories in this endurance test of Hollywood proportions.  

It has a marvellous start when Red cosmonauts find a damaged spaceship in yon ether. The special effects of this encounter are indeed special. Dead bodies, humanoid but not human, float inside the gravity-less ship. Then they find one such body in a transparent protective capsule and as they shine lights on it, the creature within slowly opens its eyes!  Nice. 

The humanoids and the survivor are paper-thin and elongated with bug eyes and army haircuts.  They look something like those pictures of POWs in Japanese prison camp with bones protruding.  Or Tilda Swinton on a good day. The sole survivor is carefully brought to Earth.  Hum, was any thought given to disease, oxygen, or gravity on Earth?  None that I detected. One minute the crewmen are moving her onto their spaceship and the next she is on Earth.  

The survivor is (barely) a woman and seems catatonic.  Well, what are we going to do with a catatonic alienness?  Why take her home to mama who will know what to do with her.  Leaving the scientists behind temporary Male Lead takes Alienness home, a very nice two-story one in a warm climate on a lake, much like all the Soviet Union. Little thought is given to how strange, threatening, and frightening all this must be the the Alienness.  The good natured family banter was enough to put anyone’s teeth on edge.  

It soon becomes apparent she has some super powers and they call Stan Lee for advice. She can teleport herself and has telekinetic abilities.  Be careful.  To touch her is not advised.  They struggle to communicate and then one day she speaks Russian.  No that is not a revelation in the story line, the mute just now starts talking. Nothing is made of the transition from mute to jabber box. Who lost the script pages? But that is only the first of the breaks in the storyline.  More are to come for its seems the script was written by a changing committee, each new member of which wanted to get something in.

While she was mute and skittish the problem she presented was interesting and had much promise; once she started talking, well the sound was the air leaving the balloon.  The Universal Script Writers Union panacea is applied: amnesia.

She has no memory of what happened but soon lifelike dreams take her back to her creation for that is one theme, is she a biological being or an android of some kind.  (’Cut me, do I not bleed?’ you might think but no one did in this story.) In any event it is not a theme continued.  She has a mission which gradually comes back to her, like a forgotten shopping list.

It also seems a redundant mission since she only finally remembers it when she sees representatives of her planet on television news asking for Earth’s help to prevent a climatic catastrophe.  She was supposed to do that, but forget in the trauma of whatever happened to the starship she was on. Which we never find out. These other agents from Dessa, her home world, look nothing like this stick figure. Huh?  Maybe she is a droid.

It is a neat scene at the spaceport Domodeldovo (airport) with Lost & Found, Baggage Collection signs just like any and all large international airports today with bilingual Russian and English signs. But the flight boards list planets, asteroids, space stations, wormholes, and such.  We went though this airport when we left Russia in 2017. 

Then we have half a movie as she stows away on the spaceship taken by these other Dessans, which is diverting to take a doctoral octopus home. You read that right. This is all very Three Stooges.  

Then the third film takes place on the planet Dessa where Alienness and the crew of the ship try to save the planet from the mean dwarves of the Lord of the Rings.  Yes, this planet is being destroyed by dwarves smoking cigars bigger than they are.  They are rude and crude, and so is story at this point. They are despicable capitalists who are destroying Lake Baikal for profit before leaving the toiling masses behind and taking a spaceship they alone can afford to a new planet to despoil. (Looks like these Reds were Green before the Greens.)  The hammer blows come one after another. 

By this time the intriguing and puzzling start has been discarded and forgotten along with that temporary male lead.

The intel on IMDb is that it was originally given the Latin title above until someone realised that was the motto of the US Apollo program, and then it was changed.  It means ‘Through (or despite) hardships to the stars’ to strike a note consonant with President Kennedy’s speech launching what became the Apollo program.  

If you have the patience and endurance for it, check it out on You Tube.  Don’t say you weren’t warned.