Sci-Fi Sundaze – Wis[s]e Words

Event Horizon — Sci-Fi Sundaze

Published on March 24, 2024Leave a comment

In 2040 the research ship Event Horizon disappeared from orbit around Neptune. Now it’s 2047 and she’s back — but where has she been the past seven years?

The event Horizon orbitting Neptune

That’s what the crew of the Lewis and Clark has to figure out. What they didn’t know until they arrived is that Event Horizon was not just a normal ship: it was designed to test a warp drive that could take it to Proxima Centauri in a day. Obviously something went wrong and when they find the Event Horizon it’s a ship without power and without crew. As they board the ship, evidence of something gone horribly wrong is quickly found: mutilated corpses, frozen blood caked on the ship’s walls, etc. Power is restored and the gravity drive that provides the warp is briefly engaged, sucking in one of the crew members who re-emergences comatose. It also triggers a shockwave that cripples the Lewis and Clark and leaves them with twenty hours to fix the ship before they run out of oxygen. All of which is bad enough without the terrible hallucinations each crew member is starting to suffer from or the weird fascination the resident scientist — also the designer of the gravity drive — has with his creation…

The gravity drive consists of three rings covered in spikes and knobs orbiting a metal globe also covered in spikes

Any sane person would’ve been wary of the drive even before the hallucinations started: just look at the fucker. That gothic design just screams evil. Event Horizon is not a subtle film, squarely in that tradition of sci-fi movies warning about things we’re not meant to know. Sam Neill’s scientist character, Dr Weir, is very much in that same tradition of scientific villains driven by hubris, opposing Laurence Fishburne’s captain Miller, the commander of the Event Horizon whose first concern is for his crew’s safety. The situation deteriorates as you would expect from a horror movie following the usual pattern of crew members picked off one by one by either the ship or Dr Weir, until the last few survivors manage to escape — or do they?

I’m not the first one who made the connection between Evetn Horizon‘s gravity drive and Warhammer 40K’s treatment of warp space, far from it, but that was honestly the first thing that came into mind. Just the design of the ship is reminiscent of Warhammer 40K, let alone the idea that warp space drives you mad and is filled with demonic beings. But it’s not the only comparison that comes to mind. Hellraiser, where you can be summoned to hell if you solve a particular puzzle box, is another one, but there are also other connections to be made.

On some level you could see Event Horizon as a movie about alien contact. Something lives in warp space and ‘talked’ to the crew: it’s not its fault that contact drove them mad. Granted, Dr Weir’s actions are purely malevolent, trying to either keep the others onboard or killing them if they try to escape, btu that might just be him, not whatever entity contacted him in the first place. It might just be a Solaris situation, with an intelligence so different from ours communication is impossible, so bizarre that our minds cannot handle it. Forbidden Planet is another such movie this reminded me off, which also had some sort of creature killing off the members of an expedition to an alien planet.

A predictable, but enjoyable horror sci-fi movie.

Now he lives on anxiety, coffee and chocolate — Sci-Fi Sundaze

Published on January 24, 20212 Comments

Enjoy this aerial shot of London as you start split Second (1992), as it’s about the last recognisable shot of the city.

And there we have the setting for this movie: London 2008, a city plagued by global warming and decades of pollution, which in practise means most of the sets are covered in scummy water and everything is fogged up. None of this setup actually matters to the plot and there isn’t any real reason this was set in the future. This is the least science fictional science fiction movie ever. Instead this is a combination of a serial killer movie and a buddy cop movie, just gussied up with a few sfnal props and weapons. Apart from the climax of the movie being set in a flooded Underground, there’s no real reason that this movie takes place in London either. In fact, most of the movies takes place on sets that could’ve just as well be used for some random American city.

Rutger Hauer isn’t necessarily the most subtle of actors even in the best of times, but I’ve never seen him chew the scenery as enthusiastically as he does here. Hauer started his career as a teenage heart throb in a medieval adventure series in the Netherland, before starring in several Dutch cult classics like Turks Fruit and Soldaat van Oranje. When the director of these movies, Paul Verhoeven, moved to Hollywood Hauer followed him. You know him of course as Roy Batty in Blade Runner, but perhaps also as the villain in The Hitcher, or from Flesh + Blood or Ladyhawke. His movies aren’t always classics, but they’re always entertaining. In Split Second he’s Harley Stone, a hard bitten cop who lost his partner to a serial killer three years ago. Now the killer is back and Hauer is on his tracks. the stereotypical loner cop, Hauer listens to nobody and doesn’t let anything or anyone stop him from pursuing the killer. Why he has to do all that in an American accent when the movie’s set in London is never explained.

Meanwhile almost every other actor in the movie is somebody who you’d probably remember from having guest starred on Coronation Street or from having had a critically acclaimed role in some worthy BBC drama. Here we have Alun Armstrong as the police chief Trasher spouting the usual cop movie cliches to Neil Duncan, the soon to be new partner to Rutger Hauer. Both of these weren’t new to playing cops, Armstrong having been in The Sweeney and Duncan in Taggart, but here they are in what is clearly an American cop flick, somewhat out of place. Duncan especially, though he’s well suited for playing the book smart, sensitive, health conscious rookie that will get on surprisingly well with Hauer’s paranoid veteran surviving on “anxiety, coffee and chocolate”.

