Revenge of the Sith (2005)

Director: George Lucas
Stars: Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Ian McDiarmid, Frank Oz, Samuel L Jackson and Christopher Lee

This is the third entry in my Star Wars I-VII Runthrough, which aims to look at the entire series of feature films with three things in mind: quality, progression and the fan theory of Jar Jar Binks as ultimate villain. Hello, Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith!

Brief Synopsis

Three years after Attack of the Clones, the Galactic Republic is in turmoil. The Separatists are winning the Clone Wars and the Jedi are spread thin across the galaxy. However, even after major breakthroughs, they become concerned that the Supreme Chancellor is unwilling to rescind the emergency powers previously granted to him by the Galactic Senate to fight this threat to the Republic.

The primary players are Palpatine, Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Senate, who is finally confirmed as Darth Sidious; Anakin Skywalker, who is spun well enough to become his Sith apprentice, Darth Vader; Obi-Wan Kenobi, his former master in the Jedi order; Amidala, Anakin's secret wife who is pregnant; Count Dooku, the leader of the Separatist movement; General Grievous, the droid who takes over after his death; and Yoda and Mace Windu, two prominent masters on the Jedi council. Characters from the previous two films reappear, especially C-3PO and R2-D2, but also many others who often appear only in cameos that are easily missed. Chewbacca is introduced for the first time.

Quality

As with the previous two entries in the prequel trilogy, my memory proved faulty when it came to this transition film. On the one time I saw this, soon after release, I was highly disappointed with it, finding little of substance but what felt like a last minute attempt to segue into Episode IV and the original trilogy. I found very little of that on a fresh viewing.

This is certainly a flawed picture, but not for the reasons I remembered. Mostly, it's because this is really three films in one and they don't entirely play well with each other.

The first half hour is the next episode in the saga we've been following within the prequel trilogy, with General Grievous succeeding Count Dooku as the villain du jour. It's a fast and action-packed ride from the very outset, beginning with a wild chase within a stunning space battle. This is eye candy better than anything the second movie ever served up and it doesn't detract or distract from anything. It feels like George Lucas ratcheted everything up at least another few notches and it feels good.

Then, whatever he had in mind is summarily ditched to focus on the defection of Anakin Skywalker to the dark side. Chancellor Palpatine works on him consistently until, as the Sith Lord Darth Sidious, he acquires a new apprentice. Oddly, as this is clearly supposed to be Anakin's story, it's really Palpatine's because he has his own growth and transition to complete to become Emperor and because, frankly, Ian McDiarmid effortlessly trumps Hayden Christensen, dominating the film utterly in the process.

Finally, once the Empire is formed, there's a collection of transition scenes that are there only to tie up a variety of loose ends and set us up for Episode IV. Nowadays, they would appear after the end credits if only there weren't so many of them, but there are plenty. Sadly, they throw off the pace of the film, somewhat like a legal disclaimer after a commercial and many of them could have been safely cut without us losing anything.

What's oddest is that, unlike the previous two movies, which were heavy on plot but short on character, this one is really the opposite. While the events that unfold are pivotal, as was inevitable in a picture tasked with transitioning from prequels to originals, the plot is really best described through its characters, because they are the plot. This film is all about Palpatine’s triumph and Anakin’s defection to the dark side. That this means the near demise of the Jedi order is almost an afterthought and, outside of that, there's pretty much only General Grievous and we've almost forgotten about him by the time the credits roll. It's surprising to realise how focused this script really was and how little actually happens.

Of course, with a focus on character over the minutiae of plot, the actors ought to be able to shine.

Ewan McGregor improves yet again, playing Obi-Wan Kenobi with the quality of Episode II but with more confidence and a little more Alec Guinness again. He makes a few scenes reminiscent of the old master with clever intonation and mannerisms. However, he's overshadowed completely, because he gets less of the solo adventures of the previous film.

Hayden Christensen is much more controlled, broody rather than pissy. There are points where the pissiness comes out, such as when Mace Windu accepts him onto the Jedi council without granting him the rank of master, but mostly he’s broody and, eventually, believably powerful. It may not be the performance that it needed to be but it’s far better than it ever promised to be on the basis of the previous film.

Sadly, Natalie Portman is sidelined and her considerable talents wasted yet again. While she was mis-directed in the first film, like the rest of the cast, she's eviscerated here. She gets very few scenes and what she does get is pathetic. The tough senator from Episode II becomes a fawning girl in Episode III, another example of Lucas's inability to write female characters. He does give her one good line and she delivers it with all due weight. Palpatine declares that the Republic has become the Empire and she comments, 'So this is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause.' Both Portman and Amidala deserved much more than just one good line.

Both Samuel L Jackson and the voice of Frank Oz get more and better material here than previously, but everything comes back to Ian McDiarmid. He grows Palpatine steadily throughout the prequel trilogy to dominate here in a real peach of a role, manipulating Anakin with panache. The thunderous 'I am the Senate!' may be his best delivered line but there are plenty to choose from before he goes overboard towards the end.

The constant invention of the previous films from a technical aspect continues but is lessened because of the focus shift. There are fewer planets, fewer creatures and fewer gizmos, but there are still great examples of each on show. It's great to see some action on Kashyyyk but we might miss it if we blink. Obi-Wan gets to ride a gorgeous giant parrot lizard on Utapau and we get to see more of that planet than most of the others, which are gorgeous but created for mere seconds of screen time during the execution of the brutal Order 66.

The final fights are faster than previous final fights, though not as well choreographed. The iconic one between Obi-Wan and Anakin is especially style over substance; it’s a spectacle rather than a fight, literally unfolding on a lake of fire. Sure, it looks great, but the few final seconds on the shore utterly trump however many minutes the fight took in all its other locations.

I should also add that there’s dirt in the Star Wars universe again, thank goodness, though less of it than there was in Episode I and would soon be again in Episode IV. Lucas's shiny fetish is less of a major problem and more of a mild annoyance here because it feels like the dirt was added only to assuage critics rather than because Lucas understood its purpose.

Progression

The script for Episode II took care of many of the transition elements needed for the prequel trilogy and Episode III does little more. Some subplots or details are ignored completely, to focus almost entirely on the transition of Anakin Skywalker, Jedi padawan, to Darth Vader, Sith lord. That's handled well indeed and far better than I remembered.

Count Dooku sows early seeds and his final moments are a major step for Anakin. Chancellor Palpatine's push for him to be his personal representative on the Jedi council sticks him into a middle ground between sides, where he's inevitably focused on which to choose. The story about Darth Tragus is well told, as it contains hints of truth rather than facts. Anakin turns much earlier than I remembered and the famous scene with the Jedi younglings makes a lot more sense. It serves well to cement the transition, especially when played with reluctance that turns into acceptance.

Most of the rest of the progression is in the background, with the occasional brief focus like the introduction of Chewbacca and the next step in R2-D2's evolution. He showed he could fly in the previous film; here he can fly, jettison oil and then set fire to it, taking down two much larger opponents. He's becoming much more of a protagonist than a constant bystander, but C-3PO is sidelined far too much, as if Lucas had given up on the idea he borrowed from The Hidden Fortress that drove the original trilogy.

The final scenes are all progression and focus on beginnings, even during the end of a trilogy. They start with the birth of Amidala's twins. I have no idea why both were named on screen, because that spoils a plot twist I know is coming, having seen the original trilogy first. It's good to see the nascent Death Star hanging in the sky. And, of course, there's the birth of Darth Vader in a ominous scene very reminiscent of Frankenstein.

Jar Jar Binks

After prominent shenanigans in the first film and more focused and massively important scenes in the second, Jar Jar is kept very distant in this third one.

Unless I blinked and missed something, I caught him twice in scenes where he appears only as part of a crowd. One is early on, when Obi-Wan and Anakin arrive back at the Senate with the rescued Chancellor. Unlike earlier movies, where he would have leapt up to welcome Anny, he simply remains in the background, though he tellingly walks into the Senate right behind the Chancellor. The other is towards the end, when he attends the funeral of Amidala, presumably back on Naboo, and follows her casket in procession.

That means that there's little here on which to base any more development of the fan theory that he's really behind the Sith. However, his change in behaviour could signify that he's done what he needed to do with Anakin and had handed him over to Darth Sidious, his own apprentice, to handle. Now, he's content to shift quietly into the background, showing up only when it would be advisable to show his face for political reasons.

So, after three films, I have to say that I can't find fault in this theory. It stands up to concentrated analysis and only the sequel trilogy will tell us whether it's true or not. I'll find out if he shows back up in Episode VII on Saturday. Of course, even if he doesn't, it's still possible that he was intended to follow this path but Lucas backtracked after the near-universal criticism of any viewer of The Phantom Menace over the age of five.

At the very least, this theory has made me reevaluate a hated character and see him in a completely new light. I know which side I'll be on now when it comes to geek debate. Time to set up a convention panel, methinks!

Attack of the Clones (2002)

Director: George Lucas
Stars: Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Hayden Christensen, Frank Oz, Samuel L Jackson and Christopher Lee

Taking the place of Monday Night Roundup for this week only, here's the second entry in my Star Wars I-VII Runthrough, which aims to look at the entire series of feature films with three things in mind: quality, progression and the fan theory of Jar Jar Binks as ultimate villain. Hello, Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones!

