Chad Taylor

Bedside reading, 1975 #2


I am kind of looking forward to John Carter. "Kind of" because Disney dropped "of Mars" from the title, and the fanboys are grumbling. "Looking forward to" because I read the series when I was very young and liked them a lot. Clive James once said that good books are the ones we feel slightly guilty about reading -- an observation I come back to more and more.

What is striking about John Carter of Mars is how it practically minted a genre. Edgar Rice Burroughs' ideas have become storytelling standards, their components recycled to power Dune, Avatar, Star Wars and many more. Like Edgar Allan Poe or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, his pulp fiction is a gift that keeps on giving.

I read Dune later. (As someone else may or may not have once said, the golden age of science fiction is twelve.) I had no time for any of the sequels -- Children of... and all that crap -- but Frank Herbert's original was strange and appealing. I read it at the beach one summer so the images mingle, pleasantly, with sands I saw every day. And I liked the David Lynch movie very much. After Lynch's Dune SF movies had a choice: they could do his version of what scifi looked like, or Ridley Scott's in Bladerunner. Critics and fans hated it, but lately it has been revisited. Writes Andrew Stimpson:
Dune's closest analogue is John Boorman's Excalibur. At the time of its 1981 release a US critic, while denigrating the film as a whole, noted that "the images have a crazy integrity". It was, in effect, a greatest hits collection of Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur: an artfully visualised series of key scenes and epic occurrences that lacked a uniting flow. The same could be said of Lynch's picture and its source novel.
Dune was in development for many years by insane person Alejandro Jodorowsky:
Salvador Dali was cast as the insane Emperor of the Universe, who lived on an artificial planet built from gold and had a robot doppelgänger (actually conceived as a way around the real Dalí's extortionate fiscal demands for appearing in person) to keep people guessing, fearfully, which one they were dealing with. He accepted the part with apparent glee, his only demand being that the Emperor's throne must be a toilet made from intersected dolphins, the tails forming the feet and the mouths to receive piss and shit separately.
Nowadays, of course, that would all be done in CGI.

Jodorowsky's mad-as-fuck version was never made -- all the artists, including writer Dan O'Bannon, ended up working on another little film called Alien -- but you want the flavour of what it would have been like -- and you know you do -- watch Santa Sangre or The Holy Mountain.

PS: Not-a-prequel Prometheus viral marketing starts here. (Milk and cookies keep you awake?)

PPS: The Hollywood Reporter says John Carter is not so bad.

Bedside reading, 1970 (Get your ass to Mars)

You can't judge a book by its cover but you sure get an idea of what the publisher was thinking. Another childhood birthday present, from 1970, Captain W.E. Johns' Return to Mars, swiftly repackaged for boys who had enjoyed Planet of the Apes and The Omega Man. But even for a younger reader the discrepancies between these possible futures and the Captain's world of tomorrow became all too apparent. To summarise:
Professor Brane, 'Tiger' Clinton, his son Rex and the Professor's butler, Judkins, travel back to Mars.
Still, nice pic. (More vintage W.E. Johns covers here.)

The colonialist vision of space lives on in Avatar and Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars, now filmed as John Carter. And manservants? Said Michael Fassbender of his role in Ridley Scott's Alien prequel Prometheus:
"I play a 'butler.'"

Old bones

Predators is a time travel movie that takes you back to an age when action movies were bloody, the monsters were some guy in a suit and the digital effects were a bit askew. The original moved the action genre forward a step by being two movies in one. Ahnuld's Predator started off like Ahnuld's Commando, giving the neck-and-pec fans all they wanted from the star in the first quarter hour (one liners, exploding ethnic stereotypes, the star lifting a truck with his bare hands). Once the special ops team had done their stuff and it was revealed they themselves were being stalked, only then did the ten little Indians countdown begin. Predator was an Alien rip off that has aged better than its source, partly because sci fi has diversified but largely because of that stylistic shift. No matter how many times you watch it, Predator is a great bait and switch.

Tasked with a sequel in the shadow of the truly awful Alien vs Predator mash ups, Nimrod Antal / Robert Rodriguez have made a faithful and loving remake in the plural, Predators, that is less daring than Predator and less tense-making than Predators II. Sticking to a single story line and tone, writers Alex Litvak and Michael Finch move the same pieces around the board to much the same effect. Instead of noble Native American soldier who faces off, knife in hand, with the invisible beastie, Predators has a noble Japanese yakuza with a samurai sword (in a fateful field of long grasses, conjured up by the alien world as surely as a Chaucerian knight's longing for a castle will make same appear around the next corner). Instead of a square-jawed tobacco chewing southern state gatling gunner it has a square jawed Russian gatling gunner. Instead of Elpidia Carrillo's "men of my village" speech it has Alice Braga giving a "men of my village" speech. Stumbling on a bad thing the humans escape the same way as Ahnuld did in 1987, falling through the bushes and into a body of water. (It's a stunt worth repeating: Jake Sulley does the same in Avatar. The sequence matches Predator almost shot-for-shot.)

