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Home Cinema
by
Leonard Heldreth
Science fiction on the big screen
The focus is on science fiction this month, with all four films falling into that genre in some fashion.
District 9
Neill Blomkamp, who is here directing his first feature film, originally was slated to work with producer Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings) to create a film based on the video game Halo. Apparently studio executives were reluctant to authorize such an expensive film with such an untested director, and the project was cancelled. Jackson asked Blomkamp to come up with an alternate project, and the young man expanded his 2005 short film, Alive in Jo’berg into the screenplay that became District 9, which was then filmed for about $30 million instead of the more than $200 million that Halo would have cost.
The film draws elements from a number of previous science fiction films but often puts the pieces together in surprising combinations. A huge spaceship (cf. Close Encounters or Independence Day) appears over an Earth city, but instead of New York or Washington, the city is Johannesburg (South Africa). The aliens do not attack or even contact earthlings; the ship just hangs above the city for four months.
At that point, men fly to the ship in helicopters and cut a hole in it; inside they find thousands of malnourished and sick aliens who look so much like crustaceans that they are referred to as “prawns.” The humans take them back to the city and give them food and shelter in an area that comes to be referred to as “District 9,” but the aliens have some negative characteristics and gradually tensions develop between the original inhabitants of the area and the aliens. At the time the movie opens (twenty to thirty years after the space ship’s first appearance), the aliens’ living space has deteriorated into a massive slum, and they are to be moved to “District 10” by MNU, a private military organization. (This back story is conveyed to the audience through old newsreels, talking-head interviews and other “found” footage.)
In charge of the move is Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley, playing his first lead role in a film), a bureaucratic nerd whose sole qualifications are that he isn’t too bright and that he is married to the daughter of one of the heads of MNU. As he tries to move the reluctant aliens out of the district, Wikus injures his arm and then accidentally sprays himself with a black fluid, a combination that begins to cause physical changes in him. While he sees the changes as negative, they enable him to operate the alien weapons, an ability no human has had before. Suddenly, everyone wants a piece of Wikus—literally. The remainder of the film traces his gradual conversion to being a sympathizer with the prawns and his fight to help two of them escape. The last part of the film, for better or worse, becomes a question of who will survive and how, and the last shot is exactly right.
Blomkamp is from Johannesburg, and the setting, with its separation of various populations into restricted areas, obviously evokes echoes of apartheid, concentration camps and even medical experiments on unwilling subjects. District 9 echoes Cape Town’s District 6, from which people were evicted, and Bantu, the language of a group targeted by apartheid, has clicks like the language of the prawns. But trying to make this film into an allegory requires far more stretching of the story and the facts than can be justified. There are parallels, but don’t push them too far.
Sharlto Copley playing Wikus gives an outstanding performance, gradually winning the audience’s sympathy as he moves from a man “just carrying out orders” to an unlikely warrior and hero. Copley also contributes to the film’s offbeat humor, as he gives ridiculous orders and tries to get the aliens to sign a paper agreeing to the relocation. Other humorous aspects include the aliens’ addiction to canned cat food, the Nigerian crime lord’s desire to eat an alien arm, and the prostitution between humans and aliens, fortunately not shown. The special effects, given the small budget, are outstanding. And the dialogue indicates a sequel, set three years later, may be in the offing. The only serious hole in the plot is whether a spaceship can be reactivated with a hole cut in its side.
District 9 references dozens of other science fiction films from The Day the Earth Stood Still up to the recent Transformer robots, but, like the South African references, these are done lightly and simply provide a rich subtext for the rest of the action. Comedy, action film, indictment of human nature, plea for interracial and interspecies understanding—District 9 covers a lot of bases and covers most of them quite well.
9
As Peter Jackson fronted for first-time director Neill Blomkamp in District 9, even to putting his name on the film’s posters and being interviewed on the DVD, so Tim Burton fronts for first-time director Shane Acker in 9, even putting his name on the film’s posters and being interviewed on the DVD. Despite the objections of some reviewers who felt misled about who did what in the films, such mentoring is a very good thing. Acker also developed his feature from a short film that was his thesis in graduate school.