Brief Synopsis

Ten years after The Phantom Menace, the integrity of the Galactic Republic is threatened by the secession of thousands of solar systems. The Jedi Council, who help to keep the peace, are few in number and would be unable to prevent civil war. Their powers are also questioned by their inability to detect the creation of a secret clone army for the Republic on Kamino until it is too late. The Senate greet the crisis by granting the Supreme Chancellor emergency powers, paving the way for a dictatorship.

The primary players are Amidala, now the senator for Naboo in the Galactic Senate and the leader of the opposition to Count Dooku, a former jedi master who leads the separatist movement; Obi-Wan Kenobi, now a jedi master, whose investigations into an attempt on Amidala's life expose the creation of the clone army and the powers behind it; his apprentice, Anakin Skywalker, who is tasked with protecting Amidala but embarks on an affair with her instead and begins his journey towards the dark side of the force; Jango Fett, a Mandalorian bounty hunter who is the template for the clone army; and Palpatine, who has become Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Senate. Other characters from The Phantom Menace return, including C-3PO and R2-D2, as well as jedi masters such as Yoda and Mace Windu, who get more to do here. A future character, Boba Fett, is introduced as a child.

Quality

Clearly my memories of the Star Wars prequels are fundamentally flawed. I remembered The Phantom Menace as frankly irredeemable but, watching afresh, I see that it's unfair to dismiss it out of hand. I remember liking Attack of the Clones a lot more and a fresh viewing reenforces that, but I also remember it being a bundle of fun and, frankly, it isn't. I enjoyed it a lot but more as a serious drama than a sci-fi popcorn flick. The slapstick is gone, with mild exceptions for C3PO's battle shenanigans, and it's replaced by a much darker and more intense tone. Sure, the battle in the Geonosis arena is an absolute blast, but it takes death and torment to get there.

The darker tone was one of three things that leapt out quickly and were reenforced often on my fresh viewing. While there's nothing that's technically unsuitable for children, there are plenty of scenes that contain material that adults will notice and I'm not just talking about the flightsuit Amidala puts on late in the movie that highlights her nipples. There's an early scene in a bar so Obi-Wan Kenobi and his teenage padawan, Anakin Skywalker, can track down whoever tried to assassinate Amidala and, beyond being a bar, it also contains some rather scantily clad females as background decoration. When Anakin finds his mother, she's tied up, so used and abused by the Tusken raiders who kidnapped her that she dies in his arms when he frees her. When this happens, he gives way to his hate and massacres the lot of them: men, women and children. Sure, we're only told about this but still. There's even a creepy crawling wall on Geonosis that feels like a nod to Bedlam.

Only some of this is really warranted by the story. Those of us who have seen the original trilogy know that Anakin is going to turn to the dark side eventually and surely he has to go through trauma to get to that point. It makes a lot more sense for him to carry his dead mother home from the month of abuse that killed her than just having him pout, stamp his foot and bitch about how jealous his master is of his fabulous powers. That's just embarrassing. 'It's not fair!' he actually shouts during his first time alone with Amidala. And yet she still falls in love with him?

The second thing that was immediately obvious was the unceasing shininess of the film. I remembered the entire prequel trilogy as overly shiny but was surprised to find on a fresh viewing that The Phantom Menace really isn't. There are a few odd exceptions, like Queen Amidala's ship which is shiny to the point of reflection but she's a queen and it makes sense for her to have the cleanest vessel on the planet for ambassadorial purposes. Most of the rest of the gadgets and ships are varying degrees of believable dirtiness, but that's utterly not the case here.

Almost everything in this film is shiny to insane degrees, like it was all made by Apple and then polished by a droid with OCD until it squeaks when we look at it. It's so shiny that the whole thing looks artificial, like we're watching a video game rather than a movie. There's no dirt in the bus depot and there's no dirt in the diner. Sure, Dex Jettster, the CGI alien who runs the latter, has grease stains on his torn vest but they never transfer to anything he touches or sits on.

It isn't only Coruscant either, which as the capital city of the Republic looks like Blade Runner with every element of film noir polished entirely away; they've apparently conquered dirt on Naboo too, where one love scene is like The Sound of Music coated in gleaming pixiedust, and especially on Kamino, which is as sanitised a city as the clone manufacturing rooms it contains. At least it rains on Kamino, even if that rain doesn't make anything dirty. Again, I can buy rooms where they build clones being clean because that's technologically needed, but when we get to the arena on Geonosis, even things made of dirt aren't dirty! You can chop a man's head off, then pick up the helmet it's in and it won't even drip blood. That's how magically clean this place is!

Dirt only shows up in the desert of Tatooine where the Lars homestead is obviously aged and the landspeeder Anakin uses to ride out into the desert is beaten up from years of service. C-3PO has a skin now but it's not shiny brass yet. It's like Tatooine is the last bastion of reality in the entire Republic and that's not good. I wanted to lie down in that desert and make dirt angels, just to wipe away the sheen.

The final obvious point is that George Lucas must have listened to the many complaints about The Phantom Menace because he fixed most of the problems that film this time out had without breaking any of the things that it did right.

We still have fabulous locations, fantastic alien designs and awesome gadgets. In fact, they get better still. The tall thin aliens on Kamino, Taun We and Lama Su, are glorious. The taxi on Tatooine has such an awesome balance that I want to leap onto it to see if I can knock it over. The big wheeled war wagons they have on Geonosis are gorgeous and Count Dooku's solar sailed space yacht is the epitome of Star Wars cool.

But now the actors are allowed to act too. Ewan McGregor almost sounds like a young Alec Guinness at points and he doesn't look as embarrassing as he did in the first film. Natalie Portman isn't on autopilot any more and demonstrates how she can both kick ass and deliver nuance, often in the same scene. Samuel L Jackson gets the chance to actually do something this time around and we're gifted with no less a talent than Christopher Lee to add some real gravitas to proceedings as the chief villain, Count Dooku. Frankly, Leeanna Walsman, playing the first bad guy in the film, a shapeshifter assassin called Zam Wesell, does more with her brief appearance than anyone did in the entire first movie and everyone else promptly follows her lead.

The only exception is Hayden Christensen, who is consistently and intensely annoying as the young Anakin Skywalker. To be fair, the blame surely belongs much more to Lucas as the writer than to Christensen as the actor and the combination of mini-ponytail and side rattail doesn't help, even if it's the uniform of a jedi padawan. I'm sure I'm not the only viewer who wanted to reach inside the screen and slap him. I really don't care if he's going to bring balance to the force; he needed a slap. In fact, Yoda should have used the force to make him slap himself, over and over until he got over his pity party and rejoined the human race. We're supposed to watch him descend gradually into the dark side not leap there because he thinks his master is a poo poo head.

Also on the negative side is the way that some scenes are so dedicated to providing eye candy that reality has to take a bathroom break. The chase through the skies of Coruscant is ridiculous and I don't even want to think about the G-forces involved or whether what Anakin does is believable even for Superman. The distances are insane too; I'm sure someone has calculated how high some of these buildings must be and how that's not remotely sustainable for a city that covers an entire planet. Are there apartments here for everyone in the entire Republic? If anything, Obi-Wan chasing Jango Fett through the inevitable asteroid field is even worse; it shatters every law of physics I could think of but it's still glorious eye candy and, for scenes like this, that's really all that counts.

It's a shame that those eye candy scenes are so long and drawn out because they're nothing but distraction from the first real substance to be found in the prequels and that pervades most of the rest of the movie. It would have been better had the eye candy been ratcheted way down.

Progression

The most obvious progression here is in tone because Lucas got serious and wrote a mostly solid script. I remembered this film as merely the one in between the one that started everyone's stories and the one that had to transition those stories into the movie that everyone knew from 1977. Yet, after the first film wasted so many opportunities and set up so many one note cartoon characters, this one really knuckled down and injected depth into everyone that matters.

It also looks at the big picture a lot better than the first episode did. We don't just set up Anakin for his imminent turn to the dark side, we set up other characters too. We meet Boba Fett as a kid shadowing his father, bounty hunter Jango Fett, but he's given a beginning to the future story that begins in The Star Wars Holiday Special, of all places. Count Dooku has the plans for the Death Star here, even though it's just 'what we're planning to build' at this point. R2-D2 and C-3PO finally get their first real bickering scenes, given that they're the bedrock of the entire series, as borrowed from Kurosawa's The Hidden Fortress. R2-D2 can fly, by the way. I need to keep that in mind when I get to Episodes IV to VI.

Beyond all the annoying childishness, Anakin also gets a real scene of power with his mother and he delivers a few lines that are very telling. 'I don't think the system works,' he tells Senator Amidala, proposing a benevolent dictatorship instead. That's a much better way to establish his future mindset than all the foot stamping. 'I'm good at fixing things; I always was!' resonates too, even delivered in different context.

I liked how his mother's dangerous situation brings him back to Tatooine, where she has been sold to a homesteader who freed and married her. It's how we're introduced to the Lars homestead and Owen Lars, who will inherit it and bring up Luke in Episode IV.