That mixture of American cop cliches and British actors makes for a strange movie. It actually took me until this scene, some forty minutes into its one and a half hour run time that Split Second clicked for me. Once again a familiar scene. Hauer takes Durban to his favourite bar with Durban having won a little bit of his trust. As Hauer munches down on a full English and Durban asks for a fancy tea and a crossaint, they share theories on the serial killer. Meanwhile, in Hauer’s flat, his murdered partner’s ex-girlfriend is having a shower; cue the Psycho music. Cue also a quick glimpse of Kim Cattrall’s breasts, because of course. All this is played completely straight, but the absurdity of this sort of cop movie cliche playing out against a background track of the Moody Blues’ Nights in White Satin makes it all slightly absurd. And you can’t tell me this wasn’t intentional.

Because even in 1992 everything in this movie was cliched and hackneyed, yet you have a cast of serious character actors who all deliver their absurd lines with complete earnestness. Granted, this could all be a case of “I haven’t seen the movie, but I have seen the house the movie bought”, but I doubt it. This feels more like a cast having fun with something they know on its own is bad, but by taking it ultra serious, can be made into something hilarious. And that’s the charm of this movie, even if it was done by accident. Having Hauer and Durban act the shit out of their roles in their own way is what makes this movie for me. Don’t watch it for the plot, or for the science fiction, such as it is. Watch it for actors having fun. Nothing in this movie really makes sense, but you’ll enjoy it nonetheless.

Welt Am Draht — Sci-Fi Sundaze

Published on June 7, 2020Leave a comment

Welt Am Draht is basically what you get if you imagine The Matrix done in 1973, directed by a German auteur director more interested in philosophy than action and made as a two part television movie for a West German television channel.

How can you know the impact of a movie like this, fortyseven years after the fact and with its own remake having come out in the same year as The Matrix, itself already twentyone years old? I’m sure you can guess the core idea of this movie just from me having compared it to The Matrix. And yes, this is a movie about reality as a simulation, and yes that is the big reveal at the middle of it. But that television audience which sat down to watch it that October night in 1973, what would they have made of it? Was this intended to have been a surprise, or something that you were expected to have deduced from the hints the movie dropped, long before the protagonist did?

Wehlt am Draht: gorgeous office sets

Another thing difficult to judge: the set dressing. This is a gorgeous office, sumptuous in its “seventies retrofuturism” as the Criterion trailer has it. But would you have seen it that way had you watched it in 1973, when all this would be far more the stuff of everyday life, or was this absurd even for 1973? Certainly the outsized ties our protagonist wears wouldn’t have been that ludicrous in their original context as they seem now. In any case throughout the movie I found myself admiring the sets and cinematography as much as I followed the plot. It is all so incredibly lush, so rich. As such it slots in neatly with the seventies science fiction cinema boom of big budget, big sets movies. But unlike some, it has more going for it than that.

Wehlt am Draht: sterile clutter

The director, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, was one of the giants of West-German cinema; this is his only science fiction movie. It’s interesting how he manages to avoid the pitfalls of science fiction movie making that so many contemporary movies fell into. Set in the present day, present time, it has no outlandish costuming (those flared ties notwithstanding) nor much easily dated sci-fi gadgetry. It doesn’t waste time and credibility explaining how its central conceit works, but rather focuses on working through its implications. If we’re capable of creating a computer simulation that is so realistic that its inhabitants never suspect that they are living in one, who is to say we ourselves are not living in one too?

Wehlt am Draht: mirrored images

Welt Am Draht is a slow, slow movie. As said, it takes its protagonist an hour and a half of the movie to get the realisation that indeed he’s not living in any real world. That’s almost the same running time as The Thirteenth Floor its remake and it still has two hours more to run. But while it is slow, it never feels slow, because it uses its running time to throroughly consider that idea of living in a simulation, what it would mean to discover that you do so. Though it flirts with the traditional idea of that sort of revelation driving you mad, it never quite gets there. It even has a happy ending.

Wehlt am Draht: watching the watchers

Welt Am Draht ends with the protagonist’s escape from his simulacrum to what’s presumably the real world. The problem of the simulacrum remains unsolved, its philosophical questions swapped for a more mundane love affair. With no real catharsis, this is an unsettling movie, much more so than most of the other movies mining the same vein of technopessimism and paranoia that came out at the same time. Because it’s set in a world that’s recognisably our contemporary world, the feeling of alienation brought on by the high modernist clutter in the otherwise sterile office landscape it mostly takes part in, works so well. Because it keeps the futuristic to a minimum, the distortions caused by it hit all the harder when it is introduced.

Wehlt am Draht: glitches in the matrix

The use of mirrors and other reflecting surfaces by Fassbinder to shoot his characters in, the extraordinary stillness of the supporting cast in crowd scenes until called into action by the script, the way the protagonist constantly keeps moving, a discordant note among the rest of the cast, it all adds to this alienation. Especially those opening minutes made me uncomfortable watching, the thought kept nagging that something was wrong with this world, without ever knowing why. The repeated use of cabaret, with all its intonations of queerness, just reinforced this feeling. What it reminded me of was not so much The Matrix, but rather Videodrome, whic is similarly unsettling. It is very much a movie you would need to see if you like the latter.

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.