Cinema – Page 2 – Wis[s]e Words

The Death of Stalin

Published on February 28, 2020Leave a comment

It took this clip on Reddit to prod me to go watch The Death of Stalin today. It only needed eleven seconds to convey the mood of the movie rather better than the awful official trailer above, which simultaneously tries to make it all more serious than it should be and leans too hard into nudging you in the side for the humourous bits. But this is Armando Iannucci bringing the same energy of the thick of It and In the Loop; eleven seconds of Zhukov dramatically taking of his coat works so much better.

Zhukov, with Khrushchev and rather nauseatingly, Beria, is the hero of the movie after all and gets that heroic entrance. They’re the ones who act, who get things done while the rest of the cast bumble around. These are all as venal and crooked and steeped in blood as the rest of them, but Iannucci still likes them the way he liked Malcolm Tucker. They’re fun, they get to do things and they get to curse.

This is just a romp of course, a mockery. Russia was right to ban it. It tramples right on the neo-Soviet myth making of Putin and his cretins, while it makes that whole gulag business look a jolly jape too. The victims are nameless, shot of screen; the executioners get to tell jokes. The villains at the heart of it all are humanised, the same way the asshole politicians of Iannucci’s early works were. And because it is a romp, don’t take its historical inaccuracies so seriously.

Is there anything more to it than just a spectacle piece for a group of good actors to get their teeth in? Not really.

Rocketship X-M — Sci-Fi Sundaze

Published on February 23, 2020Leave a comment

Trigger for when the fictional moon landing from the 1950 Rocketship X-M is less sexist than the actual moon landing programme a decade later.

Yes, that’s right. Unlike the real moon programme, he crew of the Rocketship X-M includes a female scientist next to the ex-air force pilots. Granted, she’s partially there for the romance subplot but it still struck me. She’s treated as one of the crew, just as professional as the others in a way that some much later, ‘better’ movies couldn’t do.

Rocketship X-M was made as a cheap cash-in on a more prestigious film on the same subject that also came out in 1950: Destination Moon. This was when you could still film a movie in eighteen days to take advantage that another project had been delayed by a month. It’s one of those movies I’ve read about a long time before I saw it today, back in the day when if your local videostore didn’t have it, you could only read about it in science fiction encyclopedias from the library. I thought I knew what to expect, just some shlocky, badly acted movie only relevant because it was arguably the first movie of the 1950ties sci-fi boom.

It was better than that though. There’s an earnestness to it that’s unexpected in a b-movie. There are no monsters, no things men wasn’t meant to know, but a desire to get the science right. It actually starts with a long infodump disguised as a press conference explaining how the ship will get to the Moon from the Earth and it sort of get things right? They actually use a multistage rocket and talk about using the Earth’s orbital spin to give them enough velocity to get to the Moon in 48 hours. A pity then that once the journey is underway, they run into a meteor storm and hear them whoosing past them with the deep rumbling sound you’d expect from a bunch of rocks travelling in a vacuum. There’s a fair bit of bad or outdated science like that in this movie, but it doesn’t really matter. At least it is trying to get it, if not right, at least plausible.

We can’t have a space movie without something going wrong on the movie so the ship promptly develops engine troubles, which they manage to fix, but unfortunately once it starts to accelerate the crew gets knocked unconscious and they managed to miss the Moon and end up on …. Mars. Not exactly plausible, but bear with it. This is of course a pre-Viking Mars, still twentysix years in this movie’s future, so it has an almost breathable atmosphere where you don’t need a real space suit. And of course it has an ancient, now vanished civilisation, but no Barsoom style planetary adventures here.

No, the reason there is no more ancient Martian civilisation is because it destroyed itself in a nuclear war. Even seventy years later, the scene in which the characters realise that is gripping, even with the obvious matte painting backgrounds and red filter landscape. It gets a bit more hokey once they run into the degraded into barbarity survivors and most of the crew dies at their hands. Those that survive reach the ship and make the trip back to Earth, only to crash at the very end. The movie ends with the main scientist behind the project being asked how he feels now Rocketshipp X-M proved a failure. His answer is that it isn’t and that they’re already working on the X-M 2.