What didn't feel well fashioned was Amidala's rise in influence. Sure, she's a tough and talented lady and it's entirely fair to see her moving up from Queen to Senator, now representing her entire planet instead of merely her race. However, it's only been ten years since the first film but she's still gone from someone the Senate frankly ignores to being the leader of the opposition. Given that she's standing against Count Dooku's rebellion of thousands of solar systems, that highlights just how meteoric a rise that is. But hey, more of that below.

Jar Jar Binks

There's less of Jar Jar in this second episode than there was in the first, but he's a lot more serious and he's moved up in the ranks too. He's the first one to greet Anakin when the padawan arrives on Coruscant with Obi-Wan, tasked to protect Senator Amidala. He watches thoughtfully while the two jedi bicker in public, appropriate for a secret evil genius.

And, after an attempt on her life, Amidala goes back to Naboo and Jar Jar gets to speak for her in the Senate. How's that for a pip of a promotion? It's also at exactly the right moment to propose the transfer of emergency powers to Supreme Chancellor Palpatine, who accepts them with a pointed, 'The power you give me'. Thanks, Jar Jar! You just created the Empire.

Of course, if he's the mastermind of the Sith, he meant to do exactly that and, in fact, he probably orchestrated the whole thing from the assassination attempt onwards and so got just what he wanted. Nice job, hidden mastermind!

Finally, maybe the reduced presence of Jar Jar in this second episode isn't an attempt to remove slapstick inanity and the fan complaints it generated. Maybe it just underlines his gradual movement into the shadows, where he'll hide during Episodes IV to VI.

So, the theory is holding thus far. Let's see how it fares in Revenge of the Sith tomorrow!

The Phantom Menace (1999)

Director: George Lucas
Stars: Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Jake Lloyd, Pernilla August and Frank Oz

This is the first entry in my Star Wars I-VII Runthrough, which aims to look at the entire series of feature films with three things in mind: quality, progression and the fan theory of Jar Jar Binks as ultimate villain. Hello, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace!

Brief Synopsis

The Phantom Menace introduces us to a Galactic Republic of thousands of solar systems that is being attacked from within. The powerful Trade Federation is blockading the planet of Naboo and this conflict escalates into war between the races of Naboo and a droid army commanded by the Trade Federation.

The primary players are Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi, a jedi master and his padewan apprentice, who aim to resolve the Naboo conflict; Amidala, the queen of the Naboo people, who hides in plain sight as her own handmaiden, Padmé; Jar Jar Binks, a Gungan who has been banished from his people, who live in an underwater city on Naboo; Palpatine, senator of the Naboo people in the Galactic Senate; Anakin Skywalker, a nine year old slave who the jedi free on Tatooine and Qui-Gon Jinn aims to train; Darth Sidious, the cloaked Sith Lord behind the conflict; Darth Maul, his own apprentice; and Nute Gunray, the viceroy of the Trade Federation. Future characters such as C-3PO and R2-D2 are also introduced.

Quality

No, The Phantom Menace isn't a good movie, but I was surprised to find that it's a better movie than I remembered it to be. There's a lot that's good here, but it's mostly restricted to the things that don't usually matter, while the things that do aren't strong at all. However, the later scenes are much better than the earlier ones, to the degree that I cringed my way through half of the film only to gradually realise that I wasn't cringing any more.

The best bits are in the background. It's the foreground elements that are less strong: things like the script, the acting and the direction, though I have to say that the cinematography is far better than I remembered it, with many scenes beautifully shot, even if George Lucas betrays his passion for Triumph of the Will a little obviously again.

So, on the positive side, there's a varied and impressive set of location choices (some of them surely CGI) to accompany our shift from Naboo to Tatooine to Coruscant and back to Naboo. The busy sky of Coruscant may be a sci-fi cliché but the underwater city of the Gungans is gorgeous, the pod race track is amazing and Amidala's palace is appropriately elegant.

The design of robots, ships and other hardware is consistently wonderful, ensuring that the Star Wars universe remains highly immersive. The creature design is excellent too, whether they be aliens or monster fish deep underwater; all the aliens look great and some look even better. Many of the costumes are gorgeous, not just Queen Amidala's intricate outfits but most of the rest too (I'll carefully exclude the cringeworthy haircuts of Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi here). The sound design is just as fantastic as we've come to expect from Star Wars movies, one of the few places where it's clearly notable. The pod race is massively entertaining and the acrobatic Darth Maul with his demon face and double bladed lightsaber is frankly awesome.

On the flipside, there's... well, pretty much everything else.

The three principal actors - Liam Neeson, Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman - are all amazing talents but they're also all completely wasted here. I've never seen Neeson so awful; he sleepwalks through the entire picture, unable to find any of the gravitas of Sir Alec Guinness. If Neeson is boringly serious, McGregor is annoyingly light-hearted; it's a rare line of his that isn't delivered like a joke, but there's never any real humour there. Portman is OK as Padmé but mostly monotone and underwhelming as the Queen; perhaps that was by design, given the deception, but it doesn't work. Oddly, given that company, it's Jake Lloyd who impresses the most as the young Anakin Skywalker; the best acting in the film is the scene where he says goodbye to his mother. It's notable that the most powerful scenes are the ones that don't need acting talent at all, such as the pod race and the battle between the Gungans and the droids.

The script feels inextricably paired with the editing and the two make the picture relentlessly pedestrian. It's not a bad story, though it's hardly inspired, but it's presented in such a by the-numbers-approach that it feels really cheap. Roger Corman has talked about how blockbusters like Jaws or Star Wars were just B movies with big budgets and that never felt so accurate as the early scenes of The Phantom Menace. The editing, which is powerful in action scenes like the pod race and the underwater journey through the core of Naboo, hinders any real engagement. Many dialogue scenes involve nothing but back and forth cuts between speakers who never move. Many action scenes seem empty, mostly because droids are props not characters; that makes Anakin the only human element in them and he's stuck in a cockpit throughout. It's hard to find emotional engagement in such a presentation.

And, of course, there's the racist element which is hard to ignore in the first half of the movie. While the aliens look great, they aren't all voiced appropriately or put to good use. The Gungans are like a cartoon African tribe and Jar Jar himself is an African American stereotype as horrendous as Sleep n' Eat or Stepin Fetchit. I do see how his slapstick scenes and idiotic luck would make the kids laugh though; he's not as irredeemable a character as I remembered. Watto is reminiscent of the Jewish stereotypes the Nazis threw into propaganda films, as vermin who cares only about money. However, I'd forgotten how Nute Gunray and his partners in the Trade Federation are portrayed as stereotypical Chinese villains with wildly inconsistent accents. It isn't until Sebulba shows up at Tatooine that we finally meet a non-humanoid alien who doesn't make us cringe.

Finally, there's also the introduction of midi-chlorians. To long-standing fans, this is a big deal because it means that Jedi are born not made, so replacing possibility with an odd sort of privileged class structure. To others, it's merely a bit of pseudo-science that really isn't necessary to the plot. Anakin is the only human with reflexes fast enough to be a successful pod racer. Even Qui-Gon Jinn acknowledges that as surely nascent Jedi powers. Why do we need midi-chlorians again?

Progression

As the first episode in the series, this is where everything begins and it does a pretty good job on that front.

The blockade of Naboo is where the Trade Federation really shows its colours and starts its progression to becoming the Empire of the original movies. Senator Palpatine begins his climb to power, manipulating Queen Amidala into calling for a vote of no confidence in Chancellor Valorum and thus opening the way for him. These are the formative moments of the Empire.

The Jedi are shown as all-powerful. Two jedi knights are deemed sufficient to take down an entire Trade Federation ship. The Jedi Council meet on Coruscant and think big thoughts. However, the Sith begin to make themselves known: Darth Sidious is behind the Trade Federation blockade and his apprentice, Darth Maul, is introduced and placed into battle. Clearly we're beginning a major conflict here.

On a smaller level, there are a number of key introductions. We meet the young and precocious Anakin Skywalker, who gets to strut his stuff and move from slavery to heroism in a mildly believable way. Clearly he's a character with massive potential, the only way to viably build towards a legend 'who will bring balance to the force'. We meet a young version of Obi-Wan Kenobi, who doesn't impress in the slightest; we do wonder how he's going to progress from Ewan McGregor to Alec Guinness. R2-D2 gets a heroic introduction and a memorable first meeting with C-3PO; they're well set to become important supporting characters as the series progresses. Even Jabba the Hutt gets a brief appearance that establishes him as a prominent character on Tatooine.

In other words, what George Lucas put into The Phantom Menace isn't really the problem. It's just how he did it, suggesting that thoughtful fan manipulation could create a much better picture. Clearly, once I've worked through the seven current movies, I should watch The Phantom Edit and see if it makes a difference.

Jar Jar Binks

Based on this first film alone, I can totally see how Jar Jar could be seen as much more than just a throwaway character for kids to enjoy. We merely had to be told to look at him in a differently light.

He certainly seems to passively control most of his scenes, from his very first one. He's literally in the way as Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi run into the Naboo forest, but they clearly want to keep going and he promptly talks them into doing other things. He's good at that, it seems. For a character initially banished by his entire race, he sure does a good job of convincing them to go to war.

