Monday Night Roundup #13

I've been busy at Apocalypse Later since my last Monday Night Roundup. I caught up with a couple of submissions, for a start.

One is a feature, Death in the Desert (2015), which stars Michael Madsen and the city of Las Vegas in a story based on the real murder of casino heir, Theodore ‘Ted’ Binion. It's a very different approach to a familiar story.

The other is a short, the latest from the Fatal Pictures combination of writer/director Richard Powell, producer Zach Green and star Robert Nolan. I loved Worm and Familiar and was delighted to find an Apocalypse Later quote about the latter on the Kickstarter page for this one. It's Heir (2015), 'a touching story of a father and son' which description has multiple meanings. Yes, this is a really creepy short, aided by the addition of Bill Oberst Jr in sparkling form.

I celebrated a couple of birthdays: Charlotte Rampling's 70th with a review of Nagisa Oshima's thought provoking surrealist feature, Max Mon Amour (1986), and James Spader's 56th with a look back at his last pre-fame film, the interesting thriller about twins, serial killing and an homage to Jack the Ripper, Jack's Back (1988).

I reviewed a couple of short educational films for my Weird Wednesdays project: the American bicycle safety film with monkeys, One Got Fat (1962), which my better half saw in class in first or second grade, and a chilling British take on why not to play on railway lines, The Finishing Line (1977), which was commissioned by British Transport Films and then withdrawn from circulation due to the ensuing controversy.

And I started a new project, in which I remember important people to the world of film on what would have been (or, in two instances, what hopefully will be) their one hundredth birthdays by reviewing one of their most interesting films. The first entry for this project is for the underrated Japanese director, Masaki Kobayashi. I picked a dark drama, The Inheritance (1962).

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:

Cooties (2015)

Director: Jonathan Miliott & Cary Murnion
Stars: Elijah Wood, Rainn Wilson, Alison Pill, Jack McBrayer, Leigh Whannell, Nasim Pedrad, Ian Brennan and Jorge Garcia

Fifteen minutes into Valentine’s Day and I gave my better half cooties. Well, Cooties. It’s a 2014 comedy horror movie starring Elijah Wood from the Lord of the Rings movies. He looks younger here, even though it’s thirteen years since he first put on those hairy feet for Peter Jackson.

He’s Clint Hadson, a wannabe author who’s writing a horror novel about a possessed boat and a teacher about to substitute for Mrs Kenner at the school he used to attend as a kid: Fort Chicken Elementary, home of the Fighting Roosters. The town is well named, because it’s about to get subjected to a zombie-like outbreak caused by contaminated chicken. The film’s disgusting opening sequence starts off with a Happy Poultry Farms worker wringing the neck of a chicken and progresses all the way through the pink slime manufacturing process to a Fort Chicken Elementary schoolgirl biting into the chicken tender that it became.

That’s pretty much it for the sweep of the story, this hardly being a deep exploration of anything, but it introduces a fair set of characters for us to laugh at or with. Only Hadson and Lucy McCormick, a girl he went to school with and now works as the fourth grade teacher, are remotely normal, though neither really stays there for the whole film either. Well, the obnoxious kids are normal but not in the way we want. Cooper Roth does an amazing job, for instance, as a pissant little kid called Patriot, given to the world by God on 9/11 so he can grow up to be a marine and go kill all those towelheads. No, this isn’t remotely politically correct, thank goodness.

The crossing guard is a druggie who spends most of the film in his van. He’s as high as a kite because he eats all his mushrooms when the 5-O show up in response to the zombie outbreak. ‘Are you on shrooms too?’ he asks the giraffe in the passenger seat. The vice principal is a happy go lucky sort who has bouncy balls for chairs in his office. Or is that the principal’s office, given that he’s only temporarily in charge? We really don’t care. This isn’t about a school, not really. The reason teachers will like this film is because they can live vicariously through the staff bashing in the heads of their annoying students with fire extinguishers and dodgeball equipment. This is wish fulfilment fantasy relief for hassled teachers worldwide.

One staff member has a rape alarm and just loves to tell people why she wears it. She’s a religious freak who hates the state of Illinois because it won’t let her teach creationism or carry a gun in class. There’s Wade, the huge PE teacher who can’t land a single basket in the playground and manages to miss most of the initial massacre because he’s distracted. And there’s Doug, who gets most of the best lines of the film. He’s reading a book called How to Have a Normal Conversation when we first meet him, which is much needed. He’s the staff’s nominal scientist because he had a six inch iron spike lodged in his brain when he was a kid, so he naturally got to know all about that stuff.

Doug is played by Leigh Whannell, in a rather different role to the one we know him best as: the other guy in Saw, which franchise he created. Given that we have notable names like Elijah Wood, Rainn Wilson and Alison Pill, it’s somewhat odd to find myself focusing on an actor better known as a producer. Then again, Vice-Principal Simms is played by Ian Brennan, the creator of Glee, so maybe it’s a trend. Whannell shows a great sense of comedic timing as Doug, throwing out lines like, ‘Now I’m going to extract the brain’ or ‘I always wanted to have sex with a prostitute who was non-white’ at exactly the right moments. I’ve seen a lot of people who enjoyed Rainn Wilson as Wade, but he mostly left me dry. This movie is all about Doug for me.

The biggest problem the film has is that it forgets what it wants to be. It builds slowly with a focus on character development, as if it’s a drama, but with a neat touch of comedy. The humour grows quickly until we can’t fail to realise that this is very much a comedy first, a drama second and a horror flick a distant third. The first act is engaging, the second act is hilarious and the third act is... well, the third act is mostly just there.

All the invention of the early scenes fades away to become samy samy blah. The character development is either thrown away entirely or leaps forward as if we slept through half an hour and woke up to find out how things had changed. The kids, who are frankly awesome for at least half the film, start to make less and less sense. If this chicken virus destroys their brains, then how come they keep doing smarter things than the teachers they have under siege? The only good thing in the last third of the film is the ramping up of gratuitous violence and, as much fun as that is, it really can’t save the movie.

I applaud the film for being willing to tell such a controversial story in comedic form, casting a bunch of kids who know exactly how to be creepy little bastards and spinning a tale of horror violence out of the juvenile idea of cooties. At one point, a little girl who’s avoided the chicken plague, gives Hadson an imaginary cootie shot and it’s a surprisingly touching moment in a film mostly devoid of them. Oh, and I applaud the idea that the token black kid is the only one to survive. No spoiler there either. You aren’t going to watch this for a story anyway. You’re going to watch it because a bunch of kooky teachers get to bludgeon a bunch of kids to death in increasingly outrageous fashion and we get to laugh while they do it. On that front, it works like a dream. On any other front, it’ll impress and then disappoint, so don’t get too invested.

Action Jackson (1988)

Director: Craig R Baxley
Stars: Carl Weathers, Craig T Nelson, Vanity, Sharon Stone, Thomas F Wilson, Bill Duke, Robert Davi, Jack Thibeau, Roger Aaron Brown and Stan Foster

I can’t say that I’m a particular fan of Denise Matthews, the artist formerly known as Vanity, but given that 2016 in film is currently being defined by obituaries more than releases, I felt I should take the opportunity of her untimely death today to review the movie for which she was nominated for a Razzie as Worst Actress. It turns out to sum up her career rather well.

She first appears on a club stage singing a suggestive song in a suggestive outfit, appropriate because she found fame leading Prince’s girl group, Vanity 6, in hits like Nasty Girl. The number in the band’s name represents the collective number of breasts belonging to the trio and we get to see Vanity’s two relatively soon into her role here. She turns out to be both the mistress of the villain of the piece and a drug addict, shooting up what is presumably heroin. In real life, she became addicted to crack cocaine and overdosed in 1994, nearly dying of complete renal failure. Given three days to live, she was visited by Jesus who told her that he’d let her live if she gave up the persona of Vanity. She did so and survived, turning to the Lord in the process: getting clean, cutting all ties to show business and devoting her life to evangelism. That’s here too, as her character rescues Action Jackson at one point by pretending he’s an evangelist and we get a hilarious scene with Carl Weathers as a pretend preacher man.

Unfortunately she’s clearly not the best of the two up and coming female stars who were willing to get topless for the camera. The other one was Sharon Stone, still seeking stardom at this point, her eighties career going through the usual cycle of extra work (Stardust Memories), a horror movie (Deadly Blessing), wannabe blockbusters (King Solomon’s Mines and its sequel), embarrassing aims for fame (Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol) and action (Cold Steel, Above the Law and this film). How did I not know about Beyond the Stars, though? I should find that one. Total Recall was still two years away and Basic Instinct four, so she’s still at the point where she had to do a shower scene even though she was clearly better than that. She even gets a second topless scene as a corpse and, no, that doesn’t spoil much because she’s surprisingly underused and hardly in the film.

I wanted to mention the ladies first, as inconsequential as they are here, because it’s really a man’s film, a testosterone fuelled eighties action flick with all the component parts we might expect, so we can safely now forget about those ladies.

Of course, there are overblown action scenes and the film naturally opens with one. To the strains of the music of cliché, a man is taken down hard by what looks like the nearest heavy metal band to answer a casting call (one of these hitmen turns out to be the lead singer of Giuffria). Two swing in through the windows while the other two use the door, but they all pose while they blow their target through the gap the glass left to fall many storeys to his flaming death.
There’s also embarrassing music. Beyond Vanity’s songs, which are entirely capable but cheesy eighties R&B, the score is by both Herbie Hancock and Michael Kamen, who between them defined film music in that decade, and there are featured songs by Sister Sledge and the Pointer Sisters. I’m proud to say that by 1988 I was stagediving to Napalm Death so managed to avoid this stuff for the most part.

