INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014 (20 page)

T
he most famous of all man-in-a-suit performances makes its own mocap debut in Gareth Edwards’
GODZILLA
, which has seen the king of the monsters stomping back over the Pacific box office to remind the Fukushima generation who’s the daddy. With a keen eye for someone with the skillset to leverage a thrilling film from a terrible script and great actors wantonly miscast, Disney have now recruited Edwards to the biggest reboot of them all, the extended
Star Wars
franchise. It’s been a steep ramp up from the 3-man crew, scriptless shoot, and bedroom-made effects of his debut
Monsters
, but nobody could say he hasn’t earned his shot at the prize. This
Godzilla
has some big ideas about what a Gojira for our times needs to do: to speak to our age’s nuclear and environmental anxieties as his grandfather spoke to his; to go straight to universe, with Goji merely the apex predator and enforcer of harmony in an instant kaiju ecosystem whose lower denizens come Cloverfielding out of the ocean to trash our cities and shut down our grids till the boss comes to give them a talking-to. But the human drama is woeful, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s hurt-locker vet caught between jeopardised young family and an obsessed dad who papers his walls with cuttings saying things like NUCLEAR CRISIS GROWS to remind him the nuclear crisis is growing, while overqualified stars like Ken Watanabe and for some reason Sally Hawkins are crammed into cameos that push their powers of something-from-nothing to their limit. But the monster sequences are stunningly conceived and executed, often cutting away from straight-ahead kaiju-on-kaiju combat entirely in favour of more oblique and resonant shots of media reaction and aftershock, and carefully framing all the money shots with a foreground for scale. The showreel shot of the marines making the drop through the darkness and smoke to Ligeti’s
Requiem
is epic poetry of a peculiar and wonderful kind; and even the Massive Unidentified Terrestrial Organisms steal a bit of romance and sympathy from the climax of Edwards’ own
Monsters
.

A
nother misunderstood monster has a redemptive reboot in
MALEFICENT
, an ungainly revisionist live-action hash-up of Disney’s 1959
Sleeping Beauty,
the film whose lukewarm box-office appeal put the animated Disney fairytale to sleep for thirty years.
Maleficent
is old Disney rearing up in defence of its core values and fairytale crown jewels as its younger progeny threaten to ride off with the pick of the treasure. In contrast to Disney’s new star creator Jennifer Lee of
Wreck-It Ralph
and
Frozen
,
Maleficent
’s architect Linda Woolverton is old-Disney aristocracy: the writer who first took the gospel of the hero’s journey from Chris Vogler’s famous memo to the heart of Disney’s creation with
The Lion King
and
Mulan
, and would go on to lay the foundation stone of the company’s live-action revisionings with Tim Burton’s
Alice in Wonderland
. But Burton very sensibly turned
Maleficent
down, no doubt recognising an irreparably wonky concept that subsequent script-doctoring has proved unable to keep on its feet. In this incarnation, the ill-named fairy who lays the curse on the Princess Aurora isn’t born bad but just a victim of abuse at the hands of a treacherous childhood sweetheart. “He told her it was true love’s kiss, but it was not to be”; and sure enough once she grows into Angelina Jolie with scary wired Rick Baker cheekbones, he date-roofies her and hacks off her faerie wings, leaving Prince Hans looking a bit of an amateur beside him. True, she does do a bit of ill-advised cursing, but as soon as Princess Aurora grows into a wig-trailing Elle Fanning (who turns out to be completely at sea when called on to play wet and simpering) she repents and spends the rest of the film trying to undo what she has made, with results that might be more interesting if the defining twist hadn’t been preemptively stolen by
Frozen
, which somehow got studio permission to make off with the ending from under its rival’s nose. Clonkingly on-the-nose narration oversells the Bechdel credentials, only to undermine them by yet again erasing the mother from the screen and making it all about daddies and daughters, with even the inconvenient queen’s premature death happening offscreen on the cutting-room floor. Legendary production designer Robert Stromberg, who dressed
Avatar
,
Alice
, and
Oz
, is on more subdued visual form as director, and doesn’t seem terribly at ease with his actors. But people have gone to see it, so it’s a certainty that Disney will only be encouraged to further malfeasance.