He’s in the right place at the right time at every point on the story, more than any other character. He meets Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan on Naboo before they get to the city and travels with them to Tattooine and Coruscant. That allows him to get friendly with Padmé before the jedi realise she's really Queen Amidala. He’s right there when Anakin Skywalker shows up and some idiotic slapstick scenes could easily be read as bonding experiences with him. Clearly he has easy access to key people on Coruscant too.

And, of course, he's the luckiest critter in creation. His scenes in battle, which appear to be a cross between cowardice and dumb luck, are impeccable. Watching his 'accidental' antics that take down droids with every single shot with drunken style kung fu in mind is a revelation. Nobody is this lucky.

So, thus far, I'm all the more intrigued by this concept and look forward to seeing how it progresses through the series. Could Jar Jar Binks be the real Phantom Menace? Watch for my Attack of the Clones coverage tomorrow!

Star Wars I-VII Runthrough

I've been a Star Wars fan for about 35 years but I fall in between the usual extremes. I'm certainly not a die hard fan but I've stayed with it throughout, I know quite a bit about it and I'm interested in the newest addition in context with its predecessors. I also felt that I should finally write about the films here at Apocalypse Later Now!

My Star Wars Nerd Credentials

I certainly saw Return of the Jedi in theatres when it came out and I may have seen The Empire Strikes Back that way too. I was only seven when Star Wars was released, though, and first saw it on British television, so I wasn't there at the very beginning like some of my friends.

As a kid, I played with Star Wars action figures at the houses of friends but didn't have my own; I was into Action Force instead. I only acquired the trading cards later in life. I did read Alan Dean Foster's novelisations, though, and learned about a lot of things through the Star Wars lens in books like The Star Wars Question and Answer Book About Space, which I still own. I played some of the video games back in the nineties but I can't even remember which ones they were.

I was interested enough in the Special Edition of Episode IV to go and see that on the big screen, though I was far from impressed with the changes and never followed up with the equivalents for V and VI. I watched the prequels on home video with varying degrees of horror and was surprised to find both that I only own Episodes II and III on VHS and that my Episode I DVD is a bootleg edition with hard coded Chinese subtitles.

I own a bunch of the expanded universe books but haven't got round to reading any thus far, even though I've met at least three of the authors and have two of them as Facebook friends (for other reasons). I have, however, watched a number of fan films and even screened some, like Logan Must Make Star Wars and Trial of the Mask, in my Apocalypse Later mini-film festivals.

I haven't watched the Clone Wars animated series. I have, however, watched and reviewed The Star Wars Holiday Special. That must count for something, right?

Most importantly, I read nerdy articles about the Star Wars series and realise that I'm out of touch with it. I haven't seen Episodes V and VI in what might be thirty years, at least since watching I to III. They've faded enough in my mind that I no longer have a picture in my head of the whole series.

The I-VII Runthrough

So, with Episode VII: The Force Awakens breaking every record in the book in theatres right now, I felt that I should revisit the entire series, watching them in chronological rather than release order, before following up with the new movie.

I'm aiming to refresh my memory of the series and look at each film from three particular perspectives: quality, progression and Jar Jar Binks.

1. I want to see how good each film is, from the perspectives of a fan and a film critic. I remember IV to VI being awesome, but some films don't stand up to what I thought of them as a kid. I remember I and III being awful, but maybe they just seemed that way compared to my memory of the originals. Oddly, I remember II being surprisingly entertaining but I've only seen it once.

2. I want to see how well the series progresses from film to film. I know episode IV well enough to be aware of how the prequels rendered some scenes nonsensical, but I don't remember V and VI well enough to know if that's the case or not there.

3. Having recently read a fascinating fan theory by Reddit user Lumpawarroo that suggests that the usually hated Jar Jar Binks could really be a Sith Lord and the ultimate power behind the Emperor, I wanted to see if this remotely holds up.

It's going to be an interesting ride. Let's see if I can cover these seven pictures at the rate of one per day.

The Films

The Phantom Menace
Attack of the Clones
Revenge of the Sith
A New Hope
The Empire Strikes Back
Return of the Jedi
The Force Awakens

Monday Night Roundup #9

December ended up being quieter than I'd hoped at Apocalypse Later, but I did post a new review there over the last week, for Moonrunners, shot in 1973, released in 1975 and the direct precursor to the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, which didn't appear until 1979. The connections are fascinating.

Here are brief reviews of some other features I watched this last week that won't end up reviewed on that site any time soon:

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984)

Director: W D Richter
Stars: Peter Weller, John Lithgow and Ellen Barkin

For some reason, this wildly titled picture escaped me back in the eighties when I’d probably have loved it most and then remained unseen for years even after I picked it up on DVD. Why, I have no idea, but I am happy that I finally caught up with it. However, now that I’ve finally seen it, I only know that I’ll need to watch it again to figure out a lot of what isn’t clear from a first viewing.

You might assume that I’m talking about the plot, which has been described as tortuously complex even by some of the actors playing parts in it, but I didn’t have much of a problem there, at least by the halfway mark when a variety of disparate elements started to tie together and make some sort of sense. I’m thinking more about why debuting director W D Richter felt drawn to make this film because it’s so ruthlessly uncommercial that it almost guaranteed that he wouldn’t get to make another one. He did, with Late for Dinner, seven years later, but he’s much better known today as a writer, with credits as diverse as Slither, Brubaker and Big Trouble in Little China to his name.

Buckaroo Banzai feels like an adaptation of Doc Savage for the new wave era of the eighties when style was supposed to trump substance, re-written as a science fiction comic book and then adapted back to the screen by people doing too many drugs. If that sounds like your cup of tea, you’ll discover that this works as a cult film far more than its many mainstream genre competitors for screen space in 1984; it went up against Ghostbusters, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, all of which seem utterly conventional in comparison.

Put simply, a pair of scientists back in the thirties, Drs Hikita and Lizardo, test a gadget called an oscillation overthruster, which temporarily shoves the latter into the eighth dimension, where his body is taken over by an alien nutjob called Lord John Whorfin. He brings his alien buddies, the Red Lectroids, to Earth after losing a battle with the much more sane Black Lectroids. His arrival was reported by Orson Welles in his famous broadcast of The War of the Worlds but was forced to retract it as fiction. Decades later, the polymath, Buckaroo Banzai, working with Hikita, tests a jet powered car with a new oscillation overthruster and comes to the attention of the Black Lectroids, orbiting our planet, who gift him with the power to see through the camouflage of the Red Lectroids, who have been building a spacecraft that will take them home to take over. Hearing of Banzai’s success, Whorfin escapes from the Trenton Home for the Criminally Insane to steal from him the one piece of machinery they still need, a working oscillation overthruster, and the fight is on.

Did that sound simple? Well, there are other things going on too, but it’s hard to tell during the picture which of them are actually important and which are merely distractions for the sake of coolness. Is it important, for instance, that Banzai has just discovered the long lost twin sister of his late wife? Should we even bother trying to answer that question while we figure out what else is going on? Perhaps only the Shadow knows.

Having recently watched Doc Savage: Man of Bronze in both its original version and a de-camped edit, the influence of Savage is obvious from moment one. He was a multi-talented precursor to superheroes, having been trained from birth to excel in everything; best known as a surgeon, he’s also a chemist, a composer, an inventor, you name it and he can do it better than anyone else. By comparison, Buckaroo Banzai is, well, pretty much the same; he’s a neurosurgeon, martial arts expert, particle physicist and rock star, just to name a few. He begins the film operating on a man’s brain, then switches to his jet car so he can break the sound barrier on land.

It doesn’t remotely look like Bloodhound SSC, which actually aims to do the first half of that for real, as that’s 42 feet long, weighs 14 tons and is powered not only by a jet engine but also a rocket. Banzai’s converted Ford F-350 pickup truck really doesn’t cut the mustard but we’re asked to swallow a lot here, far beyond his driving through a mountain and bringing back a creature from the 8th dimension.

For a start, we’re asked to swallow John Lithgow’s performance as Dr Emilio Lizardo, as possessed by the evil Red Lectroid leader, Lord John Whorfin. He’s utterly wild in this film, somewhat like a cross between Dr Emmett Brown from Back to the Future and Bobcat Goldthwait. He’s the maddest of mad scientists with awful teeth and he gradually gains Adolf Hitler vibes until we can’t ignore the similarities. It’s a performance that simply has to be seen to be believed.

We’re also asked to swallow the fact that Buckaroo Banzai stops his band, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, mid-song because he can hear a young lady crying at a table at the back of the audience. That’s Penny Priddy, his late wife’s twin, hence why he keeps calling her Peggy. Here’s also where his most famous line comes in. ‘No matter where you go,’ he points out, ‘there you are.’ What Penny really has to do with anything, I’m never quite sure, but she’s played by a young Ellen Barkin, so I don’t care too much. She’s the best sort of eye candy.

There’s eye candy everywhere here and ear candy too. This feels like a nerd’s dream, because nothing is what we expect it to be and everything is cool in ways that it rarely gets to be. Today, with Comicons on every street corner, it’s pretty clear that the nerds took over the planet but that wasn’t the case back in 1984. Back then, nerds were more like Eddie Deezen characters, apparently there only to get picked on for their social ineptitude. Films like WarGames pointed towards the future, but Buckaroo Banzai pointed instead towards the future of nerd fandom.