Perhaps the most successful aspect is the film’s sense of humour. I loved the first calm scene, for example. A young black hood called Albert Smith attempts to steal the purse of a huge black woman, played by a big stuntman in drag for no apparent reason, in the streets of Detroit. The lady doesn’t even let go of the bag and promptly beats him with it until the cops who are driving right next to him when it happens save him and take him downtown. They’re a refreshingly well adjusted multi-cultural pair, who scare the crap out of the kid by telling him stories about a bogeyman cop called Action Jackson, whom young Albert naturally runs into while trying to run out of the precinct, spilling coffee all over his desk. One line from Jackson and he faints. A few scenes later, a mere look through a set of offices is enough to make him faint again. And he shows up later in the film too. I loved this humour, something that modern takes on eighties action cinema, like The Expendables films, only mostly got right.

And of course there’s Carl Weathers. In fact, given that this film sprang out of an idea he had for a new blaxploitation movie while making Predator a year earlier, it features a bunch of his fellow cast members from that film. There’s police captain Bill Duke and drug dealer Sonny Landham who shows up late for a fight scene. I’m used to the blaxploitation of the seventies and hadn’t realised how many regular faces I would recognise here from a decade later.

The story plays fourth fiddle to the action, the humour and the faces, mostly because it’s a stunningly routine sort of story for this sort of film. Jackson is a dedicated cop but he ran up against a powerful man called Peter Dellaplane when he put his son in jail. Allegations of police brutality, which were probably true (‘You nearly tore that boy’s arm off,’ suggests the captain; ‘He had a spare!’ retorts Jackson) lost the cop his lieutenant’s stripes, his gun permit and his marriage. Now he runs into Dellaplane again, because the captain sends him to the Detroit Business League’s Man of the Year Award ceremony, to see if he can deal with Dellamore winning it. Of course it merely begins a plot in which Jackson discovers that his nemesis, an automobile industry executive, is killing off union bosses and so pursues him.

Carl Weathers is fine as Action Jackson, though he remains a little stonefaced at points, as if afraid to act, surprising given that he does fine throughout most of the film. Some of his best work is in early scenes where he pressures important people, like Dellaplane, while knowing that he can’t resort to the violence for which he’s known. His one liners are great and he gets plenty of them. ‘How do you like your ribs?’ he asks one bad guy as he turns a flamethrower on him. His action is fun, even though he doesn’t get to show off his remarkable physique until almost the end of the picture. One car chase in particular is quintessential eighties action flick fodder: chockablock full of outrageous leaps, crashes, explosions, gunfire, destruction and, of course, cheap plot conveniences. I loved it!

I can’t say I loved the film but it’s certainly a lot more enjoyable than it is good. I’d have happily tuned in for the sequel that never came, even if the Germans did pointlessly release 1990’s unrelated Dangerous Passion as Action Jackson 2. This is routine cheesy action comedy with a predictable plot that couldn’t be mistaken as being from any other decade but the eighties. But hey, that’s Craig T Nelson from Coach as the villain of the piece and he gets Sharon Stone for a wife and Vanity for a mistress. Really, that’s all we need to tune in. Carl Weathers as Jericho ‘Action’ Jackson and the whole modern blaxploitation concept is really just icing on the cake.

RIP Denise Matthews, formerly known as Vanity.

February 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 February's batch are now online. I reviewed between seven and nine books this month, depending on how you count:

A, B, C - Three Short Novels

This is a collection of three early novels by Samuel R Delany, a multi-award winning science fiction author who I've somehow never got round to before.

The Jewels of Aptor was his first novel to see print, written at nineteen and originally published in 1962, though this is the full version, with the fifteen percent cut for space restored.

It's science fantasy, setting up as a fantasy novel, with some characters congregating together in Leptar to end up on a quest together, working for a priestess and former personification of a goddess, to retrieve the jewels of the title from the island of Aptor and her daughter with them. It becomes more science fiction as it goes but remains fantasy throughout. It's interesting but not essential, important mostly as a debut.

The Ballad of Beta-2, however, overjoyed me. I adored this novel, originally published in 1965, and can easily see this becoming a long term favourite. It's the shortest of the three novels in the book, but it resonated with me.

It follows a graduate student in galactic anthropology on an assignment he doesn't want, to provide a historical analysis of the ballad of the title from primary sources, which means he has to visit the Star Folk, who live on generation starships that mostly got where they were going only to find that the rest of humanity jumped ahead when a hyperspace drive was invented. This book looks at how these folk changed during their journey of twelve generations and what they found on the way to change them even more. This may sound dry, but it's utterly engaging and as accessible as a Heinlein juvenile.

They Fly at Çiron, which was mostly written in the sixties but didn't see print until 1993, is the work of three decades and feels like it. It's enticing but somehow not quite right yet. It's accompanied by a couple of short stories set in the same world.

It's back to fantasy, with the blissfully peaceful town of the title (they don't understand what weapons even are) attacked by a passing army who conquer because they need to expand. It's a strange tale that follows a number of different characters on a number of different sides, as the experience builds them all in ways they couldn't expect. I liked it but was still thinking about The Ballad of Beta-2 even once it was done.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine.

A Crucible of Souls

This novel, the first in the Sorcery Ascendant Sequence and Mitchell Hogan's first book, looked like a relentlessly generic fantasy and frankly didn't do much to dissuade me from that thought. It also feels like a five hundred page prologue, as we're set up strongly with Caldan, our lead character, and a host of others in support, as well as the the city of Anasoma and a little of the world it's part of, but the story we're waiting for starts s the book finishes.

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed it and devoured its five hundred pages in two sittings. If it's an Emperor with no clothes, he's a thoroughly engaging Emperor, drawn in exquisite detail and generating questions all over the place. This is a world of sorcery but we're not quite sure who the good guys are and what's going to come crashing in from outside the city. It's told in three strands, two of which meet halfway through the book and the third waits until the very end, setting us nicely up for chapter one, I mean book two.

I'm looking forward to finding out some of the answers, because none of them show up in this volume. Maybe the next one will explain to me why I enjoyed this one so much when nothing of grand importance really happens.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine.

Press Start to Play

This is an anthology, edited by Daniel H Wilson and John Joseph Adams, which aims 'to recreate the feel of a video game in prose form.' It's a mixed bag, as anthologies tend to be but it's an interesting one with only a few stories worthy of exclusion. Sadly the first two are among the list of what shouldn't have made it, but persevere and you'll get to some real gems.

Early highlights for me include S R Mastrantone's Desert Walk and Charlie Jane Anders's Rat Catcher's Yellows, which brought my faith in the book back. The former uses videogames not just as a subject but as a way to explore obsession and it gradually slides from the banal to the surreal. It felt very true. The latter looks at games not as entertainment but as therapy and explores a fascinating relationship between two married women, one of whom has been neurologically damaged by the disease of the title and doesn't even recognise her wife. This story goes nowhere I expected and I adored it.

Recurrent themes include blurring the boundaries between games an real life, health and social issues and text adventures, an old genre that I remember well and which perhaps fits in story form better than any other.

The worst thing about anthologies is that they're almost never consistent and this is no exception though it's decent overall. The best thing about them is being able to discover a bunch of great writers that you've never heard of before. To me, that was Mastrantone, Holly Black and Hugh Howey, each of whom I'll be looking into now. I had heard of Anders but hadn't read her, so I'll be rectifying that too.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine.

Three Parts Dead

Having been given the fourth volume in Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence to review, I thought I should work my way through the first three, especially as I'd bought them from the author at Phoenix Comicon last year.

I thoroughly enjoyed Three Parts Dead, which is a fantasy novel set in a world where gods are real, but they serve as channels for energy, receiving it through worship and expelling it in a number of physical ways, such as fire which generates the steam that runs the city of Alt Coulumb. When the fire god dies, as gods can be killed, the lawyers are summoned because the work of gods is bound by legal contracts. As those lawyers are also necromancers, they can resurrect if appropriate.

Mixing up fantasy, steampunk and legal action, this is original and fascinating. Gladstone's prose is glorious and far better than it ought to be for a debut novel. His characters are good too and his plotting is tight. It's hard to find anything bad to say about this book and I thoroughly look forward to following up with the second, third and fourth in the series.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine.

Apollo the Brilliant One

A large format graphic novel skimpy on the page count, running under eighty pages, this is a cross between fun adventure and textbook for kids. It's clearly aimed for children in school, right down to the list of questions at the end to spur children to discuss what they've read.

It's the eighth in George O'Connor's Olympians series, each of which focuses on a different Greek God. Some former subjects show up here, such as Hera, Ares and Poseidon, so the books will build on each other, but this is Apollo's story and, to a lesser degree, that of his son, Asklepios.

I enjoyed the approach, which was to split Apollo's story into a set of short vignettes, each introduced by a different muse. It's a fun read too, written and illustrated well, but it's not exactly challenging. Kids ought to enjoy it very much but this isn't where the rest of us should go either for information or adventure. To be fair, we're not the audience, but hey.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine.

The Land Leviathan

I reviewed Michael Moorcock's 1971 proto-steampunk novel, The Warlord of the Air, in January, and I'm following up this month with its 1974 sequel, The Land Leviathan, which returns Oswald Bastable, time traveller, to a new future, this an earlier one, having him move forward from 1902 to only 1904 but a different one to earlier.