9 is a computer-generated animation film that imitates stop-motion animation. Burton used stop-motion animation in The Nightmare Before Christmas and The Corpse Bride. Like District 9’s slum, the setting of 9 is a post-apocalyptic world of trashed buildings, decaying landscapes and broken machines. But in the world of 9, the humans have all been destroyed in the battle with machines.
Some mechanical creatures—e.g., a cat-like creature with a skull for a head known only as “The Beast”—still roam the desolate landscape, hunting down anything that moves. Trying to survive here are some doll-like creatures that do not know who they are or why they are here. They have eyes like camera lenses, their bodies have front zippers or buttons, and, while apparently stuffed with something, they are able to hide things inside their bodies.
The later ones in this sequence of ragdoll robots (“stitch punks” is Acker’s term) seem more technically advanced than the first. The creatures are introduced in nonsequence—first is 9 (their numbers are printed on their backs), who, after some work on him by 2 (Martin Landau), speaks in the voice of Elijah Wood.
Other characters are voiced by famous actors: 1 (Christopher Plummer), 5 (John C. Reilly), 6 (Crispin Glover), 7 (Jennifer Connelly) and 8 (Fred Tatasciore). The characters 3 and 4 are mute researchers.
The plot is fast-paced but has little in the way of complex development. The explanation for the creatures’ existences is fairly mundane, and even the action that initiates the conflict between these tiny creatures and the monster machines is an accident—one can almost hear Gandalf saying, “Fool of a Took!”
It is the visuals and the action sequences, however, that make this film very much worth watching. Using what some have referred to as a “steam-punk” aesthetic, Acker combines Victorian engines, cathedrals and landscapes with computers and other elements of the modern world.
The broken skyscrapers, rusting machines, ruined tunnels and abandoned buildings all are gorgeously detailed, as are the dolls. Despite similar appearances, the dolls take on personalities through their voices and actions. 7, for example, is a tough warrior woman who saves the others on more than one occasion.
Do not, however, expect profound characterization—the cast is too large, the film is too short and the story doesn’t require it.
Anyone who is a fan of Tim Burton’s work will want to see 9, even though it’s not quite up to Burton at his best—the mystical ending is somewhat unsatisfying, the characters are less developed and the plot is predictable. See it, however, for the visuals—they are first rate. The Academy-Award-nominated short film that inspired the feature is included on the DVD.
Moon
First-time director Duncan Jones did not have Tim Burton or Peter Jackson to front for him, but as a British director of commercials and music videos, he was able to draw on a network of professional contacts and friends to raise money and offer support. Trudie Styler, a co-producer, is married to Sting, who helped finance the film, and Jones had the support also of his father, David Bowie.
Unfortunately, a few film reviewers used the opportunity to make fun of Jones’ father, citing his “space oddity” years, instead of evaluating the film itself. Looked at from any angle, Moon is one of the best science fiction films of recent years—intelligent, complex and technically impressive, all on a tiny budget of $5 million.
To provide the earth with power, Helium 3 is mined on the far side of the moon by robot machines whose operation is overseen by a single man, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), and a super computer named Gerty (think Hal 9000 of 2001).
Bell is nearing the end of a three-year shift, and the isolation and boredom are wearing him down, despite the expected arrival of his relief in only two weeks. To make matters worse, his live connection to earth is no longer functional; he can send and receive only prerecorded messages, and no live interaction with his family is possible. Under this additional stress, he has begun to glimpse things and people that he knows aren’t there, and his physical health is deteriorating.
One day, on a routine check of the mining equipment, he swerves his moon rover to avoid one of these illusions and crashes it into the mining machine, knocking himself unconscious. He awakens back in the moon base and finds himself confined for “rest and recuperation,” although he cannot remember the events leading up to the accident. Tricking the computer Gerty into letting him return to the scene of the crash, he enters the wrecked rover and in it finds something extraordinary.
The rest of the film explores Sam’s return to the moon base with his discovery and how it affects the remaining two weeks of his shift. To say any more would give away the film’s basic plot and the pleasure of watching the pieces unfold before Sam’s and the audience’s eyes.
The film essentially is a one-man show. Except for recorded messages from earth, Sam is the only person in the film, and Rockwell provides an acting tour-de-force. It has to be seen to be believed, and even then the viewer automatically stops believing it. The other “character” in Moon is Gerty, the omnipresent robot whose Hal-like qualities are used effectively in the film; Kevin Spacy provides Gerty’s voice.
