Movies & TV Star Trek: Discovery

The Game Is Afoot — Star Trek: Discovery’s “Jinaal”

This week, the Discovery crew is off on a game-style quest.

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on April 11, 2024

Credit: CBS / Paramount+

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Credit: CBS / Paramount+

If there was any doubt whatsoever that the fifth season of Discovery is a role-playing-game-style quest narrative, “Jinaal” beats those doubts to a pulp. We’ve definitely got ourselves a goal that will be found by our heroes being clever, by getting through traps, by figuring out riddles, and so on.

And it’s fun. Trek hasn’t really done this sort of straight-up game-style narrative before, certainly not on this scale, and while you can practically hear the dice rolling with each scene, it’s fun, dangit.

It helps that the episode does something that the Secret Hideout shows have been much better about than the previous wave of Trek TV shows, and that’s embracing the history on the microcosmic level as well as the macrocosmic. I love that they do things like last week’s use of the Promellians. The first wave of Trek spinoffs would have just made up an alien species rather than re-use one, but there’s no reason not to use one that’s already established. Especially since “Booby Trap” made it sound like the Promellians were a well-known extinct species, yet were only mentioned in that one TNG episode.

While this tendency can sometimes go overboard into the fan-wanky territory (cf. the third season of Picard), Discovery has generally made it work. This episode in particular makes very good use of Trek’s history, particularly the Trill both as developed on DS9 and also as seen on this show, particularly in “Forget Me Not.” And we also get some background on why the Progenitors’ technology was classified.

The clue on Trill is held by a joined Trill named Jinaal, whose current host is still alive on the world. It’s been eight centuries, and both host and symbiont are near the end of their lives—indeed, they’re clinging to life in part because nobody has approached them for their clue yet.

Discovery’s arrival is met with a riddle to prove that they figured out the clue on the Promellian necropolis last time—in particular that it initially appeared to lead to Betazed. Once Burnham provides that right answer, Jinaal’s current host is willing to talk to them, but the host who actually was there eight hundred years ago wants to talk directly to the Discovery crew. So they perform a zhiantara, first seen in DS9’s “Facets,” where prior hosts’ personalities can be temporarily downloaded into another person. The Guardians (including Gray, still apprenticing as a Guardian) perform the ceremony on Jinaal, transferring the older host into Culber.

As with “Facets”—and indeed every other science fiction story that involves characters getting a temporary new personality, a well Trek has dug into any number of times, from the original series’ “Return to Tomorrow” and “Turnabout Intruder” to TNG’s “The Schizoid Man” and “Masks” to DS9’s “Dramatis Personae” and “Our Man Bashir” to Voyager’s “Infinite Regress” and “Body and Soul” to Enterprise’s “The Crossing” and “Observer Effect”—this is at least partly an acting exercise for Wilson Cruz. And, to his credit, Cruz nails it, creating a fully realized character in Jinaal, who is crotchety, enigmatic, and more than a little manipulative.

He was a scientist who worked with the Romulan whose scout ship was found last week, along with a bunch of other scientists, after the Romulan found the Progenitors’ technology. This all happened at the height of the Dominion War, which—as we know from DS9—was a time of significant paranoia in the Alpha Quadrant. Because of that, and because of how dangerous the technology had the potential to be, the scientists all agreed to hide it and only have it be findable by someone who can figure out the clues and who could be counted on to use it for good.

Having this all happen during the Dominion War was very clever, as that was a time when worry about things like Changeling infiltration was at its height. And it’s remained a big secret since then simply because nobody knows where it is without the Romulan journal.

Besides his initial riddle and his general questioning of Burnham and Book about the state of the galaxy in the thirty-second century, there’s one final test. Jinaal claims to have hidden the next physical puzzle piece in a canyon occupied by a nasty predator animal that can cloak itself. Eventually, Burnham and Book realize that it isn’t just a big nasty creature attacking them, it’s a mother protecting its eggs. Once they realize that, they back off, which is what Jinaal was waiting for.

Having passed the compassion test, he gives them the final doodad. Culber then gets his body back and Jinaal can rest.

There are also three character-based subplots, two of which work nicely. Back at Federation HQ, Saru and T’Rina are about to announce their engagement, but Saru’s new career as an ambassador complicates matters for T’Rina’s chief aide, who advises Saru to convince his boss that they should postpone the engagement announcement. Saru goes along with this, thinking he’s protecting his fiancée, but T’Rina wastes no time in whupping him upside the head on that score. The Ni’Var President understands her staff’s need to be politically acute, but she refuses to let political concerns interfere with her personal life—a very logical decision, though logic and politics so rarely mix. It’s a nice little subplot, elevated, as usual, by brilliant performances by Doug Jones and Tara Rosling and their picture-perfect chemistry, as well as the script by Kyle Jarrow & Lauren Wilkinson, which illustrates the conflict potential when Saru’s compassion clashes with T’Rina’s logic.

On Discovery, Burnham charges her new first officer with getting to know the crew. Rayner resists this—he’s read their service records—but Burnham thinks there’s no substitute for talking to people. Rayner’s solution to this is to give each crewmember twenty words to tell him something about themselves that isn’t in their service record. It takes Tilly whupping him upside the head to remind him that his command style on the Antares isn’t going to work on Discovery. Mary Wiseman is particularly good here, showing us how far Tilly has come. (She’d better damn well be one of the stars of the upcoming Starfleet Academy series…)

The third character bit doesn’t quite work, mostly because it feels like some scenes are missing. Adira and Gray are reunited, and they apparently haven’t hardly talked since Gray went to Trill. Given the ease of holographic communication over absurd distances in the thirty-second century, this is surprising, but there it is. Gray and Adira are still obviously in love with each other and still are thrilled to see each other—but then they have a conversation that ends with them deciding to break up because the distance thing isn’t working. They’re both incredibly happy where they are. And yet, in the very last scene, they’re still hanging out on Trill, the mission itself long over. So are they broken up or not? It feels like there’s a scene or two missing there…

In that last scene, we find out that Mol, contrary to Discovery’s report that she and L’ak are on another world, is on Trill, having infiltrated the Guardians. That doesn’t bode well…[end-mark]

The post The Game Is Afoot — <i>Star Trek: Discovery</i>’s “Jinaal” appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Star Trek: Discovery

Why Star Trek: Discovery Is My Favorite 21st-Century Star Trek

After a rocky start, Discovery has become a sterling example of Trek’s ability to ask big, challenging questions while still being a whole lot of fun..

By Charlie Jane Anders

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Published on April 10, 2024

Credit: CBS / Paramount+

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Credit: CBS / Paramount+

Back in 2022, I wrote a newsletter saying that you can love Star Trek: Strange New Worlds without putting down its sister show, Discovery. Which is true! I love both shows a whole lot. I also am obsessed with Lower Decks, which I rewatch pretty obsessively. I have a lot of love for Star Trek: Picard as well. And I’ve grown to appreciate Star Trek: Prodigy greatly since it moved to Netflix. We are truly blessed to have so much amazing Star Trek right now, and there’s no need to pick one show over the others.

And yet, I still feel the need to come out and say it: Star Trek: Discovery is my favorite Trek of the 21st century so far. 

The final season of Discovery launched last week, and I’ve been remembering why I adore this show so much. These characters have a special place in my heart, and I’ve been loving the exploration of Starfleet in the 32nd century, centuries after the other Trek shows. Discovery has become a thoughtful, expansive show that asks big, challenging questions, while also being a whole lot of fun. 

Minor spoilers for the most recent episodes of Discovery below… 

Discovery got off to a rocky start, to say the least. Annalee Newitz and I discussed the first season in the very first episode of our podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, and there was a lot to talk about. Season one leaned into being a war story, something that Deep Space Nine had already done brilliantly, and then veered into the Mirror Universe, which is one of those settings that gets less interesting the more you see of it. The first season featured a lot of upheaval behind the scenes, with co-creator Bryan Fuller leaving early on and the replacement showrunners being let go. Season two served as a backdoor pilot for Strange New Worlds, while also unspooling a somewhat tangled storyline about black ops and A.I. from the future.

Much like Star Trek: The Next Generation, Discovery really hit its stride in its third season. That’s when the crew of the Discovery traveled forward into a far more distant future than Star Trek had ever explored before. The show gained a new lease on life and the Federation felt wide open once again, with so many new places and ideas to explore. 

Season three of Discovery tells a nuanced, brutal story about rebuilding the Federation after a huge setback—and questions how far our heroes are willing to go restore what has been lost. Season four is a rich story of first contact, in which aliens from outside the galaxy have unknowingly unleashed an anomaly that threatens civilized worlds, and we have to learn to communicate with them before it’s too late. Season five, without going into too much detail, is following up one of the most tantalizing stories from TNG, about the Progenitors, those ancient humanoids who seeded the galaxy with humanoid life long ago. 

(Side note: this trope of ancient humanoids who spread their DNA around the galaxy is sorta adjacent to all those “Ancient Aliens” memes. It seems to emerge from Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Däniken, and it inspired the movie Prometheus as well. A huge part of my young-adult novel Victories Greater than Death is my attempt to deconstruct and subvert this trope, by having my ancient superscientists turn out to be basically eugenicists who wanted to breed humanoids to be part of a bizarre weapon. I originally wanted to have everyone refer to my ancient beings as the First Humanoids, but the She-Ra cartoon introduced some ancient creatures called the First Ones. So I decided to change them to the Shapers, which was honestly a little bit less catchy.)

Anyway, at this point, I should probably lay out some criteria. What makes for a good Star Trek show, in my view? 

There are a few elements that seem really important. I love Star Trek when it explores humanism, using huge cosmic stories to show the resilience and ingenuity of human beings, and to explore what it means to be human. Exploration feels like a key part of Star Trek‘s DNA as well: not just traveling to places where no human has gone, but also finding vastly different forms of life and learning to understand creatures who are nearly incomprehensible at first glance. Finally, I like Star Trek when it explores the relationships among the crew, and lets us see how they help each other to grow and reach their full potential, something that Gene L. Coon was keen to explore on the original series and which became a key element in TNG. 

Resilience and ingenuity have been at the core of Discovery, especially since the third season. The crew are forced to grapple with a radically different future, one in which the Federation has suffered some huge setbacks, and they use their wits and pure inventiveness to help the Federation rebuild and regain its ability to travel at warp speeds. The fight against the oppressive Emerald Chain, which enslaves people and exploits whole worlds, includes many temptations to compromise the Federation’s values, and it’s gripping to watch our heroes struggle to stay true to their beliefs.As mentioned above, Discovery’s storylines have also involved the struggle to understand creatures whose way of thinking and communicating is vastly different from our own, which forms the climax of season four. 

At this point, Discovery has a robust cast of science geeks. Engineering is actually getting a bit crowded, what with Stamets, Adira, and sometimes the wonderfully deadpan Jet Reno all standing around being geniuses—and that’s before you add Tilly, who is capable of being an absolute science mastermind in her own right. If you missed all those scenes in TNG where Data, Geordi and the other crew debate scientific problems and technical solutions, then Discovery has been serving up huge chunks of catnip for quite some time now. 

A lot has been written about just how gay Discovery really is, from Stamets and Culber’s marriage to the T4T relationship of Gray and Adira to Tilly’s lesbian fungus fling. Plus, again, there’s Jet Reno. But the thing I really love about Discovery, going into its final season, is just how much beautiful romance there is across the board in this show—even besides the stuff I just mentioned. Saru has been having a whirlwind courtship with T’Rina, the president of Ni’Var, which is the reunified Vulcan and Romulan homeworld. And Captain Michael Burnham has a stormy on-again-off-again love affair going with Book, a smuggler she met when she first arrived in the 32nd century—I’m really rooting for those two to work out their problems, because they have ridiculous chemistry. I’m not used to seeing Star Trek put romance front and center for so many of its major characters, and I love it.

Finally, the thing I love about Discovery is how its characters have been allowed to change and grow, something the first two episodes of season five take great pains to remind us of. Out of the characters who’ve been there since the first season, none of them is the same person they used to be, and we’ve gotten to see them evolve over time. In particular, there’s a huge emphasis on redemption arcs, which is a subject close to my heart. Michael Burnham starts Discovery as a disgraced mutineer, and is now a highly respected captain with a twinkle in her eye. But a lot of these characters have been allowed to make terrible mistakes and learn from them, becoming better people as a result.

When people call Star Trek an optimistic show, I don’t think they’re just talking about fancy technology. I believe Star Trek’s true power is its optimism about people: our ability to keep being better than we were, and to choose kindness and understanding over brute force. More than any other Star Trek show right now, Discovery exemplifies this belief in our potential as a species, which is something that I personally really need right now.[end-mark]

This article was originally published at Happy Dancing, Charlie Jane Anders’ newsletter, available on Buttondown.

The post Why <i>Star Trek: Discovery</i> Is My Favorite 21st-Century Star Trek appeared first on Reactor.

Column Close Reads

Considering the Perfect Knits of Coraline

Have you ever contemplated the effort it takes to make an iconic costume?

By Michelle Jaworski

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Published on April 11, 2024

Credit: LAIKA Studios

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Credit: LAIKA Studios

Welcome to Close Reads! Leah Schnelbach and guest authors will dig into the tiny, weird moments of pop culture—from books to theme songs to viral internet hits—that have burrowed into our minds, found rent-stabilized apartments, started community gardens, and refused to be forced out by corporate interests. This time out, Michelle Jaworski breaks out the knitting needles (and possibly some extra buttons) to talk about Coraline’s amazing tiny sweaters.

Have you ever contemplated the effort it takes to make that famous and immediately eye-popping sweater or knitted garment that appeared on the screen (and just became your new obsession)?

Sometimes, a film or TV show’s costume designer might purchase it before purposely ruining it to illustrate a character’s utter disregard for taking care of their things. Sometimes, a knitter will make it by hand, putting care into items that populate a lived-in world or turn into the most iconic part of a character’s costume. Sometimes, the inclusion feels so effortless and invisible that nobody else seems to appreciate it how you do.

And then there’s sometimes an instance where a film is so painstakingly crafted with such detail, care, and precision before you even consider the knitwear that it blows your mind when you finally get around to it. A film like LAIKA Studios’ 2009 stop-motion animated classic Coraline—from stop-motion legend Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Wendell & Wild) and based on the 2002 novel by Neil Gaiman—and its perfectly tiny, hand-knitted sweater might do that to you.

Introduced about 45 minutes into the film, Coraline Jones (Dakota Fanning), the 11-year-old heroine of Coraline, sneaks through the hidden door in her new home to another world, one which offers affectionate parents, presents, delectable food, and instant entertainment. Her Other Mother (Teri Hatcher) and Other Father (John Hodgman), who look and sound just like her real parents save for the black buttons sewn into their eyesockets, aren’t home. But her Other Mother left Coraline a gift: A new outfit made just for her, and an invitation to visit their neighbors after lunch.

What’s in the box? A bright and sparkling blue sweater imbued with silver stars that catch your eye in the light, black corduroy pants, and boots much closer in hue to Coraline’s iconic blue bob. After donning this outfit, Coraline witnesses the full spectacle of this other world with a showstopping performance, as well as the Other Mother’s cruelty. She learns the truth of what the Other Mother plans to do with her with the only light coming from the glow of the sweater’s stars and the three young ghosts who fell victim to the Other Mother before her. And even as Coraline and Other Wybie (Robert Bailey Jr.) are captivated by the show Coraline’s neighbors put on, you can’t keep your eyes off that sweater.

As a knitted piece of clothing, Coraline’s sweater is deceptively simple. It’s a pullover that limits itself to a single combination of thread (compared to the multi-colored striped gloves Coraline tries on in a store in our world) and doesn’t contain flourishes like cables; the stars were attached after the fact. Coraline’s costumes often stand out with whichever world she’s inhabiting—she’s usually the most colorful person in the room in the real world’s gloomy atmosphere and appears to dim the more time she spends in the fantastical Other World—and the chameleonic nature of the sparkly thread used to knit it further amplifies that. The stars also glow in the dark, making it look even cooler.

Coraline’s sweater was captivating enough in its own right that as part of the film’s marketing, Jenn Jarvis was tasked with creating a human-sized pattern—with both children and adult sizes included—geared toward fans who wanted to make a sweater of their own; Jarvis’ pattern is no longer officially online, but you can find it if you know where to look. 

It’s Althea Crome, a fiber artist who’s been making conceptual knitted garments (meaning without a set pattern) on a miniature scale for decades, who is responsible for creating that original starry sweater and Coraline’s striped gloves; she’s listed as “Knitwear Creator” in the film’s credits. According to a 2009 interview with The Oregonian, Crome said that LAIKA’s costuming department contacted her about making knitted pieces for the film, which involved weeks of searching to find the right combination of threads—a mix of holographic and polyester—to match what LAIKA had in mind. Once Crome got the go-ahead to knit the sweater, she was sent a version of Coraline’s body to make it fit on the puppet; she eventually made 14 sweaters and six pairs of gloves for LAIKA.

But that doesn’t begin to cover the scale of it. It’s one thing to hear or read about it. It’s another to view Crome’s documentation of her work on Coraline, which includes photos of the threads she used or photos of what it looks like for her to knit something on that scale. It’s another to watch Crome fully in her element, which we can do courtesy of a LAIKA behind-the-scenes video where she discusses her miniature knitting.

“I think knitters are often fascinated by the fact that I use such tiny needles,” Chrome says in the video. “Some of the needles are almost the dimension of a human hair.”

Um… yes?

I’m in awe of what Crome has created not just because, as she put it, she shrunk a “craft or skill into something so tiny it asks the viewer to imagine how it was done.” I’ve been knitting for about seven years, so even before you shrink a hand-knitted garment, the wheels turn to calculate what goes into making something like a sweater or pair of gloves. My eyes are straining from the sheer thought.

But Crome’s work only amplifies that. To put it in perspective, the smallest set of knitting needles I own is a US 0, which has a diameter of 2mm; I might use them to work on a pair of socks or gloves. It’s kind of easy to misplace them, or accidentally break one of those needles if it’s made of a material like wood. Crome knits with needles so thin that she compared their fineness to human hair.

Crome’s needles are much smaller, the thread much thinner, and the scale is on a minuscule level (the entire span of the sweater is about four inches). One of Coraline’s gloves, measured from cuff to fingertip, isn’t much bigger than one of our fingernails. I can see Crome knitting on needles small enough to be used for sewing or embroidery, and I see what the result of that is on the screen, but all this time later, my mind still can barely comprehend it.

It’s that level of fine detail that makes Coraline’s world of stop-motion come to life. Even if you’re not thinking about the sweaters as often as I might be, it’s the kind of element that feeds into making Coraline’s more nightmarish elements feel that much more real.[end-mark]

The post Considering the Perfect Knits of <em>Coraline</em> appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Babylon 5 Rewatch

Babylon 5 Rewatch: “Soul Hunter”

A mysterious alien ship almost crashes into the station, and things only get weirder from there…

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on April 8, 2024

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“Soul Hunter”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Jim Johnston
Season 1, Episode 2
Production episode 102
Original air date: February 2, 1994

It was the dawn of the third age… Dr. Stephen Franklin reports on board, replacing Kyle, who is now working for the newly reelected President of Earth Alliance. His first patient is the sole occupant of a badly damaged ship that comes unexpectedly through the jump gate. Sinclair manages to wrangle the ship with a Starfury and a grappling line before it crashes into the station.

The sole occupant is an alien none of the Earth Alliance personnel recognize. Franklin works on him in the iso-lab where the atmosphere has been tailored to his needs. Delenn, however, recognizes him as a Soul Hunter, who is apparently the Minbari equivalent of the boogeyman. According to Delenn—who urges Sinclair to kill the Soul Hunter right there in the medbay—Soul Hunters are vultures who are attracted to death. They steal souls right at the moment of death. To Minbari, this is awful, as they believe that Minbari souls are melded together and reborn in the future.

The Soul Hunter—let’s call him “Rufus,” mostly because constantly typing “the Soul Hunter” to refer to him is annoying—wakes up at the same time that a shell-game grifter in downbelow is found out, chased down, and murdered. Rufus announces that he can sense the man’s impending death, and later Sinclair determines that Rufus woke up at the exact time of the grifter’s death.

Rufus then sits up and starts meditating and chanting, ignoring Sinclair’s questions—right up until Sinclair accuses him of being a thief. Rufus angrily retorts that his people preserve souls, they don’t steal them. They wish to preserve the great beings of society. The Minbari hate the Soul Hunters because they tried to save the soul of Dukhat, the great Minbari leader whose death precipitated the Earth-Minbari War. Sinclair informs Rufus that he must remain in the isolab until his ship is repaired, at which point he’s to leave the station.

After Franklin does the autopsy of the grifter, he and Ivanova supervise his body being cast out into space, as his family can’t afford to have him shipped home.

Delenn visits the medlab. She tells Rufus that she’ll tear his ship apart to find his collection of souls and free any Minbari souls she finds. Rufus tells her that he recognizes her as a Satai from the Grey Council, who was there when Dukhat died, and he wonders why she’s playing at being an ambassador when she’s so much more.

Rufus escapes, injuring one of Garibaldi’s security people in the process. A second Soul Hunter ship—this one intact—comes through the jumpgate. The second Soul Hunter—let’s call him Xavier—says that he’s here for Rufus, who is apparently deeply disturbed. After failing to preserve Dukhat’s soul, Rufus went a bit binky-bonkers, and is now killing people in order to preserve their souls. This is a violation of Soul Hunter law, and Xavier is here to arrest Rufus. Xavier is the one who damaged Rufus’ ship.

Rufus goes to N’Garath, a criminal kingpin in downbelow, who sells Rufus a level-five clearance that enables him to find and access Delenn’s quarters, all the better to kidnap her with.

Aided by Xavier, Sinclair, Garibaldi, and the security force search for Delenn. Xavier is able to sense Delenn’s impending death in a particular section, and, because he’s listed first in the opening credits, it’s Sinclair who finds Rufus and Delenn, the latter being slowly bled to death so that she’ll die semi-naturally and Rufus can take her soul.

Sinclair is able to stop Rufus by turning his soul-sucking machine on him, which kills him. Delenn is brought to the medlab, where she recovers, and Xavier departs, with Sinclair making it clear that Soul Hunters are not welcome on B5.

After she recovers, Delenn takes Rufus’ collection of souls and breaks the globes, releasing the souls.

Nothing’s the same anymore. Delenn’s line about how they (meaning the Minbari, or possibly the Grey Council) were right about Sinclair is another hint, along with the “hole in his mind” mentioned in “The Gathering,” that he’s important to the Minbari for some reason.

Ivanova is God. Ivanova’s deadpan and pessimism are both on full display in her interactions with Franklin.

The household god of frustration. Garibaldi’s security guard who is watching Rufus falls for the sick-prisoner trick and gets his ass kicked and his weapon taken, which probably got him fired.

If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn’s response to the presence of a Soul Hunter is to try to shoot him and to generally act batshit. We also get someone else who figures out that she’s part of the Grey Council, and just like G’Kar in “The Gathering,” she tries to kill him (though she did that part first…).

Looking ahead. Rufus sees what Delenn has planned for the future and is horrified. Delenn says before losing consciousness that the Minbari were right about Sinclair, the meaning of which will become clear before long…

Welcome aboard. The late great W. Morgan Sheppard plays Rufus, while John Snyder plays Xavier. Sheppard will return in “The Long, Twilight Struggle” in season 2 as a Narn warleader.

Trivial matters. This episode is Richard Biggs’ first appearance as Franklin. Though they are listed in the opening credits, we still have yet to see Bill Mumy or Caitlin Brown as, respectively, Lennier and Na’Toth.

This is the first mention of Dukhat, the great Minbari leader, whom we will later learn was Delenn’s mentor. It’s established that Dukhat’s death is what got the Earth-Minbari War started.

The echoes of all of our conversations.

“Typical human lifespan is almost a hundred years, but it’s barely a second compared to what’s out there. It wouldn’t be so bad if life didn’t take so long to figure out. Seems you just start to get it right, and then—it’s over.” 

“Doesn’t matter. If we live two hundred years, we’d still be human—we’d still make the same mistakes.”

“You’re a pessimist.”

“I’m Russian, Doctor.”

Franklin and Ivanova discussing philosophy.

The name of the place is Babylon 5. “The soul ends with death unless we act to preserve it.” Thirty years ago, I watched the first season of B5 and was not all that impressed. I don’t remember specifics, but I remember in particular finding each of the first two episodes to be awful.

On this rewatch, I actually really liked “Midnight on the Firing Line,” but “Soul Hunter” is, if anything, worse than I remember.

Part of what I dislike about the episode relates not so much to the episode itself, but the pre-show hype that B5 had online. Creator J. Michael Straczynski spent a great deal of time promoting the show in advance of its debut on the various online bulletin boards of the era, particularly GEnie and CompuServe, and one of the things that he said would be the hallmark of the show was that it would that it would be scientifically accurate, unlike most other screen science fiction.

And then we get this episode, which starts with a damaged ship coming through the jump gate that, somehow, is on a collision course for B5. At this point, my disbelief needs the Heimlich maneuver, because, as Douglas Adams reminded us, space is big—really big. There’s no reason for the jump gate to be all that close to the station. In fact, it makes sense for there to be a certain distance for safety reasons. Yet somehow, this badly damaged ship winds up on a collision course with the station—which is, in astronomical terms, incredibly tiny—and it’s so close that Sinclair is barely able to grapple it in time (after missing twice) to keep it from crashing.

After that, we get the entire concept of Soul Hunters, which is exactly the kind of fantastical thing that Straczynski was supposed to be avoiding. True, we’ve already got telepathy, which is equally fanciful, but the use of telepathy in science fiction is pretty well established, from Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man (which, as we’ll see, is a huge influence on the use of telepathy in B5)to Professor X and Jean Grey of the X-Men to the Ghosts in the StarCraft game, so one can forgive it a bit more readily.

But this episode presents the swiping and storing of souls as a real thing that Rufus does. Now, you can argue that it isn’t really what he’s doing—but he’s doing something. His soul-sucking vacuum cleaner enables him to see something in Delenn, so it obviously functions on some level. (Also, does he really need to carry that big-ass soul-sucking vacuum cleaner around every time he does this? Is that really practical?) Heck, the whole idea of “sensing death” is pretty much nonsense, too.

There’s some fun foreshadowing of the connection between Sinclair and the Minbari and of Delenn’s true purpose, and nobody ever went wrong casting W. Morgan Sheppard, but these are very minor good points in an episode that is just awful. It doesn’t help that there’s no sign of Andreas Katsulas or Peter Jurasik, and an episode without G’Kar and Mollari doesn’t bear thinking about.

Next week: “Born to the Purple.” [end-mark]

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Column

Bigfoot on the Paranormal Highway (2022)

Paranormal investigators explore the spookier side of Bigfoot (along with UFOs, haunted mines, and the mysteries of Cheyenne, WY).

By Judith Tarr

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Published on April 8, 2024

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There’s nothing like scrolling through the streaming options and, totally randomly, coming across a different take on our favorite giant hairy primate. 2022’s Paranormal Highway (not to be confused with Haunted Highway—two seasons, 2012-2013, starring Jack Osbourne), devotes five episodes to a grand tour of paranormal hot spots in the United States. Episodes 1 and 5 and, to a lesser extent, 3 feature variations on Bigfoot, while the rest tackle UFOs (or UAPs as the show and other more recent aficionados prefer to call them), haunted mines, ghosts and apparitions, and Cheyenne, Wyoming, which I would not have nominated as the most haunted city in the US—um, New Orleans? Savannah? Good old Salem, Massachusetts?—but apparently I am imperfectly informed.

The series explores the theory that paranormal phenomena cluster in certain geographical areas, and tests the hypothesis that humans are, to some extent, creating these hot spots. All the Bigfoot hunters and ghost hunters and paranormal investigators, not to mention the psychics and the energy workers, are feeding the phenomena.

They are not, be it noted, creating the phenomena. Those are presumed to be real. They’re drawn to the places where humans have opened portals and effectively invited the phenomena in.

Bigfoot is a frequent visitor to these hot spots. We’ve seen the details before: giant footprints, pounding sounds in the woods, howls that listeners insist are not quite right for wolves or coyotes, and rocks thrown apparently out of nowhere. One investigator claims to have seen visual evidence, but it amounts to a blurry shadow, or so he says; he doesn’t show it on screen. The other visual we do see: the shine of eyes at night among the trees.

Eye-shine at night is proof of Bigfoot’s existence, we’re told. Nobody points out that pretty much any animal could be behind the eyes. Deer are a frequent culprit. Coyotes and wolves could be spying on the humans, too.

All of that, including the sincere desire to believe, is standard operating procedure in the paranormal and cryptozoological world. What’s different here is the nature of the cryptid.

Bigfooters and giant-hairy-cryptid hunters around the world for the most part are looking for a living creature as yet unknown to science. It’s a real animal, living in a real habitat. The establishment just hasn’t found it yet.

The Paranormal Highway team has a different theory. They’re searching for—and, they claim, finding—evidence of paranormal Bigfoot. Paraphysical, they call it.

This Bigfoot can manipulate cameras so that they don’t show it passing by. It may leave footprints (which kind of shakes the logic here), or more often it leaves none that are recognizable as such. No evidence, in that case, is evidence.

It appears to be quite intelligent. It can cloud a person’s mind, make him turn his camera off, wipe his memory of an interaction that happens to have been witnessed by others on the team, and recorded by another cameraman. (Paranormal forces are always messing with cameras, but there’s almost always a camera recording the incident.)

This team uses psychics and sensitives as well as hunters and tech guys. The psychics try to communicate with Bigfoot. One self-described sensitive has a show-and-tell with what he claims are alien tracking and communications devices in the form of oddly marked river rocks, though he doesn’t explain what they have to do with Bigfoot.

Bigfoot’s role in the combination of ghosts, aliens, UFOs, and weird manifestations (levitating rocks, inexplicably magnetized fenceposts, bizarre light phenomena) isn’t exactly understood, but the team speculate that he’s some kind of paraphysical being. He may be able to travel a hundred miles instantly, or else communicate with fellow Bigfoots in a distant location in order to mess with an investigator’s head. He’s aware that he’s being hunted, but he’s not aggressive, nor does he seem to be afraid—but he doesn’t want to be seen or captured.

His not-quite-physical existence explains why no one has found authentic physical evidence. He’s basically in Mothman territory, though the series doesn’t say anything about that. This Bigfoot reminds me of John Keel’s “ultraterrestrials”: a being from another dimension who slips into and out of ours for purposes unknown and incomprehensible to humans.

He is much less terrifying than Mothman, and considerably more benign. If he cares about humans at all, he may mess with their heads, but he doesn’t do them any harm. The worst he’s likely to do is throw rocks at a hunter.

We don’t know what Bigfoot looks like, except that he has huge feet—twenty inches long, according to a pair of casts from a creek in the Ouachita Mountains in Arkansas—and his eyes reflect light at night. He likes to pound on wood, and he may make arches out of tree branches—as a portal, as an invitation, investigators can only guess.