This time out, he finds a world which had become utopian, with the various inventions of Manuel O'Bean, a child genius from Chile. However, the pace of technological change outstripped man's ability to cope with it and a War Between the Nations erupted on a scale more vast even than the ones we know from our own history. Biological weapons scorch the planet and much of the northern hemisphere is reduced to rubble. Into this vacuum moves the Black Attila, Cicero Hood, whose New Ashanti Empire expands across most of Africa, throughout Europe and is set to take North America too.

As before, this is told in the Victorian style, not only with its vintage prose but also its vintage philosophising, which is, of course, most of the point. It's even more thoughtful than the first book, playing with concepts like good and evil, war and peace, justice and injustice and so on. More real people show up, such as Gandhi, who runs the racially integrated Marxist Republic of Bantustan here, formerly known as South Africa.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine. I also reviewed The Warlord of the Air.

The Polar Treasure

I've been reviewing a Doc Savage novel every month, working in the order of publication in the pulps rather than the Bantam paperbacks. This is the fourth book, The Polar Treasure, from June 1933, which shows a steady improvement for Lester Dent, writing, as always, as Kenneth Robeson.

It's a lost treasure story, triggered by a blind violinist who was on a liner chased into the Arctic during the Second World War and lost, along with fifty million dollars in diamonds and gold bullion. Unbeknownst to him, the map to the treasure was tattooed on the violinist's back with ink that can only be seen by X-rays. Now the two factions who want it have come to get it and only Doc Savage and his men stand in their way.

This is still relatively predictable, but it's handled well with believable twists and turns, more believable exotic locations and more to do for Doc's men. I enjoyed it as much as I did the previous episode, but it's a better book and it shows how much Dent was progressing with his new series.

For more, visit my review at the Nameless Zine. I also reviewed The Man of Bronze, The Land of Terror and Quest of the Spider.

Monday Night Roundup #12

I've been busy at Apocalypse Later over the last couple of weeks:

I celebrated the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe by reviewing a lesser known adaptation of one of his short stories, Mystery of Marie Roget (1942).

I commemmorated the 130th anniversary of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by reviewing four silent versions of the story, all called Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: the 1912 version with James Cruze in both lead roles, the 1913 version with King Baggot, the famous 1920 feature version with John Barrymore establishing himself in no uncertain terms and the shorter 1920 version with Sheldon Lewis.

I also remembered Dan Haggerty by covering the two films he selected from his career for me to review for my Make It a Double project back in late 2014: Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan (2013), a classic tall tale reinvented as a slasher movie, and The Capture of Grizzly Adams (1982), the TV movie that wrapped up his run as his most famous character after a 1974 feature and a 1978 TV show.

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:

Crime Spree (2003)

Director: Brad Mirman
Stars: Harvey Keitel, Gerard Depardieu, Johnny Hallyday, Renaud, Said Taghmaoui, Stephane Freiss, Albert Dray, Shawn Lawrence, Joanne Kelly, Richard Bohringer and Abe Vigoda

January 2016 has been a really tough month for film fans, with the loss of David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Angus Scrimm, Dan Haggerty and now Abe Vigoda, who at 94 has finally left us after decades of false news reports. He died on the 26th in his sleep.

I never saw him in his most famous role, as Det Sgt Phil Fish on the sitcom Barney Miller and its spinoff show, Fish, but I’ve seen him in films as varied as The Godfather, Cannonball Run II and Joe vs the Volcano. To remember him here at Apocalypse Later Now!, I pulled out a picture that I hadn’t seen but which looked like a whole bundle of fun, riffing comedically on his many serious gangster roles. It’s Crime Spree, a Canadian/British co-production from 2003 which pits a number of French legends against American gangsters. It turned out to be a really good choice, because I laughed aloud for a majority of the first half and some of the second.

The picture begins in French, with Gérard Depardieu and a couple of cronies trying to steal a painting from an art gallery in Paris. They fail because they’re utterly inept. While they did buy a flashlight, they neglected to buy batteries, so they use a cigarette lighter to help them see. Once they’ve cut out the painting from its frame on the wall, one crook gets burned by the lighter, which he throws across the room, setting the curtains on fire. He uses the rolled up painting to put out the flames. It’s ruined, of course.

Now, at this point we might expect a Pink Panther sort of story, but that’s not where we’re going. In fact, the boss’s henchman highlights that well by mixing up the Pink Panther with the Black Panthers. That’s not where we’re going either, but America is. The boss wants them to go to Chicago to steal jewellery from the bedroom safe in an empty house. Even these morons can’t get that wrong, but just in case, he sends his right hand man and they add a professional assassin and someone who used to live there and owes them money.

The team ends up as six people. Depardieu is Daniel Foray and his two partners in crime, Julien Labesse and Raymond Gayet, are played by Stéphane Freiss and Albert Dray. I didn’t recognise either, but both looked familiar and they make a great trio with their better known leader. The two professionals arrive in the legendary forms of two of France’s biggest rock stars: Johnny Hallyday, as Marcel Burot, and Renaud, as the killer, known only as Zéro. The final man is Sami Zerhouni, a young Algerian portrayed by Saïd Taghmaoui, who was César nominated for his role in La Haine and is now starring in a host of Hollywood films as varied as GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Conan the Barbarian and American Hustle. His arrival in this film is when the dialogue mostly switches from French to English.

While these half dozen French hoods are not equally inept, they’re all hilarious and the comedy in this script was priceless. I don’t recall the last time I laughed this much out loud at a movie. It works this well partly because of the situation comedy conjured up by writer Brad Mirman, who also directed, but also because of the supremely serious way in which all of them, but especially Hallyday and Renaud, do everything. I enjoyed the odd culture shock scenes, like when they go to a café and attempt to smoke and order wine (‘What kind of country is this?’ asks Zéro), but it’s the utterly serious way that they do utterly ludicrous things that works best. And, while we could have done with a lot more background on each of these characters to bring them to more effective life, how they conduct themselves is enough to make us laugh as they dig themselves into progressively deeper holes.

How deep a hole, I hear you ask. Well, over in Chicago is a mob guy called Frankie Zammeti. He’s tough enough that he has his men break his own brother Vinnie’s arm because he can’t pay back the $20,000 he lent him. Later, he has them send him flowers and a get well card, but he sticks to principle. Frankie is a big deal and he’s played by Harvey Keitel, who can play mouthy gangsters in his sleep. So when these French hoods show up at the address they’re given, find that it isn’t as empty as they were led to believe and tie up the occupant and break into his safe, it won’t be too surprising to discover that that’s Frankie Zammeti in his underwear that they’ve duct taped. Uhoh!

Anyone who laughed aloud at the idea of inept French crooks robbing Chicago gangster Harvey Keitel by mistake will absolutely adore the first half of this film and they may well stay with it as it starts to get a little more serious. The laughs never go away but they die down somewhat as we realise that nothing is as simple as it seems. Of course, nobody could be this unlucky; this botched robbery was a set up. But who’s setting up who? We have a large and capable cast who all have their part to play in this story that reminds of the work of Guy Ritchie, in its levels of complexity and number of characters, but doesn’t aim for the same sort of style. Let’s just say that these French fish out of water are soon on the run from the FBI, the Chicago mob, a local Latino gang (after they steal their getaway car while they’re busy robbing a convenience store) and the Chicago police department.

The cast are excellent. The French criminals aren’t given the background they deserve but the actors do their jobs and some get a good opportunity to grow throughout the film. Their boss, Laurent Bastaldi, is well cast too: the highly experienced Richard Bohringer does exactly what he needs to. This could have played out as an entirely French film without any of the additional complexity and it would still be great fun. However, we have a whole American side to the story too.

Keitel is exactly as you expect but thrown into surreal situations that impress; there’s a shootout in a bar that ends in a fantastic way, for instance. At least he got an establishing scene with his brother. He’s a major player but he’s not the boss; that role goes to Abe Vigoda as Angelo Giancarlo. He has a lot of fun here too and watching Keitel and Vigoda reprise what they do best while the script conjures up laughs around them is an absolute blast. This applies to their men too. One of the funniest sections is when the tied up and duct taped Zammeti rings Joey Two Tons with his nose and the latter thinks it’s a dirty phone call. The Frenchmen’s contact in Chicago is Sophie Nichols, in the form of Joanne Kelly, six years before she’d become Myka Bering on Warehouse 13. I love that show but I liked her better here, where she isn’t as stuck up. Shawn Lawrence also gets plenty to do as FBI Agent Pogue and he keeps evolving with the film too.

The story is massively complicated but it’s easy to keep up with what’s going on because it’s episodic; each reveal serves to explain one plot device and then set up the next one. There are some interesting shots: one uses split screen in an odd way with different pauses per section to highlight who’s talking in a conversation, while another has Hallyday and his men shoot their way through a series of rooms to get out of a hotel trap, all shot from above. I loved the pregnant pause in between records on the jukebox in the bar shootout scene too but that’s less original.

The downside is surely in the odd consistency of the film. It starts out as a comedy but ends as a drama; while the entire film is both, the laugh factor decreases consistently throughout the film and the serious side grows just as consistently. This makes us wonder if the hilarity of the first half was part of the actual plot rather than the film and, if we start to believe that, the occasional humour in the second half feels a lot more out of place. It also means that the first half is much faster paced than the second; we spend half a film building up complexity then the other half tying up all the many loose ends.

What I’d like to do is watch the film again now that I know where it goes, because I want to see if it’s just as funny with that foreknowledge or even funnier because I’m not trying to figure out where it’s going. I especially wonder about that second half, when the French hoods we know little about become the folk we’re totally rooting for. Early on, we don’t have much connection. ‘Why do you work with these morons?’ Bohringer asks Depardieu. ‘These morons are my friends,’ he replies and that’s about all we have then. Later on, we care because we’ve got to know them better. These morons become our friends too and so does the film.

