INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014 (19 page)

Made in 1986, Leos Carax’s supposedly futuristic drama
Mauvais Sang
(‘bad blood’) is re-titled
THE NIGHT IS YOUNG
for DVD (23 June, above). It stars Juliette Binoche and Denis Lavant as Anna and Alex, another of this art-house director’s doomed couples. The setting is a Parisian future like something from Godard’s dystopian
Alphaville
, so don’t expect any similarities to Hollywood sci-fi. A cardsharp and ventriloquist, Alex has just broken up with his girlfriend Lise (Julie Delpy), but she pursues him while he is recruited for a heist by a shambolic pair of crooks who apparently need Alex’s skills to steal the cure for new disease STBO, a bizarrely moralistic retrovirus that only kills people who have sex without love. Prep for the job involves a parachute practice jump in training for an escape from France. Halley’s Comet reportedly causes a snowstorm after a heatwave, but weather conditions have little impact upon the vague plot, and it (the comet) is only mentioned in the movie as a rarity, something therefore ominous that brings its own cosmic fate, like alien gravity that somehow pulls characters from their chosen paths.

Seemingly intended to evoke Hitchcock style capers and European underworld mystery, Carax’s movie has an absurdly leisurely build-up to its main action sequence – which is, of course, anticlimactic. Even the characters are ciphers and just a delivery system for long rambling conversations. It’s a movie composed of pleasant curiosities and infrequently ecstatic movement (on the soundtrack, Bowie’s ‘Modern Love’ song is there to provide a street-prowling Alex with a tiredly laughable freak-out moment), and it’s a movie about smoking. Yes, if you want to act for Carax, you’ve got to smoke. The habit is evidently not an addiction, though. Clearly, this smoking malarkey is the cool essence of urban noir. It sets the players and this scenario apart from any reality. Binoche and Lavant were better than this – in both their characters and performances – in Carax’s beguiling tragedy
The Lovers on the Bridge
(1991).

Carax’s first movie,
BOY MEETS GIRL
, is available too (DVD, 23 June), and there’s a Blu-ray boxset of that with
TNIY
, plus the director’s more recent surrealist anthology-movie
Holy Motors
(
Black Static
#33) due out 27 October.

After
Metropolis
, director Fritz Lang filmed another of his wife Thea von Harbou’s SF novels. Made in 1929, silent classic
FRAU IM MOND
(aka
The
Woman in the Moon
, Dual Format, 25 August) became one of the premier genre dramas of its Weimar era.

In the mission’s overlong preamble, establishing characters and motives (that include gold prospecting) of the crew, the story notes sacrifices of the space pioneers killed on earlier flights. Although, from today’s perspective, the spaceship’s interior/set design seem to owe rather more to Verne than Clarke, the picture’s visionary miniatures and camera effects offer some impressive approximations of NASA’s massive V.A.B. and Apollo’s launch-pad, as realised forty years later, and so this vintage sci-fi is convincing as a demo of the practical details required for a moon-shot, multi-stage rocket and all.

The stowaway boy wallows in his adventure, while the supposed adults fail to acknowledge that it’s a bit late for arguments over ambition and jeopardy when they are looking down upon the lunar dark side. It all gets silly when there is atmosphere beyond the landing site, where the nutty professor uses a dowsing rod to find water, but this melodrama fulfils most of the SF criteria for a horribly dated interplanetary romance. While the men-folk bicker and fight, revealing their fathomless hubris, the lone heroine puts her desert-hiking boots on and tackles the scientific job of filming the moonscape, such as it is. Obviously, this fantasy Moon is not the airless satellite we all know about now, but
Frau im Mond
boasts an effective moral dilemma for its final chapter, and it took screen sci-fi a couple of steps closer to reality simply by not having anything like the Selenite aliens of Wells’ turn-of-the-century book
The First Men in the Moon
(filmed in 1964, with Harryhausen’s animation), or the unfeasible space-cannon of Verne’s novel
From the Earth to the Moon
(filmed in 1958).

Eureka’s masters of cinema edition for Lang’s last silent movie includes the 15-minute German documentary featurette
The First Scientific Science-Fiction Film
. It’s a great hi-def restoration and a fine Blu-ray to suit many cinema purists, students and scholars, but I just can’t help thinking that a colourised version, with subtitles instead of intertitle cards, would be a welcome project and a much better commercial venture for today’s media products.

FARTING EXCUSES: ALSO RECEIVED

MIRAGE MEN
(DVD, 30 June, above) delves into the twilight zones of US government disinformation conspiracies and military-industrial propaganda that might well have helped create the 20th century’s biggest and dumbest religious cult, UFOlogy – or not.