One point that investigator Thom Powell makes is almost convincing. He claims to have come to the paranormal as a skeptic, a science teacher. He’s been convinced of Bigfoot’s existence by a number of factors, notably the consistency of witnesses’ stories. They all tell the same ones, have similar experiences, describe similar phenomena.

I would argue that people talk. They read. They share stories online and in real life. They want to believe, and they will interpret what they see or hear according to what they’ve heard and read. That howl, that rock falling in the distance, that thud of wood on wood, must be Bigfoot. Those eyes shining in the woods, staring steadily at the camera—Bigfoot. “An animal wouldn’t stand there for that long,” the investigator declares. Not acknowledging that a predator will do that; and the country it’s happening in has wolves and bears and even, though rarely, mountain lions.

Frankly, I would rather it be Bigfoot than a mountain lion. Bigfoot is much less likely to want to eat me. He just wants to be left alone, unless he’s in the mood to play tricks on the clueless human. Then maybe I’ll hear him cackling, away in the woods, and I’ll know I’ve been pranked by a semi-solid cryptid with a weird sense of humor. [end-mark]

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Movies & TV monkey man

Monkey Man Seems Like a Straight Revenge Film, But It’s So Much More

Dev Patel serves up a bloody action film that’s really about communities supporting and protecting one another

By Alex Brown

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Published on April 8, 2024

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You’re going to see a lot of people describe Monkey Man as a bloody revenge film. Yes, there is a lot of blood. Like, A LOT of blood. Dev Patel is practically swimming in it for much of the movie. And yes, revenge is an underlying theme. It’s what starts Patel’s character down his blood-soaked path. 

But this movie is so much more than that. It’s about taking down the powerful and giving voice to the powerless. It’s about finding family in unexpected places and communities coming together to support and protect. It’s about rebellion against repression and resisting fascism in all forms. Monkey Man isn’t just a fun little action revenge movie but a call to take up arms and take back what your oppressors have stolen from you by any means necessary.

Dev Patel is our nameless protagonist—he is called “Bobby” for part of the film but credited simply as “Kid.” Kid begins the movie wearing a gorilla mask and getting the shit kicked out of him in staged matches in an underground fight club. His alter ego is based on Hanuman, a monkey-esque deity most known for his role in the epic poem Ramayana. His boss, a white South African man known as Tiger (Sharlto Copley) claims he found our monkey man deep in the African jungle and brought him to India as a beast to fight other “wild animals,” such as men known as King Cobra and Baloo. The fights are painful and designed so that Monkey Man will lose every time. But Kid doesn’t care. He has bigger fish to fry.

With his paltry earnings, he manages to scam his way into a job at the Kings Club, an exclusive night club run by crime boss Queenie Kapoor (Ashwini Kalsekar). Queenie’s fortress offers the wealthy everything they desire, from drugs to sex to entertainment to culinary decadence. On the walls hang portraits of dead Raja from the height of British colonialism, treated as aspirational tokens. All around him are signs of an oncoming crisis. Celebrity yogi Baba Shakti (Makarand Deshpande), a former poor kid who claims to have bootstrapped his way to the top, is backing a rightwing politician spouting nationalist rhetoric. His right hand man is Rana (Sikandar Kher), the chief of police of Yatana (a fictional city meant to invoke Mumbai).

But Kid isn’t concerned with social issues, not at first anyway. All he wants is to get revenge. He’s clever but not particularly skilled at fighting. All heart and head, no brawn. After a spectacular fight scene, Kid ends up in the care of a commune of hijra, or third gender people, hiding out in an abandoned temple to Ardhanarishvara, the dual manifestation of the Hindu deities Shiva, the Destroyer, and Pavarti, his consort and a goddess of love, devotion, and harmony. “Male, female, both, neither,” says Alpha (Vipin Sharma), the leader of the hijra. They help him see that the best way to get revenge isn’t to take one bad guy out but to topple the whole regime. Cue training montage and third act boss fight.

Now, I’m not Indian and I don’t know enough about the current socio-political issues going on there or about Hinduism to offer any insight into whether or not Monkey Man succeeds in its metaphorical takedown of real world issues. I expect it probably doesn’t, at least not fully. From what I can tell, it doesn’t do enough to follow through on its messaging and the messaging itself feels a bit muddled even at a distance. I also wish the film had spent more time on why the hijra are such outcasts in Indian society and how their situation differs from Kid’s and other oppressed people. There was a missed opportunity to connect their story to that of the prostitutes like Neela (Adithi Kalkunte) who are suffering under the patriarchy in a way that Kid isn’t.

The tenor and themes, however, are spot on. The third act sequence with the hijra is one I will never forget. I knew in that moment that this is a movie I am going to watch again and again and again. We may not have the Bharatiya Janata Party here in the US, but we do have religious fanatics, bigots, and nationalists who use the same hateful rhetoric to sow dissent. Whole political movements have formed to position one group of people above another as the righteous and rightful “owners” of the land. The yogi, in response to a question about what happened to the villagers living in the forest where his factory was built, claims the land was “barren” (where have we heard that one before?), and then proceeds to refer to his followers in religious terms as if he is a god and they are his worshippers. The story Patel is telling is specific to his cultural context, but many of the underlying concepts are, unfortunately, universal. 

On a lighter note, this is also a movie about community. The people in power are often seen alone; if there are others around them, they’re flunkies, goons, yes men, or victims. The people without power are surrounded by others. The hijra, his childhood village, even the poorest people living in the city, all work together and support each other. There is immediate and unconditional trust. Revolutions cannot be won through individual action. Community is what really frightens those in power.

If none of that is enough to sway you, Dev Patel’s directorial choices—assisted and enhanced by cinematographer Sharone Meir—should. The movie is well shot, with some truly beautiful backdrops. Joe Galdo, Dávid Jancsó, and Tim Murrell edited some of the fight scenes so well they almost look like they were done in one long take. Divvya Gambhir and Nidhi Gambhir deserve an Oscar just for the hijra’s glittering warrior outfits. 

Let me end this by begging Hollywood to put Dev Patel in everything. Put him in action movies, romcoms, comedies, historical dramas, literally everything. We all know Patel can act, and with Monkey Man he proves he can also direct. If he’s acting in it or directing it, I’ll watch it. I want this man to have exactly the career he wants. [end-mark]

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Column Science Fiction Film Club

The Mysterians: Flying Saucers, Mecha Kaiju, Ray Guns, and… International Cooperation?

Spectacle! Giant Mole Robots! Meetings! This 1957 Japanese film grapples with the anxieties of the post-WWII atomic age…

By Kali Wallace

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Published on April 10, 2024

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The Mysterians (Japanese title: 地球防衛軍, Earth Defense Force) (1957) Directed by Ishiro Honda. Starring Kenji Sahara, Yumi Shirakawa, and Akihiko Hirata. Screenplay by Takeshi Kimura and Shigeru Kayama based a story by Jojiro Okami.

It’s not possible to truly separate any film from the political context in which it is made. That’s a fairly bland observation about cinema. But context really does stand out in some cases more than others, and movies from the 1950s about aliens visiting Earth are one very obvious example. Last week’s The Day the Earth Stood Still and this week’s The Mysterians are companions in many ways, exploring the same themes and ideas that dominated so much of 1950s science fiction, but they are doing it from different perspectives, in different ways, with very different results.

And with very different robots that shoot death rays, but we’ll get to that.

The Mysterians came out in the middle of an absolute deluge of 1950s movies from Toho Company, the film production company behind so many beloved Japanese movies. Toho has some interesting history behind it, so pardon me for a brief detour. Toho started as a kabuki theater company in the 1930s and began producing films shortly thereafter. After Japan’s surrender at the end of World War II, one of the things the American-led Occupation government did was encourage the organization of labor unions, and one of the industries that seized this opportunity was Japan’s film industry. The workers at Toho organized into a union in late 1945, and between 1946 and 1948 they participated in high-profile labor strikes.

But the anti-communist hysteria that was running rampant in the U.S. was also in full force in occupied Japan, and the Occupation government began thinking they had encouraged things to get a bit too liberal. The third Toho strike began when the company president fired over a thousand workers with the stated goals of ridding the company of both communists and debt. The union responded by occupying the studio from April until August 1948. They had the public support of many in the Japanese film industry, including director Akira Kurosawa and rising star Toshiro Mifune, but the strike was finally broken by a joint force of Japanese police and American military, who showed up with armored vehicles and tanks. As a result, Toho ended the 1940s nearly bankrupt and barely producing any movies at all. The company entered the 1950s badly in need of a smash hit to keep itself afloat.

In 1954 it made two: Seven Samurai, which contemporary critics expected to succeed based on Akira Kurosawa’s rising domestic and international fame, and Ishiro Honda’s Godzilla, which contemporary critics expected to flop because it was about a giant monster stomping around.

Godzilla did not flop. Instead it launched one of the most successful media franchises in history, still going strong seventy years later, and sparked an entire genre of atomic age monster movies. It also brought fame and recognition to the partnership of Ishiro Honda and special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya. Tsuburaya pioneered what came to be known as the tokusatsu genre and style of films, which involve the use of elaborate practical effects. The two men would go on to make many kaiju films together, including Rodan (1956), Mothra (1961), and Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964). But they weren’t only making giant monsters. Somewhere in there they found time for a few sci fi movies, including The Mysterians.

Just as Godzilla was inspired by the success of American monster films King Kong (1933, but re-released in 1952) and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953), the idea behind The Mysterians came in part from wanting a successful science fiction movie in the vein of War of the Worlds (1953) or Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956). Japanese studios were making Japanese movies for Japanese audiences, but they were also very much aware of the fame and moneymaking potential of getting their films in front of international, and particularly American, audiences.

Big-budget movies about space and aliens were all the rage at the time, so that’s what Honda, Tsuburaya, and producer Tomoyuki Tanaka (also the producer of Godzilla) set out to make. Tanaka got science fiction writer Jojiro Okami to come up with a treatment for an alien film; Godzilla screenwriter Shigeru Kayama revised the story—adding, among other things, the mecha-kaiju that comes along to fuck things up—which was at last finalized by Rodan screenwriter Takeshi Kimura. They also brought in familiar cast members from Godzilla, Rodan, and Godzilla Raids Again (1955). All of that, plus a massive budget and full-color filming, was designed to make The Mysterians a big hit.

The movie was successful, both in Japan and later when it was dubbed and released in the U.S. Even at the time, however, many critics recognized that it was mostly the visual spectacle of The Mysterians that made such an impact, rather than its story or themes or overall quality. And that’s as true now as it was then. The film has a pretty thin plot with pretty shaky writing, and the talented cast can only do so much with the bland characters.

But the spectacle! We can’t deny the spectacle of it all. The incredible miniatures, the vibrant colors, the sweeping scenes of disaster—it’s all so much fun to look at.

The Mysterians opens with two young couples enjoying a festival in a rural village. One of the young men, Ryoichi Shiraishi (Akihiko Hirata), has broken off his engagement to one of the young women, and when his friend Joji Atsumi (Kenji Sahara) asks him about it, he gives no reason except that he must stay in the village to complete his work. This makes little sense to Atsumi, as they are astrophysicists and the village is not exactly a hotbed of scientific research. It’s about to become one, however, because a unnatural forest fire disrupts the festival, and soon thereafter the village is swallowed whole when the land is split by a massive chasm. Atsumi is back in the city when he receives this news, but Shiraishi was still in the village and is presumed dead.

Atsumi is part of the team sent to investigate the disaster. The village and temple are gone, the river’s fish poisoned by radiation, and the ground is hot enough and radioactive enough to melt the tires of their trucks. But the real problems start when an enormous mole-like robot burrows out of the mountainside and comes after them. This is Moguera, a mecha-kaiju who would decades later return to the movies in Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla (1994).

Apologies to all giant mole robots, but it must be said: Moguera is very, very silly looking. He’s wreaking havoc, but I still want to boop his pointy little mole nose.

I love the first part of this movie, with the mysterious destruction of the village, the strangeness left in its wake, and Moguera’s implacable advance—shooting death rays out of his eyes all the while—on the city while people race to evacuate. It’s tense, it’s exciting, and there is a real sense of triumph when the humans manage to stop Moguera by blowing up a bridge.

This sequence was made using Tsuburaya’s signature method: building elaborately detailed miniature landscapes and filming an actor in a monster suit at a high frame-rate as he stomps around. This is very different from the way American movies were creating giant monsters at the time; King Kong and the films of special effects legend Ray Harryhausen mostly used stop motion animation combined with live footage and projected backgrounds to put giant monsters into scenes. Tsuburaya had initially wanted to use stop motion animation with Godzilla, but constraints of time and money meant he had to use an actor in a monster suit instead, and that’s what he kept using throughout his career. (The men inside the Moguera suit are the same actors who were inside the Godzilla suit: Haruo Nakajima and Katsumi Tezuka.)

It may not have been the method Tsuburaya wanted when he started making giant monsters, but “suitmation” is undeniably effective when it comes to capturing the scale of destruction needed to make these scenes work. The quality of the miniatures is so important too, and I absolutely love how well they trick me into seeing villages and landscapes. It’s not that we can’t spot the difference when we look closely; what matters is that the overall scale and spectacle of the scene remains exciting to watch even when we can.

After Moguera is defeated, Atsumi and his mentor Adachi (Takashi Shimura) determine that the robot came from outer space. Helpfully, before he was swallowed up with the destroyed village, Shiraishi sent them a research report regarding a planet called Mysteroid that once existed in the solar system. (Note: The English subtitles sometimes refer to Mysteroid as a “star,” but that seems to be a linguistic quirk lost in translation rather than an egregious scientific error. The word they use is星, pronounced hoshi, which can refer to a star, planet, or other celestial body in either a literal or a figurative sense.)

Almost as soon as Atsumi and Akachi make the connection, the Mysterians themselves make an appearance, as their massive, hidden dome emerges from the ground near Mount Fuji. They claim to come in peace and ask to negotiate with Adachi, Atsumi, and a few other scientists. The humans are very skeptical, on account of the destroyed village and the giant mole-robot that just blasted a city with its laser eyes, but they agree to talk. They head into the Mysterians’ dome, which is wonderfully designed with bright colors and weird tubes and spinny things, and meet with the aliens directly.

The skepticism turns out to be justified, because the Mysterians have an offer they really don’t think the Earthlings should refuse. The Mysterian leader (Yoshio Tsuchiya, unrecognizably clad in an orange cape and helmet) explains that they destroyed their own planet in a nuclear war several generations ago, and they have been living on Mars ever since. The long-term effects of that war mean they all have high levels of strontium-90 in their bodies. All they ask of Earth is a plot of land three kilometers square to live on and access to human women to breed with. It would be very unfortunate for the humans to refuse, says the leader, because that would force the self-proclaimed pacifist Mysterians to respond with great force.

Let’s be clear about something. Not every science fiction story is symbolic or allegorical. Not every alien race is an analogue to people or governments in the real world. I think it is a disservice to both storytellers and audiences to view every work of science fiction through the lens of being required to dissect and determine its real-world meaning.

However, I also think that when Japanese filmmakers in 1957 make a movie about a shocking and indiscriminate act of destruction that causes radiation poisoning and has the purveyors of that destruction show up and say they really only want peace and all they ask is a bit of land to establish themselves on so they can make sure everybody does as they say… It’s maybe not a stretch to contemplate multiple levels of meaning.

The latter half of the movie, unfortunately, is not nearly as exciting as the beginning. There are a lot of meetings. Shiraishi is revealed to be alive and working with the Mysterians in their base. Women get kidnapped. The Mysterians take more land. Tokyo is in danger. There is a lot of military action. Through all of this, the special effects are still great, even if the plotting and pacing leave much to be desired. The dome itself is weirdly effective as a threat considering that it is literally just a dome that lights up and spins. It shouldn’t feel dangerous at all—but somehow it does. I am also impressed by the scene where water spouts from a lake and floods a village; the water rushing over the miniatures is very effective. But: there are so many meetings.

In a lot of ways, the meetings are the point, because this is a movie that ultimately advocates for international cooperation in response to an existential threat. There is a nice moment of Cold War commentary where a character remarks that whether they like it or not, the U.S. and the Soviet Union exist on the same planet and ought to act like it. The Mysterians was made just after Japan joined the United Nations in 1956, so the theme of international cooperation and mutual defense was very much on people’s minds. The movie does not create any tension around the notion of cooperation; the other nations show up as soon as they are needed to form the Earth Defense Force of the original Japanese title.

When the Mysterians prove difficult to defeat and somebody brings up the possibility of using a hydrogen bomb, the Japanese scientists react with horror. So, in the end, Earth’s victory comes from technological advancement that turns the Mysterians’ own weapons against them. The Mysterians flee Earth but are not destroyed. The movie ends with the message that they are still out there in the solar system, with potential to return in the future.

Even with its flaws, I find this movie to be an interesting addition to sci fi of the post-WWII atomic era. The ultimate message is very much the same as in films like The Day the Earth Stood Still: the development of nuclear weapons has set humanity on a dangerous path, and if we continue unchecked we will destroy ourselves. But where The Day the Earth Stood Still has an alien visitor show up to sincerely warn us about our own future actions, the alien visitors in The Mysterians show up unrepentant about their own past actions and fully prepared to visit that same destruction onto Earth.

And, yes, in the most obvious interpretation, that is an unsurprising difference between a film made in the country that dropped the atomic bombs and a film made in the country the bombs were dropped on. But there is also optimism in The Mysterians, not just in the success of cooperative action, but also in the ability of science to solve problems, even those problems that science has created in the first place. There are moments of individual heroism and sacrifice—Atsumi and Shiraishi in the dome at the end—but for the most part the focus is on the actions of the group, not the individual, from the large-scale civilian evacuations to the military operations.

It is a war movie, never mind the fact that the war is started by a giant mole-shaped robot that shoots lasers from its eyes and perpetuated by aliens dressed in fabulous citrus-bright capes, and more specifically it is the type of war movie where everybody working together saves the day. The Mysterians is, in a way, providing one answer to the question posed by the uneasy ending of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Is it a particularly plausible or convincing answer? Well, not especially, but I still find it notable, because it is yet another example of science fiction as a genre looked around after the end of WWII and tried to make sense of how the world had changed and would continue to change.

What are your thoughts about The Mysterians and where it sits in the subgenre of atomic era sci fi? Do you want to see more of Eiji Tsuburaya’s practical effects? You’ll get your chance; we are definitely going to watch Godzilla. I’m thinking there is a giant monster month in the future, so feel free to drop suggestions below.

Next week: We’re stepping away from the aftermath of WWII and jumping headfirst into the 1980s. We head back to the United States for some hijinks in Harlem with The Brother From Another Planet. Watch it on Amazon, Roku, Tubi, Shout TV, Apple, all over YouTube, and Internet Archive.

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Featured Essays Batman: The Animated Series

We Are All Alone With Ourselves: The Tragic Villains of Batman: The Animated Series

The surprising depth of Batman’s animated villains.

By Paul Morton

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Published on April 11, 2024

Credit: Warner Bros. Animation

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Credit: Warner Bros. Animation

Great dramatists are great and versatile lawyers. They make the best case possible for each of their characters. The Batman movies are not good dramas. Tim Burton is not a good lawyer. Christopher Nolan, Todd Phillips, and Matt Reeves should be disbarred. 

Burton’s villains are perverse freaks. The wild fetishism of Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman demands admiration, but Jack Nicholson’s Joker and Danny DeVito’s Penguin are cut-out grotesques. The villains in Nolan’s trilogy, produced in the decade following 9/11, are quasi-military terrorists, not one of whom would ever be mistaken for a freedom fighter. The more recent takes on the Rogues Gallery—Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker and Paul Dano’s Riddler—suggest a different set of real-world evils, both of them banal: the incel and the mass shooter.  

Can the superhero genre—a genre predicated on the good vs. evil binary—do the work of great drama? Yes, and it has, several times in the comics, and at least once on television, in Batman: The Animated Series, which premiered on Fox in 1992. The show, which borrows freely from Citizen Kane and film noir, is remarkable for its aesthetics. Like Sam Spade, its Batman is only a degree less troubled than his villains. 

And those villains are extraordinary tragicomedians. The show’s version of the Joker, unlike Heath Ledger’s, is a man, not a symbol. Mark Hamill’s raspy huff rises to a whiny falsetto within a single line; he is enjoying his perversions, and his disappointments register on his elongated face. He conjures the same sympathy one would grant any unhappy child. Baby Doll, a retired child actress debilitated by a physical condition, retreats into a demented version of the character that made her famous. Mr. Freeze, entrapped in a sub-zero suit, robbed of his beloved wife, has accepted a fate which denies him physical touch. He responds in turn by actively denying his obvious humane instincts.

It requires a particular magic to capture abject loneliness in a genre defined by silly costumes and power fantasies, to make loneliness something both human and superhuman. Baby Doll stares straight into a funhouse mirror where she sees the sophisticated adult woman she can never become. Mr. Freeze sits alone in his frozen cell, contemplating a woman twirling in a snow globe, the image of the wife he cannot save. With only a few notable exceptions—among them “It’s Never Too Late,” an episode in which Batman successfully works on the conscience of an aging drug kingpin— the show acknowledges the fear that we will never be any better than what we are now, that in the end, we are all alone with ourselves.  

“Mad as a Hatter” tells the story of Jervis Tetch—here voiced by Roddy McDowall—a hideous man. He falls in love with his assistant Alice, who is herself in love with what we would now call a Chad figure. Tetch becomes the Mad Hatter, and his plot involves mind control, both of random citizens of Gotham, whom he dresses up as foot soldiers borrowed directly from Lewis Carroll, and of Alice herself, whom he transforms from a sweet young woman into an automaton. Batman, as always, wins the battle. In the episode’s final moments, the Mad Hatter lies defeated, trapped under rubble, left to look on as Alice falls into the arms of her lover. McDowall recites the doggerel of the “Lobster Quadrille” with quiet resignation born of frustrated sexuality: “Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance.” 

This is more than a proto-incel fantasy. The Mad Hatter is doomed; as Batman says, even if he had won the battle on his own terms, he would not have joined the dance. And he is of a piece with the show’s other villains, victims either of capitalist overlords, psychosis, self-loathing, bullying, or simply the cruel laws of human existence. 

In “Birds of a Feather,” the Penguin attempts to reinvent himself, not as a crime boss, but as the sophisticated fellow he believes himself to be. After his release from prison, he returns to a now empty criminal hideout, where he is greeted by Batman who informs him he is under the detective’s surveillance. “Just what I need,” the Penguin says, “a bat in my belfry.” Meanwhile, Veronica Vreeland and Pierce Chapman, a high-society couple, plot to convince the Penguin to attend one of their soirees. It’s Gotham City’s version of radical chic.

The show’s creators wanted to model the Penguin on the version played by Burgess Meredith in the 1960s television show, a dandy with a monocle, top hat, and long coattails. But Warner Bros. had toys to sell, and they ended up designing a version based on what was then the most recent live-action iteration of the character, the mutant version played by DeVito. This Penguin is short, enormously rotund, with flippers and a long-beaked nose. The creators found a way around the problem by casting Paul Williams, who endowed the character with a posh manner and precise diction, at odds with his physical appearance, thus marking him as a permanent aspirant.

“Penguin was actually trying to go straight and I took the view that Batman was the villain in that show,” the episode’s director Frank Paur told me. “He couldn’t see the change in him. He would just show up and tell him, ‘I’m going to wait for you to fuck up and then I’m going to beat the shit out of you.’” The show’s version of Batman has several motivations—a devotion to justice, comfort with a life of violence, a belief in civic duty, a commitment to noblesse oblige, a horror of death, a need for solitude, a fear of loneliness, and an insatiable intellectual curiosity. He spends most of the episode at a watchful remove. He is fatalistic, and knows this story won’t end well, but he wants to see how it will all play out.

The Penguin is only half-delusional. He plays the role of a proper gentleman, forcing his portly body to stand as straight as possible. Vreeland takes him to a fine restaurant where he horrifies fellow diners by swallowing raw fish whole, and to the opera where he stands in the balcony and howls along with Pagliacci. She compliments his “rapacious wit” and calls his long beak a “fine Roman nose,” eliciting from him a sweet boyish smile. She grows to like him, particularly after he saves her from ruffians in an alleyway; he notes that he associated with a “much higher class of riff-raff” in his criminal career. He has a genuine flair for old-fashioned chivalry, a quality lacking in her world.

At the actual party, the Penguin shows up with a necklace which he hopes to gift to Vreeland. Batman appears just one more time. Love has changed him, the Penguin declares. But of course, it has not. When he overhears Vreeland and Pierce talk about their actual plans for the Penguin, he grows enraged, falls back on his true nature, and seeks revenge. The denouement, and the Penguin’s humiliating defeat, occurs at the opera house. As he is taken away, Vreeland tells him that in truth, she really had grown fond of him. “I suppose it’s true what they say,” he tells her, in an attempt to regain a semblance of dignity. “‘Society is to blame.’ High society that is.”

Batman himself has contempt for the class into which he is born—as well as a willingness to take advantage of his privilege. Unlike his enemies, he can pass. It’s not that hard for him to maintain a secret identity. According to Brynne Chandler, who collaborated on the script, the original dialogue was different. It was Batman who enjoys the final word, and who offers the Penguin comfort, and, with his trademark irony, a sense of solidarity. “It’s for the best,” he says. “She’s not our kind, dear.”

The actor who would have spoken these words was Kevin Conroy, who found inspiration for his performance in a past as traumatic as Bruce Wayne’s. A gay man, born in 1955, he had grown up in a stern, Irish Catholic household, the son of an abusive, alcoholic father who committed suicide, and the brother of a mentally ill sibling. He trained at Julliard, but despite his great talent, his sexuality cost him major roles.

He had bigger problems. The early part of his career coincided with the first decade of the AIDS crisis, and he spent many hours by his friends’ deathbeds, all while remaining the primary caregiver of his mentally ill brother. When he discovered the firm, raspy voice that became his trademark, he was hit by a sensation. “It seemed to come from thirty years of frustration, confusion, denial, love, yearning,” he wrote in an autobiographical comic published shortly before his death in 2022. His Batman, accordingly, is no slummer and he has empathy for all his foes. 

Batman: The Animated Series was meant to appeal to a wide audience. Action narratives for the kids. Innuendo and satire for the adults. But none of the above eludes the former’s intelligence. Children have a more sophisticated sense of humor than they are often credited with, and they have an acute knowledge of pain.

The simple, terrible question in Batman: The Animated Series is pre-political. Will you be all that different at 50 from what you were at five? The child fears that nothing will get better, and the adult recognizes that their eccentricities can at best be tempered and their failings managed. Superhero stories have a habit of mistaking a certain concept of “dark”—ultra-violence, graphic sexual assault, dorm-room philosophy, Holocaust references—for “serious.” Batman: The Animated Series is quite serious, and it swallows whole the implications of the saddest convention of the superhero genre: most heroes remain heroes, and villains, villains. “Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law / My services are bound.” In the early 1990s, it was the rare show that stood up for its audience of bastards.[end-mark]

The post We Are All Alone With Ourselves: The Tragic Villains of <i>Batman: The Animated Series</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Discovery

Secrets, Sequels, and a Synth Named Fred — Star Trek: Discovery’s “Red Directive” & “Under the Twin Moons”

Reviewing the premiere episodes of Star Trek: Discovery’s fifth season — spoilers ahead!

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on April 4, 2024

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The start of the fifth season of Star Trek: Discovery is unique in many ways, but probably the biggest one is that it establishes that the same person will be in command of the U.S.S. Discovery for the second season in a row, which has never happened before. The hallmark of the inaugural show of the Paramount+ era of Trek has been a new captain every year: Lorca for season 1, Pike for season 2, Saru for season 3, and Burnham for season 4.

But Burnham’s still in charge in season 5. And that’s an indication that—for once—nothing has changed on Discovery. They’ve finally found a status quo, and it’s one that works.

So, of course, it’s the last season. Sigh.

There’s only one really significant change, and it doesn’t come to fruition until the end of the second of the two episodes that went live today: Saru is being promoted to the role of Federation Ambassador-at-Large, and so will no longer be Burnham’s Number One. This is a good move on several levels, as it never sat right with me that Saru took a subordinate position to Burnham on Discovery after doing such a good job as her captain in season 3. Not that Burnham didn’t also deserve the promotion, but Saru didn’t deserve a demotion, either. They made it work last year, mostly because Sonequa Martin-Green and Doug Jones make a really good team. But Saru is, bluntly, the best thing to come out of Discovery, and he deserves better.

And he’s getting it! Not only is he being promoted, but his relationship with T’Rina has deepened to the point that she hits him with a marriage proposal. Being Vulcan, she of course phrases the proposal in the most pedantic and bloodless manner possible, which Tara Rosling manages to make incredibly adorable.

Saru’s last mission comes from Kovich, a classified mission that’s a Red Directive. Not to be confused with other directives that are prime or omega, this one is not defined, but is obviously a shut-up-and-go-do-it-now-please mission that you go on and do not fuck around. (It’s Trek’s latest red thing. The original series had red alerts, redshirts, and the Red Hour, DS9 had Red Squad, the 2009 movie had red matter, and season 2 of this very show had the Red Angel.)

In this case, an eight-hundred-year-old Romulan ship has been found that has a Tan zhekran on it that needs to be retrieved. Established in Picard’s “The Impossible Box” as a Romulan puzzle box, this particular Tan zhekran has something very valuable and very classified on it. In fact, it’s so classified that even Vance doesn’t know the specifics.

Unfortunately, two ex-couriers named Mol and L’ak have gotten to the Romulan ship, and the Tan zhakren, first. Played by, respectively, Eve Harlow and Elias Toufexis, I’m honestly not sure what to make of these two yet. I’m getting a Bonnie-and-Clyde vibe from the two of them that’s kind of a mix of Spike and Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Pumpkin and Honey Bunny from Pulp Fiction, though as yet they’re nowhere near that level of interesting. (Their names are also interesting, as “moll” is a name given to a female companion to a criminal, and “L’ak” is similar to “lackey.” Makes you wonder if there’s a bad guy they’re working for…)

They take the Tan zhakren and some other stuff, and head out in their own ship, with Discovery and the U.S.S. Antares giving chase, a thrilling sequence that has Burnham in an EVA suit on the hull of L’ak and Mol’s ship, the Antares using a tractor beam, and a game of chicken among the participants. However, the ex-couriers get away, and do so in a manner that leaves dozens of warp trails behind, only one of which is the real one.

But Burnham knows this courier’s trick from her year as one between “That Hope is You” and “Far from Home,” and she puts in a call to the courier she knows best: Book.

Book is still doing his community service, helping out the worlds that were ravaged by the DMA last season. More to the point, this summoning is the first time Book and Burnham have spoken since the end of last season. Martin-Green and David Ajala continue to sparkle in their scenes together, but Book’s betrayal last season has twisted everything. The scenes are beautifully played and written, as Burnham and Book obviously still love each other deeply, but Burnham absolutely cannot trust Book anymore, and Book knows full well that he doesn’t deserve to be trusted, and it puts the pair of them in a weird place. That place remains weird, as Book stays on after the first episode, assigned by Vance his own self to be a consultant on the mission, since he knows how couriers think.