Sure, it’s an odd picture in many ways. The pace isn’t remotely consistent. It’s an English language film with a lot of subtitled French dialogue. It changes from being a serious comedy to being a funny drama. The ensemble cast meas that some characters don’t get the opportunities they should and we deserve more background for many. But I like laughing out loud and this film got more of that from me than any I can remember in quite a while. I’ll definitely be showing it to other people for that reason alone.

Now, we’re almost into February. Hopefully Death can calm his scythe down a little and leave us some of our legends for a little bit longer.

RIP, Mr Vigoda.

The Revenant (2015)

Director: Alejandro G Iñárritu
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hardy, Domhnall Gleeson, Will Poulter, Forrest Goodluck, Duane Howard and Arthur Redcloud

It takes a director of the calibre of Alejandro González Iñárritu, the writer/director of Amores Perros, Babel and Birdman to create something as empty as this and make it rivetting, absorbing and emotional. The Revenant runs over two and a half hours, unfolds in a snowy wilderness shot in natural light and features very little dialogue, most of it from Tom Hardy, who mumbles his way through the film. We’re not even told where or when we are, though the future Dakotas in 1823, as Wikipedia tells us, is completely believable. We’re left to figure out quite a lot, though the story itself is a simple (but never easy) tale of revenge.

What we don’t get in story or dialogue, we get in cinematography, as a group of trappers, led by Captain Andrew Henry, try to escape an Indian attack with whatever they can take with them. This is the most gorgeous picture I’ve seen in a long while, courtesy of Emmanuel Lubezki, who won the last two Oscars awarded in this category, for Gravity and Birdman, and could easily make it three in a row with The Revenant, his eighth nomination. Nobody’s ever done that before and it would take something very special to beat him.

His camera roams, floats and turns but rarely cuts. Stephen Mirrione does a solid job as the film’s editor but he makes less cuts than I can remember seeing in a feature. There’s a shot where the camera follows the trappers onto a boat to leave, under fire from the tribe attacking them, then works back around to see the shore, now very differently populated. We’ve changed focus a few times and perspective a few more, with intricate choreography to make it all viable, but it’s all done in one single, utterly amazing shot. And this isn’t the only one. It’s one in a bundle of a dozen early on. It wouldn’t surprise me if my jaw wasn’t hanging open at this point. These early scenes are what cinema is for.

The trappers leave their haul in the safest location they can think of, so they can escape but return at a future point in time and hopefully recover it. We follow them for a while, but then the scene that will go down in cinematic legend comes along and things change completely. Hugh Glass, the party’s guide, is attacked by a grizzly bear who is protecting her cubs. This is an utterly brutal scene, once again shot in a single take, and it’s not an easy one to watch. The bear is CGI but Leonardo DiCaprio, who throws himself into this role like you wouldn’t believe, could have fought a real bear and it wouldn’t have been any more realistic.

Glass manages to kill the grizzly but is horribly mauled in the process and close to death. Realising that they can’t carry him back over the mountains to their home base at Fort Kiowa, Capt Henry promises a bonus to any volunteers who will stay with Glass until he dies and then give him a proper burial, before following the main party. And here’s where things really get interesting.

One of those volunteers is John Fitzgerald, who’s the Donald Trump of the party, in the sense that he says what everyone else is thinking but also goes much further to boot. Having previously survived a scalping attack which left the skin on his head disfigured, he’s already biased against Glass, who has a halfbreed Pawnee son called Hawk. He’s also selfish and unscrupulous enough to do whatever it takes to get ahead, so he takes the $100 bonus to stay with Glass and promptly tries to murder him, using witchfinder logic: blink if you want me to do it. When the dying man’s son interrupts him, he kills him in front of Glass’s eyes, an especially tough moment for a man of action who’s utterly unable to move. Then, with Indians closing in, Fitzgerald drags Glass into a makeshift grave and leaves him for dead.

However, with Glass too tough to die and now burning for revenge, the main thrust of the film begins: the march of the many, followed by the two, followed by the one, followed by a Native American tribe looking for the chief’s daughter, Powaqa, who has been stolen by trappers.

What Hugh Glass endures in this story would be hard to put into words yet retain the impact and I don’t want to spoil the film anyway. What Leonardo DiCaprio endures in this film as he plays Glass is just as mind-boggling. He’s said that ‘I can name 30 or 40 sequences that were some of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do.’ As with Iñárritu and Lubezki, it’s hard to imagine DiCaprio not picking up the Best Actor Oscar for this performance, especially as Academy Awards are often awarded politically and he’s been overlooked enough already, with five nominations for his acting but no wins so far. And, of course, he’s already won the Golden Globe for this role. What’s most amazing is that he hardly speaks, initially because he knows that silence is the best policy in hostile company and then because his dire condition prevents the very possibility.

As Fitzgerald, Tom Hardy is almost as good but in completely different ways. He actually reminds of Jesse Ventura here: the hunch, the headgear and the attitude. He gets most of the dialogue in the film, and I’d love to find out the percentage, but he’s rarely clear. I was annoyed initially as I missed lines, but then I realised that this approach fits the character well. Fitzgerald is a lazy soul who doesn’t care if anyone can understand him or not and we all get the point, even if we don’t hear the words.

These two would dominate the film, if not for Lubezki. Even with what he shows us early on, there were points where Iñárritu’s script calls for something else nigh on impossible to deliver and Lubezki promptly delivers. The entire film was shot on location, in harsh terrain, under snow and storm and cold. The lighting is almost never overt, the majority of the film lit naturally with campfires or odd glimpses of sunlight from over the horizon or through the trees. Light is a precious resource in this film for us, as it would have been for these trappers in real life. While we see characters up close often enough, there are many shots that are very long and wide to emphasize how small man really is in these surroundings. The trappers struggle against the land even more than they do the pursuing Indians, who are dangerous enough on their own.

There are others in support of DiCaprio and Hardy and they’re strong too, if with much less opportunity. Domnhall Gleeson, enjoying an insanely good year, with Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Ex Machina and Brooklyn also to his credit in 2015, plays Capt Henry, a principled man who merely isn’t the outdoorsman that Glass and Fitzgerald are. Will Poulter is Jim Bridger, a young and idealistic trapper who volunteers to stay with Glass for nothing, only to fall foul of circumstance and Fitzgerald’s scheming. Both are solid but eventually become props for the two leads to use.

Seventeen year old Forrest Goodluck is quiet, moody and resonant as Hawk’s, Glass’s son, but he’s overwhelmed by the leads and doesn’t have the presence of the older Native Americans with screen time. Arthur Redcloud impresses as Hikuc, a philosophical Pawnee who Glass stumbles upon on the trail and who assists him in a number of ways. Duane Howard is a major presence in the film as Elk Dog, the chief of the Arikara, searching for his daughter. He gets few lines but clearly doesn’t need them, as his powerful final scene underlines. Melaw Nakehk’o is effective as Powaqa too. It’s great to see a Native American cast playing Native American characters.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about this film is that it’s a true story, or at least close to one. Some of these characters didn’t exist or had other names and some of the situations are conjured up for the film (or taken from the novel it was based on), but Hugh Glass was a real man and he was really mauled by a bear and left for dead by his comrades, only to survive alone in hostile country and struggle 200 miles back to Fort Kiowa even with a broken leg, exposed ribs and festering wounds. In real life, he set his own leg and used maggots on his wounds to avoid gangrene. Friendly Native Americans sewed a bear hide onto the skin of his back to cover his wounds. So, while Iñárritu and novelist Michael Punke gave him a little too much credit at points, there are others where they don’t give him enough.

There have been other film versions of this story. Richard Harris played Zachary Bass in 1971’s Man in the Wilderness and Dewitt Lee played Sam Glass in the 1975 western, Apache Blood. I’m interested in seeing both, especially the former, but surely neither will hold a candle to this one. The Revenant was nominated for twelve Oscars. In less than a month, we’ll find out how many it wins.

Monday Night Roundup #11

I ended up getting different writing done over the last week, but did post a Weird Wednesdays review over at Apocalypse Later. It's the fascinating, genre-spanning Japanese pinku movie The Groper Train: Search for the Black Pearl (1984). I also built an index for all my Weird Wednesdays reviews.

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:

Chappie

Director: Neill Blomkamp
Stars: Sharlto Copley, Dev Patel, Ninja, Yo-Landi Visser, Jose Pablo Cantillo, Sigourney Weaver and Hugh Jackman

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from Chappie, from District 9 director, Neill Blomkamp, but it certainly wasn’t what I got out of it. It’s an enticing mixture of the classic and the modern, playing with a variety of time-honoured science fiction concepts but thrown into a heady contemporary setting in a near future Johannesburg.

Early scenes can’t fail to conjure up memories of RoboCop, with crime running wild in South Africa and a weapons corporation, Tetravaal, selling armed robots to the police force to deal with it. They even have a couple of very different designs, the human-sized Scouts and the bulky and horribly beweaponed Moose, which raise obvious comparisons to RoboCop and the ED-209. The only differences are minor: there’s no human being inside the scout suit and instead of the beast being pitched first and failing, so prompting the more realistic alternative, here the realistic alternative goes first. With the scouts doing great work, taking down thirty large scale crime rings in a year, the cops don’t want the clear overkill of the Moose.

Fortunately, this quickly grows beyond RoboCop and I had a blast with the first half of Chappie.