Led by the Shat, humans are cosmic baddies in kids cartoon
ESCAPE FROM PLANET EARTH
(Blu-ray/DVD, 14 July). Smurfs in Area 51…?
Mac and Me
for ADHD sprogs? Since such genre spoofs as
Planet 51
, I have realised that I’m far too old for this shite.

HUNTING THE LEGEND
(DVD, 21 July, above) is a documentaroid encounter with Bigfoot. Where do they find such crazy folks spreading hoaxes? Honestly, nothing really beats
The Six Million Dollar Man
’s alien-robot myth from the mid-1970s. That was genius!

LATE ARRIVALS

HELIX: THE COMPLETE FIRST SEASON
(DVD, 30 June). Thriller about a team of scientists from the Centre for Disease Control who travel to a high-tech research facility in the Arctic to investigate a possible disease outbreak.

ASHENS
(DVD/Blu-ray, 14 July). SF/Fantasy comedy adventure with nods to The Matrix, Lord of the Rings and The Goonies.

THE DOUBLE
(DVD/Blu-ray, 4 August). Richard Ayoade’s adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novella. (Theatrical release reviewed by Nick Lowe in issue #252.)

STOP PRESS:
HUNTING THE LEGEND
release date postponed till 5 January 2015.

NICK LOWE

EDGE OF TOMORROW

X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

TARZAN

GODZILLA

MALEFICENT

LEGENDS OF OZ: DOROTHY’S RETURN

PATEMA INVERTED

UPSIDE DOWN

TRANSCENDENCE

THE YOUNG AND PRODIGIOUS T.S. SPIVET

W
eren’t we just here? Did we already do this, or is this sense of déjà vu merely the anticipation of a familiar disappointment? Is this the reboot yet, or did we just forget that it never happened? Who is playing Quicksilver, and did he just pull down our pants or were they like that all the time? Has the eating itself already eaten itself? Is our Earth the one whose noösphere is ruled by a gigantic industrialised intellectual-property farm with a modest comics business attached as a loss-leader, where films make films out of films which become about their own recursiveness and the rebooting of narrative, and where the nervous question now is whether new intellectual property is worth the R&D, when old brands can be rebooted indefinitely until victory is achieved? Are we there yet, or did we crash and go back to the start?

Such is the reboot-happy world of the modern blockbuster evoked by
EDGE OF TOMORROW
, which spent most of its production falling off a cliff, only to find itself thrillingly rescued mere inches from a nasty splat-landing. Director Doug Liman, whose previous sf film was the decidedly mixed delight
Jumper
, is notorious in the business for his hair-raisingly indie and improvisational ways with blockbuster budgets and productions, and in an industry governed by reason would be the very last person you’d want to trust with a tightly-wound time-twisting plot and a Tom Cruise tentpole budget on a property with zero punter recognition and a title capable of inducing an anterograde amnesiac state all by itself. To give an idea of the history of violence offscreen, the film’s first iteration was a 2010 Black List script by emerging writer Dante Harper, written as a spec for Warners from Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s (subsequently graphicised) novel
All You Need Is Kill
, about a teenage Japanese grunt in a war against alien invaders who accidentally steals their power of rebooting the day to play over and over till they win, and who teams up with a similarly-endowed American killing machine nicknamed the Full Metal Bitch for a game-inspired mashup of
Starship Troopers
with
Groundhog Day
(or possibly
Source Code
with
50 First Dates
). But even without the Liman factor, the arrival of the distinctly non-teenage and,
Last Samurai
notwithstanding, not conspicuously Japanese Tom Cruise forced some fairly drastic changes to the property. The theatre of war was shunted from the Pacific to London and alien-occupied France, and the Bitch recast accordingly as Full Metal Emily Blunt; the graceless title was replaced by a completely forgettable one; and a series of replacement writers, bizarrely including
Jerusalem
playwright Jez Butterworth (still credited), did their best to appease the controlling Cruise and the mercurial Liman, who for his part drove producers to prescription abuse by tearing up the script six months before shooting. Eventually Cruise had a quiet word with his current go-to writer Chris McQuarrie, his helmsman on
Jack Ryan
and the new
Mission Impossible
, who triaged the script in the month before shooting without ever looking at the novel, and has now displaced the luckless Harper entirely from the credits.