Book’s arrival signals the season story kicking in: chasing after the contents of the Tan zhekran. Mol and L’ak take the stuff they looted from the Romulan ship to a centuries-old Soong-style synth named Fred (which is fabulous). Fred has Data-like makeup, and his serial number is later established as starting with “AS” for Altan Soong, the cyberneticist son of Data’s creator, Noonien Soong, established in Picard’s “Et in Arcadia Ego, Part 1.”

Played with Spiner-esque curiosity-filled deadpan by J. Adam Brown, Fred is a collector of ancient things, and he’s thrilled at the twenty-fourth-century artifact. He’s also easily able to open the Tak zhekran, which contains a diary, written in Romulan. Being a synth, Fred is able to read the entire thing in half a second. He’s also not willing to pay a fair price—or, indeed, any price, and the negotiation turns into a fight, which ends with Fred and his security dead. (Why Fred doesn’t have the super-strength and speed seen in other synths like Data is left as an exercise for the viewer.)

Book figured out that Fred would be the fence in this little adventure, and so Discovery and Antares head there, but by the time they arrive, Fred’s dead, baby—Fred’s dead. Luckily, Fred is a synth, so they send the body up to Discovery, where between them, Stamets and Culber are able to extract his memory, including his speed-read of the diary. Which means they also have the text of the diary.

This is followed by another thrilling action piece, and it’s to the show’s credit that both action sequences in “Red Directive” are actually plot relevant. And character relevant, as in both sequences, we find out a lot about Antares Captain Rayner, played by new series regular Callum Keith Rennie, a Canadian actor who is, I believe, contractually obligated to appear in every show that films in Canada at least once. Rayner is a Starfleet captain of many years’ standing who is, in many ways, still acting like they’re in the middle of the Burn, when Starfleet was just trying to keep the tattered remains of the Federation together, unlike Burnham, who spent most of her life in the twenty-third-century version of the Federation.

That conflict comes to a head during the motorcycle chase through the desert at the climax of “Red Directive.” L’ak and Mol are heading to a cave system. The notion of phasering the caves to block off the entrance is floated, but there’s a 30% chance that it’ll cause an avalanche that will wipe out the city and kill thousands. Burnham rejects the plan, but Rayner thinks it’s worth the risk for a Red Directive mission and Antares fires on the caves. There’s no avalanche, and Rayner proudly declares, “70% for the win!”

But the problem is that they gave Mol and L’ak an idea. They do what bad guys have been doing in heroic fiction for ages: they cause an avalanche, meaning our heroes have to spend time saving lives, giving the bad guys the opportunity to escape.

That’s not the only consequence. The two ships are damaged when they both crash nose-first into the surface to break the avalanche and have to return to HQ for repairs. Rayner is the subject of an inquiry that includes Vance and Rillak (always good to see Chelah Horsdal as my favorite on-screen Federation President, whom I got to write a story for in Star Trek Explorer, cough cough). At first, he’s encouraged to retire, and he does lose his command, but Burnham convinces him to replace Saru as her first officer.

Before he can take over, Burnham and Saru have a final adventure together. Kovich has decided to read Burnham in on the full story. I said earlier that the season’s story is a chase, and that’s an appropriate way to refer to a season that is a sequel to TNG’s “The Chase.” The Romulan ship belonged to one of the background Romulan science officers in that episode, and he knows what the power source is of the Progenitors, the humanoid beings who apparently seeded the galaxy with humanoid life.

Now here’s where I have to confess that I really didn’t much like “The Chase,” as it was a giant wink at the viewer in desperate search of an interesting plot that it never found. I’ve got very little patience with taking the time to explain something that doesn’t need explaining, which is all “The Chase” was.

But since we do have the Progenitors (a term first heard from Kovich in “Red Directive”), it is also true that whatever they did to, in essence, create humanoid life is pretty powerful stuff, and is something that could be abused.

The diary leads them to a Promellian necropolis. (The Promellians were established as a long-extinct species in TNG’s “Booby Trap.”) This is a straight-up video-game adventure, as Burnham and Saru have to get through various security features and figure out puzzles and clues and things. And scripter Alan McElroy has a little fun, because you wonder if this is Saru’s swan song. I mean, he’s just accepted a marriage proposal, it’s his final mission, and he and Burnham have several conversations about the adventures they’ve had together, and you realize that Saru’s fulfilling every dead-meat cliché in the book. He’s the partner at the beginning of the cop buddy movie who’s one week from retirement and then gets killed to piss off the main character. We even find out he has a nifty nickname—coined by Reno and used by Book, he’s apparently referred to in his post-vahar’ai state as “Action Saru.” And it is the last season…

Luckily, McElroy is just toying with us. Saru not only survives, but proves his “Action Saru” chops by using his spines to blow up some of the security drones. And he’s returned to T’Rina in one piece, and with a new clue.

I’m liking this direction for the season. The stakes are high, but not a threat to the entirety of the galaxy as we know it. It’s a quest narrative of a type we’ve seen a thousand times before and twice at our weekly role-playing game, but we’ve seen it so often because, dammit, it works. More to the point, the threat isn’t so over-the-top insane with a high body count, as every other threat Discovery has thrown at us has been. It’s therefore a less exhausting storyline, which is all for the best.

The clue they find will send them to Trill, thus giving Adira a chance to be reunited with Gray.[end-mark]

The post Secrets, Sequels, and a Synth Named Fred — <i>Star Trek: Discovery</i>’s “Red Directive” & “Under the Twin Moons” appeared first on Reactor.

Lists friendship

Five Unlikely SFF Interspecies Friendships

From dragons to alien bounty hunters, some friendships require a little more effort–but they’re worth it!

By Lorna Wallace

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Published on April 4, 2024

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Science fiction and fantasy stories are full of wholesome friendships that have been forged between different species. To name just a few of the most iconic examples, there’s Elliott and E.T., Chewbacca and Han Solo, and Merry, Pippin, and their buddy Treebeard. While these particular friends might have very different backgrounds, their shared connection and desire to help one another makes sense right from the start.

But some interspecies pairings seem far more unlikely, be that because of how physically and mentally different the characters are or because their respective species view each other as enemies or existential threats. Here are five of my favorite unlikely SFF friendships—all of which, coincidentally, happen to be animated.

Spear and Fang (Primal, 2019– Present)

Jurassic Park showed us that coexisting (or let’s be real, attempting to coexist) with dinosaurs wouldn’t actually be all that much fun, but Primal paints an even scarier picture. In the show’s anachronistic setting, the dinosaurs don’t start out in labs or behind bars, and instead roam freely alongside Neanderthals and other Ice Age animals.

In the first episode, a pack of vicious horned T-Rex’s slaughter the wife and children of a caveman (Aaron LaPlante) and then the hatchlings of a mother T-Rex. Following the logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” the grieving man and dinosaur team up to take out their common foe. Primal features almost no dialogue, so our protagonists’ names are never spoken in-story, but according to the title of the first episode, they’re called Spear and Fang.

The unlikely duo know that they’re better off together than on their own, but their alliance can be difficult at times—Fang can be a little greedy with her food, for instance. Despite this, it’s not long before their partnership goes from one of convenience to one of genuine affection. Spear never treats Fang like a pet and Fang never treats Spear like a snack; instead, they’re equals with trust, respect, and love for one another.

While Spear and Fang’s bond is the emotional heart of the show, it’s also pretty cool (in a pulpy kind of way!) to see a caveman riding on the back of a T-Rex.

Hiccup and Toothless (How to Train Your Dragon, 2010)

How to Train Your Dragon is set in a world where humans and dragons are mortal enemies, so Hiccup (Jay Baruchel) and Toothless (Randy Thom) don’t exactly get off on the right foot. Hiccup plans to cut out the dragon’s heart to prove himself as a Viking, but he can’t follow through and lets the Night Fury go. The only issue is that being shot out of the sky injured the beast’s tail, leaving him grounded and vulnerable.

Hiccup returns to feed the now stranded dragon and a tentative friendship between the two starts to blossom. John Powell’s gently building “Forbidden Friendship” provides the soundtrack for their growing connection, which is solidified when Hiccup reaches out 90% of the way to touch the dragon’s nose and then Toothless chooses to close the 10% gap. 

Although their friendship is established at this point, it is definitely deepened during their first flight together. Staying in the air requires Toothless and Hiccup to not only trust each other, but also to innately understand each other. The combination of the visuals of them flying, the exhilarating “Test Drive” score, and the emotional resonance of the two working in sync makes this scene a highlight of the whole movie.

Gary and Avocato (Final Space, 2018–2021)

Gary Goodspeed (Olan Rogers) is the sole prisoner aboard a spaceship called the Galaxy One, and five years alone with only AIs to talk to—there’s H.U.E. (Tom Kenny), who he likes, and KVN (Fred Armisen), who he hates—has left him desperate for companionship. When he unexpectedly bumps into a little oval-shaped green alien (also voiced by Olan Rogers), he immediately befriends him and calls him Mooncake. However, his new buddy is being hotly pursued.

Enter: Avocato (Coty Galloway), a ruthless Ventrexian bounty hunter. Essentially, he’s an anthropomorphic cat, but he really doesn’t appreciate the feline comparisons. Avocato is intent on capturing Mooncake, who he claims has the power to destroy entire planets. Circumstance forces Gary and Avocato to work together and although they’re initially hostile to one another, they quickly start treating each other as friends.

Many of Gary’s friendships begin on shaky ground—he has a knack for winning over reluctant people—but the brotherly bond he develops with Avocato remains one of his core connections.  

Hogarth and the Iron Giant (The Iron Giant, 1999)

When nine-year-old Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal) first sees the Iron Giant (Vin Diesel), a 50-foot-tall robot from another planet, he understandably runs away. But his curiosity soon wins out and when he realizes that the Giant is actually good-natured, he does what any kid would do: befriends the behemoth!

Although it’s very cool to have a big robot as a friend, it does come with a few obstacles. It certainly isn’t easy keeping the Giant fed (he eats a lot of metal) and hidden (especially from federal agent Kent Mansley, voiced by Christopher McDonald). But most challenging of all is the fact that any time the Giant’s programming believes he is under attack, he essentially turns into a weapon.

The Giant has to actively fight his automatically triggered defense mechanism (with a deleted scene
revealing his dark past of being part of a legion of planet-destroying robots). It would have been easy for the Giant to give in to his lethal programming, especially when confronted with the worst of humanity (I’m looking at you, Mansley), but his friendship with Hogarth gives him the ability and strength to choose to be a hero, rather than a villain.

To some people, The Iron Giant may just be an animated movie about a big hunk of metal, but I think it has a hell of a lot of heart.

Lucille and Francœur (A Monster in Paris, 2011)

Imagine being a little flea living on a monkey, just minding your own business, when suddenly you’re supersized and possess a beautiful singing voice. That’s the unfortunate situation a flea finds himself in thanks to a scientific blunder in A Monster in Paris, with his voice being provided by Matthieu Chedid in French and Sean Lennon in English.

Every Parisian he encounters flees in terror at his nightmarish appearance and he winds up in an alley behind a cabaret club singing of his woes. The club’s resident chanteuse, Lucille (Vanessa Paradis in both the French and English versions), overhears him and although like everyone else she’s initially frightened of his monstrous form, she gives him a chance. Lucille names him Francœur, lets him live in her dressing room, and dresses him up to help him pass as a human so that he can sing on stage.

Although Francœur’s entry into human society wasn’t exactly a smooth one, he finds a better life than he ever could have imagined on that monkey’s back thanks to his friendship with kind-hearted Lucille.

Have you got any examples of unlikely interspecies friendships that you love? Be they animated or live action, drop your favorites in the comments below![end-mark]

The post Five Unlikely SFF Interspecies Friendships appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

The Day the Earth Stood Still: Suspicion, Paranoia, and a Very Polite Alien Visitor in 1950s America

Released during the rise of McCarthyism, the film poses questions about how humans deal with fear and uncertainty that still feel startlingly relevant today.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on April 3, 2024

Image: 20th Century Fox

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Image: 20th Century Fox

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Directed by Robert Wise. Starring Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Hugh Marlowe, Sam Jaffe, and Billy Gray. Screenplay by Edmund H. North, based on the short story “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates.

I had never seen this movie before I picked it for this film club. I know it’s a genre classic. I know it’s widely influential and has been referenced in all kinds of sci fi works. I had heard of it, of course, and vaguely knew the premise—alien comes to Earth, Cold War politics—but not much more than that. And I avoided researching it until after I had watched it. I wanted to see it before I delved into what people thought of it.

I’m glad it approached it that way, because: (a) I really enjoyed the movie for itself, because it’s great, and (b) subsequently delving into what people think about The Day the Earth Stood Still is so overwhelming it makes me feel like I’m back in graduate school. For 70+ years people have been writing editorials, reviews, articles, dissertations, and books about the film’s impact and meaning. There are multiple scholarly debates still occurring across both academic journals and fandom spaces: Is the movie anti-war and anti-atomic? Is the main character a Christ-like figure? What is it saying about the doctrine of mutually-assured destruction? Is the position of the visiting alien justifiable from the perspective of ethical philosophy?

All of this is interesting, but there is absolutely no way I can cover everything in this piece, nor do I really want to, not unless somebody is going to give me another PhD for it. So I’m going to focus on a few things that I find most interesting, and I encourage everybody else to share their own thoughts in the comments.

First, a bit about the context, because we are talking about a high-profile, major studio Hollywood movie released in 1951, and there is a hell of a lot of relevant context. A few years earlier, in 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) subpoenaed ten Hollywood producers, directors, and screenwriters to testify about suspected communist activities. They refused to answer any questions, were charged with contempt of Congress, and were subsequently fined and imprisoned. The heads of major studios, along with the Motion Picture Association of America and the Association of Motion Picture Producers, responded by declaring that they would not employ any of those ten men, nor anybody else linked to communist politics or any other vaguely-defined “subversive and disloyal elements.”

The statement they released on the matter, the Waldorf Declaration, is an odd piece of legal wriggling. There was not agreement among the studio heads about what to do, or even if they should do anything. Even at the hysteria-driven height of the so-called Red Scare, it was still, in fact, a violation of the First Amendment to fire somebody for having politics you don’t like, but the pressure to do exactly that was coming from the Congress. The studio heads decided that the financial risk of being sued outweighed the inevitable public backlash if they did nothing. (There are a million articles, books, interviews, and thinkpieces on this matter, but check out this Hollywood Reporter piece for a quick summary and timeline.)

The Waldorf Statement more or less became industry policy for the next few years, and the initial blacklist of ten people ballooned to more than 300, especially after Senator Joseph McCarthy began driving the widespread persecution that would come to bear his name. The impact on Hollywood was significant and very, very high profile. Just a few examples: Charlie Chaplin was denied re-entry to the United States in 1952 and subsequently cut ties with Hollywood; actor Edward G. Robinson, who was an outspoken anti-fascist as well as a civil rights supporter, was called to testify before the HUAC and basically forced to jump through political hoops to avoid being blacklisted; Dashiell Hammett, author of The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, which became beloved Hollywood movies, refused to cooperate with HUAC and was blacklisted in 1953. The list goes on and on.

Right in the middle of all this came The Day The Earth Stood Still, a major studio film that was conceived, written, and filmed as commentary on the social and political environment in which it was made. Producer Julian Blaustein set out to make a movie about the paranoia and fear that gripped the world in the post-World War II atomic era; he was specifically interested in promoting a strong United Nations and said as much during press for the film. He looked around for a science fiction story that could be used as a basis for such a film and found Harry Bates’ short story “Farewell to the Master,” published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1940. Screenwriter Edmund North took a great many liberties with the original story, as is the way of such things, and the result is the script that director Robert Wise would turn into The Day the Earth Stood Still. Robert Wise would go on to become one of Hollywood’s absolute legends, as he would later direct West Side Story, The Sound of Music, The Haunting, The Andromeda Stain, Star Trek: The Motion Picture and many, many other films. In 1951 he wasn’t a legend yet, but he was well on his way there; he had been the editor on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) before he began directing his own films.

The Day the Earth Stood Still opens with a montage of people around the world reacting to the appearance of an unidentified craft soaring through Earth’s atmosphere. The craft soon reveals itself to be a sleek flying saucer. Articles about the film frequently claim that set designers Thomas Little and Claude Carpenter designed the spaceship with the help of architect Frank Lloyd Wright (for example: this article shared by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation), but it’s just as frequently claimed that this is an urban legend, so I have no idea if it’s true. If there are any Frank Lloyd Wright biographers hanging around, please let us know.

Whoever designed it, the spacecraft is striking and elegant as it settles into a landing spot on Earth: right smack in the middle of the National Mall in Washington D.C.. The ship opens and a humanoid alien emerges to say, “We have come to visit in peace and with goodwill,” and asks to meet with the leaders of Earth. A nervous soldier responds by shooting him, which is one of the most American things that has ever been committed to film. A large robot (played by Lock Martin) from the ship vaporizes all of the soldiers’ weapons, but the injured alien stops him before he can do more damage.

The alien is taken to the hospital, where he introduces himself as Klaatu and asks to speak to representatives of all the world’s governments. Klaatu (Michael Rennie) looks and acts human, which baffles the doctors, but it is necessary for the story the film is telling. Through the 1930s and ’40s, there was significant overlap in American cinema between sci fi films and horror films. There were popular space-based adventures like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, but for the most part American sci fi movies didn’t really begin to distinguish themselves from juvenile serials or monster movies until the ’50s. Another big sci fi release of 1951 was The Thing From Another World. The Thing was more representative of what Hollywood was doing with extraterrestrials at the time: alien visitors to Earth were often monsters and invaders, existing to be fought and feared. There weren’t characters or people. They weren’t us.

Klaatu, a polite, well-spoken alien who can easily pass as human, was a novelty. Wise initially wanted Claude Rains in the role of Klaatu, but he would later say it was a good thing Rains had been unavailable, because Michael Rennie turned out to be such a great alternative. And he was right, because Michael Rennie is fantastic as Klaatu. He’s friendly and warm, but there is a steely solemnity just beneath the surface that reveals the seriousness of his mission. When Klaatu escapes from the hospital, he tries to learn more about Earth and its people by walking around Washington, D.C., staying at a boarding house, spending a day with a child—all very human and ordinary things.

The mundanity of Klaatu’s actions are also key to the story the film is telling. There are very few special effects in The Day the Earth Stood Still; the goal of the production from the start was to give the movie a very realistic, almost documentary-style look. When we see the inside of Klaatu’s ship, it’s very minimalist in design and nothing is explained; when the robot Gort vaporizes human weapons all the audience sees is a blinding flash of white light. The stunning musical score by Bernard Hermann underscores this approach, as it is a compelling mix of recognizably orchestral and notably alien, with two theremins among the array of unusual instruments chosen to create a range of sounds. This was before stereophonic sound was standard in cinema—movies weren’t “presented in stereo!” just yet—and Hermann employed a lot of very clever techniques in both composing and recording to achieve the otherworldly sounds. Hermann is a genuine legend in Hollywood music history; he was wrote the memorable scores of many Alfred Hitchcock movies, several Ray Harryhausen fantasy epics, and many, many other movies you have probably seen. Check out a live performance of the theme of The Day the Earth Stood Still at an international theremin festival in 2018. Seventy years later, and this score is still so eerie, haunting, and beautiful.

The movie has a very clear goal in making these choices: the biology of the alien visitor, the nature of the world he came from, the details of his advanced technology, none of that is what we should be focusing on. What we should be focusing on is ourselves.

Klaatu’s time amongst the people of Earth explores a range of reactions. Presidential representative Mr. Harley (Frank Conroy) is sympathetic to Klaatu’s request to address the world’s leaders but unwilling to explore ways of helping; Mrs. Barley (Frances Bavier) at the boardinghouse thinks there is no extraterrestrial, only a Soviet agent, a conviction she states with confidence while sitting across the breakfast table from the actual alien; Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) thinks about how Earth must appear to an alien visitor who was attacked moments after greeting humans for the first time; her boyfriend Tom (Hugh Marlowe) only cares about alien visitation if it impacts his own life; Helen’s son Bobby (Billy Gray) is curious and excited more than scared. The various military men instantly see a threat to be eliminated, the news reporter is only interested in interviews that will support fear-mongering headlines, but for the most part people keep going about their lives as the tension and paranoia rise. We get glimpses of people around the world that are clearly meant to imply reactions are the same everywhere, including in the Soviet Union.

While tooling around Washington with young Bobby, Klaatu comes to the conclusion that politicians won’t help him deliver the message he needs to deliver, so he turns to scientists. He does this by asking Bobby to identify the smartest man around, a question that really bears no thinking about in a modern context (I do not want to consider what the range of answers would be), but makes a bit more sense in the context of Professor Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe) being an obvious analogue to Albert Einstein, who was hugely popular with the general public at the time. Barnhardt agrees to summon scientists, philosophers, and all manner of thinkers to the city so they can all hear what Klaatu has to say.

What’s most curious about the film’s range of character reactions to alien contact is, perhaps, how very familiar they are to anybody who has watched a movie in the past 70+ years. From E.T.: The Extraterrestrial to Independence Day to The Avengers, the widespread paranoia, the childlike naivete, the military aggression, the scientific curiosity, the selfish disinterest, the histrionic press coverage are all so common they are often compressed into a montage. But here the reactions of the people of Earth aren’t a prelude or epilogue to the story, or an element that must be dispatched with before the action can start. Those reactions are the entire story.

Nothing in The Day the Earth Stood Still is actually about aliens. We learn almost nothing about Klaatu’s home or any other civilizations out there. It’s all about humans, about how we see ourselves, about what we do when we meet somebody a little different, about how we deal with fear and uncertainty.

Because those aspects of the film are so familiar, even comfortable, in the genre of sci fi, I am struck by how strongly I reacted to the ending. At the very end, Klaatu finally has a chance to address thinkers from all over the world. He tells them that because Earth has developed rockets and nuclear weaponry, other civilizations on other planets now view us as a threat. He has come to deliver a warning: change our violent ways, or be destroyed. He explains that his own civilization has achieved peace by outsourcing the enforcement of this moral and ethical dictum to a force of robot police, including his companion Gort, who have the absolute and unretractable mission to destroy any planet that is not sufficiently peaceful.

Now, look, I am an American living in the year 2024. The situation Klaatu describes as peaceful and ideal is, to me, the one of the most horrifying scenarios imaginable. I hate every single thing about it. We can’t even trust cops with handguns to make good choices; I’m sure as fuck not eager to trust a bunch of cops who never have to justify themselves with the power to destroy an entire planet.

But, setting aside my own visceral full-body shudder, I am fascinated by two things about this film’s ending.

The first is that I’m not sure how audiences in 1951 were expected to react to Klaatu’s ultimatum, because reactions were not at all uniform. Within the film itself, we don’t really get a good sense of how the gathered scientists and thinkers react to Klaatu’s message, only that they are taking it seriously. (Any crowd of real scientists would immediately begin arguing, but maybe they wait until Klaatu and Gort have noped out.) The film ends before we get a look at how humanity reacts—which is, of course, the entire point. There are several troubling assumptions behind Klaatu’s ultimatum: that everybody will define terms like threat and violence and freedom in the same way; that a serious enough and clear enough threat will unite the world; that it is possible to create a universal ethical standard that can be enforced without exception; that outsourcing our ethical choices beyond a certain level of significance to external actors is better than making those choices ourselves.

I don’t know that the movie is advocating acceptance of any or all of those assumptions. It is promoting international cooperation as a much better choice than mutually-assured destruction, but there is still skepticism about enforcing peace by means of violence. But, as I have already mentioned, people have been arguing about this for more than 70 years, and will probably be arguing about it for 70 more.

I’ll let the philosophers carry on and move on to the second thing that fascinates me, which is less about what the film itself is saying and more about where it fits into the history of science fiction, because most of the sci fi genre seems to be with me in experiencing that full-body shudder of revulsion. The Day the Earth Stood Still was asking if humankind could or would abandon its violent ways when forced to by an objective, unstoppable external force—and we’ve gotten a lot of answers from other stories over the years. Consider Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), The Terminator (1984), and Robocop (1987), to name just a few films in which humans try to outsource their warfare and policing to machines and it does not, alas, result in peace and harmony for all mankind.

The Day the Earth Stood Still is, like all films, a product of its time and place, but in this way it seems to be a movie that could only have come from that particular time and place. Because the film ends before we learn what humans will decide, there is very much a sense of this being a story that stands on a precipice, one that is looking around at the world in the aftermath of WWII, in an environment of intense fear and paranoia that was actively harming the lives and careers of all kinds of people, and asking, “Now what do we do?”

What do you think about The Day the Earth Stood Still? How do you interpret the promise/threat of Gort’s robot police force and the politics of sci fi during the atomic era? I haven’t watched the 2008 remake with Keanu Reeves, and I’m curious how the story was changed for a different era. Feel free to chime in with your thoughts on that or anything else about this film in comments!

Next week: We’re bringing some different alien visitors down to Earth in The Mysterians (1957), one of the many epic collaborations between director Ishirō Honda and special effects master Eiji Tsuburaya. Watch it on Criterion and FlixFling, and it’s worth checking YouTube, the Internet Archive, and other upload sites. Some of the uploaded versions I’ve found are the English-language dub and some are of very sketchy quality, but poke around a little to find one that works for you.[end-mark]

The post <i>The Day the Earth Stood Still</i>: Suspicion, Paranoia, and a Very Polite Alien Visitor in 1950s America appeared first on Reactor.

Column

The Curse’s “Green Queen” and the Plight of the Sacrificial Lamb

This dark satire about terrible people plays around with genre elements in a number of disconcerting ways…

By Dan Persons

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Published on April 2, 2024

Image: Showtime

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Image: Showtime

In Luis Buñuel’s brilliant The Exterminating Angel (1962), a group of affluent operagoers gather in a mansion for some socializing, a late-night supper, and a little bit of entertainment. But once they’ve enjoyed a piano performance by one of the guests, they discover they cannot leave their hosts’ salon. Nothing dramatic—no barricades, hostage-takers, or force-fields—they just all, as a group, spontaneously decide it’s not time to go home. Nor will that time arrive the next day, nor the day after, nor, it’s suggested, for weeks. Starvation will set in, social niceties will crumble, and a closet full of expensive vases will be turned into impromptu toilets, but for better or worse—mostly worse—some indefinable force of the universe has become intent on keeping these people captive, well past the point of endurance.

Buñuel had no fondness for the moneyed elites. In films like The Phantom of Liberty and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, he concocted viciously whimsical scenarios to expose their greed, self-involvement, and hypocrisy. In The Exterminating Angel he provides no overt explanation for why this particular clutch of people are damned in this way, just an implicit suggestion that some power beyond our ken has espied them, has taken their measure, and has decided it’s had enough.

But, if you think about it, the engine of these people’s torment is much more proximate.

In the first episode of The Curse (2023), Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder), approaches a young, black, immigrant girl, Nala (Hikmah Warsame), as she tries to sell cans of soda in a New Mexico parking lot. Asher’s been filming a pilot with his wife, Whitney (Emma Stone), for a new reality show, Fliplanthropy, and at the goading of his producer, Dougie (Benny Safdie), attempts to show his generosity by giving the child some money, no strings attached. Problem is, he only has a hundred dollar bill in his wallet. After the B-roll is logged, he summons the child back, apologizes, offers to come back with twenty dollars, and snatches the bill out of the girl’s hand. Without missing a beat, Nala stares Asher dead in the eye, and says, “I curse you.”

At face value, that bit of hexing would seem to be what’s referenced in The Curse’s title. The idea is reinforced when, later in the episode, Asher discovers that his Factor_-style order of chicken penne has mysteriously arrived sans chicken, and upon subsequent questioning, Nala claims her curse—based, she says, on a TikTok trend called “tiny curses,” in which the jinx isn’t supposed to be much more than annoying—was centered on chicken and “spaghetti.”

It doesn’t take all that long, though, for a viewer to intuit that Ash isn’t alone in laboring under a curse. The big difference is that while his appears to involve some kind of cosmic intervention (he later finds the vanished chicken in a firehouse bathroom), others have been burdened with whammies that are more earthbound. The TV show Fliplanthropy is supposed to be a showcase for Whitney Siegel, and her campaign to bring “passive housing”—homes that purport to minimize energy waste—to the poverty-stricken community of Española, New Mexico. It never seems to occur to her that the local Indigenous population may not have much use for the boxy, mirrored monstrosities Whit wants to build (fancying herself some kind of conceptual artist, Whit insists that the buildings’ exteriors literally reflect the community). Nor is she all that eager to concede that she and Ash are so cash-strapped that the funding for her project has come from her wealthy parents, a pair of notorious slumlords. Nor does she pause to consider that the, um, “-lanthropy” part of Fliplanthropy (awful name, that) comes not from supporting local businesses, but from importing the gentrifying likes of a Canadian coffee franchise and an upscale jeans store into the town’s decaying strip mall. Whit is in fact so blinded by her saintly self-image that when a wealthy but conspicuously conservative client (Dean Cain, playing, essentially, Dean Cain) expresses interest in purchasing one of her homes, she can’t see past the Thin Blue Line flag on his car to realize that the man sincerely supports many of the social causes that Whit makes a pretense to care about.

If Whit is the self-deluded model of the just-throw-cash-at-the-problem liberal (when the jeans store becomes the target of shoplifters, Whitney tells the cashier to charge the shrinkage to her credit card, with predictably disastrous results), Fliplanthropy’s producer Dougie is all too aware of the burden he carries. Having fled New York in the aftermath of a drunk-driving incident that killed his wife, he puts up a cocky, confident façade, while attempting to slough off any remnants of the Big Apple by bedecking himself in turquoise. It doesn’t conceal what we see: That he carries a breathalyzer in his car’s glove compartment, and that too often it tests positive; that prior to Fliplanthropy getting the greenlight from HGTV he’s been using his vehicle as an improvised hotel room; and that the weight of his responsibility goads him into such bizarre actions as begging Nala to inflict a curse on him, or lecturing teens on the evils of alcohol, then buying them beers after getting them to turn over their car keys.

Ash has his own issues, aside from the phantom chicken curse. He’s socially awkward and near devoid of a sense of humor—taking a corporate comedy course, the best he can do is to bleat like a goat. He is so devoted to Whitney that he loses his cool on camera when a TV interviewer dares to ask a question about her parents, and then to quash the damning footage offers to betray his colleagues at the Tribal casino where he used to work. The security video he subsequently provides, while succeeding in indicting a state gambling official, also shows him laughing at the plight of a gambling addict. And he’s got a micropenis, the reveal of which leads to a cringey sequence where he and Whit make love via the services of a vibrator and a fantasy stud named Steven.

In short, and to put it as delicately as possible, what we’ve got here is a trio of righteous shits. But it turns out, not all shits are created equal.