Rocketship X-M then, is more of a science fiction than a sci-fi movie, perhaps the first to take the idea of space travel seriously as more than just a way to get the heroes to the scene of the action. And it only existed because George Pal was a bit behind on his movie…

It Came from Outer Space — Sci-Fi Sundaze

Published on February 16, 2020Leave a comment

The trailer for It Came from Outer Space really wanted to let you know how awesome its 3-D effects are:

Pity that the version I watched missed them. What remains is a plodding, dull, dragging story that takes far too long to get to the conclusion.

A meteor falls to Earth near Sandy Hook, Arizona and a local amateur astronomer and his school teacher fiancee get their neighbour to take his helicopter to take a look at it. He climbs into the crater and discovers it’s actually a crashed space ship, but before he can show it to the other two the crater collapses and the ship vanishes underground. Already tought of as a bit of a heads in the clouds egghead, nobody believes him, certainly not the local sherrif. But then people start disappearing, some coming back but not entirely themselves. When the astronomer’s fiancee disappears too, the sheriff organises a posse to capture or kill the aliens. Meanwhile our astronomer hero himself has managed to make contact with the aliens and realises they are not hostile, just ‘borrowed’ the towns people to help them make repairs to the ship. The climax is a race against time as the posse closes in and the astronomer tries to stop them long enough for the aliens to get away.

This could’ve just as well been told as an half hour Outer Limits or Twilight Zone episode, instead of an eighty minute movie. There’s too little plot for too much time and the suspense doesn’t hold up for me. I do like that the aliens here are mostly benign, if rather impolite to kidnap and then duplicate people without consent. You can’t argue the paranoid sheriff is entirely in the wrong to mistrust their motives. This being based on a Ray Bradbury idea I have the feeling that the moral is supposed to be that humanity has to grow up before being able to actually meet other civilisations, but the aliens didn’t cover themselves in glory either.

It Came from Outer Space: the astronomer hero as seen through the eye of the alien

Shot in black and white in 1953, based on an idea of Ray Bradbury, this is at least a good looking movie. Not sure how much difference the 3-D effects would’ve made, but in the 2-D version they are sparse. We get shots of the ship crashing and leaving, but the most ambitious scene is when the astronomer finally comes face to face with an actual alien, rather than an alien possessed human. We first get a shot of him through the alien’s eye, then slowly his body is revealed to the astronomer and us. While it looks a bit naff, it’s at least an attempt at a non-human looking alien.

It Came from Outer Space can be seen as part of that 1950ties wave of Cold War paranoia sci-fi movies, but doesn’t fit neatly in it. The aliens do not kill or hurt anybody, are ultimately benign and not here to take over. They just want to go home.

Sci-Fi Sundaze is an attempt to get me to watch more classic science fiction movies and blog about them. Sci-fi is a bit of a curse word in echt-fandom circles of course, something Forry Ackerman couldn’t have expected when he coined it to give science fiction a cool new name ala hi-fi. Sci-fi is shlock, all the bad stuff ‘we’ left behind in the pulps, proof that media sf could never catch up to the written stuff. That’s all bollocks of course.

What I’m interested in is taking a closer look at three long maligned waves of sci-fi schlock. First, like with this entry, that whole flood of quickly and cheaply made 1950ties science fiction thrillers, the purest expression of ‘sci-fi’. Second, there are the pre-Star Wars seventies dystopias like Rollerball or Logan’s Run. Sometimes these had little more going for them than awesome sets, but it’s still worth looking closer at them. Finally, there’s the eighties science fiction boom. Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Alien had made science fiction a blockbuster genre and boy were people ready to cash in. So let’s look at all the Star Wars ripoffs, the nuclear war armageddon Mad Max clones, all the sci-fi horror movies winking at Aliens. These are the movies I’d get from the videoshop once I saw all the good sf movies.

Resident Evil redux

Published on March 15, 2015Leave a comment

Alice versus patient zero

Unlike myself, Mr Moth has played and is a fan of the original Resident Evil games the movies are based on. Therefore he’s considerably more hacked off at them than I was, though I can certainly agree with much of his criticism:

3) Paul WS Anderson really believes the Umbrella Corporation is staggeringly incompetent.

Umbrella manage to wipe out nearly every human in existence but to what end? They’re a business and the undead are not a target market. By the fifth film it’s clear that the Red Queen is intent on destroying humanity. The problem is that humanity is well on its way to total extinction by the time of, well, Extinction. Las Vegas is a ruin, buried by the Nevada desert in just five years. There’s no coming back from that, but still Umbrella hold board meetings and employ receptionists (exactly how were they recruiting their staff? “Are you a zombie?” “No.” “Welcome to Umbrella.”). Their long-term plan made no sense, and it’s worth noting that in the games, humanity is in much better nick.