Instead of Ahnuld Predators has Adrian Brody who does a pretty good job balancing knowingness and 'roid rage. It also has similar continuity problems: the troops break cover long before anyone thinks to look up and notice the alien sky, and the aliens have varying degrees of mortality, but with these lies come the satisfying "gotcha" moments, and a bullet count, and a fun cast and some parts when it's almost scary, thus balancing the filmmakers' goal of getting back to action movie basics while meeting the needs of a modern audience whose idea of mystery is a Tumblr link. Recent movies such as The Hangover change gears five times to keep people watching; if modern cinema is any indication then audiences have not been this restless since the Monkees' Head.

Predators is way more fun than Avatar. The movie has been shot on what looks to be a live set, and looks great: the digital effects are often tacky, and the old soundtrack and sound effects have been retained, to its benefit. I stopped counting the references to the previous Predator movies and Alien because it made me feel old, and because I was having fun watching it. There's a lot wrong with it and a couple of things brilliantly right with it. The irony is that this is how movies used to be before the movie that inspired it came along.

The premise of a human hunter who is himself hunted by an alien was the subject of a 1953 short story 'The Ruum' by American SF writer Arthur Porges. When a game hunter in the Canadian Rockies stumbles on the alien's eerie gallery of life specimens, the ruum pursues him to add to its collection. I read the story when I was 11 in R. Chetwynd Hayes' 1975 anthology Tales of Terror From Outer Space; years later when I first saw Predator I immediately wondered if it had been the movie's inspiration. Porges' alien is also liquid, like a rolling bubble of mercury, and morphs into different tool shapes to pursue its prey, just like James Cameron's T-1000 in Terminator II. Someone owes that writer lunch.

About The Blues

Avatar. Oh, so many things. In Paris, working, but in summary, Memo To JC style:
  1. Worst voice over ever. Ever. Worse than Terminator 2. Give me half an hour and what you spent on designing one handheld weapon and I'll write you something better.
  2. 3-D is of negligible benefit. It is immersive, but I don't want to be immersed in something -- I want you to tell a story, and if I'm distracted looking at something in the background then I'm not being directed.
  3. But it's much much better than Titanic. Not as good as T1 or T2, more mature than True Lies... It's buff and self-absorbed, like The Abyss. A big anime Abyss.
  4. I don't really care about the animals. There's a big red one and a small one and so on - did this really take four years to invent? Really?
  5. The CG is good. Nav'i almost totally believable. Tactile sense is quite amazing: when the Nav'i kiss or touch each other, you can really sense it.
  6. The forest at night is amazing. Almost did some of the thematic talking for you.
  7. The Marines are boring.
  8. What does Unobtanium do? Is it anti-grav or what? Because for a movie that explains everything, you cannot have a McGuffin. If you explain the plants and flowers, you have to explain what the plants and flowers are being killed for, and why.
  9. Sigourney Weaver's not really used.
  10. Sam Worthington's wasted legs are the most amazing effect of all.
  11. Nav'i language very good -- chants and songs Not Silly.
  12. Why does Michelle Rodriguez's character turn? I would like to know. (See #8)
  13. Why was Sully's brother just gunned down in a mugging? I would have had him die while being trained by Colonel Quaritch -- more motivation for conflict, betrayal, etc, especially if Sully discovered this later on. Just a thought. Would have thrown that in with the voice over.
  14. For all the actors and CG-actors, there are really only four or five characters in the movie, so Quaritch has to embody all evil, like the driving instructor in Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky.
  15. Shot where real Sully is cradled by real Nav'i Neytiri is the best Cameron ur-mother moment since the sleeping Ripley faded into the curve of the Earth.
  16. How can Sully be awake as Sully during the day while at the same time being awake as an avatar during the day? I think you got the timing wrong. The detail bothered me only because you went into such detail about everything else.
  17. I'll probably go see it again.
  18. Hurry up and make Fantastic Voyage. More your thing.

Addendum: Saw it the second time, and it was better. I'd pre-booked to watch it at the BFI Imax 3-D and would have happily given up my ticket if I'd had someone to give it to, but I didn't, so I went. The projection quality was good when I first saw it but Imax projection made a remarkable difference. For a start, the 3-D composition was clearer, so shots became more dynamic and engaging, which did make parts of the story more exciting. (The slow bits were still slow, and the Pocahontas storyline was unaffected.) The Nav'i worked better as characters because rendered digital animations read better in 3-D than real actors filmed with the same 3-D system. I don't know the technical reasons for this but it seems logical when you think about it. Zoe Saldana's mo-cap performance as Neytiri and Sam Worthington still carry the film. The handheld sequences were hard to take in: without the slo-mo pauses in the Sully-being-chased-by-the-whatever sequence I would have been unable to track what was going on. And the aircraft looked solid in the Imax version: on a smaller screen they seemed greyed out and flat, more like drawings than real physical craft. Ships and craft were, according to this story, "built" (i.e. rendered) by a separate special effects shop, which probably has something to do with it.

Overall, the Imax 3-D experience was a revelation. It did improve the film. So now I'm wondering what happens in reverse: would the movie be proportionally less satisfying on a small TV screen? I suspect it would. This film needs a big screen and 3-D projection to work.

Story's story. Whether it's Breathless or Casino, a great film is a great film whether you see it on a big screen or a TV set. I don't think anyone would make the mistake of putting Avatar in the category of the former. But as a piece of entertainment it relies more on technology than its predecessors -- far more than Cameron's first Terminator movie, for instance. That's an interesting development.