The cast is a dream and they’re mostly pre-fame. There’s Peter Weller before RoboCop, Ellen Barkin before The Big Easy, Christopher Lloyd before Back to the Future and Clancy Brown before Highlander. There’s Jeff Goldblum before Into the Night, The Fly and Earth Girls are Easy. Only John Lithgow was really already established, because this came afer Twilight Zone: The Movie. Yet none of them are put to the usual sort of use, this being an anomaly in all their careers, however many sci-fi pictures they may have made since.

Why? Because Richter and his writer, Earl Mac Rauch, made a whole slew of decisions that went utterly against the commercial norms of the time. The US President spends the entire film in hospital, encased within some sort of huge medical device. The good aliens aren’t just Black Metroids, they’re very black, like Caribbean rastafarian black, while the bad aliens are all Caucasians played by recognisable names like Lithgow, Lloyd and Vincent Schiavelli. While the Hong Kong Cavaliers, not merely Banzai’s band but also his multi-talented assistants in the tradition of Doc Savage’s Fabulous Five, are all white men, many other characters who fight for good are not: such as the white woman who’s the only sane voice in the White House, the Chinese scientist who sparks the plot and the black kid who supports Banzai through the Blue Blaze Irregulars, surely a take on the Baker Street Irregulars of Sherlock Holmes. All the aliens are called John, even presumably female ones played by actors like Rosalind Cash, but often have wildly odd surnames like John Small Berries and John Bigbooté. Presumably this was a mix of Ford Prefect from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with the Bruces from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

These decisions would seem like good ones today because they’d set up all sorts of opportunities for merchandising and diversity appeal, but in 1984 they seem completely insane. What else seems insane is the way the film is cut, which is highly cryptic. A coherent editing job would have made the plot much more understandable, though the test version screened ahead of general release was much longer and may have made more sense. Jamie Lee Curtis’s role as Banzai’s mother was cut entirely, for instance. Perhaps what feels strangest is that, for all the wild and weird action, this is still a slow movie that contains a lot of emptiness, not least in the underplayed delivery of most of the dialogue that doesn’t come from John Lithgow. Weller especially mumbles his way through the entire film, as if Banzai is simply too busy to enunciate.

I have to say that I was befuddled by the wild approach taken by Richter. I enjoyed the film’s riotous nature, more Marx Brothers than Mel Brooks, and I enjoyed the way that it’s as much a comedy, a ripping yarn and a romance as it is a sci-fi movie. I feel like I should like it but was too rooked between the eyes to really figure out why. However, I’ll certainly return to it again, because it feels like a real cult gem, a journey as much as a destination and something that would grow with multiple viewings.

Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971)

Director: Mel Stuart
Stars: Gene Wilder, Jack Albertson and Peter Ostrum

Like pretty much anyone growing up in England when I did, I read a lot of Roald Dahl and, of course, that included Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, published in 1964. It became a feature film in 1971, which I didn’t catch until later because I was too busy being born. I don’t remember being that impressed when I did see it, but I don’t remember why. Maybe it’s because it’s a musical. I’ve never been a fan of musicals in general, because I tend to see the songs as annoying interruptions.

Watching afresh for the first time in over three decades, that’s certainly part of it. The opening musical number is a great example of how the internal consistency of stories tends to get horribly mangled in a musical because it’s trumped by the requirements of choreography. It doesn’t help that this particular one just plays wrong to today’s sensibilities; Aubrey Woods does a good job as the Candy Man, but this scene feels like he’s a paedophile drug dealer pushing sugar to kids. The second song makes no sense and the third is one of those annoying interruptions. Even when the song is a whole bundle of fun, like the Oompa Loompa song, it’s a distraction, especially when the picture is crushed into a quarter of the screen to make room for the animated lyrics. Mostly, it’s the one song here that actually accompanies the story, thus it’s the one that I’m all for. Mostly.

Fortunately, I liked most of the rest. The story is much closer to Dahl’s original than Tim Burton’s recent reimagining. I’d expect most of us have experienced the story in some form by now, but it has to do with Willy Wonka, a famed chocolatier whose factory has been closed for years but which will open again for the lucky recipients of the five golden tickets which he has secreted inside five Wonka bars. Four of the five end up with obnoxious kids and the fifth with Charlie Bucket, a poor but humble soul who puts others before himself. Oh yes, this is a morality play, if a notably twisted one.

I liked the general approach, much more down to earth and much less stylised than Burton’s version. Clearly the budget is much lower, but for the first half of the picture, before the gates of Willy Wonka’s factory open, that actually works to the film’s advantage. Everything feels real instead of plastic.

The best moments, though, are ones that I’d completely forgotten. An uncredited Tim Brooke-Taylor is a computer operator trying to persuade a Siemens System 4004 into revealing the location of the tickets, though it doesn’t want to play ball. Even better is the kidnapping. A woman’s husband is whisked away and the ransom is their case of Wonka bars. ‘How long will they give me to think it over?’ she asks. The teacher at Charlie’s school who does chemistry experiments with ‘horrible dangerous stuff’ is great fun too. There’s even a cool scary moment with a tinker outside the Wonka factory gates, spouting poetry from behind his cart of knives.

Another plus is the casting of the five kids with the five golden tickets, because all of them are spot on. Julie Dawn Cole gets the most opportunity as Veruca Salt, the spoiled daughter of a despotic northern English factory owner, played by the fabulous Roy Kinnear. Both are obnoxious in exactly the right ways. Peter Ostrum is Charlie, the star of the book but relegated here to supporting Wonka. He does a pretty good job at being good even in trying circumstances, but he’s more whiny than Freddie Highmore was in Burton’s film. Chubby Augustus Gloop from Düsselheim is actually played by a German, Michael Bollner, though his introduction is photobombed by a TV reporter who appears to be wearing antlers because of where he’s standing. Denise Nickerson is the gum-chewing Violet Beauregarde, daughter of a Montana used car salesman. Finally, Paris Themmen is Mike Teavee, a well named Arizona television addict.

Dahl created all of them to teach lessons to obnoxious children, so they’re deliberately one trick ponies, but I’m remembering that they had more substance in the book than they did in either film. Really, it’s only Charlie and Veruca who get much opportunity to do anything in this one.

And, of course, there’s Gene Wilder, who dominates the picture even though he doesn’t even show up until almost the halfway mark, 44 minutes in, when he limps his way quietly out of the Wonka factory towards the waiting masses, only to fall over into a neat forward roll. Starting out by pretending to be a cripple is hardly politically correct, but he only gets worse in that vein, turning nothing lines into magic, especially when resignedly warning his guests not to do whatever it is that they’re about to do, knowing full well that they’ll do it and the results will be horrible. He’s delightfully dark, even though he doesn’t remotely resemble the androgynous Willy Wonka that Johnny Depp conjured up for Tim Burton.

What else happens halfway through is that we journey into Wonka’s factory, where the lack of budget shows itself to be a real problem. The Chocolate Room is the first moment where I really wished for the set decorators of Burton’s film and the budget to pay for their creations. It’s a small, cheap and notably underwhelming set, but Gene Wilder enhances it by his presence, making a production out of simplistic acts like walking down a staircase. If only the sets were up to his standard, but they’re obvious ones like we might have expected to see on a seventies variety show rather than a riot of imagination.

So I liked a lot here but I was underwhelmed by the end result. If Burton’s film suffered from being too rehearsed and clinical, this suffered from being too loose and too bareboned. The story is timeless and Gene Wilder provided an iconic performance that joins it, but much of the rest suffers from the lack of budget to push it beyond some very basic limitations. It’s hard to buy into Wonka’s magical chocolate factory when it’s a bunch of cheap sets dressed up for a children’s party. It deserved better.

This was film #82 in my runthrough of the debased.com 100 Greatest Cult Films. You can find the full list here.

6 Ways to Sundown (2015)

Director: Nadeem Soumah
Stars: Vinnie Jones, Vivica A Fox, Dominique Swain, Bai Ling, Tom Sizemore and Michael Walton

I have no clue why Tom Sizemore’s opening monologue is edited the way it is, annoyingly chopped up into slices for no apparent reason, but he’s as magnetic as ever when our attention is on him. He’s Mike Jones, he’s getting drunk and he’s about to get assassinated by a contract killer, Frank Casper.

He dies before the opening credits, so apparently we’re here to watch Frank not Mike. Frank is a mild mannered and well spoken man played by Chris Jai Alex and, after the credits, we follow him into Vinnie Jones’s car where he’s hired to assassinate Sonny ‘Sundown’ Garcia, the biggest cocaine dealer in the United States. After the sequence in which that happens, the first of the six segments into which this picture is broken down, he’s gone too.

Jones is one of the two men who continue throughout the movie. He’s not named until late on and even then it’s just as the suitably anonymous John Doe. He’s the driving force behind this story, but he does it at a distance, through other people. His time and finances appear to be unlimited and he’s serious about how the work needs to be done. What he wants is to exercise his revenge on Garcia, the other key focus of the picture, by taking him down piece by piece: his freedom, his money, his reputation, his loyalty, his love and, eventually, his life. We watch all this happen in reverse order because, of course, there’s a twist to explain why we’re working through such an apparently simple story with such apparent complexity.