Per IMDB, Luis Buñuel expressed regret that he wasn’t able to take the characters of The Exterminating Angel all the way to the extreme of cannibalism. However disenchanted the director may have been with the outcome, the restriction did lead to a telling moment in the film: The trapped partygoers, starved, thirsty—not to mention awash in the stench of unwashed bodies and unflushed excreta—have irrevocably turned on each other. Full-on violence is imminent—as is the potential for, yes, cannibalism—when a flock of sheep, apparently stockpiled by the host on the night of the party for some kind of prank (a bear cub is also somewhere on the premises), wander into the salon. Immediately, the prisoners fall upon the passive beasts, not just as a solution for their hunger, but also as a way to displace the brutality they’ve begun to turn on each other.

Throughout the course of The Curse, it becomes agonizingly clear that the friendship between Asher and Dougie, dating back to their youth, was anything but. As they reminisce about the past, it turns out that Dougie was an especially nasty and emotionally manipulative bully, dispensing cruelties that Ash has transmogrified into typical, childhood hijinks. And Dougie has far from outgrown that malicious aspect of his personality. He scolds his friend for never inviting him to the shabbat observances Ash and Whitney hold, despite Dougie evincing no particular devotion to his faith; leveraging Ash’s curse-induced paranoia, he has a whole roast chicken delivered to Ash’s plate when they dine out; and when Nala refuses to grant Dougie’s self-destructive wish, he jealously watches the oblivious Ash entering his home, while muttering under his breath, “I curse you.”

Most dismayingly, under the guise of drumming up some dramatic tension for the series, he goads Whitney into turning against Ash, a suggestion Whit seems not so reluctant to embrace. She’s clearly chagrined at how Ash’s social ineptitude clashes with her carefully-groomed façade of empathy and social awareness, something not helped when she witnesses the video of him mocking the gambler. (In a reflection of the relationship between Ash and Dougie, Whit also has a lifelong “friend,” Cara [Nizhonniya Austin], an Indigenous artist who clearly sees through Whitney’s bullshit.) A devastating failed pregnancy and Asher’s emasculated role in their lovemaking hasn’t elevated Whit’s opinion of her husband; that her father is similarly graced with an inadequate member may also have something to do with it. (And as an aside, let me just say that while I understand that cringe comedy gotta cringe, the whole micropenis thing may be a little too on-the-nose. Or on the whatever… sorry.) So in the penultimate episode, when Whitney insists Asher watch the confessional where she unsparingly unloads on him, we know that whatever way the relationship ends up—and in this case it’s with Ash tearfully declaring his undying love after watching the devastating footage—her well of sublimated contempt for him is deep, and likely everlasting.

All of which may go to explain the discombobulating events of “Green Queen,” The Curse’s final episode.

[Hey. There are significant spoilers ahead. You’ve been warned, me buckos.]

It starts out pretty much of a piece with the rest of the series. Approximately one year after the events of the previous episode, Whit and Asher are appearing via remote on The Rachel Ray Show to promote their just-premiered—and pointedly re-titled—series, Green Queen. It doesn’t go especially well, with Whit and Ash delivering frozen grins to the camera while Vincent Pastore cooks meatballs and Ray asks questions that don’t especially allow Whit to present the show, and her life’s work, in the best light. Ash, for his part, contributes little except to ineffectually direct Ray’s attention to Whit’s burgeoning belly. Because, yes, she’s successfully pregnant, and due any day.

Notwithstanding the botched promotional appearance, and Whit’s dissatisfaction that their show—already renewed for a second season—has been relegated to HGTV’s streaming service, the imminent arrival of a little bundle of joy appears to have worked wonders in terms of Ash and Whitney’s reconciliation. Whit busies herself prepping an unpressurized nursery within their passive home, while directing the handyman to conceal the control panel, lest anyone touring the joint get the wrong idea that eco-friendly abodes might somehow be bad for newborns. Ash meanwhile unveils a premature and unusual “push” present to his wife: Gifting the distressed home that the couple were planning to flip to Abshir (Barkhad Abdi), the father of Nala and her sister Hani, all three of whom just so happened to be squatting on the property when the Siegels acquired it. And if Abshir’s reaction to the good news doesn’t quite reach the effusive heights Ash and Whit were anticipating—he delivers clear signals that he plans to cash out as soon as the paperwork is signed and sealed—the couple rationalizes it as just a personality quirk of the man, so overwhelmed is he by their generosity.

Secure in the afterglow of their perceived goodness, the couple bed down for the night, after singing a Hebrew lullaby to Whit’s fetus. In the morning, Whit awakens to discover Ash sound asleep.

On the bedroom’s ceiling.

Something clearly has gone horribly wrong. Or perhaps, from another perspective, something’s gone exactly right, as if the universe has noted Ash’s general lack of gravity, and decided to make his shortcoming literal. Whatever the reason, the Earth’s natural pull has been reversed for Ash and Ash alone, and in a brilliantly surreal sequence—this episode, as with many of the others, was directed by Fielder—Asher and Whitney struggle to decipher what is going on. Ash, not exactly mastering the inverted physics—he keeps falling upwards—thinks the newly unmodded nursery is to blame. Whit, for fear of being caught up in whatever sadistic force has plagued her husband, crab-walks her way out of the building. Complicating matters: Whitney has gone into labor.

Things go from bad to worse. Determined to drive his wife to the hospital, Ash—in a turn that would’ve pleased Nabokov—instead winds up snagged in the branches of a tree. Dougie arrives just as Whit and her doula depart, and just before the fire department turns up. Nobody listens to Ash’s very precise description of what’s befallen him, with Dougie deploying a drone to get some second season footage of what he thinks is Ash’s crisis of fatherhood; while the firefighters follow the playbook for a treed bear, sawing through the branch despite Ash’s hysterical pleading. To the shock of Dougie, the firefighters, and a small gaggle of bemused onlookers, the tree branch goes one way, and Ash goes the other, tumbling up toward the heavens. The last we see of him is as he—or maybe his corpse—leaves Earth’s atmosphere, heading toward the infinite. Dougie—once again realizing his own negligence too late—sobs at the loss, while Whit delivers a healthy boy via C-section, all the while inquiring about her husband. The final shot is of firefighters and neighbors milling around in front of the accursed house, as the camera slowly tracks into the mirrored doorway. Cut to black.

It’s a pretty damn audacious finale, and yet, not all that surprising. As Jordan Peele has successfully explored how the separation between comedy and horror can be a mere matter of degrees, so Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder—the joint authors of The Curse—manage to take comedy’s natural proclivity for hyperbolics and nudge it over just enough for it to qualify as genre television. It’s there in the ambiguity of whether Nala’s curse is an actual phenomenon or just a figment of Ash’s imagination; it’s there in the weird coincidence that the distressed property Ash has bought is the one that Abshir and his daughters are crashing in. There’s shock in the way the narrative takes a sudden turn to full-on fantasy, but in many ways, the show sets us up for the moment long before it arrives.

The question, though, is why Ash is singled out for this punishment? I’ve read analyses that suggest that, with Whit bringing a new life into the world, the passive house has determined that Ash has become a threat to its perfect balance, so much waste that must be ejected. That may be a part of it, but I don’t think it’s all. Something else is going on, something that reaches beyond Ash’s failures and damns all of The Curse’s main characters.

There is no doubt the show’s main trio are horrible people (Whitney’s artist friend, Cara, who has built a career upon putting her Indigenous heritage up for sale to gullible Caucasians, is better only in the regard that she’s fully aware of the con she’s running). But there’s an aspect that sets Ash apart. Dougie is an alcoholic and a cruel manipulator, forever trying to exorcise the guilt over his wife’s death and forever backsliding into his worst aspects. Whitney is in some ways worse, an entitled rich girl desperate to escape her parents’ shadow (while taking their money), oozing performative empathy for her less-fortunate, Indigenous neighbors while telling herself that her pricey glass houses (hey, I just discovered there’s a metaphor there!) are the key to rescuing her town. (And let me just note here that if you doubted Emma Stone’s Oscar win this year, you need only watch as she navigates the various shades of Whitney’s awfulness. Her spoiled daughter tantrum when her parents try to steal some of her spotlight is, in and of itself, award-worthy.)

Both Whit and Dougie are deserving candidates for the universe’s condemnation, so why just Ash? It is, I think, because both Dougie and Whit are in profound states of denial, desperately seeking any conduit that will siphon off the cognizance of their responsibility. Asher is the perfect target: He mistakes Dougie’s meanness for amiable joshing; he looks at Whit exerting a power dynamic over him and thinks it’s love. He’s guileless and vulnerable—the perfect shlimazel—and it would not be at all shocking to discover that, because of that, Whit and Dougie harbor a deep and abiding hate for him, however repressed. He is their sacrificial lamb, ready to relieve them of their sins.

There’s another thing, though. I’ve been saying that it’s the universe that passes judgement on Asher, but that’s not really true. It’s actually Bennie Safdie and, more pointedly, the person who plays Ash, Nathan Fielder, who have condemned him to the void. Granted all storytellers—filmmakers, writers, etc.—are the puppet masters of their creations, but sometimes the creator’s invisible hand becomes not-so-invisible. Fielder’s filmic career—notably with the “reality” TV series Nathan for You and The Rehearsal (the latter of which was more cringe than even I could handle; I didn’t get past the first episode)—has frequently cast him as the sad-sack target held responsible for his social awkwardness. Like Buñuel toying with his hapless aristocrats, like Nabokov acknowledging the author’s active participation in their characters’ fates, you can sense Fielder casting final judgement on Ash for his spineless acquiescence, banishing him to the great beyond for sins that are not fully his.

It’s a rare situation when you can detect an artist saying, “Okay, this has gone far enough,” to their creation. The Curse is a social satire that indicts high-profile do-gooders for their hypocrisies, but it’s also a demonstration of how the artist can make their presence overt within their works, and speak to the audience directly about their feelings. The best of art forms a bond between creator and spectator; with the likes of The Curse, that connection becomes even more intimate.

Benny Safdie has indicated that The Curse could continue on to subsequent seasons, although it’s hard to figure out how that will happen now that one of its main characters has been evicted from the narrative. Then again, a universe that can suddenly eject a person off the face of the Earth is just as capable of ejecting him back. Had I my druthers, I’d be more inclined to continue on without poor Ash, to see how Whit and Dougie cope with their own curses once their convenient whipping boy is gone. I’m not a TV exec, though, I have no control. Maybe you are, or maybe you just have thoughts about what The Curse’s startling finale means, and what could be in store for its characters in the future. If you do, we have a comments section below, ready for your thoughts. Just be cordial and friendly when you post—let’s restrict the cringe to the TV screen.[end-mark]

The post <i>The Curse</i>’s “Green Queen” and the Plight of the Sacrificial Lamb appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Babylon 5 Rewatch

Babylon 5 Rewatch: “Midnight on the Firing Line”

The Centauri agricultural colony on Ragesh III is the victim of a surprise attack!

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on April 1, 2024

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“Midnight on the Firing Line”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Richard Compton
Season 1, Episode 1
Production episode 103
Original air date: January 26, 1994

It was the dawn of the third age… The Centauri agricultural colony on Ragesh III is the victim of a surprise attack, with the identity of the attackers left a mystery to the viewers.

On B5, new first officer Lt. Commander Susan Ivanova is informed of one of Sinclair’s eccentricities by Garibaldi, in this case that he spends some time every day in the observation dome with his link turned off. Ivanova goes to observation to inform him of the attack on Ragesh.

In the casino, Mollari tries to inveigle Garibaldi for a favor, but is interrupted by his new aide—also his entire staff—Vir Cotto, who informs him of the Ragesh attack. Mollari calls for an immediate emergency session of the council; he also receives apologetic condolences from Delenn and G’Kar, though Mollari is suspicious of the latter, despite his insistence on being ignorant of what has happened.

Ships in the area have been attacked by raiders. Garibaldi and one of his people take a couple of Starfuries out to investigate the latest attack.

New telepath Talia Winters reports in to Ivanova, who brushes her off.

Security footage comes in from Ragesh, revealing that the attacking ships are Narn, and they’re now occupying Ragesh. Mollari confronts G’Kar, and they almost come to blows. However, Mollari bumped into Winters en route to confronting G’Kar, and she was able to sense his murderous rage, so she warned security, who separate the ambassadors before they can kill each other. Later, in the ambassador’s quarters, Mollari apologizes to Sinclair, while the latter says that he’s agreed to call the emergency council session he wanted. However, Mollari has more skin in the game, as it were: his nephew Carn, is on Ragesh. Mollari pulled some strings to put him in charge of the agricultural colony in lieu of military service. He swears that if Carn dies, he will stop at nothing to go to war with the Narn.

Sinclair invites Kosh to attend the meeting, and he agrees to do so, but makes no commitment as to how he will behave.

Vir informs Mollari that the Centauri government has decided that there will be no response. Ragesh is too distant and too unimportant a part of the Republic to be worth dedicating the resources necessary to retake it. Mollari is livid and instructs Vir not to tell anyone what the government decided. He will try to talk the council into taking action against the Narn, and hope that the council’s action will embarrass his government into taking some as well.

Winters asks Garibaldi why Ivanova is being so standoffish. Garibaldi suggests meeting up with Ivanova at the bar when she’s off duty, and she might be more approachable. He also invites her to his quarters to share his “second favorite thing,” which sounds incredibly creepy.

G’Kar meets with Sinclair and making it clear that the Narn are out for Centauri blood, hoping to avenge their years of being subjugated by them. G’Kar also reminds Sinclair that the Narn sold weapons to Earth during their war with the Minbari, but Sinclair counters that the Narns will sell to anyone who’ll buy. The commander also is less than impressed with the Narns’ sneak attack on a civilian target.

Sinclair is instructed by a senator to abstain from the vote. There’s a presidential election about to happen, and Earth can’t afford to act as the galaxy’s police—at least not until after the election.

Garibaldi has turned up a connection among all the ships that were raided: they all bought their transport routes from the same company—which, it seems, has a leak. Sinclair decides to lead the Starfury contingent to protect what they believe to be the next target, leaving Ivanova to run the council meeting. Sinclair also tells her that he couldn’t find her to tell her the instructions from Earth, ahem ahem, so she’ll just have to vote yes to sanctions against the Narn…

In the council meeting, G’Kar reveals two things that kneecap Mollari’s plan. One is that he knows full well that the Centauri government’s official response is to do nothing. How can he ask the council to take an action his own government won’t take?

The second is the revelation that Ragesh was a Narn colony which was then taken from them by the Centauri when they conquered the Narn. The attack was simply taking back their world, and as “evidence” he provides a recording made by Mollari’s nephew Carn saying that they welcome their new Narn overlords and everything’s hunky dory and pay no attention to that gun to my head.

G’Kar moves that the motion to sanction Narn be dismissed, and it passes.

Sinclair and the Starfuries (totally the name of my next band) drive off the raiders, but doesn’t chase them, instead checking an asteroid field in the opposite direction, where he finds the command-and-control for the raiders.

There’s a Narn on that C&C base—as Sinclair said, the Narn will sell weapons to anyone. But they also leave someone behind to make sure they know how to use the weapons properly. That Narn also has data crystals that prove that—Carn’s testimony to the contrary—the attack on Ragesh was wholly unprovoked. Sinclair gives G’Kar an ultimatum: pull out of Ragesh, or he will show this evidence to the council. G’Kar chooses door #1.

Winters meets Ivanova in the bar, and the latter explains that her mother was a low-level telepath who refused to join Psi Corps. So she took the option of suppressing her telepathy with drugs. Those drugs changed her forever, and eventually drove her to suicide. So Ivanova is never likely to look kindly upon any member of the Corps.

Garibaldi has convinced Delenn to join him for his second favorite thing: a viewing of Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century, complete with popcorn. It’s not clear what Delenn is more baffled by, the cartoon or the popcorn…

The episode ends with the announcement that President Luis Santiago has been reelected.

Nothing’s the same anymore. Sinclair is a legacy, as his family have served in the military going back to the Battle of Britain. His grandfather, also in EarthForce, advised his grandson to trust what you see over propaganda. Because of that, early on before it’s revealed who’s behind the attack on Ragesh, Sinclair believes firmly that the Minbari weren’t responsible, because what he saw during the Earth-Minbari War showed him that the Minbari would never engage in a surprise attack on a helpless target.

Ivanova is God. Ivanova says she’s voting for Marie Crane for Earth President over the incumbent Santiago because the latter has a weak chin and she doesn’t trust someone with a weak chin.

The household god of frustration. Garibaldi is, it turns out, a Daffy Duck fan. Despite this, he never once tells Mollari that he’s despicable…

In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Earth’s first alien contact was with the Centauri Republic. The Centauri made a lot of wild claims to what they perceived as gullible humans, including that humanity was an offshoot of the Centauri. (When Garibaldi reminds Mollari of this, Mollari dismisses it as a clerical error.)

Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. The Narn obviously targeted Ragesh to see how the Centauri would react. It’s a gambit designed to see if war is feasible. That the Centauri declined to respond likely meant it was a successful one, even though they had to give up Ragesh.

The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. Any humans who are discovered to be telepaths are given three choices: join the Psi Corps, go to prison, or have your telepathy tamped down by drugs.

The Shadowy Vorlons. Sinclair visits Kosh when he’s out of his encounter suit, but he’s hiding behind a screen, though something is glowing back there. Kosh also seems to teleport into his encounter suit…

Looking ahead. Mollari tells Sinclair that Centauri sometimes dream of the moment of their death. In Mollari’s case, it’ll be being strangled by G’Kar while he strangles G’Kar. He had the dream when he was young, and was gobsmacked when he first met G’Kar and recognized him from his prophetic dream. This event Mollari dreamt will be seen down the line, more than once…

Welcome aboard. Paul Hampton is back from “The Gathering” for his second and final appearance as the senator. Peter Trencher plays Carn.

Trivial matters. With Tamlyn Tomita, Johnny Sekka, and Patricia Tallman declining to return after “The Gathering,” we meet two of their replacements: Claudia Christian as the new first officer and Andrea Thompson as the new Psi Corps telepath. In addition, this episode marks the first appearance of Stephen Furst as Vir.

Richard Biggs, Bill Mumy, and Caitlin Brown are all listed in the opening credits as playing, respectively, Dr. Stephen Franklin, Lennier, and Na’Toth, but they do not appear and the episode gives no indication who they are.

Both Delenn and G’Kar have new makeup/facial prosthetics. In Delenn’s case, there’s less of it, as they’re no longer trying to make her look more masculine (or at least more androgynous), and just in general, she looks more “traditionally” feminine. G’Kar’s has simply been refined a bit, one hopes in a way that made it easier for Andreas Katsulas in the makeup chair…

This episode has the first reference to spoo, a meat dish popular among the Centauri and Narn (and also “oops” spelled backwards). J. Michael Straczynski also had a food called spoo in an episode of She-Ra: Princess of Power that he wrote.

The echoes of all of our conversations.

The name of the place is Babylon 5. “I’m in the middle of fifteen things, all of them annoying.” There are some ways in which this feels like a do-over of “The Gathering.” You’ve got character introductions (in this case to Ivanova, Vir, and Winters), you’ve got Garibaldi investigating things, you’ve got the senator telling Sinclair to do something he doesn’t want to do, you’ve got G’Kar and the Narn being the bad guys and plotting evil things of evil, you’ve got Sinclair bopping off on his own and leaving his first officer in charge of a council meeting, you’ve got a council meeting where, once again, G’Kar doesn’t apparently have a seat, instead leaving poor Andreas Katsulas to wander around during it.

And you’ve got epic rants from Mollari, though the Centauri gets much more focus here than he did in the pilot, which is all to the good given that Peter Jurasik was the best thing about the prior episode.

The Centauri/Narn conflict is one of the bedrocks of B5, and it is very much on display here. While G’Kar is still being written as a one-note mustache-twirling villain, Katsulas imbues him with a palpable sense of outrage and fury. He’s matched by Jurasik, whose anger both at the Narn for their surprise attack on a civilian target that includes his nephew and at his government for their spineless response drives the episode.

Stephen Furst’s Vir is another character like G’Kar who will improve as the series goes on, but his introduction, alas, creates very little impression beyond “oh look, it’s Flounder from Animal House with worse hair and sharper teeth!” (The Centauri had massive incisors initially, though that makeup choice was dropped after the first season or so, probably as a favor to the actors.)

By contrast, Claudia Christian creates an instant, excellent impression as Ivanova with her cynicism, her sarcasm, her fatalism, and her bluntness. Though she also has a tendency to speak without contractions in this first appearance which comes across as mannered, and which will also be dropped before long.

As for Winters, there’s nothing to really distinguish Andrea Thompson from Patricia Tallman’s Alexander beyond hair color, at least so far.

This is a stronger opening to the series than “The Gathering” was by far, setting up one of the show’s core conflicts as well as establishing some of the character dynamics. And Garibaldi is, at least, portrayed as competent in this one, actually solving the case and not faffing about the way he was last time, plus we get his Daffy Duck fandom, which is delightful.

Next week: “Soul Hunter.”[end-mark]

The post <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “Midnight on the Firing Line” appeared first on Reactor.

Column SFF Bestiary

Bigfoot for Kids: Bigfoot (2009) and Cry Wilderness (1987)

This time I went looking for live-action adventures with kid protagonists — I wanted friendly Bigfoot.

By Judith Tarr

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Published on April 1, 2024

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There’s no shortage of killer-Sasquatch movies. Some are silly, some are scary, some are rampantly gory. Some are just plain awful. They’re good old-fashioned monster movies. No rhyme, not a lot of reason, and a whole lot of chasing and roaring and screaming.

Movie monsters for the most part exist to chase and roar and rampage. Even if we get some backstory or a rationale, it’s secondary. The monster is still a monster. We’re not there for the warm fuzzies.

Bigfoot is more than a monster. Maybe it’s because he’s a primate. He’s family, of a sort. He’s a giant, but he’s not seriously off the scale. He’s not King Kong. He’s still within semi-reasonable limits.

In some traditions he is dangerous and he may kill or eat you. But for the most part he’s a benign creature. Huge, yes; powerful, for sure. He’s rarely murderous and he’s not known for being destructive. He just wants to be left alone.

Kids’ movies love him. I wasn’t in the mood this week for animated features—Abominable and its ilk—so I went looking for live-action Bigfoot/Sasquatch/Yeti adventures with kid protagonists. They needed not to be monster movies; I wanted friendly Bigfoot. Harry and the Hendersons, but centering the kids.

My search came to a somewhat abrupt halt with the straightforwardly-titled Bigfoot. I’m not sure if it’s even a B movie. D? E? Z? I recognize the mom’s face (I think) from somewhere in the low-budget-movie universe, but there isn’t a recognizable name in the cast. Production values aren’t bad; I’ve seen worse in prime-time TV.

It’s set in California, and the actors are modeling-school pretty, except the villains, who are determinedly average. The kids live in mansions but act as if they’re just normal ordinary houses. They’re all supposed to be high-school freshmen, but they’re awfully mature for their ages.

The plot is plugged straight into the standard kids’-movie template. Young Percy has a crush on gorgeous classmate Madison. Best friend Leonard is outspokenly skeptical. Things come to a head when a couple of rednecks bully Madison at the local teen hangout. Percy comes to her rescue, does heroic and spectacular things with a bike, and takes off pursued by rednecks in big ugly truck.

The chase scene ends with a wipeout, but by then Percy has got rid of the rednecks. He comes to to find himself being inspected by a huge, hairy creature with sweet and very human blue eyes and serious beard and mustache. Percy immediately recognizes him as Bigfoot, and proceeds to make friends with him.

Bigfoot is a wildfire refugee, driven into human territory and apparently unable to find his way back. Percy sneaks out to the woods to hang with him and bring him food (he’s a vegetarian, Percy discovers), but that doesn’t last long—Percy is caught claiming to be with Leonard when he’s with Bigfoot, then enlists Madison to lie for him. But Madison wants to know what she’s lying for. Percy tells her about Bigfoot; she refuses to believe him, and breaks off their brand-new romance.

“Nobody in the world believes in my mythical friend” is a trope of alien-monster-cryptid kidflicks (ET, anyone?). So is “evil rednecks (or scientists, hunters, government forces) capture my alien friend and we kids have to rescue him.” Bonus points for cool parents who also disbelieve, but ultimately get on board, with extra points for dad who is, very conveniently, a doctor.

This is the ultimate soft and fuzzy Sasquatch. He’s not stinky. He’s not mean or scary. He’s not even especially huge, though he has super strength and can fight off a tranquilizer dose that would, says Redneck Number One, take out an elephant. He seems to be about as bright as a chimp or an orangutan; he enjoys watching movies, complete with popcorn, and he catches on to things like riding in the back of a pickup truck and being transported in a Winnebago.

1987’s Cry Wilderness has bigger aspirations (and zero, that’s zip nope nada, female characters). Its boy hero is much younger, but just as affluent: he attends a fancy boarding school with a stern and skeptical but not outright evil teacher. His father is a forest ranger, which means there must be family money, but that’s my writer brain getting in my way.

Young Paul made friends with Bigfoot while spending summer vacation with his dad. Now he’s back in school, and Bigfoot has come to warn him that his dad is in danger. Of course his teacher doesn’t believe him, and the other kids aren’t even on the radar.

He sneaks out of school and hitchhikes to the wilderness, where the plot tangles itself into incoherence. There’s a big game hunter, a massive hunt for an escaped tiger, a cave-in that nearly kills Paul’s dad, and some cringeworthy Native American nonsense.

Bigfoot is caught up in the nonsense. Paul used to feed him Coke in cans, which Bigfoot crushed and scattered around his lair. He’s not nearly as cuddly as the 2009 model: he’s genuinely gigantic and slightly less shaggy, and his hair is black rather than  light brown. But he has the same human-like blue eyes.

He seems to be higher on the intelligence scale than Percy’s furry friend. He communicates with Paul, and Paul gave him a radio, which he learned how to use. We don’t see as much of him as we do of Percy’s Bigfoot; after the first scene, in which we’re shown a model of him in a natural-history museum, labeled MISSING LINK, we only catch glimpses. Mostly he exists through what Percy says about him, in the face of universal disbelief.

This version of Bigfoot is more of a fantasy creature than a realistic denizen of the deep wilderness. He gives Paul a pendant with supernatural powers, which lights up when it’s activated, and he’s part of a shaman’s collection of magical animals, including a wolf and a bird that’s supposed to be a bald eagle but I don’t think that’s what it was born as.

Like Percy’s Bigfoot, Paul’s friend is a gentle giant. The monsters in these films are human. Bigfoot is a benevolent force, loyal and kind. He’s more truly humane than the humans who claim to have originated the virtue.[end-mark]

The post Bigfoot for Kids: <i>Bigfoot</i> (2009) and <i>Cry Wilderness</i> (1987) appeared first on Reactor.

Column Close Reads

The Artistic Bravery of Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin

What are things we don’t want to look at, but should?

By Leah Schnelbach

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Published on March 28, 2024

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Welcome to Close Reads! Leah Schnelbach and guest authors will dig into the tiny, weird moments of pop culture—from books to theme songs to viral internet hits—that have burrowed into our minds, found rent-stabilized apartments, started community gardens, and refused to be forced out by corporate interests. This time out, we take a trip to a rocky beach to talk about a haunting scene from Jonathan Glazer’s film adaptation of Under the Skin.

I’m not a brave person, but I am trying to get better at being brave on the page. What are things I don’t want to look at, but should? How can I get at truth in my fiction? How can I write criticism that people find useful?

When I was trying to think of artistic bravery, my mind washed up on the shores of Jonathan Glazer. Specifically, what I think of as “the beach scene” in Under the Skin.

Under the Skin is the rare example of me liking a movie better than the book—mostly because I think the movie is its own entity. The book (by Michel Faber) is quite good, a dark sociological look at humans and the environment (it actually reminds me, weirdly, of Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow) that spends most of its time in the mind of an alien hunting human prey.

But Glazer’s adaptation of the book is a miracle. The way he takes the book’s themes and runs into a direction that uses the strengths of film, color design, sound design, showing us a story rather than telling us a damn thing. When I watched it I felt like I was seeing something new.

And the beach scene to me is the best example of what it does well.

The scene opens with something innocuous, even nice. A dog is swimming in an inlet off Scottish coast. The unnamed alien, whom we’ve already seen prey on several men, watches a man swim a little further down the beach. In a cut back to the other end of the beach, we see a woman standing right at the shore, waving to a man and a baby, her back to the dog. Then the camera’s back with the alien, hanging a few feet behind her as the swimming man comes in and walks up the shore.

She begins what we know is her usual routine: asking him questions that will, potentially, get him to explain something to her—the aliens have figured out that it’s an easy way to get a man to open up—interspersed with questions that seem innocent and pleasant but are actually her way of learning if anyone will miss him if he disappears. He’s wary, but does tell her he’s travelling, alone, from the Czech Republic. As she’s about to press further, he looks past the alien and abruptly sprints off down the beach. The alien looks after him, her face reverting to the blankness she holds when she isn’t flirting for work.

The woman we saw before is swimming out past the breakers to save the dog, who’s been caught in a tide. She’s fully clothed, even leaving her heavy jacket on. The man (presumably her partner) leaves the baby to chase after her, and the Czech man dives in after both of them. The camera stays at its remove. We watch the dog go under, then the woman, as the man desperately takes on wave after wave. The Czech man gets to him after he goes under once and hauls him back to shore, but he’s no sooner let go than the man plunges in again. He goes under as the Czech man sprawls on the beach, too exhausted even to crawl out of reach of the waves.

The couple’s child sits alone on the rocks and screams.

The alien walks down the beach, inexorable. She lets waves break over her legs and boots and shows no sign of cold. She stands over the Czech man. Then she sorts through the stones for a moment until she finds one that fits easily in her fist, and bashes the Czech man in the back of his skull. Just once, just enough to knock him out. She drags him back toward her waiting van.

She never looks at the baby.

Just this could have been enough. Instead Glazer shows us the alien driving the man back to her house, the man still slumped over and unconscious in the passenger seat. He shows us the silent man, who appears to be the alien’s handler also in human disguise, back at the beach in the dark, gathering up the Czech man’s belongings so as to leave no trace of him. Again, this could have been enough. Instead, the camera follows the man down the beach as he retrieves the Czech’s towel.

The baby is still there. Still screaming. The man takes no notice of it and leaves the way he came. But the camera doesn’t follow him, instead it gives us one of the only closeups of the sequence, sitting squat in front of the baby, watching it sob, try to stand, fall back down. The camera is impassive. We know that no one knows it’s here. No one will hear it over the waves.

A few scenes later, we watch the alien as she hears a different child crying, in a car next to hers in traffic. In another scene, later still, she listens to a news bulletin that says the man’s body has been found on the shore, but that his wife and their child are still missing.

Did someone else take the child? Was it taken by the sea when the tide came further in? Is it still crawling down the beach alone? We don’t know. We never know.

Why did this come to me when I was rifling through moments of artistic bravery like stones on a beach? In some ways it’s the best moment in a very good movie, but it’s also doing something I hate. I hate child endangerment in fiction, and I hate animal deaths. They’re both cheap plays for emotion, easy screws to turn if you want your reader or audience to feel something.

So why does this work so well?

Part of it’s the camera placement. The camera neutrally records everything from a slight distance. It’s not a totally zoomed out God’s Eye shot that would elbow us in the ribs with the idea that some Unseen Other is watching tragedy unfold. It’s not fully the alien’s POV, because her actions are also recorded. It’s not zooming in on people faces. We’re never in the water with the dog or the people as they drown.