To everyone’s relief and most people’s considerable surprise, the result is far from the apocalyptic planewreck that was on the cards, delivering instead a mostly tight, ingenious, and innovative update of the venerable
Rogue Moon
template for iterable action narrative where you keep getting blown to atoms and going again. In this final recurse of the film’s own reboot-camp hell, Cruise is a weaselly media general busted down to private when he attempts to extricate himself from humanity’s last doomed surge to retake France, only to have to hero up when he finds himself plunged into groundhog D-Day and dying a couple of hundred times while he learns his lesson. As he and we grow used to the beats of his day, the pace of the cycle quickens, the gaps in narrative become more casual, and at a crucial point the audience find themselves dropping behind the hero and increasingly tasked with filling the ellipses for themselves. It’s getting harder all the time to make Tom Cruise sf films, not least because merely putting him in a film has increasingly the effect of making it all about Scientology whether or not anyone intends it; but he’s rather good here, particularly while his character’s still being a craven self-serving dick, even if the excavation of his inner hero and Operating Thetan within by fast-forwarding through his lives has a little too much cultic resonance to pass entirely beneath the threshold of attention. The third act was concocted in haste, but its palpable sense of depleted invention is partly the result of unavoidable constraints: that Tom clearly has to lose the power and play the finale with real-world, one-shot, life-or-death stakes, and a final sacrifice payoff with a redemptive twist reward. The novel has a rather cooler, darker climax where the hero and heroine, who in this version are both time-looping, discover that the only way to thwart the alien prescience is for one of them to kill the other (at the end of a day which has finally managed to wind the complete loop from meet-cute to consummation into its span). But never in a thousand lifetimes were we going to get that.

E
dge
’s script-rebooter Chris McQuarrie made his name on
The Usual Suspects
, which was also the film that propelled Bryan Singer to the
X-Men
franchise and changed the course of blockbuster history. Singer’s trumpeted homecoming to the series with
X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST
is in part an act of atonement for almost destroying the two biggest franchises in comics when he bailed on
The Last Stand
to make
Superman Returns
instead; and franchise veteran Simon Kinberg’s screenplay is a confident if cluttered reunion of old friends credited and pop-up, in a generously expanded version of Claremont’s twin-timelined tale of a future X-Man sent back into the younger version’s head to preempt the X-termination of mutantkind at the hands of the Sentinel killbots. It’s easily the most complex transformation yet of a major franchise universe, bending the series’ increasingly centrifugal spin-offs, prequels, and reboots back into a single continuity by folding the Fox franchise’s past and future (which, to complicate things further, are in internal continuity the other way around) back together so that a new future (or past) is born out of the Singer-Vaughn canon while
Last Stand
and the
Wolverine
films are erased from the memory of all but the hero and his mentor, who in this film are also the other way about. By a productive accident, the X-Men films have wound up extending their universe backwards and forwards in tandem, resulting in the only comics franchise whose history is laid out before us as a sixty-year whole; and the coexistence of original and reboot cast allows the continuing dramatisation of a complete generations-spanning allohistory of our own world from the Silver Age to the Age of Apocalypse, with
Days
’ end-credit tease extending the canon into gulfs of time deeper still.

It’s not a film that’s particularly bothered with explaining its narrative conveniences – why walking through walls gives you the power to send consciousness through time, or how the resurrected Charlie Xavier managed to end up in an identical body (Kinberg and Brett Ratner have different definitive answers to this one) with identically non-working legs, or just how Raven’s DNA enables the Sentinels to anticipate and counter mutant powers like
Edge of Tomorrow
’s Mimics – while the passage of a decade since First Class with the story essentially on hold is a funny kind of homage to the First Class’s years of action, and the original cast feel a bit narratively boxed-in thanks to the deletion of their big-mission set piece to rescue Rogue from the Sentinel-occupied X-mansion. But if it’s an early certainty that the finale will involve gigantic battles in two timelines intercut and temporally intertwined, the middle of the film is refreshingly unpredictable after the original plot wraps up at the midpoint and the mission angles off unexpectedly elsewhere. By the end of the film, we’re deep into Abrams
Star Trek
space, rewinding slowly through the past of a reset canon future which may or may not have jumped both rails and shark. Next stop is a 1983-set
Age of Apocalypse
, which could easily be just that.

T
he great-granddaddy of modern franchise branding makes his post-millennial return in the German-produced mocapimation
TARZAN
, with Kellan Lutz voicing and part-performing a new iteration of ERB’s iconic vine-swinger after sixteen years away from screens. This Tarzan for our time is no longer an English lord but an American energy baron, a scion of the new global aristocracy as the lost heir to multinational “Greystoke Energies”, his parents victims of a nefarious boardroom clash between conservation and exploitation of a lost meteorite deep in mountain-gorilla country. Fortunately plucky conservationist Jane Porter is on hand to draw Tarzan back to civilisation by the eternal power of ape-boy and hot teen in tropical kit. Tarzan find human girl unconscious! Tarzan take advantage! Tarzan abduct to mating dungeon cave! It’s fairly primitive stuff, but the thing it gets right is that Tarzan is a gift to the modern medium of motion-captured
3
D, with some superb ape mummery under the choreography of the legendary Peter Elliott, who made his name as the lead suit performer in
Greystoke
. Of course it’ll be swiftly erased from memory and canon come David Yates’ live-action reboot, but those are the breaks.