I learned a number of things during the first quarter of an hour and they were only underlined as things ran on. Quality actors don’t need quality material to do quality work. Vinnie Jones should never read narration. And Nadeem Soumah is a much better cinematographer than he is a writer or director. There are a whole host of visuals here that look absolutely stunning: they’re well composed and well shot. However, they also serve their own purpose rather than that of the story.

Jones is fine when not narrating, though he spends the entire movie sat in a car in a warehouse, so it’s hardly a stretch for him. Each segment of the picture involves him finding someone, testing them and hiring them to be part of his master plan. Some get more to do than others, but they each have a task. What was surprising, given Soumah’s background in cinematography and obvious flair for gimmickry, was that he didn’t handle each segment in a stylistically different way, instead leaving that task to the actors he hired to play characters for Jones to hire.

Chris Jai Alex kicks things off well, playing a neatly calm counter to Sizemore’s brash target. Jose Rosete is even better as Marcus, a petty street thug hired to kidnap Garcia’s wife. It’s always great to catch new work from this Arizona talent whom Hollywood is keeping busy and it’s especially great to see him in a role he can get his teeth into. The last time I saw him was in a tiny role in the Danny Trejo movie, Bullet, which was almost as bad as the last movie in which I saw Dominique Swain, Nazis at the Center of the Earth. She plays Garcia’s wife, Steph, with a suitably foul mouth. Melissa Mars gets perhaps the most to do of the segment leads, as a continental thief; it’s good to see her again after The Cabining. Jeff Galfer has perhaps the least to do as a private investigator who tracks Steph, which gives Bai Ling prominence as the surprisingly underplayed con artist who follows. Finally there’s Vivica A Fox, who plays her corrupt cop with a slow, knowing presence.

To draw us into why this is happening and why we should care, there’s also a flashback sequence that’s carefully broken up into sections as well so as not to reveal too much until the time is right. It aims to explain why John Doe is so keen on destroying the life of Sonny ‘Sundown’ Garcia but, while it does that from a story perspective well enough, it has some other problems that are hard to get past. For a start, while Nicholas Small and Marco Silvestri are capable enough as younger versions of Vinnie Jones, they don’t look anything like him, making us wonder why they were cast or, perhaps more to the point, why Jones was cast as the older version of them, given that his character was apparently born in the US and grew up on the streets of Mexico before spending two decades in jail. Why precisely none of the many supposedly bright people he hires question his iconic English accent, given this related back story, is surely a major plothole.

I have to admire Nadeem Soumah’s ambition here. His concept is good, though it’s an overly complex one that relies on us being manipulated throughout. His cast are very good, though nobody really gets much opportunity to shine because they’re each only in the film for a short time; the only exception being Michael Walton, who appears throughout as Garcia and does well with a role that clearly doesn’t flow. Visually, Soumah is clearly capable, though I’d question his decision-making ability as a director because, on the basis of this film, he would probably be better served by filling only one of those two roles at a time. I get the feeling that he’d have done a more consistent job shooting the picture if he wasn’t also directing it and vice versa.

In the end, I’d call this an interesting experiment that has a few successes but more failures. The odd ending elevates it a little but also highlights how much that was needed.

December Reviews at the Nameless Zine

I write book reviews for The Nameless Zine, an online zine run by the Western Science Fiction Association (WesternSFA), a non-profit fandom group based here in Arizona.

As the Nameless Zine follows a graphical indexing system, I also maintain my own text index of what I've written at my own website. You can find it here at the Reviews at the Nameless Zine page.

Reviews at the Nameless Zine post monthly on the 15th of each month and December's batch are now online. I reviewed five books this month:

The Devious Dr Jekyll

I adored The Diabolical Miss Hyde, which is surely my favourite novel of the year. This first sequel isn't quite up to the same standards but that's mostly because it's a sequel. It's still a glorious romp through an alternate Victorian London in the wild company of Dr Eliza Jekyll and her wicked half, Miss Lizzie Hyde.

Dr Jekyll's new case is a series of grisly murders committed by the Pentacle Killer, which trawls in some more gothic Victorian literature into its scope. However, there's so much more going on than just a mystery that it's often not the key focus. Viola Carr created a monster with this series and it really wants to run loose. Not every character gets the time they want to play and some of their stories will have to wait until book three.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine, which I'm happy to say is the featured review for December. I also reviewed the first book at the Nameless Zine: The Diabolical Miss Hyde.

The Machine Awakes

In the future, mankind expands across the galaxy until it meets the Spiders, a race of AI driven world-devastating machines. The ensuing war isn't the focus of this novel but is the background to it. During the war, mankind is led by the Fleet, in turn led by the Fleet Admiral. Our story ties to the assassination of not one but two Fleet Admirals in as many days.

I'm not quite sure what The Machine Awakes wants to be. It's a decent futuristic mystery, in which an agent called Von Kodiak investigates these murders. However it gradually shifts away to become a technological thriller focused on the Fleet psi-Marine who sits at its centre. Eventually it decides that it wants to be a space opera instead and that's the weakest angle because it's better at being small than being big.

Adam Christopher did draw me into this novel and I want to read each of the stories he tried to write. I just want to read them in separate volumes rather than just this one.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine.

Mystic

I devoured the 315 page Mystic in under four hours because it's as easy a read as I've found in years. This is mostly for two reasons. One is that it's a rather conventional fantasy novel that doesn't ever try to do anything particularly original. The other is that, even given that flaw, author Jason Denzel really makes us care about his leading lady and the world which she inhabits.

It's a relatively simple novel of magic. Pomella AnDone is a commoner who gets caught up in a grand adventure, being selected to compete for the role of Mystic, one who uses the Myst, or the magic in this world. She's the underdog because no commoner has ever been selected for such competition and that pisses a lot of people off. Cue heroes and villains and all the rest.

I don't believe this is YA fiction, but I'd highly recommend it to young readers who haven't explored fantasy yet. The more you know about the genre, the less memorable this will become.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine.

Deadlands: Ghostwalkers

The first of three novels revolving around the Deadlands RPG, this is a thoroughly enjoyable weird west tale that sets a high standard for Jeff Mariotte and Seanan McGuire to live up to in the remaining two.

It's a simple story in an imaginative framework. Grey Torrance, a soldier literally running from the ghosts of his past, finds himself in what's left of California after the Great Quake of 1868, teaming with an Oglala Sioux called Looks Away to fight a land baron, Aleksander Deray, and the dark forces he commands, to save the people of a town called Paradise Falls.

It's an old school pulp romp that betrays its influences on its sleeve, but has an ungodly amount of fun with them. It's weird and it's western and it's well worth your time.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine.

The Land of Terror

The adventures of Doc Savage were originally published monthly in the Doc Savage pulp magazine and I'm reviewing them in order, one per month. This is the second, after The Man of Bronze, and it's not remotely up to the standards it set.

On the positive side, there's a rollicking adventure set in a wild variety of locations, like a pirate ship turned museum, a submarine and a former volcano full of prehistoric creatures. There's also a bunch of cool tech, like the Smoke of Eternity, an acid which melts everything, including human bodies.

On the negative side, Doc is outrageously talented here, more like Superman, whom he heavily influenced, than a pulp action hero. He's supposed to be the best of us, but here he's beyond that. He's also dark here, much darker than I remember him, as he kills a bunch of people in his quest for justice. That's too dark for this sort of inspiring hero.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine. I also reviewed the first book at the Nameless Zine: The Man of Bronze.

Monday Night Roundup #8

I posted another Weird Wednesday review to Apocalypse Later over the last week. Given that the world and its dog went to see the new Star Wars movie this week, I took on the arduous task of reviewing The Star Wars Holiday Special.

Here's a brief review of some other features I watched this last week that won't end up reviewed on that site any time soon:

Terminator Genisys (2015)

Director: Alan Taylor
Stars: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jason Clarke, Emilia Clarke, Jai Courtney and Byung-hun Lee

I’ve been a Terminator fan since the first one, but the franchise ran on too long. I haven’t even got round to watching Terminator Salvation yet, but I was highly interested in this one, because it isn’t just another Terminator movie. I’ve been told that it’s an amalgam of The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day with a few twists, but I don’t know because I haven’t seen it. It’s about time, no pun intended, to take a look myself.

It certainly begins very much as I know from those original films, strangely even down to the end of the world being 1997, though we see a little more of it than we might expect. Skynet comes alive, launches missiles worldwide and wipes out three billion people. Survivors call it Judgement Day. Our narrator, who was born after that point, in a world already ruled by the machines, is clearly Kyle Reese. In 2029, before John Connor destroys Skynet and wins the war, the machines send a terminator back to 1984, tasked to kill John’s mother Sarah and so erase him from existence. Reese volunteers to go after it and save her.

We all know this story, right? Well, not quite, because things change pretty quickly.

When the terminator, in the form of Arnold Schwarzenegger (though really a body double by the name of Brett Azar), famously asks for clothes, he finds himself fighting another terminator who’s really played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is wildly new. What else is new is that when Reese arrives in 1984 and gets arrested, it’s Sarah Connor who shows up and shouts, ‘Come with me if you want to live.’