The humans act in recognizable, though slightly heroic ways, the woman going to rescue her dog with no thought for her own safety until it’s far too late, the husband diving in after her even though he can see how bad the tide is now. The Czech man going after both of them, despite already being worn out from a swim in these cold choppy waters. There too—the Czech charges after the family. He’s focused entirely on what he can do, which is get the husband, the closest one, the one who hasn’t been caught between tides or swept into a rock. The husband blindly going back in without even a backwards glance at the man who saved him, or the baby.

The camera doesn’t take on the alien’s point of view as she walks up the beach to the Czech man. It stays back and lets us see that she’s simply pursuing prey. She’s not angry—this is just part of the hunt. And then my favorite moment of all: the rock selection. As the baby sits a few feet away, crying, the alien matter-of-factly chooses a rock to hit the Czech man. She’s completely focused on finding a good rock. She’s not in a hurry, she’s not worried about being caught, or the man escaping.

So many other ways it could go: the Czech man could yell to the alien for help. The wife could scream at the husband to go back to their child. The husband could look back at the kid instead of diving for his wife. He could take a swing at the Czech man rather than saving all of his panic and energy for the second attempt in the water. The husband could make the second attempt while the wife was still above water. The alien could use a rock to silence the child, annoyed by its screaming. She could hit the Czech inexpertly the first time, and have to hit him repeatedly to incapacitate him. She could reveal extreme strength (as happens in the novel) and be able to lift the man and carry him easily. The baby could try to walk to her, could hold its arms up to be lifted.

But none of that happens. Nothing is told, nothing is indicated, nothing is underlined or highlighted or italicized. No tip into melodrama or pathos or torture porn. There is only what we see: the tide flowing in and out. The man who abandons the child to go after the woman—twice. The other man who goes in after them, despite knowing what he’s getting into. Who saves the person closest to him, and then is too exhausted to see that his rescue has been undone. The baby screaming with no awareness of what’s happening, only that it’s alone suddenly. The alien watching all of them, waiting to see what happens, finishing her assignment with no fuss or extraneous violence.

A different movie might show us the alien going back for the baby, or calling the police about it. A different movie might show us an alien who listens thoughtfully to the broadcast. Instead there isn’t even the barest hint of emotion. Even when she hears the other baby crying in a later scene, her expression only hints at curiosity—not empathy or pity. The beach scene is only the first tiny step toward empathy with humanity as she watches a succession of people try to help each other and fail. There’s still another half hour to go before she frees one of her captives, and another ten minutes after that before she attempts human food. It isn’t that she hates us or fears us or that we disgust her—we are precisely as interesting as the ant she observes in the opening scene, the fly she watches later, the dog swimming out into the waves.

The water flows, the waves crash, the cliffs loom over the tragedy. Nature doesn’t care that these people and their dog are dying. It doesn’t care about the terrified baby. It doesn’t care that an alien has come to Earth and is standing by and watching it all. Nature is implacable, unreasonable, unswayable. The sun goes on shining, the water goes on flowing.

Glazer keeps his camera back and observes. He neither holds our hands (the camera is going to sit right there and watch the baby cry, and there’s nothing we can do about that except close our eyes and stick our fingers in our ears), nor pats our heads (the radio bulletin doesn’t give us the happy news that the baby was saved, at least). By staying impassive and allowing cause and effect to play out, he creates a gap between us and the movie. We can fill that gap with emotions, empathy, sorrow, anger, a sense of futility—or we can balk and reject the film. It’s an act of artistic bravery to trust the audience to pay attention and come all the way to him, rather than meeting us halfway.[end-mark]

The post The Artistic Bravery of Jonathan Glazer’s <em>Under the Skin</em> appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Star Trek: Discovery

All You Need to Know About That [REDACTED] Reference in Star Trek: Discovery’s Season 5 Premiere

The fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery has premiered… Spoilers ahead!

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 4, 2024

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Warning: This article contains spoilers for the first episode of Star Trek: Discovery, Season Five.

The fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery has premiered, and the overarching challenge facing Captain Burnham and her crew has its roots in an episode from Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I’m talking, of course, about the Progenitors, who we first met in the April 1993 TNG episode, “The Chase.” In that episode, Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) reunites with his old archeology teacher, Richard Galen (Norman Lloyd), who wants him to leave Starfleet and come with him on an expedition to finish his research on a secret project that, when revealed, will shock sentient life to its core. Picard refuses, and Galen subsequently dies when his shuttle is mysteriously attacked.

The captain realizes the attack has something to do with his mentor’s work and goes on an interstellar search to find out why. He and his crew uncover that Galen was gathering DNA chains—“seed codes,” if you will—from planets across the known universe, all of which appear to have connected sequences that can only come from someone intentionally coding them as such billions of years ago. The Klingons, the Cardassians and, in the end, the Romulans, are also looking to find the missing pieces of the code on other planets, and for the most part, the species work to one-up each other (except for Starfleet, of course) and try to hoard the codes they find.

Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) gets the last sample on an almost-lifeless planet while the others fight and puts the code together. When she does so, an automatic message plays on her tricorder from “The Progenitors,” a four-billion-year-old species who has long since died out, but who sprinkled their DNA over multiple planets so that life in their humanoid likeness would rise after they were gone.

The message ends with the Progenitor being happy that all these species came together to unlock the message. “It was our hope that you would have to come together in fellowship and companionship to hear this message,” the recording says. “And if you can see and hear me, our hope has been fulfilled. You are a monument, not to our greatness, but to our existence. That was our wish, that you too would know life, and would keep alive our memory. There is something of us in each of you, and so, something of you in each other. Remember us.”

The rub, of course, is that the different species spent more time fighting each other than working together, though the last scene, where Picard talks to the Romulan captain, suggests that maybe this knowledge will slightly improve relations for the better.

The concept is a heady one, but is something that hasn’t been explored much in Trek since then, suggesting that those who heard the Progentior’s message didn’t do such a great job in remembering their words. The episode, however, stuck with Discovery showrunner Michelle Paradise, and she and her writers’ room wanted to bring the concept back to the franchise.

“We were originally exploring the Progenitors in Season Four,” Paradise said in a roundtable discussion that Reactor attended. “And back then we were thinking that we would have them toward the end of the season, but as we really got into exploring the season itself, the Ten-C felt like enough, and it felt like it was just too much story. But the idea of exploring the Progenitors—Where we come from, where did life come from? How do we all look the same but different?—really stuck with us, and so it felt like a really wonderful jumping off point for the fifth season, even before we knew it was our final season, in terms of what our characters were going through and where we wanted to take them emotionally.”

As we see in the season’s first two episodes, Burnham and her crew have a chase of their own related to the Progenitors—it’s up to them to collect all the pieces of another message from the species who started it all over four billion years ago, before the two rogue actors, Moll and L’ak, do.

The first two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery‘s fifth and final season are now streaming on Paramount+. Subsequent episodes drop weekly, with the finale airing May 30, 2024. [end-mark]

The post All You Need to Know About That [REDACTED] Reference in Star Trek: Discovery’s Season 5 Premiere appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV The Beast

The Beast Is a Stylish and Sprawling Reincarnation Romance

Part Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and part Equilibrium, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is a surreal experience

By Gavia Baker-Whitelaw

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Published on April 5, 2024

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It feels almost misleading to summarize The Beast using its central sci-fi conceit. In the not-so-distant future, in a world run by A.I., people are encouraged to undergo a procedure to dull their emotions. More mystical than technological, this process involves recalling and then “purifying” the memories and traumas of their past lives. Supposedly this will shape them into a more productive member of society.

Part Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, part Equilibrium, this concept provides the foundation for an intense yet dreamlike romantic drama spanning three different periods in time. 

In 1910, protagonist Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) is a celebrated pianist, living comfortably in Paris with a wealthy husband. In 2014, a different version of Gabrielle is a jobbing model/actress in L.A. And in 2044, she’s an unemployed woman embarking on the aforementioned procedure, reliving the experiences of her previous incarnations. In all three time periods, she’s haunted by an overpowering sense of impending doom. A “beast” lurking in the shadows of her life, representing a variety of dangers both specific and metaphorical. 

Written and directed by French filmmaker Bertrand Bonello, The Beast is based on a Henry James story published in 1903, The Beast in the Jungle. “Adaptation” is a conservative term for what’s happening here, however.

Gabrielle shares the same defining neurosis as James’ original protagonist, and her 1910 storyline echoes certain aspects of The Beast in the Jungle. Otherwise though, Bonello invented The Beast’s futuristic elements and interconnected timelines, encasing an early 20th century drama within a more elaborate examination of anxiety, predestination and the concept of soulmates.

Each iteration of Gabrielle is familiar yet distinct, shaped by their divergent circumstances. Yet in each period, she finds herself drawn to the same man: Louis, played by English actor George MacKay (1917). Cleverly, each of their encounters play out in noticeably different genres.

Meeting at a well-to-do party in Paris, their 1910 introduction unfolds as a restrained historical drama, establishing an enigmatic tension between Louis and the married Gabrielle. By contrast the 2014 sequences resemble contemporary psychological thriller, and the 2044 arc is arthouse science fiction. Here, a beige-clad Gabrielle exchanges cryptic dialogue with a judgemental A.I., in an eerily deserted Paris where everyone wears visors to protect from some unnamed contaminant. To connect with her past lives, she reclines in a tank of gloopy black liquid. (This sequence also includes a brief but memorable role for Saint Omer actress Guslagie Malanda, who does a great deal with a small amount of screentime.)

If not for its brief prologue set in 2014, you could spend quite a while enjoying The Beast purely as a historical drama, starting out with Louis and Gabrielle’s “first” meeting in 1910. But the first couple of minutes elegantly set the scene for the film’s unusual mix of tones and genres, introducing modern-day Gabrielle as an actor performing a trashy horror movie scene in a greenscreen soundstage.

Knowing Léa Seydoux, this almost feels like a sly reference to her own talent and career choices. Aside from her supporting parts in the James Bond franchise and Dune: Part Two, Seydoux mostly stars in adult indie dramas, avoiding shallow and/or CGI-heavy projects.

In The Beast’s opening scene, the greenscreen backdrop implicitly signals that Gabrielle’s current gig is a hollow, artless operation. A voice directs her to react to nonexistent visual cues, defending herself against an invisible monster. The camera zooms in on her terrified eyes; a convincing performance rendered meaningless by her empty surroundings. So we already see a hint that the titular beast is metaphorical—and that despite its high-concept logline involving futuristic technology and psychic reincarnation, this film won’t follow a conventional framework for sci-fi cinema. 

Bonello originally wrote The Beast for Seydoux and the French actor Gaspard Ulliel, who died shortly before filming was set to begin. Seeking to avoid direct comparisons with Ulliel, Bonello recast the role of Louis with a British actor. Youthful and slightly awkward-looking, MacKay brings a very different energy than we might imagine from the original casting.

Better suited to Louis’s rather unsettling characterization in the 2014 storyline (which I won’t spoil here), MacKay is less effective when he needs to be a straightforward romantic lead. The entire film hinges on the compulsive attraction between Gabrielle and Louis, subconsciously recognizing each other in every lifetime. 1910 offers the most traditionally romantic view of this relationship, but while Seydoux is a champion of longing glances and ambiguous body language, MacKay doesn’t quite have the same sizzle. Then again, The Beast isn’t necessarily interested in boiling their relationship down to simple definitions. Maybe sexual tension isn’t as relevant here as genre conventions might normally dictate. 

Atmospheric and stylized, The Beast demands to be watched with your full attention—and with minimal interest in technical worldbuilding. Bonello has little interest in the logistics or plausibility of his near-future setting. More important is the dreamlike spiritual connection between Gabrielle’s past lives.

Despite the film’s obvious lack of blockbuster vibes, I found myself thinking several times of the Wachowskis, whose recent work leans into the idea of emotion as a driving force for sci-fi storytelling. In each lifetime, Gabrielle is lonely, self-contained and thoughtful—but also quietly passionate, motivated by fears and compulsions she can’t quite understand.

In the midst of The Beast’s fantastic original score (composed by the director and his daughter Anna Bonello), Gabrielle comes into contact with several pieces of real-life music. As a pianist in 1910, she’s commissioned to perform a work by the expressionist composer Arnold Schoenberg, complaining that she finds it hard to connect with. Meanwhile in 2014, a different Gabrielle finds herself bewitched by a karaoke cover of the schmaltzy Roy Orbison ballad “Evergreen.” Emotion trumps artistic merit.

More to the point, emotion trumps logic. As we draw to the close of The Beast’s meandering 145-minute runtime, Bonello’s creative choices grow increasingly surreal. To fall back on an overused critical cliche, it’s not for everyone. But if you enter The Beast’s world with sincerity, it’s a fascinating and moving experience, offering a distinct and experimental take on some rather familiar genre tropes.[end-mark]

The Beast will receive a limited US theatrical release on April 5.

The post The Beast Is a Stylish and Sprawling Reincarnation Romance appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Babylon 5

Babylon 5 Rewatch: “The Gathering”

Keith R.A. DeCandido revisits the start of the Babylon 5 franchise

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on March 26, 2024

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“The Gathering”
Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Directed by Richard Compton
Season 1, Episode 0
Production episode 0
Original air date: February 22, 1993

It was the dawn of the third age… We open with Ambassador Londo Mollari’s voiceover setting the stage: the dawn of the third age of mankind, whatever that means, and how the last of the Babylon stations, Babylon 5, was the last best hope for peace. A station in neutral space constructed by the Earth Alliance and administered by their military, EarthForce, it is home to dozens of species, with the five major powers in this area of the galaxy represented: Earth Alliance, the Minbari Federation, the Centauri Republic, the Narn Regime, and the Vorlons. Tensions are high, as the Earth-Minbari War wasn’t that long ago, and the Narn used to be a subject species of the Centauri, but now are the ascendant power while the Centauri are a shadow of their former selves.

Lt. Commander Laurel Takashima, the first officer, is in Command & Control, overseeing a ship docking at the station. The security chief, Michael Garibaldi, calls C&C saying that the station commander is needed to greet a new arrival. Takashima says that he’s already on his way.

Sure enough, Commander Jeffrey Sinclair greets Lyta Alexander, a telepath from Psi Corps who will be working on the station, available to be hired. Sinclair tells her a bit about the station, taking her through the alien sector, where those species who require something other than Earth-normal atmosphere and/or gravity hang out.

Another person who arrived on the transport is a human named Del Varner. In fact, we saw him initially during Mollari’s voiceover, so we know he’ll be important….

Four of the five representatives are on the station: Delenn representing Minbar, Mollari representing the Centauri, G’Kar representing the Narn, and Sinclair reprsenting Earth. The fifth is en route: Kosh from the mysterious Vorlons, about whom very little is known. At one point, Sinclair joins Delenn in the Chinese garden, and she, to his surprise, provides all the intelligence the Minbari have on the Vorlons. It’s not much, but it’s more than Earth has…

G’Kar complains to Takashima about a Narn supply ship that is being denied docking. Takashima explains that the shipmaster has refused to consent to a weapons scan, and they can’t let the ship dock without that. G’Kar leaves in a huff. In fact, he leaves in a minute-and-a-huff.

Kosh’s ship arrives two days early. Also en route is the ship belonging to Sinclair’s girlfriend, a trader named Carolyn Sykes. Garibaldi asks G’Kar and Delenn to be at the docking bay to meet Kosh, but he’s having trouble tracking down Mollari—eventually finding him in the casino, losing a lot. Mollari asks Garibaldi for a loan (obviously not the first time he’s made that request), which Garibaldi refuses (obviously not the first time he’s said no). However, Varner offers to stake him.

G’Kar changes his mind, and tells Takashima to go ahead and do the weapons scan on the supply ship.

En route to meet Kosh, Sinclair’s elevator stalls out. By the time he makes it to the docking bay and meets Garibaldi, they find Kosh unconscious on the deck. Vorlons have to wear full-body encounter suits in order to interact with other species for reasons that nobody’s too clear on (which is par for the course with the Vorlons). Takashima reports that the Vorlons have stated in no uncertain terms that Kosh’s encounter suit is not to be removed. Dr. Benjamin Kyle is not happy, as he can’t treat his patient without removing the suit.

Sinclair instructs Kyle to open the suit, but to do it alone, with all monitors turned off. Kyle is bound by doctor-patient confidentiality not to reveal what he sees. Kyle’s subsequent examination reveals that Kosh was poisoned. But Kyle can’t determine where the poison was applied, nor what the poison is.

Sinclair locks down the station, and Garibaldi conducts an investigation. One of his prime suspects is Mollari, who wasn’t at the reception with Delenn and G’Kar.

G’Kar approaches Alexander after she finishes a job. The Narn have no telepaths, and they wish to produce some. G’Kar makes her an offer to help them do so, either by G’Kar and Alexander mating, or by cloning, which would be a much more complicated process. G’Kar will pay her more if they just mate.

Sinclair finally gets to have some mad, passionate nookie-nookie with Sykes. He also tells Sykes a bit of his personal history that he’d been avoiding telling her before: that he was part of the Battle of the Line, the final battle in the Earth-Minbari War, of which he was one of the few survivors. He was doing a kamikaze run at one Minbari ship, then he blacked out, and the next thing he knew, it was twenty-four hours later and the Minbari had inexplicably surrendered, ending the war.

Takashima and Kyle convince Alexander to perform a mind-scan on Kosh. She reluctantly does so, only to discover that Sinclair is the one who poisoned the ambassador by putting a skin tag on Kosh’s hand.

Garibaldi’s investigation leads to Varner, but checking his quarters reveals Varner’s dead body. Confusing the issue is that he’s been dead for days, even though he’s been sighted more recently.

Sinclair is temporarily removed from B5’s council, replaced by Takashima. After the council questions several witnesses, including Kyle, G’Kar moves that they turn Sinclair over to the Vorlons. Takashima votes no, Delenn abstains, while Mollari and G’Kar vote yes. But that tie is broken by the proxy vote the Vorlons provided to G’Kar, making it a majority yes vote.

The Vorlons will arrive in twelve hours. Mollari apologetically explains to Garibaldi that G’Kar blackmailed him into the yes vote. He had information about one of Mollari’s ancestors that would prove politically embarrassing to him.

G’Kar approaches Delenn about the possibility of a Minbari-Narn alliance. But when he mentions a rumored shadowy organization in the Minbari Federation called the Grey Council, Delenn immediately attacks G’Kar, nearly killing him, and making it clear that she’ll do worse if he ever even mentions the Grey Council again.

Another body is found, that of a technician who has been seen since his time of death. Kyle is working in the medical bay, having found an antidote to the poison, when he sees Alexander enter, and she starts sabotaging the medical equipment—and tossing Kyle across the medical bay when he tries to stop her. But then the real Alexander walks in, and the duplicate runs away.

It’s now clear what’s going on: Garibaldi has learned that Varner was a smuggler dealing in black-market tech. His most recent trip had him acquiring a changeling net, which would enable its wearer to look like anyone. The net would give off a lot of energy, so Sinclair has Takashima do a scan of major energy sources, and then blank out anything they know about—life support, lights, and so on—and the only one that isn’t accounted for is small and moving through a remote part of the station. Sinclair and Garibaldi suit up and go after it. At Takashima’s suggestion, they take a recorder that will document everything, so they have proof for the Vorlons.

Garibaldi is injured, but Sinclair manages to stop the assassin, after he has cycled through several different disguises (including Sinclair himself). Eventually, he’s revealed to be a Minbari, a member of their Warrior Caste. Before blowing himself up, he says that Sinclair has a hole in his mind. Later, Sinclair queries Delenn about that, but Delenn blows it off as a standard Minbari insult. The nervous look Delenn gets before saying that makes it obvious to the viewer (but, for some reason, not to Sinclair) that she’s lying.

Sinclair shares a drink with G’Kar, revealing that he knows that the changeling net was brought on the delayed Narn supply ship, which was why Varner had to come to the station to pick it up, and then provide it to the assassin. G’Kar says Sinclair has no proof; Sinclair counters that he put a nanotech tracker in the drink they just shared, so now Sinclair will always be able to follow G’Kar. Outraged, G’Kar once again leaves in a huff. Sinclair then reveals to Garibaldi that he was lying, but that’ll it’ll be fun watching G’Kar try to find the tracker that isn’t there in his intestinal tract.

The big hole made by the assassin is being fixed, Ambassador Kosh is up and about, Sinclair has been cleared, and the station is, as Takashima says, open for business.

Nothing’s the same anymore. Sinclair gets to hit several rough-and-tumble leader clichés, including the close friend whom he hires even though nobody else wants him, being accused of a crime he didn’t commit, and insisting on stopping the bad guy himself despite having an entire frickin staff under his command.

The household god of frustration. Garibaldi is established as difficult, having bounced from assignment to assignment. He also doesn’t exactly light the world on fire with his investigation, as most of the work is done by Kyle and by the assassin being seen disguised as Alexander when Alexander walked into the room.

If you value your lives, be somewhere else. Delenn is surprisingly friendly to Sinclair, which he doesn’t expect, given the history between Earth and Minbar.

In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… Mollari is pretty broken, reduced to gambling and drinking and lamenting the days when the Centauri Republic was a super-power instead of a has-been power.

Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. G’Kar is a manipulative bad guy in this one, showing an impressive ruthlessness and a tiresome nastiness.

The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. We learn that humans have developed telepathy, and there’s a Psi-Corps that supervises and adminstrates telepathic activity. The rules regarding telepaths are very strict, including no unauthorized mind-scans.

The Shadowy Vorlons. Vorlons wear encounter suits at all times and “for security reasons” don’t allow them to be removed. Very little is known about them by anyone else on the station.

Looking ahead. The hole in Sinclair’s mind will become extremely important down the line.

No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. Sinclair and Sykes are in a nice relationship; at one point Sykes tries to convince him to resign his commission and go off adventuring with her. He says he’ll think about it.

Also G’Kar tries to mate with Alexander in a scene that is eye-rolling and creepy all at the same time.

Welcome aboard. In this pilot movie, the only stars are Michael O’Hare (Sinclair), Tamlyn Tomita (Takashima), Jerry Doyle (Garibaldi), and Mira Furlan (Delenn). Peter Jurasik and Andreas Katsulas are listed as guest stars, as are Blaire Baron (Sykes), Johnny Sekka (Kyle), and Patricia Tallman (Alexander), even though all were intended to be regular characters. In addition, John Fleck plays Varner and Paul Hampton plays the senator.

Hampton will return next time in “Midnight on the Firing Line.” Tallman will return in “Divided Loyalties” in season two.

Also Ed Wasser plays one of the C&C officers; he’ll return in the recurring role of Mr. Morden starting in “Signs and Portents” later in the first season.

Trivial matters. Two different versions of this exist in the world: the original as aired in 1993 and a re-edit that was released when the show moved to TNT in 1998. Some of those changes were to fix things that later became continuity errors, including G’Kar’s reference to his wife and Mollari’s referring to Sinclair as the last commander of the station in his opening voiceover. Others were simply tightening some scenes and including some scenes that were cut, including a confrontation Sinclair has with a smuggler and Sykes meeting with Delenn. Sinclair and Alexander’s trip through the alien sector was cut down, as there were (legitimate) complaints that it looked too much like a zoo. The music by Stewart Copeland was redone by Christopher Franke, who was the composer for the series. In the original, Tamlyn Tomita’s dialogue was redone and looped in when Warner Bros. complained that she sounded too harsh; the new version restores Tomita’s original performance. Finally, the biggest change was Kosh referring to the assassin disguised as Sinclair as “Entil’Zha Valen,” a reference that will pay off in the “War Without End” two-parter in season three.

Tomita, Blaire Baron, Johnny Sekka, and Patricia Tallman were all intended to be regulars, but they did not continue on the series for various reasons. Tomita was replaced by Claudia Christian’s Susan Ivanova, Baron by Julia Nickson-Soul’s Catherine Sakai, Sekka by Richard Biggs’ Dr. Franklin, and Tallman by Andrea Thompson’s Talia Winters. Tallman’s Alexander would, however, return to the show as a guest in seasons two and three and become a regular for seasons four and five. Plotlines originally intended for Takashima were transferred either to Ivanova or to Winters.

Delenn was originally intended to start out as a man, but would emerge from the chrysalis at the top of season two as a woman. But they couldn’t make Mira Furlan masculine enough, apparently, so they abandoned it and just had her be female all along.

Furlan’s and Andreas Katsulas’ makeup were both changed when the show went to series, as were the EarthForce uniforms.

“The Gathering” was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. The award went to Jurassic Park.

The echoes of all of our conversations.

The name of the place is Babylon 5. “Babylon 5 is open for business.” There are three things a pilot needs to introduce: the characters, the types of stories that will be told, and the setting. The latter is more challenging in the science fiction/fantasy genre because it’s the only genre in which the setting isn’t real. So in addition to everything else, you’ve got to build a world and make it convincing.

Whatever the flaws of “The Gathering”—and they are legion—it did that part of it beautifully. Creator/writer/co-executive producer J. Michael Straczynski gives us a fully realized future history. We get an Earth that’s a power, but not the biggest power. We get the ugly history between the Centauri and the Narn, with the latter having burst onto the scene after being subjugated by the former, while the Centauri themselves are much less than once they were. And there’s the history of the Earth-Minbari War, which left scars on both sides—as well as the complete confusion as to why the Minbari surrendered.

Surrounding this world-building is a story that’s a pretty straightforward whodunnit with tech and a script that can generously be called awkward. The moment where Alexander asked Sinclair why the station was called Babylon 5, I groaned. Thirty-one years later, that conversation remains the tin standard for awkward exposition, not aided by the fact that I kept thinking of the Swamp Castle litany in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. (To this day, I always refer to Babylon 4 as having fallen into the swamp.)

That clunkiness of dialogue runs throughout, alas, not aided by performances that range from mediocre to uneven. Jerry Doyle’s Garibaldi is a walking, talking cliché of the maverick cop, Andreas Katsulas’ G’Kar is a mustache-twirling villain of the most ludicrous type (the scene where he proposes mating with Alexander is embarrassing), and Patricia Tallman’s Alexander ranges from stilted (her accusation of Sinclair comes across as a teenager throwing a tantrum) to excellent (her body language when she’s the disguised assassin is completely different, making it clear from jump that this isn’t really Alexander). All three characters will, of course, get better, but that just makes watching the early versions of them even more painful to watch. G’Kar especially—Katsulas was one of the finest actors of his time, always able to bring menace and nuance to his roles (which were almost always villainous to some degree or other), and G’Kar would certainly become a complex and tragic character as the show went on. But the G’Kar of “The Gathering” has muted menace and absolutely no nuance, and feels like an utter waste of Katsulas’ talent.

The leader of an ensemble needs to have a certain charisma in order for the ensemble to work, and sadly Michael O’Hare doesn’t quite have it. O’Hare is the type of actor who’s better off playing the sidekick or the helpmeet or the bad guy. (He played Colonel Jessup in the theatrical version of A Few Good Men on Broadway, and he was amazing. It was a hundred and eighty degrees from Jack Nicholson’s performance of the same role in the movie version, instead bringing a quiet, solid intensity.) He would’ve been perfect to play Garibaldi, truly.

Besides the world-building, the other way in which the pilot absolutely shines is in the character of Londo Mollari, brilliantly played by the great Peter Jurasik. In 1993, he was best known for his role of the squirrelly and slimy Sid the Snitch on Hill Street Blues and its short-lived spinoff Beverly Hills Buntz, which in no way prepared anyone for this. He magnificently brings the broken-down Centauri ambassador to life. The bit I quoted in “The echoes of all our conversations” above is a masterpiece, showing us how far the Centauri Republic in general and Mollari in particular have fallen.

Finally, there’s the CGI visual effects, which were groundbreaking at the time, and which I was dreading on this rewatch, as I feared they wouldn’t have aged well. And, well, they haven’t, but it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting. Mostly the biggest problem with the VFX is the same problem CGI continued to have up until 2010 or so: too bright and shiny and completely unable to convey mass. But it’s not fatal, and the CGI is well integrated.

Next week: “Midnight on the Firing Line.”[end-mark]

The post <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch: “The Gathering” appeared first on Reactor.

Lists movies

Five Films With Unexpected Genre Shifts

One minute you’re watching a crime thriller or historical drama, and the next you’re knee-deep in sci fi or horror…

By Lorna Wallace

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Published on March 28, 2024

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The vast majority of films remain the same genre (or the same mix of genres) throughout their entire runtime, but every so often a film that seems to be telling one kind of story switches to another part way through. There are, of course, a few films where this abrupt change is expected from the beginning: Anyone pressing play on James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), for instance, has it in the back of their mind that the romance between Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate Winslet) is going to be rudely interrupted by an iceberg, turning the love story into a disaster/survival story.

Below I’ve compiled a list of five films which I think brilliantly execute unexpected genre shifts. Some may consider the following discussion of these films to be spoiler-y—I’ll try to avoid major plot points, but if you don’t want to know anything about the twists and turns of these films, consider yourself warned as I will mention (or at least hint at) the genre switch in each. (The same goes for the trailers below, most of which tease or reveal a bit more than you might expect…)

From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)

I’m kicking this list off with one of the best-known genre shift films: Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn. The film starts off as a tense crime story, with brothers Seth (George Clooney) and Richie Gecko (Quentin Tarantino, who also wrote the screenplay) on the run for robbery and murder. Wanting to cross into Mexico, they kidnap a father (Harvey Keitel) who is vacationing with his two teenage children (Juliette Lewis and Ernest Liu) and force the family to smuggle them across the border.

About halfway through the movie, the group make it to the Gecko brothers’ destination: the Titty Twister, an isolated strip club in the desert. There’s a palpable feeling that sh*t is going to hit the fan, but the form that sh*t takes completely changes the film’s genre. If you’ve managed to avoid the twist of this movie for all these years, then here’s your warning to stop reading…

It turns out that the Titty Twister is actually home to a group of bloodthirsty vampires who feast on their patrons, forcing our unlikely gang to work together to avoid becoming dinner. From this point on the film becomes an enjoyably violent B-movie; it’s pulpy, it’s bloody, and it’s full of fangs.

One Cut of the Dead (2017)

I’m a big fan of zombie movies, so I was down to watch One Cut of the Dead, which was written, directed, and edited by Shin’ichirô Ueda, just based on the zombie aspect; I had no idea going in that the film would be playing around with genre. Although some people think that the zombie genre is nothing but a mindless shambling corpse itself these days, I promise that One Cut of the Dead offers a fresh take.

The film starts with a single continuous shot that lasts 37 minutes. We follow a group of actors and crew as they attempt to make a low-budget zombie flick, which isn’t going so smoothly thanks to the demands of intense director Takayuki Higurashi (Takayuki Hamatsu). But his anger issues are soon eclipsed by the appearance of actual zombies. Desperate for the film to be a hit, Higurashi recklessly insists on keeping the camera rolling.

That’s all the plot I’m going to reveal, because this film really benefits from the element of surprise. Just trust me when I say that it becomes both innovative and funny, and while its first section may feel clunky, you’ll be rewarded if you stick with it—I even found myself wanting to restart it as soon as the credits rolled!