I liked the realism at Tetravaal, which is a far cry from the yuppies and fat cats of RoboCop’s OCP. Deon Wilson, lead developer of the Scout program, and Vincent Moore, who has the same role for the Moose program, sit in standard cubes in the same aisle of an office. They run Linux with a spot on screensaver and software that doesn’t look like it escaped from the Enterprise. Scouts are modular, so if one part is damaged, they can simply replace it and sent the scout back out to work.

I liked the realism in the streets. When the cops arrive to take down heavily armed crooks, the scouts go in first, guns blazing, and the human cops follow, using them as shields. People get hurt. So do scouts, with 0022, who has already been repaired once in this film, getting hit by a rocket and thrown through a wall. It isn’t repairable, with its battery fused to the chassis, so it’s written off as scrap with a believable reject sticker.

I liked the realism in Deon Wilson, who lives his work. After leaving his robotics job at the office, he gets home to be greeted by a few home robotics projects in a down to earth version of J F Sebastian in Blade Runner, then gets to work on his pet project of a conscious artificial intelligence. When he nails it, after 945 days, he blisters in to talk it up to his boss, who rejects it out of hand. Why would a publicly traded weapons manufacturer go for an AI that can judge art, write poetry and enjoy music?

And, while it’s an odd form of realism, I adored the choice of bad guys. Instead of cookie cutter villains, we’re given Ninja and Yo-Landi from the zef group, Die Antwoord. I’m not a fan, but I have a great deal of respect for their integrity and they bring something utterly unique to this film. I’ve never seen a bad guy with a yellow machine gun before, or a pink punching bag for that matter. Odd hair. Weird tattoos. Pastel colours. Why the heck not? It’s better than the usual criminal mastermind with a suave British accent. The third in their gang, Amerika, is a little more traditional, but that works to ground the other two.

Where the story takes us isn’t too surprising. Deon salvages 0022 from the reject pile to take home and upload his new AI into. After Yo-Landi figures that the guy who created the scouts must have some sort of remote control to switch them off, she and Ninja kidnap him and end up with 0022 for good measure. So Deon gets his shot but under the scrutiny of criminals rather than his company, as he can’t call the cops about them stealing what he stole to begin with.

And here’s where the old school concepts start to rear their heads. 0022 wakes up, but as a child. He’s a baby who learns quickly but still needs to be trained. I loved how Deon is totally in the zone as he gives his creation a rubber chicken and he’s not happy when Yo-Landi names it Chappie. By the way, Sharlto Copley is superb as Chappie the sentient police robot, even if he didn’t provide its movements through motion capture, making him a very believable child. He doesn’t just channel kids, he channels childlike adults such as Raymond Babbitt from Rain Man and he steals the show without ever appearing on screen.

So we have the whole robot coming alive concept. Chappie is written wonderfully, grabbing little bits of information and connecting the dots between them as best he can. He makes leaps that make sense to him but may well be completely wrong.

We have the moral angle, with Chappie’s promise to Deon that he won’t commit any crimes working as a simplistic version of Asimov’s laws of robotics. However, as a child, Chappie is easy to deceive, so we’re given scenes of Chappie stealing cars because he thinks he’s merely returning them to daddy. He won’t take part in the heist that will save them, because that’s a crime, but when it’s all explained to him in a different way, he gladly helps out. It’s not merely abuse on the part of this gang of crooks, it’s abuse that the victim doesn’t even know is happening.

We have the question of how to define consciousness. ‘That’s it!’ Chappie says at one point, looking at a digital copy of his neural map, ‘That’s me!’ And after the definition of consciousness, there’s the definition of death. ‘Just a temporary body, mummy. I’ll make you a new one,’ is a glorious line that resonates through its childlike innocence.
In between consciousness and death is the will to live. Chappie’s battery being fused to his chassis is a built-in death sentence; he has five days before it’ll run dry and it apparently can’t be replaced. So this creation learns about birth one day and has to deal with death only four days later. That’s a tough life and it raises a number of other concerns like self worth, sacrifice and moral prioritisation.

All these are explored pretty well, though the technological side does take a lot of shortcuts. This is the near future. I can buy the concept of uploading an entire mind into a machine but I can’t buy that it can be dumped onto a single thumbdrive or transferred in ten seconds. Clearly, serious breakthroughs were made in storage and networking technologies, but they didn’t trickle down to anything else except this. Nah, don’t buy it.

The Moose is an interesting creation. It might look like ED-209 but there’s no brain inside; it’s controlled by a human being via neural transmission, making it like an insanely flexible drone. There are plenty of issues to explore there but they’re rejected in favour of turning Hugh Jackman into a cheap villain set up by an obvious line to do ridiculous things. He clearly enjoyed it and used a few opportunities to his best advantage, but he’s a waste of a character introduced only because of cheap writing.

Similarly Sigourney Weaver is wasted as an inconsequential CEO who gets a few strong scenes early on but soon fades into nothingness. What’s worse, the company she runs does the same thing: it walks the walk in the opening scenes but soon becomes a mess of plotholes masquerading as security holes.

Fortunately Dev Patel is given a better role, playing Deon Wilson as a sort of benign Victor Frankenstein. Chappie calls him Maker but connects to him through the emotions of a very dangerous child. Sadly, it’s not the role it could have been. Then again, with so many concepts in play, some had to be prioritised and this was clearly one that wasn’t. He’s mostly a foil for Ninja because, while Deon wants him to paint, Ninja wants him to walk cool and shoot guns like a gangsta.

I adored Neill Blomkamp’s debut feature, District 9, and clearly should revisit it again. I haven’t seen his second, Elysium, which I should check out soon. This one is a great film for a while, a good film in many respects but ultimately a disappointment because it doesn’t have the courage to finish what it started.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Director: J J Abrams
Stars: Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Adam Driver, Daisy Ridley, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Lupita Nyong'o, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson, Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew and Max von Sydow

Note: This is a spoiler-free review of The Force Awakens for those who haven't seen it. For those who have, who still believe it's a good movie and who want to try to put their case, I wrote a spoiler-filled version for my Star Wars I-VII Runthrough earlier in the month.

Oh dear, oh dear. The Force Awakens, which is the seventh feature film in the regular Star Wars series, even if it doesn’t include an episode number in its title, is a stunningly safe retread of the entire original trilogy, a complete mess of a story that actually gets worse the more we think about it and, in many ways, a worse film than The Phantom Menace. And, now that I’ve upset everyone who saw it six times and adored it more every time, please calm down and let me explain.

My theory is that J J Abrams was a Star Wars fanboy who adored the original trilogy and went to see the prequels with the sure knowledge that they were going to be the best thing in the history of ever. As we know, they weren’t, though recently watching all seven films in order in seven days suggests that they’re not as bad as we remember. However, when he was given the task of making a new first entry in an official Star Wars trilogy, he knew that he couldn’t make the mistakes that George Lucas made so emphatically with The Phantom Menace, and so proceeded to make the safest film he could to make the fans happy.

And they were. While people went back to see The Phantom Menace again and again because they were unable to accept how awful it was, they went back to see The Force Awakens again and again because it felt like a Star Wars movie and that felt good, dammit! Abrams certainly got the feel right.

Thirty years after Return of the Jedi, the Empire has fallen and been replaced by the First Order, just as the Rebel Alliance is now the Resistance. The same fight is on that we’re used to seeing, merely with different names. Things are a little shakier, a little darker, a little grittier. But there’s Max von Sydow, a very cool new droid called BB-8, a brutal massacre in the Lidice style led by a snappier Darth Vader by the name of Kylo Ren and some intriguing scenes with a stormtrooper catchily named FN-2187.

And then there’s the planet of Jakoo. It's a desert planet littered with Imperial wreckage: downed AT-ATs, downed TIE fighters, even a downed Star Destroyer. A whole community of scavengers has grown up to loot this equipment for parts to trade for food. I adored the scale, which is beautifully shot, as much as the detail. I adored the dirt and the open spaces and the fact that broken things fell out of the sky, all anathema to George Lucas. It’s quintessential Star Wars but all shot in a way we’ve never seen before that pulls at the heartstrings and makes us want to cheer J J Abrams for finally doing it right.

The downside creeps in with the progression of the story, because it feels rather familiar. Von Sydow is here because he has documents stolen from the enemy. He gives them to a member of the Resistance who, under fire from the First Order and their dark helmeted commander, secretes them into a droid and lets it loose on a desert planet to seek help. Yes, this is A New Hope all over again, but it doesn’t stop there. Without trying to throw out spoilers, it proceeds through The Empire Strikes Back and ends up in Return of the Jedi territory with the Resistance aiming to destroy the shield generator to Starkiller Base, which is a gigantic superweapon the size of a planet.

And so those millions of us who grew up on the original trilogy start to wonder if they actually wrote a new script or just changed a bunch of names in the old ones. We already know that the First Order is the new Empire and the Resistance is the new Rebel Alliance. Well Jakoo is the new Tatooine. Kylo Ren is the new Darth Vader and Supreme Leader Snoke the new Emperor. Poe Dameron is a male Princess Leia and BB-8 is a round R2-D2. Starkiller Base is the new Death Star, just even bigger and even more dangerous. Rey, the movie’s lead, is a female Luke Skywalker, even if she isn’t let in on much of why during the film and has to figure a lot of it out for herself. FN-2187, soon renamed Finn, could even be a new Han Solo until the real one shows up.