Everything has changed. Everything is new, however familiar it seems. The scenes that follow are mirrors of scenes from the first and second movies, but they’re in a different context and are sometimes merged together. Now we’re in a world where the Arnie terminator which protected John Connor in T2 grew up protecting Sarah Connor from the age of nine. She calls him Pops and he’s still around, doing his job. Her entire story has been replaced (‘I don’t need saving,’ she says), so Reese’s entire mission has changed. A new liquid metal T-1000 is hot on their trail, but the real story kicks in after they destroy it.

Just before Reese travelled back in time, he sees a terminator who shouldn’t exist attacking John Connor. At that moment, he begins to remember a different life, one in which he grew up with a family in a world without terminators, at least until something called Genisys became Skynet and sparked Judgement Day in 2017. So, now when Sarah Connor wants to travel forward in time to 1997 to destroy Skynet, he talks her into going forward to 2017 instead to destroy Genisys, which turns out to be a completely integrated system designed by Cyberdyne Systems. It’s sort of like the internet of things, making this reboot of an old franchise neatly ahead of its time again.

This is an interesting new setup and it feels good. It gives Schwarzenegger an interesting opportunity in a role that really hadn’t given him many opportunities in three previous movies. The terminator he plays here appears at three completely different times looking three different ages because, thanks to a neat suggestion by James Cameron, the skin that he wears is human and ages just like we do. After taking the long way round to 2017 he looks just like Arnie today, because that’s cheaper than CGI. It’s good to see an old terminator. A recurrent theme here is that he’s ‘old not obsolete’.

I can’t go any further into the story because that would venture into serious spoilers and there are more than just a few twists here. I’m sure that there are a whole bunch of sites out there that break down the entire thing into its constituent parts; I don’t need to be another one.

What I can say is that the actors are surprisingly good in iconic roles that aren’t easily filled. Of course, Arnie is Arnie, so he can clearly play a terminator in his sleep. In the first picture, his iconic stature was partly due to his lack of depth as an actor. He’s come a long way since then and films like Maggie have shown that he’s gained some surprising props on that front and he gets to use a little of that newfound skill here. Perhaps because her role in the various stories is so fundamental, Sarah Connor has become as iconic a character to we viewers as the terminator himself. Linda Hamilton isn’t easy to replace, but in an oddly synchronistic casting choice, given that her Game of Thrones co-star, Lena Headey, played the role in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on television, Emilia Clarke stamps her own authority onto it here, however small she is (and she looks smaller next to Schwarzenegger than she does next to a trio of dragons).

I’m less sold on Jai Courtney as Kyle Reese and Jason Clarke as John Connor, though both are surprisingly good and both eventually engage me enough to put my investment in their characters from earlier films aside. Courtney felt wrong for a while because he’s so abrasive, but that’s actually pretty appropriate for a boy who grew up a soldier in a world run by machines. Clarke somehow didn’t fit my idea of what John Connor should look like, but surely that’s just a personal thing. I can’t complain about what he does.

What I can complain about is the unresolved web of time travel paradoxes. While many critics lambasted the complex reworking of the time travel aspects of the first two movies into one new one, I found that I had no problems with that. I liked the additional complexity, especially as it heightened the plot twists. However, once it’s done, there are unresolved questions for which I was waiting for answers that never came and that was an annoying way to leave the movie. For instance, someone sends Arnie’s old T-800 back in time from somewhere to protect the nine year old Sarah Connor, but even he doesn’t know who because the files were erased. That prompts who, when and how, among other questions.

If there are answers, they aren’t in this movie. Perhaps we’ll find out in the projected television series and/or the further two feature films in a new projected trilogy, but Hollywood accounting sees a $440m gross on a $155m budget as not breaking even, so they’re all on hold for the moment. If they don’t end up being made, I hope that the storylines are released to provide closure. I want to see what happens in the Sarah Connor/Kyle Reese relationship now that we’re outside the original timeline. I want more Det O’Brien, who is a fascinating character in a unique position in the story. ‘Goddamn time travelling robots covering up their goddamn tracks,’ he says at one point, which is easily my favourite line of the movie. Surely we would expect to see more of Matt Smith, notching up another major sci-fi franchise after his run as the Doctor.

Critics seem to have given more negative reviews to Terminator Genisys than positive ones and I don’t see why. There are certainly flaws here and it’s not the classic that the first two movies were. However, it’s a much more thoughtful but still action-packed ride than Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which opposes this in theory. If this is the story that happens after the bad guys win in the first two films, it’s also the story that happens when the third one is ignored entirely. I can buy into that. Now I guess that the fourth film, itself the first in a projected trilogy that never was, ought to move up my queue. Maybe that’s also better than the critics suggested.

Police Academy (1984)

Director: Hugh Wilson
Stars: Steve Guttenberg, Kim Cattrall, G W Bailey, Bubba Smith, Donovan Scott and George Gaynes

In 1984 when Police Academy was released, or more accurately, in 1985 or so when it made it to English television, I thought this was hilarious. OK, I was thirteen or fourteen at the time, but still. Of course, the sequels got progressively worse and worse, but I never got through all of them and the last one to date, Police Academy: Mission to Moscow, features both Christopher Lee and Ron Perlman in supporting roles. Clearly I have to make it through the first six to get to that one. No, 2010’s Police Academy Gangbang isn’t part of the series but it may be better than the last one that was and I’m not into gay porn.

Talking of porn, I certainly didn’t know who Georgina Spelvin was back then. She’s the hooker who gives Commandant Lassard a memorably good time from inside a podium while he’s giving a presentation. It’s fair to say that I first encounted all these actors here, even more famous mainstream ones like Steve Guttenberg and Kim Cattrall. Of course, I only know some of them from Police Academy movies; it wasn’t the launchpad for everyone’s career that it was for some.

The story is pretty simple, but effective. The mayor controversially removes all restrictions to joining the police force, including height, weight and aptitude. Naturally, a whole slew of inappropriate candidates immediately apply to the Police Academy and hilarious chaos ensues as Lt Harris, an odd sort of villain given that he really cares about the police force and does what he does here in its best interest, tries to weed out the undesirables so that, while anyone can start at Police Academy, not everyone can finish.

Steve Guttenberg is a surprisingly weak lead, given that he became the biggest star of all of these for a while. He’s Carey Mahoney, a smartass parking lot attendant who gets fired at the beginning of the film and promptly sent to the Police Academy by the local police chief who’s fed up of his shenanigans. The deal he’s given to stay out of jail is 14 weeks of training without being able to quit. Naturally, he plans to get kicked out but, to spice it up before he does, he insists on taking the human sound effects machine he just met with him. That’s Larvell Jones, in the talented form of Michael Winslow, and he gets some of the best scenes of the movie.

Many of the rest immediately became regulars in the series which churned out a picture every year until movie number six. Eugene Tackleberry is a trigger happy security guard played by David Graf. Donovan Scott is the girly sounding Leslie Barbara, a nervous nelly working a photo booth who still gets bullied at age whatever. Doug Fackler, in the form of Bruce Mahler, is accident prone, leading to slapstick humour whenever he’s on screen. Moses Hightower, memorably played by the late Bubba Smith, is the massive 6’ 7” gentle giant. Marion Ramsey, wearing a fat suit, is Laverne Hooks, the weak voiced little lady who eventually finds her voice at just the right moment.

I remembered all of them, but I’d forgotten the fake Latin lover, George Martin, surprisingly as Andrew Rubin is particularly good in this film. I’d also forgotten Kim Cattrall as Karen Thompson, but probably because she didn’t really have a gimmick of her own. She merely wants to meet normal people outside the high powered circles her rich family walks in and is both nice and gorgeous enough to immediately become the love interest for Mahoney. Both Cattrall and Thompson deserved better.

What surprised me most is just how young everyone looks, except for George Gaynes, who looks exactly as I remember him as Commandant Lassard. Even G W Bailey seemed young as Lt Harris, who, from the perspective of thirty years of hindsight, steals this movie. Sure, he tasks the two bullies to weed out the ‘scumbuckets’ as his squad leaders, but he’s the only real character with depth and Bailey is hilarious in a whole slew of scenes, interacting with everyone else as they find humour in their one or two.

The film as a whole feels more relaxed than I remember but, of course, we’re still watching these actors establishing their routines. They’d hone them in this movie, repeat them in the next and keep on going until people stopped showing up to see yet another instance. Each movie in the series made less money than the previous one, mostly because the jokes were the same ones every time out. Mostly.

If Lt Harris is by far the strongest character to a fresh viewing, Mahoney is the weakest. He is given more to do than the rest of the regulars, but Guttenberg sleepwalks through the film apparently believing that a cheeky grin is all that’s needed to collect his salary. I remembered him as the everyman, the grounded character to whom we could all relate amongst the comic relief, but today he annoyed me nearly as much as he did the people he was actually trying to annoy. Nowadays I’m Harris’s on side, at least in this movie. Maybe I grew up.

Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (1985)

Director: Hugh Wilson
Stars: Steve Guttenberg, Bubba Smith, David Graf, Michael Winslow, Bruce Mahler, Marion Ramsey, Colleen Camp, Art Metrano, Howard Hesseman and George Gaynes

I saw the first four or five Police Academy movies back in the eighties. They became something of an annual tradition, because the first half dozen were released one per year and generally made it to TV around the same time. I’m vaguely remembering the Christmas season, which suggests that, given that the first movie was released in 1984, my first exposure to this franchise was roughly thirty years ago. Holy crap, I’m getting old.