LEGENDS OF OZ: DOROTHY’S RETURN
is a complex derivative of Baumian intellectual property, a direct musical sequel to
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
drawn not from the original cycle but from a 1989 novel by Frank’s grandson Roger S. Baum, part of the Baum estate’s extended Oz canon and thus a different universe again from the MGM/Warner and Disney variations of the Oz cinematic universe, each with its copyrighted likenesses and design elements. In its film version the plot has a lot of Woolverton’s
Alice in Wonderland
about it, as Dorothy suffers a further concussive episode and finds herself and Toto back in Oz years later (though only the next day in her own life) to face a darkness that has fallen upon the kingdom in her absence, while back home in Kansas the tornado victims face eviction and exploitation at the hands of predatory disaster-chasers that only Dorothy can thwart. The title suggests franchise aspirations, but they’ll be lucky; the budget seems to have gone on the songs rather than the animation, and the musical numbers are like watching Sims karaoke.

Y
asuhiro Yoshiura’s anime oddity
PATEMA INVERTED
has had a curious release pattern, restricted to a handful of kids-only weekend shows outside its festival screenings, but derives some ingenious twists of action, orientation, and serial conceptual breakthrough from its premise of a failed experiment that has reversed gravity for part of the planet and divided the survivors into mutually hostile domains. But when the intrepid princess Patema ventures out of Plato’s cave into the topsy-turvy world of her enemies, she strikes up a forbidden friendship that sets her on a path to the exposure of a series of secrets about her world and the truth about her missing father’s fate. The influence of Miyazaki’s Laputa is evident, and perhaps also of Naohisa Inoue’s Iblard art as featured in
Whisper of the Heart
; but Yoshiura’s film specialises in vertiginous inversions of orientation and perspective, which its plot ties to increasingly outré revelations about the experiment, its consequences and implications, and realises in an inventive cascade of artful upside-down stunts.

J
uan Solanas’ live-action version of the same conceit in
Upside Down
has also finally started to peep shyly out on the festival circuit, after a couple of years on the shelf and clearly no realistic prospect now of a wider UK theatrical release. This variation has Jim Sturgess’ and Kirsten Dunst’s star-crossed lovers inhabiting near-contiguous binary planets whose matter and inhabitants remain (preposterously) constrained by their native gravity on one another’s worlds, so that Sturgess has to stuff his shoes and pockets with souvenirs from wealthy Up Top to go clumping round undetected on the ceiling to visit his quondam teen sweetheart who’s forgotten all about him since the head injury she sustained falling out of the sky. Full of ravishingly impossible greenscreened digital vistas, it’s one of those Euro-hashes that depend for their existence on continental funders’ inability to recognise a dead-on-its-legs script. The actors struggle, the dialogue squelches, and the plot emits the sound of a deflating bladder. But it does look lovely, bless it.

A
hardly less high-concept romance is the year’s big-budget sf flop
TRANSCENDENCE
, in which Rebecca Hall has to deal with her cybergenius husband turning into Skynet after he gets poloniumed by Kate Mara’s sinister patissière in a backfiring attempt to prevent the coming singularity. Johnny Depp’s performance is inevitably a bit Skyped-in, consisting as it does mostly of a digitally-distressed face playing a machine simulation of himself; but the plot escalates nicely through its levels, as what starts as a race to save Depp’s mind (as in Save control-S) by backing his consciousness up to the cloud becomes the beginning of something much bigger, with Depp taking control first of the internet and then of the nanofabric of matter itself, and Hall discovering that the downside of being married to God is that He can be really rather controlling. Another script that went through some odd changes in development, it’s eliminated the original love-triangle between Depp, Hall, and bestie/rival Paul Bettany, as well as an originally still more spectacular third-act apocalypse – the last presumably to preserve the intermittent side-mystery over whether the ghost in the machines was ever her husband at all or a sinister AI opportunistically mimicking a human identity for its own advantage. It’s unfortunate that the film’s found itself the poster-child for the riskiness of original narrative property in the blockbuster market – not just as its actual originality is fairly moot, the essential concept going back at least to Budrys’
Michaelmas
, but because for all its fluffs it’s a film with a proper sf arc that changes up through conceptual gears in a way that Hollywood rarely has the patience or thoughtfulness to attempt.