Which he does. And it feels awesome. This is what Abrams does in The Force Awakens. He feeds us a lot of recycled material, but watered down to make less sense. But he does it with cinematic style that awes us. And then he throws another bone to the fans to make us happy. A bunch of favourite characters are brought back and every one of them is re-introduced in an entrance that combines emotion and style. The Millennium Falcon gets the first cheer, rescued from a junkyard and immediately put through its paces. Then it’s Han and Chewie, who have been working as smugglers again because it’s what they know best. Then it’s Leia, now serving as the leader of the Resistance. Then it’s a chipper C-3PO and a drained R2-D2. Eventually, it’s Luke, who’s the MacGuffin of the piece rather than a player in it. I adored every entrance and wanted to cheer at the screen.

And then I thought about what I was watching. Nothing here makes sense. In the original trilogy, those stolen documents were the plans to the Death Star, an unprecedented superweapon. Here, they’re the map to Luke Skywalker. Now, who the heck makes a treasure map to a person? Who can move around whenever he wants. Who would give it to the bad guys? And break it into two parts? Why would anyone even care, given that the majority of the universe apparently believe that the Jedi order and even the Force are mythical stories. This is all clearly ridiculous. Why are the Resistance fighting the First Order, given that the Republic is apparently back in play? Who are the Resistance if they’re not the Republic? What’s going on in this universe? Did we blink and miss a movie? Is this Episode VII or Episode VIII?

A little less ridiculous is the story of Rey, which is completely unexplained and left for the next movie to cover. She’s an orphan, having been dumped on Jakoo as a child, where she’s grown up to be a talented scavenger. As things happening around her start to drag her in, she turns out to be something more. A Jakoo scavenger wouldn’t be able to fly like that, for a start, and a Jakoo scavenger wouldn’t have a wild connection to certain things that I won’t spoil. She’s clearly someone important but we aren’t let in on that secret yet.

Fortunately, Daisy Ridley, who plays Rey, is a revelation. Her character may be nothing but a new Luke or Anakin, but she nails her role absolutely and dominates the film. She’s better than Mark Hamill and much better than Hayden Christensen. In fact she’s the best actor in the entire franchise who isn’t an old white man. I’ll be seeking out her previous work because she’s definitely going to be a huge star.

Her co-star is Finn, the one original idea in the movie as a stormtrooper who can’t be part of the opening massacre and tries to get as far away from the First Order as he possibly can. He’s a great character as he’s a blank canvas for morality to paint on. He’s not the bad guy they want him to be but that doesn’t mean he’s the good guy he could be. He spends the film trying to run away only to find that he might be more than he ever thought possible. John Boyega, who was so great in Attack the Block, is just as great here too.

Sadly, the other major character for the trilogy looks like being Kylo Ren, who’s supposed to be the new Darth Vader but comes across more like the new Jar Jar Binks and that’s not good. I don’t think it’s really Adam Driver’s fault as the actor stuck in the Vader Halloween suit, but he’s acutely embarrassing and often laughable. It’s like Darth Vader, the personification of evil for an entire generation, was revealed to be nothing but a spotty little oik. Kylo Ren is Alan Partridge playing Severus Snape with a vague Tom Hardy as Bane voice, less effective than Rick Moranis as Dark Helmet. My better half burst into giggles every time he took off his helmet because she expected him to introduce himself as Vinnie Barbarino.

Kylo Ren excepted, I understand why Abrams did what he did here. He made something that pleased the fans and got them on board for the Disney trilogy. All the old guard got another moment in the spotlight, Harrison Ford in particular being better than ever as Han, and BB-8 is going to make toy companies rich. But this is a glorious facade that hides an astounding lack of substance. It’s like a gigantic chocolate egg of goodness that looks amazing but only shows us that it’s hollow after we take a yummy bite.

Surely the next film, Episode VIII, will be more substantial and it’ll get the crowds that Attack of the Clones missed out on, having to follow The Phantom Menace. I want to know what Finn gets up to. I want to know who Rey is. I want to see Kylo Ren’s arm cut off, though I’d prefer that it be his head that meets a lightsaber. But I also want it to not suck. So I’m going to go with my fingers crossed.

Ex Machina

Director: Alex Garland
Stars: Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia VIkander, Sonoya Mizuno and Oscar Isaac

This was clearly the best of the three science fiction films I’m reviewing tonight and the one which most deserves to be called science fiction instead of sci-fi. It’s sad to see a frequent description of the film as ‘smart science fiction’ as that infers that the genre nowadays fails to be smart by definition instead of by frequency.

It’s a neat intellectual puzzle, written by Alex Garland, the writer of 28 Days Later, Sunshine and Dredd, who also debuted as a director here. It revolves around the Turing test, which can be considered passed only if an artificial intelligence can convince an observer through conversation that it’s human.

The setup is that a billionaire CEO runs a competition within his company, apparently for an employee to spend a week with him on his massive estate. The company is Blue Book, which has multiple meanings but to most people will translate to something similar to and as successful as Google and Facebook put together. The CEO is Nathan Bateman, who exudes the confidence of a young genius who’s already conquered the world. The winner is Caleb Smith, a talented young computer programmer, who promptly has to sign a non-disclosure agreement because there’s something else going on here.

Once done, Bateman tells Smith that he’s here to be the human component in a Turing test, tasked with judging whether Ava, an AI he’s created, could pass that test. A number of flags immediately arise, the most obvious of which is raised by Caleb himself, namely that Ava is obviously a humanoid robot, given that her arms, legs and torso are transparent and show her inner cabling. If he knows that she’s artificial, how can he conduct a fair Turing test?

So, of course, we start asking questions in our heads. The obvious setup is that Ava isn’t the real focus of the test, which is surely Kyoko, the Japanese housemaid who speaks no English. However, that’s a little too obvious and she doesn’t actually speak at all, so we dig deeper and become rather engaged in this intellectual puzzle. Given that Caleb isn’t stupid, he realises this too, especially given that this wonder of a research facility is apparently subject to convenient power cuts. So Caleb asks these questions as we ask these questions. My better half and I came up with a few theories, which to my mind hold water. The good news is that the one that Garland pursues wasn’t any of them but it still makes complete sense. To my mind, that’s the best sort of puzzle, one whose solution isn’t obvious but is clear and concise once revealed.

Garland is clearly the star of the show, having both written the script and directed the film. There’s a lot of clever detail here, so read the Wikipedia page and the IMDb trivia. I caught a few of these little details, like the riffing on the alien tones in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a number of references to the man becomes god motif highlighted by Robert Oppenheimer when he built the atomic bomb. However, I missed other references and was blind to quite a lot of it, making this a learning experience as well as an enjoyable viewing.

However, Garland isn’t the only star of the show. The technical aspects are consistently strong, though I didn’t feel like I was watching a Stanley Kubrick film as I get the impression I was occasionally supposed to. More obviously, there are four actors with prominent parts who all prove very capable indeed.

Domhnall Gleeson from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows gets a lot more opportunity here as a bright and awestruck young programmer than he did as General Hux, the commander of Starkiller Base, in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, though I’m sure he made a lot more money from the latter. He had a wonderful 2015, also starring in Brooklyn and co-starring in The Revenant, meaning that he made four pictures with multiple Oscar nominations. He’s a precocious young man here, uncomfortable for much of his time in a rich man’s house but willing to continue with the experiment he’s tasked to perform. The way he moves in and out of control is fascinating.

Oscar Isaac from Inside Llewyn Davies is arguably even better here. He was also in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, playing ace pilot Poe Dameron, but I didn’t even recognise him here. He’s very believable as a child prodigy and a rich man, mildly eccentric and socially awkward but very direct. He’s often a little the worse for drink and often inappropriate but he’s always in charge. He has the beard and glasses of a nerd but the muscles of a jock and he capably walks the line between the two, making him at once predator and prey.

Alicia Vikander from The Man from UNCLE plays the robotic young lady at the heart of their interaction. She’s calm and composed, but obviously thoughtful and with a clear agenda of her own. She’s also both prey and predator, stuck behind glass in an experiment she doesn’t like but notably able to turn Caleb’s questions around on him.

Backing them up in a much smaller role is Sonoya Mizuno, a ballerina and model who debuted on film as Kyoko. She does a good job too; she merely had much less to do.

The heart of the film revolves around artificial intelligence and the Turing test. The questions asked are good ones, examining what consciousness means in a very different way to Chappie. This is old school science fiction, often reminiscent of Frankenstein, but with some modern twists to keep things up to date for the 21st century, such as how things go when an AI turns the Turing test round on a human being. There are also side issues raised that are well worth debate, like the idea of using search data from a large enough search engine as a map of how people think or whether there can be consciousness without a sexual component. I’m sure both of those ideas will be used more and more over the next few decades.

I definitely plan to revisit this movie in a year or so to see how it stands up now that I know what happens. I’m acutely aware that there’s a meta level here with Alex Garland using me as the human component in an imaginative Turing test by tasking me with figuring out which and how many of his four characters are really human and which are artificial. If I’m rating this film highly today on the basis that he successfully manipulated me, then I’m likely to lower that rating on a second viewing. If I’m rating it highly because I appreciate how he played with these ideas, then I’m likely to keep it high, unless flaws become obvious with a second look. I’m eager to see which it’ll be.

In Memoriam

I wrote these reviews with the plan of them constituting my Monday Night Roundup on the 18th, but it quickly became obvious that every one of them represented a tribute to an actor who had died. It's been a tough year thus far. After losing Lemmy at the end of 2015, two weeks of 2016 hit us with David Bowie, Angus Scrimm and Alan Rickman. Each of the films covered here is reviewed in tribute to them.