The Prestige (2006)

Personally I find Christopher Nolan’s films to be pretty hit or miss, but The Prestige is a definite hit in my eyes. Based on the novel by Christopher Priest and set during the Victorian era, this period drama film follows the bitter rivalry between two stage magicians, aristocratic Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) and working-class Alfred Borden (Christian Bale). The animosity between the pair feels raw and real, and their various magic tricks are impressive and intriguing.

One trick in particular is more intriguing than all the others though, that being Borden’s “The Transported Man,” which sees him seemingly teleport across the stage. Angier is obsessed with finding out how this illusion is done and pulling that string eventually leads him to inventor Nikola Tesla (David Bowie—a truly brilliant casting choice). The film enters genre-switch territory at this point… and that genre can probably be guessed given the film’s inclusion of a fictionalized version of Tesla.

I can understand why the introduction of certain speculative elements might be off-putting to some who’d expected the film to continue as a psychological thriller (especially those unfamiliar with the original novel)—people who dislike The Prestige often cite it as one of their main criticisms, along with Angier and Borden’s destructive obsession making them unlikable characters (which I think is the point!). To each their own, but I leaned in to all the various twists and loved it.

Overlord (2018)

Overlord opens with an American paratrooper squad being shot down over France in a scene that is so chaotically brutal that it’s on par with battle scenes from Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Hacksaw Ridge (2016). Four surviving soldiers—played by Wyatt Russell, Jovan Adepo, John Magaro, and Iain De Caestecker—band together to complete their mission to destroy a Nazi-controlled radio tower near Normandy.

A good portion of this film plays like a typical World War II movie—there’s the evasion of Nazi forces, the infiltration of a base, and the befriending of a French villager—but the film eventually winds up in the realm of sci-fi and horror. Our soldiers discover that the Nazis are performing some disturbing scientific experiments—but what exactly those experiments are I’ll leave for you to discover.

All you need to know is that their scientific tinkering leads to some gory body horror, but it doesn’t feel that scary. Director Julius Averywent on to make The Pope’s Exorcist (2023) after all, so the scares tend to lean towards entertaining silliness rather than nightmare fuel.

Bone Tomahawk (2015)

S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk has a classic Western setup: it’s the late 1800s and the sheriff of a little town called Bright Hope must lead a rescue party into the wilderness after three people are captured by unknown (and allegedly cannibalistic) assailants.

For a while the film proceeds like a regular Western—there’s horses and campfires and shootouts, oh my! Our classically heroic Sheriff Hunt is played by Kurt Russell, who is always a joy to watch (particularly when he’s sporting fun facial hair!), but the posse soon develops an uneasy dynamic. There’s Deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins), who is well-meaning but perhaps a little too old for the mission, Arthur O’Dwyer (Patrick Wilson), who has a severely injured leg but insists on coming along because his wife is one of the abductees, and John Brooder (Matthew Fox), whose morals might not be quite in the line with the others.

Once the film hits its third act, things take a turn for the truly horrific. Now, it’s fair to say that classic Westerns tend to have a lot of killing in them, but it’s not usually can’t-look-at-the-screen grisly. Bone Tomahawk, on the hand, offers up such gruesomely stomach-churning visuals that it turns into a full-on horror movie. If that sounds like your can of campfire beans, enjoy!

Have you got any recommendations of films that succeed in pulling off an effective or surprising genre shift? Drop them in the comments below![end-mark]

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Column Science Fiction Film Club

Ikarie XB-1: Imagining a Journey Across the Stars, Martinis Included

This visionary 1963 film acknowledges the challenges of interstellar travel, but expresses a refreshing optimism about the future of space travel and humanity

By Kali Wallace

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Published on March 27, 2024

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Ikarie XB-1 (1963) Directed by Jindřich Polák. Starring Zdeněk Štěpánek, Radovan Lukavský, František Smolík, and Dana Medřická. Screenplay by Pavel Juráček and Jindřich Polák based on The Magellanic Cloud by Stanislaw Lem.

Let’s start with the ending, so we can get that nonsense out of the way.

After its release in Czechoslovakia in 1963, Ikarie X-1 was picked up for distribution by American International Pictures, an American film production company that had a sideline in importing, editing, and dubbing foreign films in the 1950s and 1960s. The film had a bit of buzz at the time; it had won the top award at the inaugural Trieste Science Fiction Film Festival (alongside Chris Marker’s French New Wave short film La Jetée, which we will watch in the future). But when AIP acquired Ikarie XB-1, they changed the title to Voyage to the End of the Universe, rewrote a lot of the dialogue, cut several minutes from the running time, altered many of the names in the credits to look more American, and gave the film an entirely different ending.

An entirely different and—let’s not mince words—really incredibly stupid ending.

In the original film, when Ikarie finally reaches Alpha Centauri’s mysterious White Planet, the crew gaze down on a heavily developed and populated surface, knowing they have encountered an alien civilization. In the American version, the view of the alien planet is replaced—this is painful to type but I promise I am not joking—by stock footage of New York City.

The intent, it seems, was to give the film a shocking! twist! ending! by suggesting that Ikarie and its crew were from another world, and their destination was Earth all along.

It’s so stupid. It’s such a bad choice! Why did they even bother? I know, I know. These are rhetorical questions. Because it’s Hollywood. Because they wanted to Americanize the film to keep any suspected Eastern Bloc socialist cooties away from it. Because sometimes people make really stupid decisions while believing themselves to be very clever and/or trying to make a lot of money.

I know some of you are wondering the same thing I was wondering, so: the dubbed Voyage to the End of the Universe was released in 1964, four years before Planet of the Apes and its famous Statue of Liberty twist ending.

The incomprehensible twist ending did the film no favors: Voyage to the End of the Universe was not exactly a smash hit, although a lot of sources claim it was an inspiration to Stanley Kubrick and many speculate the same for Gene Rodenberry. For a few decades it just sort of bounced around in the obscurity of niche sci fi film circles. Due to the names in the credits being Americanized, there was even confusion about where it came from and some viewers heard that it was Russian in origin. It was more than forty years before the original film would become widely available through DVD/Blu-ray releases and streaming for international audiences to watch again. (Matthew Keeley wrote a bit about this on this site: “Ikarie XB-1, Based on the Fiction of Stanislaw Lem, Is a Fascinating Obscurity.”)

And I, for one, am very glad that it is, because I think this is a fascinating movie. I didn’t know what to expect going in; all I knew was that a lot of people across the internet recommended checking it out as a worthy entry into classic sci fi films.

The film opens in media res, with a tense and disorienting scene in which the crew of a spaceship are trying to calm a man named Michael, who is having a dangerous breakdown in a series of corridors straight out of a trypophobic’s worst nightmare, accompanied by the unsettling and often jarring score by Zdeněk Liška. Before we learn anything about this situation, we skip backwards several months to the very beginning of Ikarie’s journey.

In the year 2163, the spaceship Ikarie (Icarus, which is, yes, a terrible name for a spaceship, but no, never explained) has set out from Earth with an crew of forty men and women. They are headed for Alpha Centauri, where their scientists have identified Earth-like planets that could be home to life. This is purely a mission of scientific exploration and possible contact; life on Earth is implied to be pretty nice. The crew have a range of names clearly intended to convey people of multinational origin: Abayev, MacDonald, Svensen. The introductory voiceover tells us that fifteen years will pass on Earth while they make the round-trip journey, but only eighteen months will pass aboard the ship due to time dilation.

Before we get into the story, I want to talk a bit about the lookof the film. Pavel Juráček and Jindřich Polák even visited Stanislaw Lem during production to ask him about how he imagined The Magellanic Cloud; but he was, apparently, not terribly interested in providing many details. So it was up to set designer Jan Zázvorka, which turns out to have been a very good thing, because the delightfully modernist interiors he built are incredible. Filmed in striking, high-contrast black and white by Jan Kališ, this is an environment of pronounced geometry and open spaces, carefully placed light and shadows, octagonal corridors and long perspectives. The exterior shots of the ship are largely forgettable, and inside there are plenty of standard sci fi technological details—the usual flashing lights and unlabeled buttons—but it scarcely matters because the rest of the environment is so beautiful.

The first part of the film is essentially a slice-of-life look at Ikarie’s journey. We learn how the crew eats, how they stay healthy, how they socialize, what they left behind, what they hope to discover. In a very obvious narrative example of Chekhov’s Gun—with a robot on the stage rather than a firearm—they tease Antony, an elderly scientist, for bringing a beloved, outdated robot aboard as a personal item. (The robot, Patrick, seems to share some robot genetics with Forbidden Planet’s Robby.) A young couple embarks upon a happy flirtation; a married couple worries about their unborn child. It’s all very congenial and pleasant, with much of the same feel that would come from moments of downtime aboard the Enterprise when Star Trek premiered a few years later.

Ikarie’s journey runs into its first trouble during Antony’s amazingly groovin’ birthday party, where everybody was having a grand time drinking martinis, dancing, and sharing huffs of earthy scents in place of cigarettes. An alarm interrupts the festivities: the ship has spotted an unexpected object in space. Closer inspection reveals it to be a spaceship. After some debate about the best way to greet potential extraterrestrials—with impersonal robots or friendly faces?—they send two men over to check it out. Just as I appreciate the inclusion of time dilation in the travel time and the presence of women on the crew, I also appreciate the film’s attempt to show some realistic zero-gravity movement in this section—especially considering that in 1963, humans had been going to space for all of two years.

They discover that it’s not an alien ship after all, but a ship from Earth’s dark and violent past—that is, the year 1987, and implied to be American, or at least distinctly Western. The men from Ikarie learn that the people aboard were poisoned, presumably by the final two crew members, in an ill-fated attempt to save themselves as they ran out of air. I love a spaceship full of corpses, it’s one of my favorite sci fi tropes, so I appreciate this entire tense sequence in which the men explore the derelict ship. The moment in which the desiccated flesh crumbles from the pilot’s skull is a particularly great, gruesome image that I totally want to steal for the next time I write a novel about a spaceship full of corpses.

But it ends poorly for the two men from Ikarie as well, because the ship is carrying nuclear weapons in addition to poison, one of which is accidentally armed during the search of the ship. It explodes before the men can get away, killing them instantly—which I was absolutely not expecting, even though the movie opened with a scene proving that the journey would eventually encounter some very serious problems. There is anger among the crew back on Ikarie, most of it directed at the humans of the past, the ones who built chemical and nuclear weapons, then fled Earth only to bring all that careless greed and violence with them. (I would also be angry if in the year 2163 the relics of the Reagan Era are still ruining everything. I’m already angry about that in the 2024.)

After the tragic encounter with the 20^th-century ship, the crew of Ikarie face some more excitement: the Dark Star (not to be confused with Dark Star (1974), which we’ll watch during this film club’s future John Carpenter month), the mysterious radiation, the equally mysterious force field that saves them from the radiation, and poor Michael almost losing his mind, as shown in the film’s opening.

When they reach Alpha Centauri’s White Planet, they are triumphant and excited, a mood emphasized by the successful birth of a new baby. Not only have they achieved the goal of their journey in finding life on another planet, but this life has already proven itself to be helpful in protecting their ship from the dangerous Dark Star.

The movie ends very abruptly after that, but the point is made: their journey was a success, they found what they hoped to find, they are breathless moments away from making contact, the galaxy is full of exciting things to discover and encounter.

The bright optimism of the ending just makes the changes in the American dub so much worse, but never mind all that. Let’s pretend it never existed, now that we have the original to appreciate.

I love this ending, abrupt though it is, as a natural extension of the themes set up in that great sequence aboard the ’80s spaceship full of corpses. Because the film is saying space exploration is dangerous, but worthwhile. It will take a while. We’ll fuck it up before we get it right. We’re always going to bring our problems with us. But when we get there, it’s going to be even more worthwhile if we’re not going out there conquer or colonize or make money—all the usual reasons humans have historically gone places—but simply to discover.

At the same time, it’s very interesting to me how much commentary about this film frames that optimism as nothing more than Soviet propaganda. It’s not entirely off-base; Ikarie XB-1’s screenwriter Pavel Juráček would come to be very critical of the film himself, viewing it as a failed attempt to work within a utopian vision of the future without accepting it unquestioningly. Less than a decade later, Juráček would be blacklisted from the Soviet-controlled Czechoslovak film industry for his absurdist satirical film Case for a Rookie Hangman, when it was judged that his “activities disrupted the socialist social order.” So I think it’s a mistake to view Ikarie XB-1 as nothing more than propaganda. It is, yes, presenting a socialist future as a good one, and the entire sequence with the derelict ship is a critique of capitalism, but there is a difference between a story intended to impose a future and a story intended to imagine a future, however imperfectly it does so.

For me, there something refreshing about Ikarie XB-1’s kind of optimism. Not only because there is often a tendency for science fiction films of any era, from anywhere in the world, to be cynical about science, but also because sometimes it feels like it’s almost fashionable these days for sci fi to be more interested in asserting that we can’t do exciting things like travel to other stars or live on other planets, rather than imagining how we can.

That’s what Ikarie XB-1 is doing: imagining how future space travel might go, from the lofty mission goal of discovering life on another planet right down to the minute detail of everybody on board taking their vitamins. Science fiction is a massive genre, with room for any kind of story. I want there to always be one little corner that saves some room for imagining the great and exciting things we can do and how we might be able to do them.

What did you think about Ikarie XB-1 and its rather domestic portrayal of interstellar travel? Has anybody seen the Voyage to the End of the Universe cut and have thoughts on the two versions? Why do you think the ship is called Icarus, because I honestly couldn’t find an explanation for such an ominously portentous name for a ship that never suffers any tragic fate? Do you also love it when a movie provides a surprise spaceship full of corpses?

We Hear Earth is Lovely This Time of Year

Last month we sent humans into space, so this month we’re bringing some aliens down to Earth. It’s weird how so many of them showed up after WWII to offer pointed commentary about the nature of humanity.

April 3 – The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), directed by Robert Wise
An alien goes to Washington D.C. during the Cold War, and seventy years later some people on the internet still insist Golden Age American sci fi was apolitical.
Watch: Cultpix, Apple, Google Play, Amazon, YouTube, Vudu, Microsoft, Hoopla (if available).
[Note: Hoopla and similar site Kanopy are streaming services that allow you to use U.S. public or university library logins to access videos. I have no idea if public library systems in other countries have something similar—if they do, let me know. Support your public libraries!]
View the trailer here.

April 10 – The Mysterians (1957), directed by Ishiro Honda
Aliens go to Japan in the 1950s and probably do not actually come in peace.
Watch: Criterion, FlixFling. And, as always, I suggest a search of YouTube and the Internet Archive, although the quality of different uploads seems to vary widely.
View the trailer here.

April 17 – The Brother From Another Planet (1984), directed by John Sayles
An alien crash-lands on Ellis Island and experiences Harlem in the ’80s.
Watch: This film is widely believed and reported to be in the public domain since its release, so you can watch it in any number of places, including Amazon, Roku, Tubi, Shout TV, Apple, all over YouTube, and Internet Archive.
View the trailer here.

April 24 – Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), directed by Steven Spielberg
Alien graduate students go to Wyoming to complete their thesis research on columnar jointing in unique intrusions of phonolite porphyry. At least that’s why I would go to other planets: to look at cool rocks.
Watch: Apple, Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, Vudu, Microsoft. There’s the original version, the special edition, and the director’s cut/collector’s edition, but, hey, just watch whichever version you feel like.
View the trailer here. [end-mark]

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Movies & TV Late Night With the Devil

Late Night with the Devil Asks: Is There Anything Scarier Than a Desperate TV Star?

The power of Sweeps Week compels you!

By Leah Schnelbach

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Published on March 25, 2024

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Of all the movies this year, Late Night with the Devil, written and directed by Colin and Cameron Cairnes, might be my #1 Most Anticipated of 2024. It has everything I love: body horror, period-accurate horror, meta commentary on my favorite genre, David Dastmalchian, The Devil. And the movie lived up to a lot of my hopes! I’ll talk about how it worked and how it fell short in non-spoiler and spoiler sections below. But first, unfortunately: a note on its use of AI.

I had already bought tickets and planned my review when I heard about the use of AI. Part of me wants to draw a deep line in the sand and refuse to discuss any creative work that uses that shit even slightly. Part of me doesn’t want to dismiss or ignore a movie that a lot of people worked on because of one poor decision that a lot of them had nothing to do with. If my info is up-to-date, it seems like AI art was used in a few interstitial shots, and that when the movies was made two years ago, they were exploring it as an interesting new tool, which, well, I would argue against that. In fact, while I’ve come down on the side for reviewing the film, let me be clear. With the caveat that AI—or the thing people call “AI”, it’s not, it’s not intelligent, it does not have consciousness, ffs, get a grip—is EVIL. Genuinely evil, not just horror-movie-evil. Potential-to-destroy-art-and-society EVIL. We have to reject it, as a species, because a certain type of person is going to keep trying this shit, just like they tried to get us all to say “content” instead of writing, film, painting, thinking, etc. We can’t let it slide.

AI cannot make art.

Art isn’t content—it’s how humanity knows itself.

You, person reading this, are neither a consumer of content, nor a collection of content. Don’t make me play David Bowie’s Top of Pops “Starman” performance at you, cause I’ll fucking do it.

OK now that all of that’s out of the way: Late Night with the Devil!

It’s an inventive retro horror movie that didn’t completely land for me, despite a lot of great moments, but that I’m excited to watch again. The 1970s atmosphere is just about pitch perfect—I think they could have made the stock a little grainier but still, if you’re one of those families that puts Christmas decorations up immediately after Halloween, put this sucker on a double bill with The Holdovers.

The movie opens with a brief documentary-style introduction telling us that Jack Delroy (my beloved David Dastmalchian) is the host of a late-night show called Night Owls who desperately wants to beat Johnny Carson in the ratings. There are hints that he’s maybe gone a little too far to achieve this. Then, on Halloween Night 1977, he invites four special guests onto his show: Christou, a psychic, Carmichael the Conjurer, a former magician now styling himself as a professional skeptic/debunker of supernatural phenomena, Dr. June Ross-Mitchell, parapsychologist, and her charge, Lilly, the only surviving member of a Satanic cult. The movie unspools in real time as the footage from the episode, in glorious grainy 1970s color, with the behind-the-scenes stuff that happens during the commercial breaks shot in black-and-white.

The four guests interact with each other, Jack argues with his producer, his sidekick Gus trots around asking if there have been script changes, and everyone gets increasingly frantic as Jack eggs them on, hoping to get a 40 share in the ratings. Obviously, he gets considerably more than that, otherwise there wouldn’t be a movie.

David Dastmalchian takes this star turn and runs with it. He’s absolutely perfect and present, and makes Jack come alive in every smirk at the camera, every moment when you can’t tell if he’s really feeling a human emotion, or playing to his audiences’ sympathies for ratings. Rhys Auteri plays sidekick Gus, who is, like most non-Andy-Richter sidekicks, the butt of Jack’s jokes. He also attempts to act as Jack’s conscience as the host’s desire for ratings careens out of control. The guests are also note perfect. Fayssal Bazzi plays Christou as so committed to the bit that he might actually believe he’s psychic. Ian Bliss plays Carmichael the Conjurer as a sleazy blowhard who might actually be driven by a sincere desire to keep people from being swindled, but might also just love stirring shit. And Laura Gordon as Dr. June Ross-Mitchell is a perfect nod to Exorcist II’s Dr. Gene Tuskin. Does she care about Lilly? I think so, but she does have books to sell, and she somehow keeps caving when people want her to do on-air spirit conversations despite all the ethical reservations she claims to have. Ingrid Torelli captures Lilly’s creepiness: Is she the socially awkward and disturbed former cult member? Is she actually possessed by a demonic entity she calls “Mr. Wriggles”, or does she simply think she’s possessed? I think the best aspect of this, though, is how guileless she seems—this is a 1970s child, who only has access to like four TV channels and a rotary phone, who can’t imagine an internet. She’s never taken a selfie. She’s dazzled by the cameras, and keeps staring into them and smiling because she’s grown up in a foreign land where people aren’t constantly recording themselves. It’s a great touch.

Where this movie really shines like the light reflecting off a disco ball is in the attention to the 1970s. The cheesy theme music, the color palette of the set, the clothes in various shades of brown and burgundy—if you plunked Dick Cavett into one of the Night Owls chairs, he’d feel right at home. The Cairnes brothers keep a fine balance between slightly nudging us about how absurd and antiquated it all looks, and being absolutely sincere about Jack as a real human person who has suffered tragedy, but who’s also a slightly sleazy talk show host desperate for fame. A few minutes into the found footage, the movie has completely bought into itself. The only time it winks at the audience is much later—and that’s a very pointed wink, with a purpose.

This is why part of me wonders if seeing it on television might make it even better. I saw it in the theater, in a surprisingly crowded theater for a late afternoon showing, and the audience was really engaged; I heard gasps and laughs throughout. I love watching horror in a dark room full of people—but I find myself wondering how much more effective it would be if I stumbled across this on TV, with little idea of what I was going into. If you want to recreate that, I’d advise you to duck out now before I start spoiling things, and watch Late Night with the Devil in the dark, at somewhere around 2am, when it plays on Shudder. It won’t be quite as good as coming across it by accident, but I’m planning to see how it changes the experience.

But now let me get into the full-spoiler discussion. I’ve been thinking about this idea of “found media” anyway, with people on the internet lamenting the fact that you can’t just accidentally trip over some interesting older film on cable or in a mom-and-pop video store like you used to. Last week I saw people arguing about whether The Matrix is still relevant to The Youths (so what if it isn’t? The Youths can always watch Speed Racer or, perhaps even better, V for Vendetta) whether Kids These Days watch anything from even five years ago, let alone 30. This stuck in my head a bit as this original horror film opens against yet another Ghostbusters legacy sequel with a dozen huge ideas stuffed into a creaking, leaking vessel that barely qualifies as a movie. (And before you get weird, I’ll have you know that Child Leah based a disturbing amount of their personality on Dr. Peter Venkman—but I still have no need or desire for these rehashes.) Late Night with the Devil is an interesting way to engage with the past. If Kids These Days watch it, they’ll get a pretty accurate sense of ‘70s horror and ‘70s talk shows, but more than that, they’ll get a fun, knotty horror movie that spends most of its time on slow burn suspense. A movie that respects their intelligence and rewards it.

Everything in the film is obviously leading to the encounter with “the devil” and then to the moment when Dr. Ross-Mitchell loses control of Lilly and the devil attacks everyone. Anything else is a letdown—and in some ways Late Night with the Devil more than fulfills its promise, but in others it falls short. Where I thought it was brilliant was that in the initial conversation between the doctor and Lilly, everything that happens can actually be explained away by Carmichael. If you know anything about psychic powers and the debunking thereof, you can pick it apart as you’re watching it.

When Carmichael then asks permission to hypnotize Gus, to prove how malleable the human mind is, the debunking becomes the text of the film. Carmichael hypnotizes Gus into thinking he’s full of worms, but he also hypnotizes the other guests, the studio audience, and the viewers at home. Where the movie takes a really fun step is that the hypnosis plays out as though all of us watching the movie have been hypnotized as well, and it does it pretty seamlessly. There’s a moment when Carmichael winks directly into the camera where I realized, “Oh, OK, I am also under hypnosis now” and was waiting for the reveal, but it still worked. Knowing I was being tricked didn’t undercut the gross fun of the worms. (If the shrieks of the audience are anything to go by, everyone in my theater bought into it, too.)

(Also, how weird is it that two movies, made in 2022, heavily featuring worms, are now getting a Spring 2024 release?)

This whole section of the film was note perfect. The problem comes after this, in the ending. Jack demands that they play the tape of the conversation with Mr. Wriggles, to verify that there was no hypnosis, no studio trickery. And it’s authentic, Carmichael starts getting freaked out, and then, of course, Mr. Wriggles actually comes bursting through Lilly and killing people. That’s the only way this movie could end. The problem for me at least, was that this giant over-the-top killing spree felt less visceral than Carmichael’s hypnosis. Having the demon shoot Palpatine-ish lightning bolts at everyone just wasn’t as horrifying as watching worms burst out of Gus’ stomach, or watching Jack realize that the demon was speaking to him, directly, and seemed to know him. Jack’s own freefall through hallucinations was good, but I don’t think it quite paid off the hints that he’d made a deal with dark forces—and also if he knew he made that deal, why invite them onto the show? Wouldn’t you be dancing as fast as you could to avoid the Devil? (I haven’t made any deals yet—I don’t think—so I don’t know how it works.) And finally, while on the one hand I like the idea that the found footage simply stops, and that’s the end of the movie, it opened with the premise that there was a documentary about Jack’s last show—where was the end of the documentary? I’ve been thinking about Asteroid City roughly once every 7 minutes since I watched it last May, and it used the similar promise of a wraparound documentary about a live broadcast. It, also, dealt with its ending by delivering the audience into raw emotion, rather than wrapping things up in a neat documentary bow, so I’m OK with that, but I think I just wanted it to be even scarier.

If you promise me the Devil, I want the Devil. Late Night with the Devil is set in October 1977, four years after The Exorcist shattered box office records and redefined what “blockbuster” meant. You can watch documentaries about the cultural impact—it was huge. Talk shows really did bring psychologists and parapsychologists and exorcists on to talk about the phenomenon. It could be that I missed some stuff, but I only caught one real full reference to the film (even though we’re in a universe that includes Johnny Carson), and this might be me overthinking things, as I have a tendency to do, but I kind of wanted Late Night with the Devil to acknowledge the pop culture that everyone on the Night Owls set, and in the studio audience, would presumably share when they walk into a live broadcast of a conversation with the Devil.

But still, I think there are a lot of great ideas here, so I don’t want to dwell too much on where it fell short.

[END OF SPOILERS KLAXON]

Late Night with the Devil is a flawed film, but it’s reaching for something really interesting, it commits to the bit, and the cast is absolutely stellar. It’s worth a trip to the theater, but if it isn’t playing near you I’d recommend setting an alarm for 2am once it hits Shudder on April 19th.[end-mark]

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Movies & TV Star Trek: Discovery

Star Trek: Discovery’s Doug Jones Hints Saru Might Make Appearance in Starfleet Academy

The actor teases what’s in store for his Star Trek character

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on March 28, 2024

Credit: Michael Gibson/Paramount+

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Credit: Michael Gibson/Paramount+

The final season of Star Trek: Discovery is almost here, and one can’t help but hope that the characters we’ve met over the course of the show’s five seasons might make appearances elsewhere in the Star Trek franchise.

On that front, there’s some good potential news: During a roundtable discussion Reactor attended, Doug Jones, who plays Saru on Discovery, teased that we might see more of the Kelpien.

“Saru, he’s been on a trajectory of one promotion after another, it feels like,” Jones said.

He added with a sly smile, “He’s reaching a point and maybe an age and a maturity and a wisdom level, where he might be asked to come be a guest speaker at Starfleet Academy… perhaps.”

Jones’ comment was vague enough that it could be interpreted as Saru joining Tilly (Mary Wiseman) at the Academy during the upcoming season of Discovery. I’d put my 21st-century money, however, on Jones teasing that Saru will be at least be a guest star on the new Star Trek series, Starfleet Academy. If that is the case, his presence further supports the assumption that the show will take place in Discovery’s timeline (aka 3190, after the Burn).

One thing we know for sure, however, is that Season Five of Discovery will see the relationship between Saru and his paramour, the Vulcan T’Rina (Tara Rosling), grow.

“At the last episode of Season Four, we finally held hands, and the crowd went nuts,” Jones said about Saru and T’Rina’s romance. “That was so sweet to see such an innocent love story unfolding.”

Jones added that the relationship will continue to unfold in Season Five. And while the actor was coy as to what will happen, he did hint at what’s in store for the two: “They face their challenges. The closer you get, the more conflict you might find, in places you never thought to look for it. With Saru’s career advancement, opportunities coming, and how he weighs that out against his relationship with T’Rina. Can they work in unison? Can we all do this together and get the most out of career and relationship, and love? I think they’re going to find a way. I hope so.”

You watch the first two episodes of the fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery when the show premieres on April 4, 2024 on Paramount+. Subsequent episodes drop weekly, with the finale airing May 30, 2024. [end-mark]

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Movies & TV Star Trek: Discovery

Star Trek: Discovery’s Sonequa Martin-Green Says Season 5 Will Have “A Sense of Joy and Adventure”

There’s gravity to the final season, but everyone will still get to have fun

By Vanessa Armstrong

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Published on April 1, 2024

Credit: James Dimmock/Paramount+

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Credit: James Dimmock/Paramount+

“Remember, it’s an adventure!”

That, according to star Sonequa Martin-Green, was the advice the writers on Star Trek: Discovery told the cast when they shot the fifth and final season of the show.

During a roundtable discussion with Martin-Green that Reactor attended, the actor, who plays Captain Michael Burnham, shared how everyone—even before the cast and crew knew they were filming the series’ final episodes—knew this season would be different than the ones that came before it.

“We knew that we wanted to make a tonal shift,” Martin-Green said. “[Showrunner] Michelle Paradise was really vocal about that. She let us in on that process, and she said we really want this to be an adventure. We want this to be our Indiana Jones season. We want everybody to have fun.”

That doesn’t mean, however, that Season Five will be light on the major challenge the USS Discovery crew faces. “We went even bigger with our subject matter,” teased Martin-Green. “But even while we went bigger, we wanted to bring levity to the gravity of it all….”

The adventure the crew goes on is something that Paradise said in a separate roundtable was something that had been brewing with the writers since Season Four, and as such wasn’t something they thought they’d explore when the show was first created.

Alex Kurtzman, the co-creator of several Star Trek shows, including Discovery, also reflected how certain developments in the series came about as the show’s seasons passed. “I don’t know that we necessarily thought when we created the show that we’d be jumping to the 32nd century, and that turned out to be a total delight for us, and I think a delight for people who watch the show,” he shared during a separate roundtable discussion.

Kurtzman added that Burnham’s character arc—moving from a mutineer to a Starfleet captain—was something he and co-creator Bryan Fuller wanted to have happen from the beginning. These two contrasting examples, said Kurtzman, reflect how Discovery—for lack of a better word—discovered what kind of show it would be.

The first two episodes in the fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery premiere on April 4, 2024 on Paramount+. Subsequent episodes drop weekly, with the finale airing May 30, 2024. [end-mark]

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Featured Essays Marvel Cinematic Universe

Madripoor Examined: Orientalism and the MCU’s Fictional City

Never given a specific location in comics, Madripoor’s placement in the Indonesian archipelago of the MCU raises questions going forward

By Thom Truelove

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Published on April 9, 2024

Credit: Marvel Studios

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Credit: Marvel Studios

The Chinese saying “Tiān gāo huángdì yuǎn” means “The sky is high and the emperor is far away” and implies an attitude of “while the cat’s away the mice will play.”

This may be used as the most charitable description of the city of Madripoor as represented in Marvel Comics and the cinematic universe it has inspired.