I remembered generally that the first movie was better than its sequels, but I was surprised to find from a double bill of the first two that it wasn’t even close. The first one was a fun, enjoyable, decent romp, even if it was fundamentally limited by what it was. The second one didn’t mark the beginning of a downward slope; it had already slid halfway down.

With the cadets graduating from the Police Academy in the first film, clearly they couldn’t just re-run the same plot again. They tried, but shifted the action to the 16th precinct, which is conveniently run by Pete Lassard, baby brother to Commandant Lassard of the Police Academy. Pete is Howard Hesseman, a good actor who is clearly embarrassed to find himself in this picture and thus fails to distinguish himself at all. He was asked back for sequels but he refused, claiming that he regretted doing this one. Given his lack of leadership, it’s believable when the police chief gets egged on the way into his precinct building, budget cuts or not. The only thing Captain Pete manages to do is to weedle a bunch of new recruits out of the chief to take on Zed, an odd gang leader played by Bob Goldthwait.

Yes, that abbreviated credit hides Bobcat Goldthwait, wild and crazy comedian who basically extrapolates his act into his character. Fans will see him as the best thing in the movie, while those who don’t like him won’t be converted. I’m somewhere between those sides as I found him annoyingly awful for most of the film but surprisingly funny towards the end, mostly because of some magical dialogue that I could easily believe he improvised.

You won’t be surprised to discover who those new recruits are going to be: Tackleberry, who’s working at a school; Maloney, who’s patrolling the beach; Hightower, Hooks, Fackler, Jones... everyone we expect. There’s no Kim Cattrall, but her character, Karen Thompson, wasn’t given a gimmick in the first movie so we don’t really miss her. There’s no Andrew Rubin either, which means that Tackleberry gets thrown the romance angle for the second film and it constitutes one of its weakest parts. Otherwise, they all do what they did in the first picture over again.

The oddest decision the filmmakers took was to ditch Lt Harris, who was clearly the best thing about the first film, and replace him with Art Metrano as Lt Mauser, Pete Lassard’s butt kissing Watch Commander. G W Bailey actually wanted to return to reprise his role as Harris, but he was left out, perhaps because time has shown that he was really the good guy in the first film and the producers wanted the equivalent role in the second to be a bad guy. While Harris did what he did for the sake of the police force, Mauser just wants the precinct for his own and thus doesn’t get any sympathy from us, even when the pranks against him get rather outrageous; they go too far to remain as funny as they’re supposed to be. In my opinion, Harris was the glue in the first film and, as decent as Metrano is, he’s not up to Bailey’s level and the picture suffers from his absence.

While the 16th precinct’s new recruits are familiar to us, they’re paired up with established officers who are new faces and none of them are really any good. Mahoney partners with a complete slob, Vinnie Schtulman; while he clearly has fans online, I’m far from one of them. Tackleberry is paired with a lady motorcycle cop called Kirkland, yet another police role for Colleen Camp; she’s only there as a prop for him. Hightower is given foot patrol and Hooks is stuck on the desk. None of this is inspired.

Beyond their standard routines, they don’t begin well. Mahoney sees an armed robbery in process at a store and the rest respond to the call. Between them, they completely destroy the place and tackle the owner to boot. 1,200 rounds of ammunition causes $76,813 of damage. The only good thing about this scene is that the merchant is Sweetchuck, who initially only had one scene but the director bulked it up when he saw how well it was going. While Mauser deserved abuse, he’s given too much so it isn’t funny; on the other hand, Sweetchuck doesn’t deserve any abuse but what he gets is funny, because he’s so gloriously up tight about it. He’ll return later in the series as a cadet.

Unfortunately he’s by far the best thing about the first half of the film and he’s just a bit part. Everything new is weak, from Zed’s fun but utterly pointless unhinged gang leader through Hesseman’s weak try at a police captain to Tackleberry’s distracting romance with Kirkland. They do get one great scene, as they undress and disarm, ably highlighting how much of an arsenal they carry between them, but that’s it.

Fortunately the gimmicks haven’t quite got old yet and, frankly, Michael Winslow’s Bruce Lee routine is priceless. It could have been shot better, but I loved it anyway. It’s by far the best scene in the movie; in fact it’s one of the best scenes of the series. If only it had shown up in a better picture, but this one alternates between weak and hopeless, eventually just fizzling out into nothing as if the story was never a priority. It’s just an excuse to run through a few established routines again and half heartedly throw a few new ones into the mix without any real effort. There is talent here, but mostly it’s wasted.

One Hour Photo (2002)

Director: Mark Romanek
Star: Robin Williams

Given that my better half has been on a Robin Williams kick with the grandkids, it seemed like a good time to get round to One Hour Photo. I often use Williams as a counter to Tom Hanks, two comedians who made me laugh for years but then got serious. I still have problems not laughing when I see Hanks, even if he plays someone dying of AIDS, but I never had that problem with Williams. I wonder if it’s because, as we know all too well today, he had a sadness in him that carries through into many of his serious roles.

Here he’s Seymour Parish, who works in the photo shop at a Savmart. He takes it seriously; to him it’s an art not merely a job. He seems lonely and sad, as friendly as he is to his customers, but we know that there’s more to him than that because the opening scene has him in custody, looking a lot more scary than sad. What did William Yorkin do to provoke him, asks the cop, who wants to understand what he did and why. What that was, we don’t know yet, but surely we’re about to find out.

We start when Nina Yorkin, William’s wife, brings in some films to develop of their son Jake’s birthday party. Initially, Seymour, or Sy the Photo Guy as they’ve come to know him, seems friendly and helpful, prioritising Nina’s photos because she’s a regular customer, upgrading her to larger prints at no extra cost and even giving Jake a free disposable camera. However, we then see that he developed an extra set for himself and he even passes the Yorkins off as his own family to his waitress that night at a diner. When he gets home, are those photos of the Yorkins on the counter rather than his own family? Oh yes. And there are more than a few plastered across the wall of his front room, taking it over one snapshot at a time. He’s clearly been obsessing for a very long while.

And so we proceed. We listen to him narrate the details of his job, calmly and politely. He only gets upset at the AGFA maintenance guy who doesn’t take the quality of his work quite as seriously as he does. And, in and amongst this, we watch his obsession progress. He loses himself completely in his copies of the Yorkins’ photos, imagining himself into them and the scenes they portray. He sits outside their house in his car, imagining himself inside. And he reaches out for deeper connections, watching Jake practice football at school and sitting near Nina in the food court and setting up conversations by reading the same books he sees her buy.

Creepy, huh? Well, you might imagine this as a standard psychological thriller, in which some deluded maniac gets just a little too crazy about his obsession and bad things happen. In a way that’s true, but assuming this is like your standard movie would be a mistake.

The primary reason this works is the nuanced performance of Robin Williams. In other hands, Seymour Parish could have been a routine psychopath from moment one, but Williams makes him very human indeed. Put simply, we care about him, even as we watch the things he should never have been doing and hope he finds a way to stop doing them.

We watch him struggle with his emotions, attempting to maintain a calm exterior as he churns away inside. We wonder about how he got this way, about how alone any one man can be, about how nobody saw into his mind and did something about it. We think about all the mass shooters out there nowadays and draw the obvious comparisons. If someone as nice as Sy the Photo Guy can be this out there, then what about our nice co-workers?

And, of course, we worry about what he’s going to do, what got him into the police station for that first scene, especially given two particular escalation points that I won’t spoil but which come right on top of each other and shake up both his real life and his fantasy one with the Yorkins. It’s no surprise that he’ll do something about it, but what?
From a cast perspective, Williams dominates this film utterly. The supporting players were appropriately cast and they do everything they need to do but, from their first moments on screen, they’re really just props for Williams to work from. He’s the only character with sufficient screen time and character depth to draw us into his story and Williams nails him absolutely.

His real support is from the crew rather than the cast. The score is slow and brooding electronica, which works well with the slow and brooding pace of the film. To accompany the focus on photos, a majority of the film is shot straight on like a still photograph. The camera does move but, when it does, it’s usually clinical and one directional to mimic Parrish’s tunnel vision and attention to detail. Only when it gets tense does it go subtly handheld. Even the colours are varied, with some scenes white and clinical, others saturated and emotional. There’s also a well edited dream sequence with solid effects.

And, of course, there’s a strong and unusual script, courtesy of the film’s director, Mark Romanek, which refuses to go where most psychological thrillers tend to go. We’re conditioned to expect certain sorts of progression in these films but this refuses to play ball. It’s not a police procedural, the cops only showing up towards the end and, even then, they just do their job like professionals, never getting cinematic on anyone’s ass. Nobody’s ever interested in body count. There’s almost no running around screaming in fear on anyone’s part, responses to revelations appropriately handled by adult human beings. The goals and results are not remotely what we’re used to.

And, above all, the role of victim isn’t clearly defined, because every one of the key players is a victim, including Seymour Parish. While he’s clearly the villain of the piece, in his own mind, he’s the hero too and that’s a wonderful and traumatic thing to realise. Bravo!