Now Dan Haggerty has joined that number, but he chose a couple of films for my Make It a Double project, so I'll post those two reviews at Apocalypse Later over the next week.

The Hunger (1983)

Director: Tony Scott
Stars: Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie and Susan Sarandon

The world lost David Bowie on 10th January, less than two weeks after it lost Lemmy, two genre-spanning musical icons whose stature is immeasurable. In tribute to Bowie, we watched The Prestige and The Hunger as a double bill, which was an interesting experience. He may be the weakest link in the former, playing Nikola Tesla, but is perhaps the most resonant performer in the latter, even though it features a lesbian scene between Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon.

I’ve seen The Hunger before, but not since it came out and I’d forgotten the entire story, remembering only that it was a vampire flick put together with a particularly unique style by mainstream filmmaker Tony Scott. Perhaps that’s because the story is by far the weakest angle, Scott and his scriptwriters only paying lip service to Whitley Strieber’s source novel and then riffing off it in cinematic experimentation.

It’s that style that shows up first and dominates throughout. The film begins with Bauhaus performing Bela Lugosi’s Dead in a club, which is an astoundingly good way to kick off a vampire movie. Cutting back and forth between Peter Murphy performing from behind a wall of chicken wire and the young and beautiful getting their groove on is a touch of class. Everything here is stylish to the degree that these aren’t actors playing characters but performance artists eliciting an effect. There are visual devices in and amongst all this, so that we’re given an impressionistic connection between sex and violence in a fetishistic way. ‘Forever and ever,’ Bowie tells Deneuve in the shower after they kill a young couple and drinking their blood. It’s like the conclusion of a ritual.

Scott’s film doesn’t go into the background that Strieber’s novel does, as it never seems particularly interested in that sort of thing. It merely highlights that Deneuve is Miriam Blaylock, an elegant and ancient vampire, if a wooden one who sometimes reminds of one of the ancient marble busts in her shadowy and underlit house. Bowie is John, her husband, who she turned once upon a time. We have to read up on the background to discover that she’s an ancient Egyptian and he’s merely a French cellist whom she fell for a couple of hundred years ago.

The plot revolves around Strieber’s concept of inheritance in which, while Miriam may well be immortal, those she turns are not; they’re merely long lived, but once age starts to catch up with them, it catches up quickly. That’s happening to John as we join his story and he’s scared. After two full centuries of apparently being thirty years old, he doesn’t like the idea that he’s not going to remain young for much longer. Miriam gives him a week and she’s optimistic, so off he goes to see Sarandon.

She’s Dr Sarah Roberts, a gerontologist studing progeria, a disease that prompts aging at an unnatural rate and kills children of old age. The vampires know of her book, Sleep and Longevity, which suggests that ‘age is a disease which can be cured.’ Of course, they can’t cure it yet as, while her team at the Park West Clinic are good, they ‘can’t promise everlasting life.’ What they can’t imagine, of course, is that there’s someone out there who has already conquered the aging process, at least in herself.

Probably the best scene of the film has Sarah leave John in the lobby because she thinks he’s a kook, only for him to age decades in the couple of hours that pass. He’s struggling to pass for thirty when he goes in but, two hours later, he looks like a Stan Lee cameo. The make up effects are superb and Bowie sells the progression magnificently. His dismissal of Sarah when she finally realises that he’s for real is stunning and he keeps that standard up until he’s too old to do anything. Later that day, when Alice, his violin student of a year, shows up at the house, he’s aged so much that she thinks he’s his own father. When Miriam gets home and he calls her on ‘forever’, it comes out as a croak because he’s more like a hunchback Dr Phibes.

Apart from Bowie, there’s little acting going on. I’ve seen what Deneuve can do in other films, so have to assume that she underplayed Miriam deliberately, perhaps because she’s frustrated at losing another lover to age and refuses to deal with it, knowing that if she ignores the situation it’ll go away quickly while she focuses on finding a new lover, namely Dr Sarah Roberts. I understand that Sarandon is a skilled actress too, but I’ve never been a big fan and she left me dry here as well. There are much more sexy and erotic vampire films out there for me than this one, even if these two get behind Scott’s omnipresent fluttering transparent curtains to get down and dirty. I think I enjoyed the brief appearance of Bessie Love, one of my silent film favourites appearing in her very last role, and an almost as brief appearance of Willem Dafoe, very young but much more recognisable while earning only his second credit, more than the two leading ladies.

There’s even less story going on. I love the concepts in play here, but they all belong to Strieber rather than Scott and nobody involved with the film seems remotely interested in exploring them.

For a start, the idea that a vampire story should involve someone professionally studying how aging works ought to generate an interesting progression, but it doesn’t here. The idea that a vampire is stuck in the vicious cycle of seeking out lovers, turning them, spending centuries with them, only for them to leave her through a process that she’s conquered but is unable to truly gift them, is a sad and brutal one. I was reminded of the treatment that Highlander took, where Connor Macleod was advised against taking a mortal lover because they’ll age and die when he wouldn’t. This is even worse, because the process isn’t consistent but merely an unknown time followed by an abrupt ending. At least the Highlander could prepare! Yet again, this is avoided almost deliberately, John being Miriam’s focus until, well, he isn’t and, well, Sarah is. That rejection is an utterly brutal thing, as is what she the ndoes with him and did in the past with his predecessors. The idea that she has no power over this is yet another one that’s woefully underdeveloped.

The positive side is almost entirely on the stylistic front. There’s style everywhere here, but it ends up being almost entirely over substance. The film is very dark, less in the thematic sense than in the one that there’s very little light. Unless the characters are outside, the lighting is turned down low and nobody seems to care. Perhaps it’s just to make Deneuve look younger than she was. The point isn’t to play with shadows in some expressionistic way but just to render the whole picture moody. It’s also bathed in blue, maybe to play to the age motif by reminding of a tinted silent movie or maybe to subtly play up the connection between erotica and the colour blue. Scott paints this like a modern dream rather than the old masters that his brother Ridley is so good at staging. It’s thoroughly eighties in its feel.

And that’s about it. The worst thing is the end, because the regular finalé is shot poorly, albeit with very good effects work, and the actual finalé was pointlessly tacked on by the studio and makes no sense whatsoever. Leaving the film in such a poor way merely reminds of how well it started and how it just gradually slid from one extreme to the other throughout. I enjoyed it thoroughly until I didn’t, then it merely passed by until I realised how poor it was and, finally, the ending underlined that. Just because a cult following has built around The Hunger, mostly because of its slow but stylish visuals and the use of lesbian vampirism, doesn’t mean that it’s any good.

RIP Mr Bowie.

Phantasm

Director: Don Coscarelli
Stars: Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Bannister, Kathy Lester and Angus Scrimm

Another actor we lost recently is Angus Scrimm, who died on 9th January, another horror genre icon to leave us after Wes Craven and Gunnar Hansen. Scrimm acted in more films than David Bowie, which will always make me wonder which two movies he might have picked for my Make It a Double project, but he was more tied to one role, that of the Tall Man in the Phantasm series, which he played five times if we include Phantasm: Ravager, which is currently in post-production. I’ve reviewed this film before but back in 2007 when I was mostly writing notes for my own benefit, so, in tribute, here’s some better coverage.

The film starts well for Tommy, given that he’s getting some from a blonde number in the Morningside cemetery. It doesn’t continue so well, though, given that she promptly stabs him to death with a knife. From that point on, writer/director Don Coscarelli seems more interested in setting a freaky tone than unfolding a story and he does a solid job by setting us up with a whole host of freaky components from which he can hang that story when he’s ready to start telling it.

There’s a huge white funeral home, the exterior of which we only seem to see from a distance. There are a lot of freaky passages inside that are lined with identical memorial stones with reflective labels. There’s an odd thirteen year old called Michael who rides a dirt bike between the gravestones, stalks his brother and spies on people through binoculars because apparently he has no life. There are little creatures in robes like jawas which chase him and infect his dreams. There’s a tall man whom he watches effortlessly lifting a loaded coffin into a hearse on his own. There’s a blonde in lavender who seems to like to make out with guys on top of gravestones. There’s a repetitive but catchy theme that sounds very much like a riff on Tubular Bells, which had worked so well for The Exorcist. There’s a sign with only a red hand on it, outside the home of an old wheelchair-bound psychic woman who looks rather like Ozzy Osbourne with her black clothes, round glasses and a star on her forehead; she lets her granddaughter speak for her. There’s an ice cream man who’s bald on top but wears a short ponytail like he’s a lounge lizard. There’s even a bar, the Dunes Cantina, with a horse on the balcony; not a real one, but still.

Half an hour in, we still have no idea what’s going on but we know it’s going to be freaky. This isn’t like any other franchise horror flick we’ve seen before. It’s no slasher film, it’s no monster movie and it’s no serial killer flick. It’s something a little different that clearly tells us that there’s something going on at Morningside and if we we’re horror nuts, we just have to know what it is. Inquisitive little Michael has to know too, so he breaks in to find out and that’s when the infamous metallic ball, the most memorable icon of the series even over the Tall Man, shows up. It flies of its own accord, generates blades to stick into people’s skulls, then extrudes a drillbit to siphon the blood out of their bodies until they’re dead. I adore this little thing; it’s genius design and it ratchets up the freaky factor to new levels.

The freakiness is a good thing, not only for its own sakes but because the budget is clearly low and the acting hardly a major achievement. Most of the cast members tend to appear predominantly in Don Coscarelli movies, which highlights that they like to work together but also that they either don’t have a heck of a lot of ambition or other people aren’t that interested in hiring them. Both ideas are believable, because most were amateur actors hired for a cheap independent production and they combine coarse acting with slow and methodical delivery and minimalist sets of expressions. A few even play characters with their own names.