Chris Claremont may not have been aware of the Chinese phrase when he introduced Madripoor in New Mutants Vol. 1, No. 32 . The release date for the issue, 25 June 1985, was 12 years and one week from the expiration of the United Kingdom’s lease on Hong Kong, on which the fictional location was partly based. Madripoor has also been said to have taken inspiration from Singapore, as an important port, cultural melting pot, and former British colony.

In the 40 years since Madripoor’s debut, through 359 comic book issues, it has been characterized as the hub of various forms of sketchy financial practices, illicit trade, and organized crime. The island principality is a de facto rogue state with a history of piracy and drug trafficking. All forms of gambling appear to be legal as does some unethical scientific experimentation. Stateless sponsors of terrorism, particularly Hydra, have often sought haven there.

Writers of the comics have used Madripoor to contrast morally ambiguous protagonists such as Black Widow, the Punisher, Deadpool and others with villains so compromised they can only be described as evil. The setting is, in nearly 70% of the issues that feature it, a showcase for Wolverine, X-23, and/or other mutants making the name of Madripoor a signal of imminent mutant storylines in the MCU.

But it is a beacon of another kind—to Indonesians. On May 2, 2012, Zonautara.com ran an article: “Dimana letak Madripoor, pulau yang disebut di Indonesia dalam serial Marvel ‘The Falcon and The Winter Soldier’?” by Ronny Adolof Buol. Prompted by the following lines in the third episode of the series, the article draws attention to the choice by Marvel Studios to place Madripoor within Indonesia’s borders.

This explanation of Madripoor is provided by an American victim of Russian brainwashing and a Sokovian, presumably the recipient of a Soviet Bloc-style education. “Lawless” might mean “imperialist” to one or both of them on some level.

I was actively collecting comic books when Madripoor was introduced. The association with Indonesia had never been made quite this clear or canonical. Until this scene, I had never associated Madripoor with Indonesia. This is a sour note in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, heard again in Echo.

But, of course, I’d have noticed this second sort of signal even without Bucky’s exposition.

My father was born in 1939 in the West Java city of Sukabumi, in what was then still the Dutch East Indies; he was born under colonial rule. During World War II, when the Japanese invaded, they placed Dutch and Indonesian alike (of which my father was both) in prison camps. He was only three years old. I do not know in which camp he was held but he would very likely have been under the guard of the Japanese 16th Army.

General Douglas MacArthur is said to have wanted to lead Allied troops in the liberation of Java but such orders never came from either the Joint Chiefs or President Franklin Roosevelt. Most of the Japanese presence only came to an end after their surrender, which was announced on 15 August 1945. Two days later, Indonesia declared itself independent from the Netherlands. The war for that independence lasted 4.4 years after which, the boy who would become my father was deported, along with all Dutch and half-Dutch like my father, to the Netherlands, a country to which he’d never been, at the age of ten.

Thus far, episodes that show or mention Madripoor have twice almost paused for a remark bordering on racism or to make a cheap joke.

In The Falcon and the Winter Soldier episode “Power Broker,” specific reference to the odor of Madripoor is made. This same point is made in the comics (Old Man Logan, Vol. 2, № 22). In neither case is it complimentary.

In Echo episode “Lowak,” we get the comment “…but that’s all stuff from Madripoor.” This seems like a ‘file the serial numbers off’ the stereotype that cheap crap comes from Southeast Asia. It’s offensive and completely ignores the fact that such merchandise is made by exploited workers. It may be fair to posit that this is played as a joke and may be meant to express the Native American experience of inauthentic knock-off tribal artifacts being manufactured on the cheap more than 9000 miles away.

Some of this is literally by design. Kari Skogland, the director and executive producer of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier said of the fictional setting: “We wanted to give Madripoor its own individual idea space, signature place. I wanted it to be somewhere both exotic and a bit familiar but off-grid; to have a real street feel but be quite colorful and eye-popping.”

This is Orientalism. In short, the MCU is serving a “chop suey” of tropes about Southeast Asia that were passé since at least the late ‘80s. The representation is as inauthentic an imitation as the aforementioned dish invented to cater to white tastes. Until they make a distinction between Madripoor and Indonesia, what the MCU says about one technically counts against the other.

Madripoor would not risk being offensive had no mention of the Indonesian archipelago had been made. Fictional locations have already been used to play on real world themes in the MCU to great effect.

A year and a month after the annexation of Crimea by Russia, “Sokovia” first appeared in Avengers: Age of Ultron. The story made use of Soviet Era themes to give us understandable origins for both Wanda Maximoff and Helmut Zemo and did so without visiting the true tragedies of life behind the Iron Curtain or the consequences of current Russian irredentist ambition.

Diligent research of and respect for Mesoamerican cultures is strongly evident in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The Talokan language is based on Yucatec Mayan. The story of Wakanda as told in Black Panther does not shy away from treatment of slavery and the plight of the African diaspora. It provided the much-needed term of “colonizer” to the experience and, if only based on its box office performance, was seen by many as an uplifting story.

Given that the Dutch presence in Indonesia placed such a priority on spices to export, little arable land was devoted to crops to feed the indigenous people. Natives starved. We—Indonesians—might use the “colonizer” term as well.

The center of Madripoor (based on the simplified map in Marvel Atlas, Vol. 1, № 1) would be near 0° 25′ 51.6″ N, 104° 8′ 45.6″ E, making it 57.574 miles south of the southernmost point of Singapore and 29.779 miles north of the equator. This would also mean Madripoor is one of the Riau Islands, part of Indonesia in the real world.

Let us imagine Madripoor began not as a hideout for the nefarious but as a sanctuary of a different sort. If Marvel in its cinematic universe and comics issues provided a history for Madripoor from which it had fallen, heroes including some new, native ones could work to move the location from tragic circumstances toward more hopeful outcomes. That is what heroes do.

The nearest major city to Madripoor is Singapore; its name derives from the Sanskrit words simhah and puram, meaning “lion” and “city,” respectively. The suffix of Madripoor may suggest a cognate with that of Singapore’s. The potential origin of the “Madri” portion may come from real-world history of the region.

In 1413 or thereabouts, the Riau Islands of which Madripoor must be presumed to be, became part of the Malacca Sultanate. “Madri” may be a contraction of madrasa making the full name the equivalent of the city of the school. European ambitions in Southeast Asia began with the Portuguese. The Malacca Empire fell in 1511. Whatever the ancient names for Madripoor may have been, it might have been changed to Mother’s City from mãe or madre.

It might have become Madripoor some time after the 13th century when Islam began to establish itself in the region. The first two syllables may therefore have been borrowed from madrasa in acknowledgement of the island having been a center for instruction.

Chinese accounts of piracy in the area that would include Madripoor exist from the 15th-century. As a tactic, it is known to have been used as an implement of state by many polities in the region.

In an effort to deal with piracy along the route between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, the British and Dutch Empires signed the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of 1824. This led to the creation of the British Straits Settlements which included Malacca, Dinding, Penang, Singapore—and presumably Madripoor.

The European parties signed the treaty in secrecy, without participation by the local nobility. The Sultanate of Johor was effectively divided and a British-aligned puppet monarch was installed in Singapore.

The period of piracy to which Bucky refers almost certainly began as indigenous reaction to the illegitimate shenanigans by England and the Netherlands. A European perspective might conceive of this response as “lawless ways”—as little different from true piracy. From the point of view of Malay and Indonesian people, these new privateers from Madripoor would have been seen as freedom fighters.

The Disney+ series have thus far depicted the ramifications of the Partition of India from a Pakistani-American perspective in Ms. Marvel (2022). In the following year, What If…? season two featured the debut of a new Native American superhero who had not previously been seen in Marvel Comics. The first season of Echo (2024), part of Phase 5, featured a very different Native American story. All of these stories show us that Marvel Studios knows what representation means. The excitement provided to members of the audience for having been seen was made explicitly, proudly textual in the finale of Moon Knight:

Since the MCU have made Madripoor’s placement within the Indonesian archipelago canonical, they have created a troublesome situation for themselves and Indonesian representation. This is not yet unsalvageable if they begin to make a clear distinction between Madripoor’s disagreeable reputation and the Indonesian culture they’ve placed it beside.

In the real world, Indonesia conducts anti-piracy patrols of the Strait of Malacca, through which over one quarter of global trade transits. Their main partners are Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, and India.

Show us the Indonesian anti-piracy hero. While the Indian Ocean is vast, it is entirely likely that an Indonesian science hero might be among those who have taken an interest in the petrified remains of Tiamut in that adjacent body of water, last seen in Eternals (2021).

Alternatively, we could meet some home-grown heroes from Madripoor. If there is a fictional location in the MCU badly in need of the equivalent of Robin Hood, Madripoor’s Hightown and Lowtown would be the most likely place to find them. Flashback heroes could show us the original purpose of the sanctuary of Madripoor before it became subverted for criminal purposes or introduce us to the early 19th century resistance Bucky should more properly have called privateers.

The audience of the MCU will probably not be treated to X-Men stories until Phase 7—the second half of 2026 or later. By the time the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning reopens, the development of Indonesia’s new capital city—Nusantara—will have entered its Phase 2. That means there’s still ample time for the writers and directors to differentiate Madripoor from Indonesia and offer the kind of representation and inspiration superheroes can provide. [end-mark]

The post Madripoor Examined: Orientalism and the MCU’s Fictional City appeared first on Reactor.

Lists television

10 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Shows With Stellar Freshman Seasons to Watch in 2024

Catch on these excellent shows before their second seasons

By Melody L. Simpson

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Published on March 22, 2024

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In a time when television shows are renewed and then suddenly canceled just a few short months later, it’s vital to get more eyes on the shows that we love sooner rather than later. Let’s give these networks a reason to stop the constant renewal reversals and make them a thing of the past. So let’s talk about a number of new speculative shows that have entered or will be premiering their sophomore seasons soon. If you love these shows, now is the time to talk about them with everyone you know and get them on board. Let’s dive in.

Severance

Severance (AppleTV+) is without question, the most successful sci-fi show on Apple TV+. When you watch the first season, you’ll know exactly why: The show takes place in a world where people can choose to have their memories of work and personal lives surgically divided. So what happens when one officer worker begins to investigate this division and who benefits from it? You’ll have to watch and see how this speculative mystery thriller unfolds. While the show is binge-worthy, it’s also a show that asks its viewers to be fully immersed in this viewing experience with no distractions. This show is so rich—top-notch storytelling, pitch perfect directing (seven of the nine episodes were directed by Ben Stiller), the music, lighting, sets—everything plays such a necessary part in bringing this story to life. In 2022, the series entered the Emmy Awards race for the first time with 14 nominations and took home two wins. Severance is a chilling examination of work-life balance and the sacrifices we make for it in a way you’ve never seen before. Season two is slated to premiere in 2024.

Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur

There is a huge lack of diverse sci-fi and fantasy storytelling on the small screen and Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (Disney+) is a breath of fresh air amidst that lack. The animated action-adventure series, which is based on Marvel’s comic books, follows a 13-year-old prodigy who is the smartest character in the Marvel universe. But before she gives Iron Man and everyone else a run for their money, she’s a kid. She’s a kid who accidentally brings a dinosaur to present-day New York City. Together, the two fight crime on the Lower East Side as Lunella discovers her place and responsibility in the world as a super-genius. Did I mention she can switch consciousness with Devil Dinosaur? You’ll have to tune in to discover how this works. Season two premiered February 2, 2024.

Gen V

Gen V (Amazon Prime) is the breakout hit spin-off series to watch for fans who loved The Boys, which was adapted from the comic book series by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. Set at Godolkin University, the only college for superheroes in the nation, the series follows the first generation of superheroes who know they are superheroes because of Compound V. Only those who are ranked at the top have any shot of joining The Seven, Vought International’s elite superhero team that we came to know in The Boys. Just like The Boys, Gen V is not for children. This is a very mature series and it’s set in college, so if you appreciated the adult content in The Boys, Gen V is the spin off you’ve been waiting for. It’s raunchier, it’s got blood and guts, and it’s got a stellar story. Do you have to watch The Boys before you watch Gen V? No. You can watch either show first. With the actual return dates of both shows a mystery as of now, you have plenty of time to watch three seasons of The Boys and the first season of Gen V on Amazon Prime. 

Echo

Marvel’s first TV-MA series, Echo debuted on Disney+ this winter. It’s a series that tackles family and legacy in a way that we haven’t seen Marvel do before on the small screen. The story is set in Tamaha, Oklahoma where we meet Maya Lopez shortly before the tragic death of her mother. This takes her to New York City, where things get worse as the person she trusts the most raises her to be an assassin. Secrets are discovered. Decisions are made. And Maya heads back home with even bigger choices to make, this time testing her loyalties and putting her family at risk. 

Alaqua Cox is the first Deaf actress to lead a Marvel television series. She is also an amputee and her disability is written into her character’s story. Marvel also made sure to intertwine the richness of Native American culture throughout the show wouldn’t be complete without this care taken. 

The character of Maya Lopez was introduced in the Hawkeye series. While it is not required to watch Hawkeye beforehand, it is recommended if you have the time. The first season of Echo is magnificent, so get the popcorn ready and make a night for this five-episode event. 

The Ark

If you’re aching for a space drama with twists and turns like you’d never believe, The Ark (Syfy) is here to serve all of your greatest desires. Set 100 years in the future, when global warming has officially run us off the earth, spacecraft Ark One faces conflict after conflict in the race to keep the humanity alive. The stakes are raised immediately as the series begins when disaster strikes and the majority of the Ark’s senior officers are killed. How do you survive when most of the colonists on board aren’t qualified to get the ship to its final destination? When I tell you this show starts off with a bang and does not let up for any moment, I mean you will be at the edge of your seat with bated breath for all twelve episodes. Get ready for a ride. 

Silo/Beacon 23

Let’s cheat with a two-for-one here. Book-to-television series are hit or miss, so when I tell you not just one Hugh Howey series was a hit, but two… it’s almost too good to be true. But if you’ve read either the Silo or Beacon 23 series, you will not be disappointed. If you haven’t read these works, that’s okay, too. Both shows do a phenomenal job making the adaptations fully comprehensible and enjoyable without a need to be familiar with the original works. So for anyone who has a taste for psychological thrillers set in either a dystopian world or in space, you’ve found your next two shows to watch. The character development, the secrets, the mysterious high-ups holding together a completely broken system for their own selfish desires… both shows are packed with all of this and then plenty more. Gather your friends who love sci-fi for a fun weekend full of mystery, tension, and more on AppleTV+ and MGM+. The second season of Beacon 23 premiers April 2024 on MGM+. 

Fired on Mars

With thousands of layoffs over the past four years, this series might be triggering for some. Hear me out. I, too, was laid off at the beginning of the pandemic. So when I heard about Fired On Mars (Max), instinctively, I had no desire to watch an entire TV series about someone who experienced the same fate. But then I found out that the main character, whose job relocated him to literal outer space, is laid off with zero chance of returning home. Now that’s a satire if I ever heard of one. Could you imagine? Eight episodes is not nearly enough time to explore everything I wanted to see in this animated comedy, but what they’ve shown so far hits deeply. This show is so intelligent and deserves more recognition. I’m stunned that this series hasn’t garnered water cooler discussion because it will make people angry, and rightfully so. 

Halo

For someone who has never played the Halo video game a day in their life, the television adaptation on Paramount+, to my surprise, became one of my favorite new series of 2023. If you’re a sucker for military science fiction, Halo will do it for you. If you want to see some of the best sci-fi action scenes you’ve seen in a long time on the small screen, Halo is the show you want to tune into. If you want to see aliens attempt to annihilate human beings, buckle up. This action-packed series will take you on a ride for nine episodes that will leave you hankering for more. Take it from me, you don’t need to be a gamer to enjoy. Season two premiered February 8, 2024. 

The Last of Us

We can’t talk about Halo without talking about the video game adaptation that took over television this past year. The Last Of Us (HBO) recently announced that season two premieres in 2025, so you have plenty of time to watch the first season and play the game on Playstation before new episodes. Winner of eight Primetime Emmy Awards, Craig Mazin has masterfully brought this world to life, which is set when a global pandemic causes absolute chaos as those infected mutate. If you know people who don’t like zombies, watch this series with them. I guarantee this will bring them to our side. The Last Of Us is more than the zombies that wander the earth. It’s about the survivors—their pasts, their present, and their fight for the future. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll cheer, you’ll shout. You will feel all of the emotions with this one. Prepare the tissues. 

Interview With the Vampire

Based on the classic by Anne Rice, you might be thinking we didn’t need another adaptation of Interview With the Vampire (AMC). But this is one instance where you’ll be so happy to be wrong. It’s so culturally rich as it doesn’t shy away from the reality Louis faces as a Black man who is a vampire. By making this change, the series has a depth that most vampire stories don’t have by ignoring the aspects of racial tension over time. There is plenty more to love and appreciate about this series. Take my word for it. Watch it. Thank me later. Season two premieres May 12, 2024. 

The Power, School Spirits, the list goes on. What speculative shows in their freshman year do you love or plan on watching soon? Let me know in the comments![end-mark]

The post 10 Sci-Fi and Fantasy Shows With Stellar Freshman Seasons to Watch in 2024 appeared first on Reactor.

Featured Essays Polite Society

How Polite Society Conveys Its Characterization Through Martial Arts

The combination of thoughtful fight sequences and Jane Austen style humor created one of 2023’s best films

By Aamir Mehar

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Published on March 21, 2024

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As a teenager, I spent most days fixated on martial arts. I practiced Northern Shaolin kung fu, which involved sets of elegant but sharp movements (called “forms”), sparring, conditioning (stamina and strength work), and basic punches and kicks. I watched martial arts films like Tsui Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China and Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, I read books about Bruce Lee, and I impulsively demonstrated martial arts constantly at school and at family events. I also enjoyed science fiction, and years later, at university, I became a big fan of Jane Austen. Throughout all that time I was also dealing with the complexity of my identity as a “British Asian”; I’m both an Indian and someone who was born (and has always lived) in the UK.

Last year I heard, much to my surprise and immediate curiosity, about a film that actually combined many of those things into one work: British South Asian experiences, martial arts, and a Jane Austen quality. (It even had a science fiction element, which I found out later.) The film is called Polite Society, written and directed by Nida Manzoor, and I have trouble believing that it exists, even though I have seen it twice now.

Polite Society is about a martial arts and stunts-fixated British Asian teenager named Ria (Priya Kansara) and her increasing panic at the prospect of her art school dropout sister Lena (Ritu Arya) marrying a charming bachelor and geneticist named Salim (Akshay Khanna). Salim also happens to have a truly menacing mother named Raheela, played by Nimra Bucha. As the narrative continues, Ria explores as many options as possible to try and stop the wedding, taking things ludicrously far on more than one occasion, and just when it seems she must surely stop, she discovers that Salim (who is reminiscent of Austen’s deceitful Wickham rather than the Darcy comparison that Ria makes at one point) and Raheela are villains; they are planning to create a clone of Raheela and use Lena as a carrier for said clone. The film can be very silly–and it demands to be taken as both serious and unserious simultaneously–yet it also works, mainly because there is a human foundation to it all. That foundation is Ria’s terrible fear of losing her sister, and how losing Lena also means (to her) losing her own dream to become a stuntwoman.

Film scholar David Bordwell noted (when talking about “classic kung-fu movies”) that martial arts on the screen is a way of conveying character, and Polite Society taps into this style too. Manzoor has said that she wanted to explore the pain of being a teenage girl (when everything feels almost violently intense) through action. With this in mind, I’ll go through some of the most significant martial arts scenes in the film and break down how Manzoor and her team were able to explore characterization through combat in such a powerful manner.

One of the big fight scenes in the film is between Ria and Lena. (Lena has discovered that Ria has been interfering with her relationship with Salim, and confronts Ria in her room.) Their fight melds humor (the shot of their parents listening to their shouting with resignation from downstairs) with the vicious reality of a bitter dispute between siblings. The choreography in this scene echoes this concern; it’s like a mixture of UFC style combat with street fighting, and it’s horrifyingly over the top. Lena uses an elbow strike, a headbutt, a choke, and even burns Ria’s face with a hair appliance. Ria, who is such a fiery and aggressive personality throughout the film, fights quite defensively in this scene, showing her respect for her sister as well as her attachment to her.

As in the rest of the film, Ria doesn’t actually want to hurt Lena, but to save her from what she sees as a terrible fate. She uses what looks like Brazilian jiu-jitsu grappling to try and keep Lena from attacking (essentially holding her down on the ground), and only makes her own harsh attack (a bite) when Lena is choking her. At the end, Lena finally spits out the truth. She’s scared that she’s not good enough to ever become an artist, and this is why she’s decided to move on to marriage. The fight ends on that sad, tender note. Ria hasn’t been able to convince Lena of anything, and Lena is distraught at admitting her own sense of failure. Manzoor wanted this specific fight to be the “bloodiest” because a sibling knows what can hurt you the most, and while we see this in the actual fighting, it also comes through in that final confession from Lena. Ria has pushed her to a breaking point.

Perhaps the scene I enjoy the most is when Ria performs a dance as a diversion at Lena’s wedding to Salim. The dance itself is a homage to Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Devdas, a famous 2002 Bollywood film adaptation of a novel by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay. In the film, a character named Chandramukhi (played by Madhuri Dixit Nene) is dressed in a vibrant green dress and performs a dance set to “Maar Daala,” an unsettling but hypnotic song sung by Kavitha Krishnamurthy and KK. I don’t recall being a big fan of Devdas when I watched it a long time ago, but I’ve always liked that one song. The main line in the chorus of “Maar Daala” apparently translates as “my joy is killing me.” By using this as a song for her sister’s wedding, Ria gives what is normally a happy occasion a troubling, ominous feeling. Her movements reinforce this; she infuses the Devdas choreography with a martial intent in both her expressions and her gestures.

Sometimes Ria’s movements differ, like when she wonderfully throws in a pose from The Matrix at the very end of the song, beckoning to Salim as Morpheus did to Neo in their dojo sparring, or when she quite bluntly mimics shooting a gun at her own head while glaring at Salim. At other times, though, she uses the original choreography and it takes on a new, more aggressive tone due to the context, as in where she slices down with one hand into her palm just as Dixit did in Devdas. Coming from Ria, the motion looks like a chopping attack associated with martial arts. Dance and martial arts are often linked, especially when people describe fights seen on the screen. (Some have compared the beautiful wirework choreography in films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to dances.) Polite Society fuses martial arts and Indian dance through Ria’s performance in a way that I have never seen done.

After the dance, Ria ends up alone with Raheela, and has to fight her. Manzoor wanted this fight to feel like Ria was confronting a “Big Boss,” Ria’s ultimate villain. The fight with Raheela is similar to the one with Lena in the sense that Ria is once again the one being overpowered, but the style of this fight, and the emotional element of it, are both very different. The style in this one references classic kung fu cinema; Raheela uses motions that look traditional rather than modern, smoother and more graceful. Her skillful movements represent how slippery she is as a villain. She blocks attacks using the outside and inside of her forearm, and when she settles into a stance at one point it looks similar to something from Taijiquan (Tai Chi), with one hand formed in a hook-like gesture. Instead of brawling like Lena, she catches, redirects, and counters Ria’s strikes. Raheela even parries Ria’s punch using a clothes sash at one point, then snaps it at her to blind her, and uses the same sash to choke her; the fight arranger, Rob Lock, has said that he wanted to emphasize how malicious Raheela could be through her technique, and took these specific moves from Silat, a class of martial arts from South East Asia.

Even outside of the fighting, Raheela is incredibly creepy, but some of the impact behind that creepiness might be lost on members of the audience who aren’t familiar with the cultural context. I was always encouraged to call many elders who weren’t related to me “aunty” or “uncle” as a sign of respect. (I still do.) Elders hold a special place within the hierarchy of South Asian families, which can lead to a truly grim situation when they happen to be malicious. There is a sinister quality to this, where you have to be respectful to someone who, as Hamlet would put it, “may smile and smile and be a villain.” Raheela perfectly embodies this quality, which particularly comes out in the scene where Ria goes to her house to apologize for her behavior, and Raheela seems to accept it at first. Eventually things become more and more threatening, with an unsettling waxing scene and Ria then having to fight off flunkies and escape while Raheela laughs. It’s comedic, but in a way that also feels unfortunately real as it mimics the powerlessness one can feel in front of someone of higher “status.” While this is rooted in a specific cultural context, there is also once again a parallel to the work of Austen in the way outward politeness mixes with an antagonistic undercurrent, before that politeness then falls apart. Much like Austen’s Lady Catherine de Bourgh does with Elizabeth, Raheela attempts to control Ria. Both Ria and Elizabeth are outmatched in experience, wealth, and status, but they behave in unorthodox and rebellious ways, and never give in.

Manzoor still remembers to add a touch of sympathy for Raheela by referencing the lack of choice that women of her generation faced, and the bitterness that can arise from that. We even see another dash of sympathy at the end, when Ria finally defeats her and Raheela is left on the street, reaching out for Lena in despair. It’s ultimately her dream, rather than that of Ria or Lena’s, that shatters.

The lyrics in the ending credits song for the film, by X-Ray Spex, say it all: “Identity is the crisis, don’t you see?” Ria is obsessed with needing to be a “stuntwoman,” Lena is afraid to face failure as an “artist,” and Raheela is fixated on being reborn through a clone, to be the person she thinks she was “destined to be.” Their fighting throughout the film reflects their passions and fears. Raheela with her subtle and masterful movements, Lena with desperate brutality, and Ria, fighting with (as her friend puts it) admirable tenacity. Raheela tells Ria that she has “big dreams,” but really, she’s “utterly unremarkable.” Ria’s response—an elegant jumping spin kick that she has never been able to perform properly before—is the perfect response in a film that approaches martial arts as an integral part of characterization.[end-mark]

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Column Science Fiction Film Club

Silent Running: A 1970s Environmental Fable Remains Depressingly All Too Relevant 

Director Douglas Trumbull’s special effects and Bruce Dern’s intense performance anchor this haunting, melancholy classic.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on March 20, 2024

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Silent Running (1972) Directed by Douglas Trumbull. Starring Bruce Dern. Screenplay by Deric Washburn, Michael Cimino, and Steven Bochco.

For just a moment, let’s time travel back to the summer of 1962. In the U.S., John F. Kennedy is president and committed to sending astronauts to the moon. Dodger Stadium is brand new. The Supreme Court issues rulings declaring mandatory prayer in schools unconstitutional and decriminalizing nude photographs of men. The Cuban Missile Crisis is lurking just a few months in the future. And, starting in June as a lead-up to a September publication, The New Yorker begins serializing a little book called Silent Spring, in which marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson documents research into the harmful effects of man-made pesticides on the natural world.

Silent Spring had a huge and immediate impact on the American public, which Carson and her publisher, Houghton Mifflin, had very much expected and prepared for. There was somewhat panicked pushback from the U.S. government and chemical industry giants like DuPont and Monsanto, but all of that only made Silent Spring more influential in public opinion. A culture of unchecked growth and technological development had dominated life in the U.S. since the end of WWII, and Carson’s book was one of the many catalysts that prompted people to seriously ask if all that progress was doing more harm than good.

The environmental movement picked up momentum over the next decade. By the end of the 1960s, the Environmental Defense Fund, founded as a direct response to Silent Spring, was actively filing lawsuits to end use of the pesticide DDT. The first Earth Day was declared in 1970; the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was established that same year. Environmental concerns were in the news, in the halls of government, in the courtrooms, and in the public consciousness. It’s no surprise that those themes showed up in movie theaters as well.

Humanity’s impact on the natural world—whether our own Earth or other worlds—has always been a part of science fiction, but Silent Running was not initially meant to be an environmental story at all. Douglas Trumbull had recently finished working with Stanley Kubrick, creating the special effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, so he had big, thoughtful, serious science fiction on his mind when he first starting putting Silent Running together. His earliest conception of the film was about first contact with an alien civilization.

But it evolved, as stories tend to do, and what he ended up with is an environmental fable that simply—and not remotely subtly—calls out the dysfunction in humanity’s relationship with nature. Trumbull had never directed a film before, and in fact he would only direct one more feature in his life. (That would be Brainstorm (1983), which is largely remembered now for being Natalie Wood’s last movie, as she died during production.) What Trumbull is mostly known for is his absolutely legendary special effects work on some of Hollywood’s most influential sci fi films: 2001, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Blade Runner. So much of how we imagine science fiction to look comes from Trumbull’s special effects work.

Here are some fun details about how Silent Running was made, which I share for no real reason other than the fact that I love learning about this stuff and hope you do too:

• The exterior shots of Valley Forge and the other ships use a 25-foot model built from wood, metal, and plastic, with much of the mechanical detailing coming from literally hundreds of model kits of WWII airplanes and tanks.
• For the interior, Trumbull made a deal with the U.S. Navy to film inside the aircraft carrier USS Valley Forge, which was waiting to be decommissioned and scrapped at the Long Beach Naval Shipyard.
• The forests were filmed inside a hangar at the Van Nuys Airport, and many scenes with the stars and domes were done “in-camera,” that is, using projected footage in the live scene, rather than added afterward during processing.
• And, finally, the three robotic drones—Huey, Dewey, and Louie—are not mechanical at all, but are actors in costume: Mark Persons, Cheryl Sparks, Steven Brown, and Larry Whisenhunt, all double amputees. (Additional fun fact: A few years later, George Lucas would direct Ralph McQuarrie to consider the Silent Running drones as an example of what he wanted R2-D2 to look like.)

On that note, if the business and craft of making sci fi movies in ’70s Hollywood interests you, I recommend Trumbull’s lengthy 1978 interview with Fantastic Films Magazine.

Trumbull was inspired by working on 2001, but he wasn’t working with 2001 money. As a result the practical effects in Silent Running are a great example of doing a lot on a comparatively limited budget, just by looking around Los Angeles and getting creative with what was available. (We are talking about more than a million dollars; this is Hollywood budgeting, not normal people budgeting.) And the film still looks really, really good. The ship exterior is visually interesting, the sense of interior space is convincing, and the images of the darkness of space outside the forest domes are hauntingly effective.

But let’s be real. The most important special effect in Silent Running is Bruce Dern’s crazy eyes.

Dern plays Freeman Lowell, a man who has spent the better part of a decade aboard the spaceship Valley Forge, caring for the last remnants of Earth’s flora and forests. The film doesn’t explain why the last pieces of nature have been enclosed in domes and launched into space aboard American Airlines spacecraft—and I have questions about what the hell American Airlines was thinking with this sponsorship, because it does not make them look good. We learn that there are no trees or plants left on Earth, no parks or wild areas, no places where kids can dig in the dirt or run through the grass. There is also, apparently, “…hardly any disease. No poverty. And everybody has a job.” Everything has been replaced by absolute uniformity: everywhere is 75 degrees Fahrenheit and everybody looks and acts the same. (Feel free to insert your own joke about Hollywood here.)