The set is a combination of the crisp whiteness of 2001 and the lived-in quality of more recent science fiction films. Jones admires films like Silent Running and Outland. He used mostly model work and miniatures, augmented with CGI effects, for the moon base and the moon scenes, and they have an authenticity that CGI alone does not produce. The effects are as good as or better than those in Sunshine, a much more expensive film with a similar confined set.
One of the main themes of Moon is the profitable exploitation of the individual by large corporations, but, like Blade Runner and both versions of Solaris, it raises fundamental, intelligent questions about the self, one’s relationship to other people and the limits of self-knowledge. Don’t miss it.
Inglourious Basterds
The deliberately misspelled title of Quentin Tarantino’s new film should tip off the audience that he is going to take conscious liberties with reality, and take them he does. He recasts the crew of The Dirty Dozen into his Jewish “basterds,” strikes fear into the Nazis through his sadism, and creates an alternate ending to World War II. As if that were not enough, he creates the best role for a Nazi in recent films.
The plot is straightforward, as long as the audience accepts the science fiction concept of “alternate history,” a world in which the things that happen in our shared reality occur in a different fashion (or do not happen at all)—e.g., Lincoln isn’t assassinated, Japan isn’t A-bombed, Richard Nixon doesn’t resign and is reelected, Napoleon isn’t defeated at Waterloo, etc.
This plot has two strands that come to the same geographic location in the last part, although the two sets of characters barely meet. In one strand, Brad Pitt plays Lt. Aldo Raine (a nod to Hollywood actor Aldo Ray) who creates a group of Jewish commandos patterned after those in the film, The Dirty Dozen. Their singular goal is “killing Nazis,” and they slit throats, smash heads with baseball bats, take no prisoners and scalp their victims.
The other strand concerns Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a Jewish girl who escapes her family’s slaughter and hides in Paris with her aunt, from whom she inherits a movie theater. When the Nazi high command holds a film premier in her establishment, she and the Basterds decide, independently, to burn down the theater with the Nazis inside, and they do, thus ending WWII.
Pitt is adequate as Aldo Raine, although his Southern accent sets your teeth on edge. Christoph Waltz steals the show as the charming, ruthless Colonel Hans Landa—so far he’s collected an acting award at Cannes and a Golden Globe. The other actors and actresses are fine in the ensemble cast, although Tarantino’s screen plays are not known for their great characterizations.
Inglourious Basterds, like all of Tarantino’s films, is uneven—there are parts to admire and parts you wish were not there. In Basterds, however, the extremes seem greater—the best parts are really good and the bad parts seem really bad. One of the best scenes is the opening, in which Landa quizzes French farmer Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet) about whether he is hiding Jewish “rats” under his floorboards (he is).
The circling camera, framing the soldiers standing outside, and extended discussion, mostly in English, build the tension to the breaking point before the final explosion of violence. A similar pattern is followed in an underground tavern in Paris where some Nazis try to discover whether the other Nazis are authentic, again with a building up of tension until the final explosion (Tarantino likes to follow Hitchcock’s advice about the knowledge of a bomb under the table). The photography is excellent throughout, especially the deep reds that are used to highlight the women.
One amazing shot near the end projects a woman’s laughing face onto a movie screen that is engulfed in flames, leaving the laughing face outlined in smoke as people die around it. There’s also the satisfaction of seeing Hitler and Goebbels machine-gunned.
On the negative side, it’s hard to accept the virtual lack of security that would allow men with dynamite fastened to their legs to approach Hitler or that would let a large pile of highly explosive nitrate film be stacked behind a screen which most of the Nazi leaders would be watching. Also disturbing is the cultivated sadism of the Basterds—if they behave like Nazis, are they any better than them?
Also, some of the dialogue goes on and on for no apparent reason, except to work in more film references (as in the scenes with Emil Jennings), and there’s something slightly egotistical about a film director using film and a theater as a device to end the World War II.
So, some aspects of the film are great and some are deficient—like most Tarantino films. Despite the running time of two and a half hours, I was never bored, and certain scenes remain in the memory for days afterward. That’s usually a sign of an impressive movie.
—Leonard G. Heldreth
Editor’s Note: All films reviewed are available on DVD or VHS from local stores. Reviews of earlier films cited can be found at www.mmnow.com
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