Michael Baldwin is surely the best of the cast as the precocious Mike, even though the studio blocked Coscarelli’s plans to bring him back for the first sequel. He was only fourteen when he made this movie but he’s believable with his weird obsessions, in his growing terror and in his determination to face it. Sure, he’s a little annoying but having a sort of young Marty Feldman flavour actually makes that work. By comparison, Bill Thornbury sleepwalks through the film as if he’s a cardboard cutout of Han Solo and the various young ladies, refreshingly all wholesome girl next door types, don’t do much at all beyond looking like wholesome girl next door types. Reggie Bannister gets a little substance as the ice cream vendor, though, and I can’t fault Scrimm for looking and acting agreeably sinister. Coscarelli cast him because he’d been intimidated by him on a previous film and felt that he would make a great villain. He was right.

The freakiness that’s everywhere does gradually coalesce into a story, which is minimalist but weirdly compelling. The dialogue is cheap and oddly sparse, but there’s no arguing that this is one of the more original genre movies of the era, however little budget it had to play with. It plays as a dreamlike horror movie throughout but betrays science fiction sensibilities (the placement of a Roger Zelazny paperback on Mike’s bedside table has to be deliberate) and it ends up as a philosophical meditation on death and the mourning process. I won’t spoil why, but keep your eyes open for the ending. This mashup of genre elements is heightened by the editing and very deliberate camera movements that include zooms and pans for specific effect. Coscarelli took care of all that himself because he couldn’t afford to hire anyone else.

It was released in 1979 and sits well in that no mans land between the psychological seventies and the gory eighties. That’s one reason why it stands up today but the biggest reason is surely Don Coscarelli, who had the imagination to write this script, the dedication to direct it as an independent movie and the will to continue with a concept that strongly connected to people through three sequels thus far and a fourth to come. I’m a confirmed fan of his unique output, especially this and Bubba Ho-Tep but also John Dies at the End and even Survival Quest, so I really ought to delve into the relatively few other features that he’s made thus far.

RIP, Mr Scrimm.

Galaxy Quest (1999)

Stars: Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Tony Shalhoub, Sam Rockwell, Daryl Mitchell, Enrico Colantoni, Robin Sachs and Patrick Breen

Finally, we also lost the great Alan Rickman, almost the template for British Hollywood villains and so much more, on 14th January.

It feels very strange, given how many conventions my family and I work, attend or run nowadays, to think that the last time I watched Galaxy Quest was so far back that it predates my attending one. Autographs at $15 a pop? Clearly I discovered them too late.

What this means is that while I understood the film intellectually back then, I didn’t grok it. I didn’t realise its depths and understand how David Howard, who wrote the story and turned it into a screenplay with Robert Gordon, got most things very right indeed. Nowadays, even though I’m no trekker, I’d like to think that I understand a lot more.

The concept is rather like The Last Starfighter squared. Instead of a young man who’s trying to escape from a trailer park, only to get a lot further away than he dreamed when his video game playing skills brought him to the attention of an alien race fighting a space war, here we have the cast of a sci-fi TV show who are trying to escape their success, only to get a lot further away than they dream when their fictional exploits bring them to the attention of an alien race fighting a space war.

The humour, of course, stems from the fact that unlike Alex, who with a stretch of credulity, actually has the skills needed to fight Xur and the Ko-Dan Armada, the cast of Galaxy Quest have no skills to bring to bear at all because they’ve just been acting all this time. Or do they? This is the same idea that would later drive My Name is Bruce, but the different genre changes up the humour. Instead of R-rated horror, this is sourced from PG science fiction and digs very deep in its exploration of Star Trek and what it has meant to people over the decades.

Howard’s story is the biggest reason that this film succeeds. It finds the humour in geek fandom without ever offending the geek fans and it presents it in such a way that it found an audience beyond fandom, albeit not as sizeable an audience as it deserves. It’s also backed up by one of the most appropriate casts that I’ve seen assembled.

I’m not a Tim Allen fan by any stretch of the imagination but he plays Jason Nesmith perfectly, the actor who plays Capt Peter Quincy Taggart on Galaxy Quest. As a womanising egotist who had the world in the palms of his hands because of one iconic character, but has only found depression since the show was cancelled and he couldn’t play him any more, he’s both William Shatner and Tim Allen. While the trekkers would focus on the similarities between Taggart and Kirk and between Nesmith and Shatner, I’d argue that it’s actually the parts where Allen is playing himself that resonate the most because they bring a sadness to the character that is all too true. It’s not Jean Claude van Damme in JCVD, but there is a connection.

And, of course, Taggart is the star of the show so Nesmith is the star of the cast and it’s naturally to him that the alien race of Thermians from the Klaatu Nebula reach out for help. They are real aliens, octopoid creatures who can disguise themselves as humans, and they have no concept of fiction. When they show up at a Galaxy Quest convention, they don’t understand that it’s all made up. They picked up broadcasts of the show out there in space and, believing the episodes to be ‘historical documents’, fashioned their entire culture around the philosophy and technology that they saw. Now, with Sarris, a powerful warlord, about to destroy them, they are reaching out to their last hope, the legendary Taggart and the legendary crew of his legendary ship, the Protector.

That crew is superbly cast. Sigourney Weaver is Gwen DeMarco and Lt Tawny Madison, whose entire job on the Protector is to repeat what the computer says. The part says a lot in itself, and she looks good in blonde, but casting Weaver also invites comparisons with the character which she’s played most on film, Ripley from the Alien series. Alan Rickman is Alexander Dane and Dr Lazarus of Tev’Meck, the token alien crewman with a culturally odd weapon and a overblown catchphrase. Again, beyond the part saying much in itself, Rickman personifies the traditional Hollywood treatment given to British Shakespearean stage actors and he nails his disdain as only a craftsman of his calibre can. ‘I was an actor once,’ he repeats and it resonates.

Tony Shalhoub is Fred Kwan and Tech Sgt Chen, even though he doesn’t look remotely Asian. He’s magnificently matter of fact throughout, even though everyone else is utterly thrown for a loop by the discovery that the world they occupied in fiction is also real. He has one minor crisis of faith but it’s quickly solved and he even falls for one of the alien women, tentacles and all. Daryl Mitchell, who I didn’t know at all, is strong as Tommy Webber and Lt Laredo, filling both the token black spot and the token child prodigy spot, having begun his role as the pilot when very young indeed. He’s the least prepared because he never took the role remotely seriously and one of the best scenes is the extended scraping of the Protector 2 as he only just manages to navigate it out of the docking bay.

In addition to these core crew members, there are three other major players.

Sam Rockwell is gifted with a magnificent part as Guy Fleegman, who we meet as an MC at the Galaxy Quest convention, and only discover later when he’s transported up to the Thermian ship with the crew that he was a redshirt in one episode. This gives him a great deal of opportunity, which he lives up to superbly. While his companions are trapped within their famous Galaxy Quest roles, the show is his only claim to fame. While they are inherently invulnerable as major crew members, he feels imminent death just because he isn’t. And he gets to be the one guy that nobody knows, nobody recognises, nobody acknowledges. He doesn’t even have a surname. While Galaxy Quest the TV show is all about them, Galaxy Quest the movie is, in many ways, more about him.

Robin Sachs is hidden behind some superb make up effects and prosthetics as Gen Roth’h’ar Sarris, the villain of the piece, named for the film critic Andrew Sarris. He has very little substance, as was the norm for such sci-fi TV show villains, but he gets to bellow and posture a lot, all of which is notably cinematic. The character design is magnificent, a cross between insect, lizard and human, a B-movie creation with A-movie quality.

And, finally, there’s Enrico Colantoni, who steals the entire show in my book with an absolutely fantastic performance. He plays Mathesar, the leader of the Thermians not only in title but in fact; they all follow him at every point and in everything. He has a memorable look, a memorable voice and a memorable way of moving, all of which they copy. The voice is best of all, but close behind it is his inability not to smile, even under insane danger. He plays Mathesar like he doesn’t quite understand the human body and how it works, which is appropriate for an octopus that is merely appropriating the form. I adored his entire performance.

There’s a lot of success here for a film that could easily be written off because of what it appears to be. It’s actually one of the funniest comedies I’ve seen from Hollywood, a clever drama in science fiction clothing and a meta piece that works on a number of layers. It’s telling that a Star Trek convention actually voted it the seventh best Star Trek movie, but it’s also better than merely being something obviously related to that show and its appeal should be wider than merely those who understand that Tim Allen’s bathroom scene, where he overhears fans explaining how he’s a joke and doesn’t realise it, was a real life scene for William Shatner back in 1966.

It’s perhaps most successful when riffing on the connections between actors, the characters they play and how fans perceive the two as the same thing. However it’s less successful when delving deeper to themes from the golden age of science fiction, which, after all, had prompted the creation of Star Trek to begin with. I was reminded of Robert A Heinlein’s Methuselah’s Children, in which the human race invents the solution to a problem only because they believed that it already existed and it was being withheld from them. This applies very much to the Thermians, but runs much deeper than Mathesar’s inevitable discovery that he already is what he’s trying so hard to copy. In focusing so much on the people, it fails to develop the ideas properly, resulting in a fun, touching and affectionate but ultimately nonsensical finalé.

Galaxy Quest might look like a simple Star Trek pastiche, but it’s much more than that and it deserves more attention that it’s been given. However, it could have been much more again, only to find that it didn’t quite look far enough.

RIP Mr Rickman.