But that’s ok, because they were never going to benefit from it, anyway. Every single one of their developments got away from them in one way or another. The Red Queen goes rogue and kills everyone. The Nemesis turns goodie. The super-secret exit to their bioweapons lab is besieged by thousands of zombies, kept at bay by the thinnest of chainlink fences. The airtight lab they store their highly infectious weaponised virus in has aircon vents that link directly to the offices. If their underwater base loses power, all their soldiers go to sleep during the power cut. They leave hundreds of clones lying around of their most powerful enemy.

The Resident Evil movies really only make sense as spectacles, especially after the first one, which I still think was a rather good suspense horror movie even if there were plot holes there you could drive a zombie horde through. The overall story arc doesn’t make much sense and Umbrella has to be the most incompetent, pointlessly evil corporation in the world.

And yet, having watched all five movies over the last two months, these are still entertaining movies that have the redeeming feature of starring strong, female characters who aren’t undermined by their male costars, hold their own without becoming the usual bad girl cliche. It can be so much worse, as a look at the Underworld series, that other naughties action horror with female lead franchise, shows.

Resident Evil: Retribution

Published on February 28, 2015Leave a comment

Fake Alice closing the door on some zombies

Resident Evil: Retribution is the latest and so far last movie in the Resident Evil franchise. It starts with about ten minutes of recap of the previous movies, after which “Alice” wakes up as a housewife with a husband and a daughter. Cue a few minutes of syrup before the zombies attack. All of which turns out to be a danger room scenario, which the series is inordinately fond off.

Alice unchained

Real Alice meanwhile has been captured and is interrogated by evil Jill Valentine, which eats up a couple more minutes, before a power shutdown, which interestingly also shutdowns Valentine, allows her to escape. Despite the deadline she takes the time to pose here. To be honest, it is a nice shot of Alice in her badass uniform, against that white, sterile Umbrella corps background. Note the change in hair colour and length here.

Alice versus the Japanese zombies

The first real Alice set piece sees her re-enacting the zombie infection of Tokyo, which we know from the last movie but which is news to her. The last zombie facing off against Alice is in fact patient zero. This shot shows off everything I like about her: calm, cool, in control.

Big Wesker is watching you

Enter Wesker, the scumbag villain from the previous movie, the one who made everything worse and is now reassuring Alice that really, honestly, he’s on the side of angels and it’s the Red Queen AI who’s been behind the Umbrella Corp’s actions. Turns out she wants to wipe out the human race, which considering their track record in the previous movies, means she must be carrying out Umbrella’s true wishes.

Leon to the rescue

Wesker has sent a team of professionals to the rescue, including floppy haired Leon, who’s a much more important character in the video games. Here he’s just another bloke with a gun.

Soviet zombies shooting up capitalist Moscow

As the series has progressed, the bullshit has increased, from zombies to super zombies and here we have zombies intelligent enough to use weaponry and jeeps, something not seen in previous movies, so why now? Because it looks cool, probably, and normal zombies aren’t much of a threat anymore.

Good and evil square off

Meanwhile, despite dying in the first movie, that bloke in the middle is Alice’s boyfriend brought back to life by the Red Queen, as are the other non-mooks there. Alice meanwhile has gotten fake Alice’s daughter. The woman in the impractical dress is Ada Wong, yet another mysterious bad ass from the games brought into what’s essentially a drawn out cameo here.

Good and evil square off again

The climax comes with an extended battle on the ice, as brainwashed Jill Valentine goes mano a mano (wait, that’s not quite right) with Alice, while Rain on the right (also killed in movie 1) goes after the rest of the team, now reduced to Ada, Leon and that rapper dude from the previous one. The one true strength of the Resident Evil movies remains that it has so many kick ass women in it: Alice, Valentine, Ada, Claire Renfield, Rain.

Alice meets Wesker again

The movie ends with Alice meeting up with Wesker again, who now is the most powerful man in the world, holed up in the White House, defended by Umbrella and US army troops, the last surviving humans in the world, the logical end result of all of Umbrella’s scheming through the previous movies. Getting stuck in the White House, not the most defensible position in the world, being a prime example.