The film doesn’t dig deeply into any of this; these details emerge when the characters are arguing. I’m skeptical enough to doubt fictional characters when they claim the world has no poverty or disease, nor am I entirely convinced the audience is supposed to buy it. (The whole world? Or just the world of white guys working corporate space jobs? I have questions.) It’s vague and muddled worldbuilding anyway, so we won’t dwell on it. Whatever the intent, as a person who likes trees and seasons a lot more than I like being an anonymous cog in the grinding wheels of capitalism, I agree with Lowell that this future Earth sounds pretty bleak. But even bleaker is the fact that of the few characters we meet in the film, only Lowell believes it’s a situation than can be changed.

When Valley Forge and its fleet receive orders to destroy the precious forests and return to Earth, with no explanation except that it’s time they get on with the business of commercial shipping, Lowell is crushed, but the other members of the expedition are happy to be going home. They acknowledge that it’s kinda sad to destroy the last of Earth’s forests, but to them it’s inevitable. They don’t even question that they’re doing it just so their bosses can make more money using the ships for something else. There’s no point in trying to fight it, or dream about a different world. One of them says, “The fact is, Lowell, if people were interested, something would have been done a long time ago.”

I’ll pause there to let everybody wince before we move on.

Lowell decides to do something about it. What he decides to do is murder: he kills his three crewmates to stop them from jettisoning the last forest dome, then stages an explosion so the other ships in the fleet think he’s suffering some sort of catastrophic mechanical failure. He sets course for Saturn, hoping to run away far enough that the other ships don’t follow.

Because Lowell is the only character on screen for the majority of the film, so much of the movie depends on how Dern plays him. Contemporaneous reviews of the film had some mixed opinions about Dern’s portrayal, but I come down on the side of loving it. Even before things start to go wrong, he’s wide-eyed and strident, soft-spoken but intense, and more than a little sanctimonious. His crew uniform has a prominent Smokey the Bear patch on it, but when he’s working in the forest dome he wears a loose robe to talk to rabbits and birds, like some sort of space-age St. Francis of Assisi, complete with Joan Baez on the soundtrack. (The music was composed by Peter Schickele, better known as musical satirist P.D.Q. Bach; Diane Lampert wrote the lyrics to the songs Baez sings.) He’s a hippie, a wild man of the woods, a bedraggled mystic, a wise hermit. He’s committed to his counterculture perspective. He’s an insufferable dinner companion.

The fact that he’s right about what a terrible decision it is to destroy the forests has nothing to do with how he comes across; there is no effort here to artificially link righteousness or morality with likability. Lowell’s crewmates are good-natured and affable—they’re also the ones who laugh while blowing up cute little bunnies with nuclear bombs.

But they are Lowell’s fellow humans and almost-friends, and their deaths weigh on his conscience, even though he believes he made the right choice. The way he unravels as the film goes on is fascinating, because he uses the robotic drones to replace the crew. He reprograms them to follow his lead when it comes to work, but also to keep him company in poker games. He even has them bury the corpse of a former human crewmate, just in case the symbolism wasn’t clear enough. (About the poker: A computer scientist by the name of Nicholas Findler was programming computers to play poker in the 1970s—there may have been others, but his research articles were the ones that came up when I dug around—so this element wasn’t actually very futuristic at the time, just a few years on the early side.)

This progression grows more unsettling when Lowell teaches the drones to care for the forest, recalling the children of Earth who will never have a chance to climb a tree or play in grass. It’s interesting to me that the drones are never actually proven to have any personality or human characteristics; Lowell’s perception is what anthropomorphizes them. And when we get to the end of the film, Lowell uses the last drone to replace himself as the final caretaker of Earth’s forests. Humans may be willing to save themselves—after all, the other ship shows up to rescue Lowell, even after he assumed they would abandon him—but they can’t be trusted with the last scrap of Earth’s forests. That’s up to one little robot with a watering can.

Silent Running is far from a perfect movie. If we started listing the scientific inaccuracies we would be here all day. In a 1978 New York Times piece about science fiction, Carl Sagan wrote, “Trumbull’s characters are able to build interplanetary cities but have forgotten the inverse‐square law. I was willing to overlook the portrayal of the rings of Saturn as pastel‐colored gases, but not this.” And, really, that about sums it up. Science fiction often has very silly science.

But as a fable about man’s relationship to the natural world, the film is anything but silly. It’s heavy and melancholy, even more so now, fifty-two years of escalating climate crisis later, than it was upon release. Silent Running was a modest success at the time, sandwiched as it was in an era of some of the biggest, flashiest, most genre-defining sci fi films to come out of Hollywood, but it’s easy to see why it’s maintained a long-lasting cult status, even as its style of earnest and heavy-handed moral commentary has fallen out of style.

There are a lot of climate crisis stories in modern sci fi, but a great many of them focus, intentionally or not, on the natural world’s utility to humans: we must preserve it or else we doom ourselves. Silent Running argues that we should preserve the natural world even if we can live without it, even if it serves no purpose in feeding the hungry or curing the ill, even if we can find a way to get along just fine. That’s a less common philosophy in environmental sci fi, and it’s one of the reasons I find this film so interesting.

One last note: On the wall besides Lowell’s bunk is a copy of something called the “Conservation Pledge,” which dates back to 1946, when the magazine Outdoor Life held a contest to encourage outdoors enthusiasts to dedicate themselves to the preservation of the America’s natural resources. The winning entry, the one that adorns Lowell’s wall aboard Valley Forge, was submitted by L.L. Foreman, a former ranch hand turned author of pulpy adventure Westerns.

The second-place winner of that 1946 contest? Rachel Carson.

What are your thoughts on Silent Running and its place in the subgenre of environmental sci fi? Do the cute little drones succeed in emotionally manipulating you even when you’re fully aware you’re being emotionally manipulated? Share your thoughts below!

Next week: We’re traveling back into deep space with another (loose) adaptation of a Stanislaw Lem novel, traveling to a distant planet aboard the spaceship Ikarie XB-1. Watch it on Criterion, Cultpix (some locations), British Film Institute (UK only), and I suspect you all know how to poke around the internet for other options, if you need to. If the version you stumble across is the American dubbed release titled Voyage to the End of the Universe, take note that it has a different cut and ending.[end-mark]

The post <i>Silent Running</i>: A 1970s Environmental Fable Remains Depressingly All Too Relevant  appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV The American Society of Magical Negroes

The American Society of Magical Negroes Fails Its Satirical Premise

An ungainly romance and a failure to commit to its concept makes this film an unfortunate dud.

By Alex Brown

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Published on March 18, 2024

Image: Focus Features / Universal Pictures

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Image: Focus Features / Universal Pictures

The best thing I can say about The American Society of Magical Negroes is that it has an intriguing premise. A satire about the Magical Negro trope with a bit of magic and romance thrown in sounded fun. Then came the trailer. The function of a trailer is to get butts in seats, but all this one did was make me want to run away. If I hadn’t already agreed to review it, I would’ve skipped it. Hopefully you will make better choices than I did.

Aren (Justice Smith) is afraid of upsetting white people. He’s passive and apologetic with enough self-loathing that he should probably see a therapist. That makes him a prime candidate for The American Society of Magical Negroes, a historic, secret group of Black Americans who have dedicated their lives to making white people feel better. (A group founded by enslaved Africans at Monticello, in case you needed a reason to scream.) An angry white person is a risk to Black lives, so, the thinking goes, let’s make sure white people are always comfortable. “We’re showing the client the parts of ourselves that make them feel good, and nothing more.” The Magical Negro is a trope where a Black person, often a man, exists solely to offer support and comfort, often of a mystical nature, to a white person. It’s on the same spectrum as the Sassy/Token Black Friend and the Mammy. The Magical Negro is a counter to the post-Reconstruction era trope of the Black Buck, an aggressive, violent, large Black man usually found threatening the virtue of innocent white women (see Birth of a Nation, or, better yet, don’t waste your time) and the Tragic Mulatto (or quadroon or octoroon) where a Black woman with a white father cannot fit into either Black or white society and dies as a result.

Aren is brought into the fold by Roger (David Alan Grier), an old hand at the white fragility game. Aren thrives in his new role. His first client, Jason (Drew Tarver), is a mediocre white man careening through his career at a Facebook-esque tech company with unearned confidence. As the story progresses, Jason’s entitlement shifts from annoying to suffocating, especially as both men pursue Lizzie (An-Li Bogan), their biracial white and Asian coworker. Eventually, Aren is forced to choose between his job and his love life. All this culminates in a confrontation hampered by confounding editing choices and a speech that undermines and misunderstands everything that came before.

The only things we know about Aren’s background is that he has a white mother and that he went to the Rhode Island School of Design (a school that as far as I can tell has few Black students and a lot of white ones). He’s financially well off enough to afford a spacious studio apartment in downtown Los Angeles despite being a failed yarn artist. Aren is a blank space where a person should be. Every other character is just as poorly developed. It’s hard to care about any of these people if we know hardly anything about them. What does Lizzie like about Aren? What does he like about her? Writer and director Kobi Libii doesn’t seem to care. Smith and Bogan have chemistry, but it has nowhere to go in the script. Even Los Angeles barely exists as a place. They shot multiple scenes on location, but they might as well have been on a sound stage for all the impact the city had on the characters. The magic makes no sense and feels more like the script had the note “INSERT SOMETHING ABOUT MAGIC HERE” instead of actual worldbuilding.

Proximity to whiteness is a real problem with this movie. I spent the entire hour and forty-four minutes alternately cringing and desperately wanting Aren to speak to another Black person outside the Society. Any Black person. Literally any. Los Angeles is only 8.6% Black (and 48% Latinx) but Aren exclusively spends time in spaces predominately white spaces. Truly a feat in a region as racially diverse as Southern California. As someone who has spent most of my life living and working in predominately white spaces, I’m well acquainted with having to balance my sanity with white fragility. But I also know the first thing you do when you get a job like that is find the other BIPOC and form a community. You need someone to talk to when white people and Pick Mes get out of hand. There are two Black people at his job, and Aren never even acknowledges them. The movie isn’t invested enough in its premise to bother exploring it that deeply.

The movie’s worst crime, however, is its reliance on individual solutions to systemic problems. Bear with me here because we have to go back to Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Washington and Du Bois are often seen as two sides of the same coin: very basically, assimilation and economic independence on the Washington side, education and civil rights on the other. Both wanted the same thing, equality, but one believed we could earn it by being productive members of society and following the rules set forth by whiteness while the other believed the Talented Tenth was the key to freedom.

The movie intentionally signals these outdated approaches to civil rights. The clothing and accouterments of the Society are all late 19th and early 20th century, when both men were active. Society members all seem to believe they can respectability politics their way into safety. They believe they are saving the world and their own lives by making white people happy. They believe that if Black folks can manage enough white feelings, Black people will be safe. How you hold onto that in the face of Jim Crow and the pushback against the Civil Rights Movement and BLM is beyond me, and the film never brings it up. Nor does it bring up the fact that the Society was founded during the height of the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan (here comes Birth of a Nation again). During this era, a lot of white people found happiness in violence against Black folks. They held picnics at lynchings, posed for photos with their children smiling ear to ear with a body hanging in the middle, and sold off pieces of their victims as souveniers. Keeping white folks happy didn’t keep Black folks alive back then and doesn’t now because the problem isn’t individual white people but the entire damn system.

That disconnect is ripe for exploration. However, that requires the script to be willing to dive head first into satire, and it either can’t or won’t. It is an unsuccessful satire that veers too often into sincerity. It pulls its punches and seems to fundamentally misunderstand the trope it’s trying to deconstruct and what good critique looks like. It wants to be insightful without having any real insight into the Black experience. There are kernels of truth here and there, but every time it comes close to addressing one it instead sails right past. Sometimes it tries to be an intracommunity conversation about identity and navigating whiteness, but it wanders away from that conversation every time Lizzie shows up.

Ultimately, it’s better than the trailer let on to be, but that’s a low bar to cross. It is neither a good satire nor a good romcom. It has nothing to say and nothing to show.[end-mark]

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Movies & TV Babylon 5

Introducing the Babylon 5 Rewatch

Welcome to a new weekly rewatch of J. Michael Straczynski’s groundbreaking science fiction series!

By Keith R.A. DeCandido

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Published on March 18, 2024

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Three decades ago, in the wake of the success of Star Trek: The Next Generation in first-run syndication, there was a plethora of shows that were released in that form—not beholden to a particular network, but sold to individual markets separately. Into that boom stepped Warner Bros., who formed a sort-of syndicated network: the Prime Time Entertainment Network, which would syndicate a series of shows to various markets: Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, Pointman, Time Trax, a few miniseries, documentaries, and TV movies, and a science fiction show from the mind of J. Michael Straczynski: Babylon 5.

Straczynski had an ambitious plan: to do a science fiction show that would succeed on a reasonable budget and also that would tell a complete story—a novel in television form, as it were. While such serialized storytelling is de rigeur now, it was very rare on television in the 1990s, seen mostly in places like soap operas, as well as the occasional drama like Hill Street Blues.

B5 was planned as a five-year arc. Straczynski simplified budget concerns in two ways. One was to have the action all in the same location rather than hopping from planet to planet, as most screen science fiction shows did.

Another was to do the effects entirely via a process that is almost universal in the 2020s but which was virtually unheard of in the 1990s: Computer Generated Images. B5 was a pioneer in CGI, using the Video Toaster for the Amiga to create the visual effects rather than models and miniatures. This meant that episodes of B5 could be produced for less than half the budget of an episode of TNG.

B5 debuted in 1993 with a television movie, The Gathering. It had the misfortune to air the same week as the World Trade Center bombing in New York in 1993, which put the antenna atop the WTC out of commission, keeping the movie from being broadcast in certain parts of the New York metropolitan area. Despite this ratings hit, the movie did well enough for Warner Bros. to order a series, which debuted exactly thirty years ago on PTEN.

Straczynski’s five-year plan hit a few roadblocks, including losing his main protagonist. Series lead Michael O’Hare, who played the Babylon 5 station’s commanding officer Jeffrey Sinclair, was suffering from severe mental illness, and departed the show after the first season to seek treatment. (At O’Hare’s request, Straczynski kept the real reason for O’Hare’s departure secret until the actor’s death in 2012.)

Other real-world issues with various actors caused rewrites and rejiggers of the plotline, but perhaps the biggest was PTEN’s collapse in 1997, with B5 still in its fourth season. Straczynski wound up cramming a lot of the planned storyline for seasons four and five into season four—only to then have the show rescued by TNT (also at this stage owned by Warner Bros.’ parent company, Time Warner), which not only aired the fifth season, but also commissioned several TV movies and a spinoff series. Alas, the spinoff, Crusade, only lasted one season. Straczynski created another pilot movie, Legend of the Rangers, for what was then called the Sci-Fi Channel, but it was not picked up for a series.

In addition to being a CGI pioneer, Straczynski’s B5 was also an early forerunner of viral Internet marketing, using CompuServe, Usenet, and especially the GEnie bulletin board to create buzz for the show. In tribute to the support of the show prior to its airing on GEnie, Babylon 5 station’s coordinates were Grid Epsilon 470/18/22. Grid Epsilon was a reference to GE, the company that ran GEnie, while B5’s bulletin board was on page 470 (one of the three Science Fiction Roundtables, specifically the one dedicated to screen productions), category 18, topic 22. (Your humble rewatcher was a regular presence on GEnie in those days, under the username KEITH.D.)

In September 2021, Straczynski announced that he was rebooting B5. That’s still in development at the moment, delayed at least in part by the writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023. Also in 2023, Warner Bros. released an animated film, The Road Home.

Partly in honor of this reboot, partly in honor of the TV series’ thirtieth anniversary, and partly because I’ve been wanting to rewatch the show for the first time since its initial airing, next Monday will kick off The Babylon 5 Rewatch here on Reactor. We’ll be covering everything, starting with The Gathering, continuing to the five seasons of the TV series, the one season of Crusade, and each of the various movies, from In the Beginning all the way to The Road Home. I might cover some ancillary material, too…

Like my rewatches of the first five Star Trek shows, of the 1966 Batman, and of the Stargate franchise, each entry will be broken down into categories. A few will be familiar, though most will be new.

It was the dawn of the third age… A summary of the plot.

Nothing’s the same anymore. Jeffrey Sinclair’s role in the story.

Get the hell out of our galaxy! John Sheridan’s role in the story.

I’m not subtle, I’m not pretty. Matthew Gideon’s role in the story.

Ivanova is God. Susan Ivanova’s role in the story.

Never work with your ex. Elizabeth Lochley’s role in the story.

The household god of frustration. Michael Garibaldi’s role in the story.

If you value your lives, be somewhere else. In general, the role of the Minbari in the story, as well as the specific roles of Delenn, Lennier, and the Grey Council.

In the glorious days of the Centauri Republic… In general, the role of the Centauri Republic in the story, as well as the specific roles of Londo Mollari and Vir Cotto.

Though it take a thousand years, we will be free. In general, the role of the Narn Regime in the story, as well as the specific roles of G’Kar and Na’Toth.

We live for the one, we die for the one. In general, the role of the Rangers in the story, as well as the specific role of Marcus Cole.

The Corps is mother, the Corps is father. In general, the role of telepathy, telepaths, and Psi-Corps in the story, as well as the specific roles of Lyta Alexander, Talia Winters, John Matheson, and Alfred Bester.

Never contradict a technomage when he’s saving your life—again. In general, the role of technomages in the story, as well as the specific role of Galen.

The Shadowy Vorlons. The role played by one or both of the Shadows and the Vorlons, the two ancient foes whose conflict makes up the tapestry of much of the series, in the story, particularly the uses of Kosh and Morden.

Looking ahead. B5 made copious use of foreshadowing by way of flash-forwards and prophecies, and this category will show when they’re used, and also when they later come to fruition (often not in the way you expect).

No sex, please, we’re EarthForce. A chronicle of the romantic and/or sexual exploits seen in the story.

Welcome aboard. The guest stars in the story.

Trivial matters. Various bits of trivia, ephemera, connections, revelations, etc. seen in the story.

The echoes of all of our conversations. A particularly good quote from the story.

The name of the place is Babylon 5. A review of the story.

Note that this rewatch will not have a 1-10 rating of each story. My least favorite part of prior rewatches has been having that silly rating system, which removes all nuance from the words that appear above it. I inherited it from the first Star Trek Re-Watch that appeared on this site back from 2009-2011, so I reluctantly continued it through all the Trek rewatches. I managed to not have to use it for the Great Superhero Movie Rewatch or the Stargate Rewatch, and I’m just as happy to avoid it here.

It’s possible I will think of other categories to add. I tried to anticipate all the various changes we’ll see throughout the various series, but I may have missed something that is worth having its own category. And I’m aware that not every character gets their own category, and in response I’ll just say that Jim Kirk, Jean-Luc Picard, William Riker, Miles O’Brien, Julian Bashir, and Chakotay are among the major characters in the Trek rewatches that didn’t get their own categories. It happens.

We’ll be back next week with The Gathering![end-mark]

The post Introducing the <i>Babylon 5</i> Rewatch appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Solaris: Guilt, Grief, and the Many Human Facets of Science Fiction

Tarkovsky’s film highlights different aspects of the story than the novel it’s based on; both use science fiction to explore deeply human experiences and emotions.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on March 13, 2024

Image: Mosfilm

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Image: Mosfilm

Solaris (1972) Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Starring Donatas Banionis, Natalya Bondarchuk, and Jüri Järvet. Screenplay by Friedrich Gorenstein and Andrei Tarkovsky based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem.

When Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey came out in 1968, it made a huge splash in the movie world. Some people loved it so much they declared it the end-all-be-all of science fiction filmmaking; some people hated it so much they dismissed it as a boorish waste of time. Just about everybody with even a passing interest in cinema or science fiction had something to say about the film, and they keep saying it now, decades later.

We are not talking about 2001 this week; we’ll get to that one in the future. But I want to mention it briefly, because the reaction to 2001 is such a significant part of the legacy of Solaris that it’s impossible to ignore. The two films are often set in direct contrast to each other, a cinematic rivalry first driven by the politics of the Cold War and still going strong more than fifty years later. I’m not terribly interested in any perceived competition or any manner of compare-and-contrast, but I am interested in the way pieces of art influence and inform each other. Science fiction, as a genre, is often in conversation with itself, and so too are films as a medium.

Among 2001’s critics was Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, who disliked what he viewed as a phoniness, a sterility, a cold and off-putting technological obsession in 2001. A 1970 interview in which he describes this reaction is very interesting, because much of his reaction seems to be about the fact that he simply thinks about storytelling, filmmaking, and the themes that fascinate him very differently from Kubrick. The dislike was not mutual; Kubrick was reportedly fond of Solaris and Tarkovsky’s work.

There is another layer to this conversation, and that’s the fact that Stanislaw Lem, the Polish author who wrote the 1961 novel Solaris, did not like Tarkovsky’s movie at all—although it’s not entirely clear if he ever watched the entire film, or if he never fully viewed it because he was so annoyed with the screenplay and the argument he had with Tarkovsky about it. Most sources indicate that it was the screenwriter Friedrich Gorenstein who wrote the parts of the movie that stray most significantly from Lem’s novel, including the lengthy opening on Earth, but Lem always focused his ire on Tarkovsky. (Lem also criticized Steven Soderbergh’s 2002 Solaris without watching it; his opinion was based only on reviews.) And, once again, the dislike was not mutual; Tarkovsky spoke very highly of Lem’s novels.

Some of Lem’s objections to Tarkovsky’s film do seem to be borne of a stubborn, almost petty, refusal to acknowledge that any change to the story would be necessary. But that’s not all there is to it. It seems that, similar to Tarkovsky’s response to Kubrick, they were simply, fundamentally interested in very different stories. Lem famously declared that Tarkovsky didn’t make Solaris; he made Crime and Punishment. Later critics take it even further, such as Philip Lopate, writing for the Criterion Collection, who suggests Solaris is more akin to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, in that it’s focused on a sad man’s guilt about a beautiful dead woman, a very common theme in cinema across many genres. I can see the point about the sad man and the beautiful dead woman—it’s one of my least favorite tropes in any fiction—but I am very wary of any comparison, regardless of who it comes from, that tries to take the science fiction out of Solaris when searching for its “real” meaning.

It is true that Solaris the book and Solaris the movie do explore different themes and ideas, even while following the same characters and plot. That’s one small part of what makes the film so interesting to me. The much larger part is the fact that it’s a stunning movie, regardless of what inspired it. It’s weird, moody, ponderous, melancholy, and tense, full of disconcertingly long scenes and oddly disjointed conversations, with characters who feel unreal in one moment and achingly human in the next. It’s both alluring and frustrating. I love that about it.

The film opens on Earth, where we meet Dr. Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis, fittingly broody) at his family’s home on Earth: wooden farmhouse, running water, saturated greens, sudden rainstorms. The pastoral quiet of this setting is interrupted by the arrival of a man named Burton, who comes on the eve of Kelvin’s departure for space to share a report of his own strange experience on the planet Solaris. We learn that people have been studying Solaris for many years, attempting to understand what is theorized to be a sentient ocean that covers the entire planet. Kelvin’s task is to determine if the research should continue or if the project should be abandoned.

Kelvin travels to Solaris to meet the three scientists remaining on the dingy, dilapidated station. He learns that one of them has died by suicide, and the other two behave in suspicious and off-putting ways, including apparently hiding the presence of other people aboard the station. Kelvin makes some half-hearted attempts to find out what’s going on, but all of that stops when he wakes up the next morning to find that his dead wife has shown up.

His wife, Hari, died by suicide ten years ago. This new Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk, truly fantastic in an intense and challenging role) is a construct created from Kelvin’s memories and dreams of her. She doesn’t know this, exactly, but she does know something is very wrong with her existence. Kelvin panics and kills her (by launching her into space), but she appears again the next day.

This is what the sentient ocean of Solaris does: it plucks memories from the subconscious minds of the humans in orbit and creates living beings out of them. The two surviving scientists on the station, Drs. Snaut (Jüri Järvet) and Sartorius (Anatoliy Solonitsyn), have figured this out already, but they didn’t explain it to Kelvin when he arrived. He, in turn, demonstrates almost no curiosity about the planet, the research, the attempts to communicate with the sentient ocean, any of it. So many obvious questions go deliberately unasked, as though the events and their explanations are too heavy for the characters to handle.

Tarkovsky was open about the fact that he had little interest in the shiny technological trappings of science fiction; that’s where much of his dislike of 2001 came from. One of Solaris’s few concessions toward a “futuristic” look is the a long, lingering, drawn-out scene that follows Burton’s ordinary mid-century car along the Shuto Expressway near Tokyo, which was specifically chosen because it was thought to have a futuristic look at the time. But even that is, quite literally, grounded: it’s just a car on a highway, a man and a child, a city at twilight.

There is similar purposeful neglect to other science fictional elements in the film. After the long, lingering highway scene, Kelvin’s journey through space is dispatched in a matter of seconds, with no details about how it happens, how long it takes, or what effects it has. The station itself is in a depressing state of disarray, with damaged equipment and exposed wires everywhere, signs of long neglect and disregard. All we see of the planet itself is the whirling ocean; I don’t know how it was filmed, but it sure looks like footage of frothy, foamy water that has been color-graded and adjusted, nothing more, nothing less. The single instance of the scientists attempting contact with the sentient ocean happens entirely off-screen, almost as a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it afterthought.

All of this combines to create a story that is science fictional, yes, but very much not meant to impress us or inspire awe. It keeps us uneasy instead. It wants us to feel uncomfortable, not astonished, because this station is a deeply unsettling place to be.

The film may not draw attention to the story’s science fictional trappings, but that only makes the attention it pays to other sensory elements more significant. For example, the extremely subtle electronic score by Eduard Artemiev is punctuated by repeated uses Bach’s Ich ruf’ zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 639, a chorale prelude for organ that sets an inescapably mournful tone throughout. (The use of this piece is also one of the very few religious elements left in the film after Soviet censors forced Tarkovsky to remove all mentions of God.) Another example is a mundane oddity when the first Hari construct appears: Her simple, decidedly non-Space Age dress has no fasteners, and Kelvin has to cut it off with scissors to help her change—because Kelvin doesn’t remember how her dress fastened, so Solaris’s sentient ocean could not recreate that detail from his memories.

There are so many other low-tech details like this. Burton’s testimony is shared via tape on a 1970s-appropriate television. The bed in Kelvin’s room aboard the station is covered with stiff, uncomfortable plastic. The few instances of violence in the film are brutal and intimate: Gibarian’s suicide by handgun; Hari frantically beating her way through a closed door; her failed attempt to die by drinking liquid oxygen.

But my favorite of these not-very-science fictional elements is the library at the heart of the station. It’s such a terribly human space. With its dim lighting, wood-paneled doors, and green walls, it could have been plucked from any university professor’s office or slightly shabby social club. There are books stacked haphazardly amidst mirrors and stained glass and classical art replicas. There is a copy of Don Quixote, from which the characters read a passage. They drink from crystal glasses. The candles are chunky with wax drippings. There are no windows overlooking the planet below; that’s why Snaut chooses it for his birthday party.

In this very human room, surrounded by the art and aesthetics of humanity, the characters talk about what it means to be human. It’s almost as though they couldn’t have this conversation anywhere else on the station, where everything is coldly technological and Solaris is visible through the windows. Sartorius makes a toast to science, which Snaut wearily counters: “We have no interest in conquering any cosmos. We want to extend the Earth to the borders of the cosmos. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. We need a mirror. We struggle for contact, but we’ll never find it.”

While the men are talking, Hari is wandering restlessly around the library, growing more and more agitated. She doesn’t speak until the men begin to bicker. She accuses Snaut and Sartorius of being inhumane to the “guests”—the simulacra, like her, who were created from their own minds but destroyed for being too frightening, too unexpected. Sartorius is unmoved; he tells Hari she is nothing more than a copy of a dead woman. She doesn’t back down. She can feel that she is becoming more human.

This argument about the nature of humanity provides no satisfaction or resolution. After the bleak birthday party disperses, Kelvin and Hari are alone in the library. Hari is studying a print of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow, a 16^th-century painting depicting part of the seasonal cycle of rural life. The camera, showing Hari’s perspective, takes in the painting not as a whole, but in a series of cuts focusing on small details. The visual metaphor is obvious and effective: the constructed woman, created from memories plucked from a grieving man’s mind, studying an image of humanity piecemeal, disjointed and unsteady.

When Kelvin speaks her name, Hari’s concentration is broken, and what follows is the loveliest, saddest scene in the film. The station is adjusting its orbit, and for a moment the gravity vanishes. Hari and Kelvin cling to each other as they drift gently through the library. We don’t know in the moment, but we will learn very shortly, that this is when Hari has decided to die.

Because in spite of the Bach and the Bruegel, the candlesticks and the crystal, they’re not on Earth, safely tucked away in a wood-paneled library at a university club, having a friendly but ultimately inconsequential philosophical discussion. And Tarkovsky did not make Crime and Punishment, nor did he make Vertigo. He made Solaris, a film with a sentient ocean that creates living things out of memories that it telepathically obtains from people’s minds.

Stanislaw Lem wrote a novel about the impossibility of understanding an entity that is so entirely alien to us that communication fails even when it can literally make our subconscious thoughts into reality. Andrei Tarkovsky made a movie about guilt and grief and the excruciatingly human experiences of life and love and death. They both believed they were focusing on the most important part of the story—and they were both right.

They were both right, because for all that sci fi fans love to draw intragenre lines—”that kind of sci fi is about technology and ideas, this kind is about humans and emotions”—such distinctions have a way of feeling so very pointless after a while. Curiosity and awe and exploration are part of the human experience, and so are the desire to communicate and a craving for understanding, and so are guilt and grief and death. Science fiction can be used to explore any and all of those human experiences. That’s one of the genre’s great strengths.

I love this movie mostly for itself, because it’s such a unique and fascinating experience, but I also love it because it’s such a great example of one artist picking up another’s work, turning it this way and that to see what facets catch the most light, and creating something different and new out of the same basic shape. Maybe Lem and Tarkovsky (and Stanley Kubrick, for that matter) were talking past each other, but they were still engaged in the larger conversation of science fiction.

What do you think of Solaris, either as a movie in itself, as an adaptation of a beloved classic novel, or as a major influence on so much serious, heady sci fi that followed? What do you think of those long scenes and heavy silences and all of Tarkovsky’s most Tarkovsky-est filmmaking quirks? Did anybody else finish the film and immediately have to look up Hunters in the Snow to stare at it for a while, or was that just me? Share your thoughts below! (To anticipate the obvious question and suggestion: yes, we will be watching Tarkovsky’s Stalker in the future.)

Next Week in the Science Fiction Film Club: If that wasn’t heavy enough for you, don’t worry: it gets worse. We head to the outer planets to do some gardening with Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running. Watch it on Amazon, Apple, Google Play, Vudu, and others.

And a quick note: I just want to thank everyone who has dropped movie suggestions into the comments. I am noting down every single suggestion. I knew there were many films—especially older non-American films—that I would need help finding, and I am delighted to have so many to add to the list. No need to worry if you have a suggestion that doesn’t seem to be available for streaming right now. I’ll make a note and keep an eye out, because streaming availability changes constantly. Thank you![end-mark]

The post <i>Solaris</i>: Guilt, Grief, and the Many Human Facets of Science Fiction appeared first on Reactor.