INTERZONE 254 SEPT-OCT 2014 (22 page)

E
ven now that
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY
has beaten
Apes
,
Transformers
, and
Dragon
to the top of the summer charts, it’s still not at all clear why this film exists. A purely genetic narrative would point to its origins in Marvel Studios’ previously little-noticed in-house writing programme, which farms a bullpen of early-career screenwriters on two-year contracts to develop a secret library of scripts from Marvel’s vast back catalogue of intellectual property, with occasional furloughs to do cheap and uncredited polish work on
Thor
scripts. As is now well known, Nicole Perlman was a lone female among these indentured labourers, who got the gig from her Richard Feynman biodrama
The Challenger
(which might easily be confused with the subsequent BBC biodrama
Challenger
about Richard Feynman, but for the fact that Perlman’s name appears nowhere on it), and politely refused the female-led properties dangled to her in favour of the recently rebooted
Guardians
. The film was greenlit, and the script promptly whisked out of her hands for a series of other writers to work on, ending up with James Gunn rewriting the whole thing anyway. But none of this explains why
Guardians
was allowed to go forward in the first place, which may be something to do with Marvel’s need to reassure Disney in 2009 that their four billion was buying something more than a yellowing portfolio of fifty-year-old characters and storylines on which they’d failed to improve or build in the half-century since, and that the present-day comics business was still an engine for heavily franchisable properties that could generate entire suites of collectible character toys at the snap of an opposable thumb. It won’t have hurt that Disney were able to take the opportunity to test the waters for their much bigger investment in the risky revival of a space-opera brand at a time when the genre was all but extinct. Of course it’s spun as Marvel showing new confidence in their less familiar properties, in the expansive supercluster starfield that stands as the comics universe’s backdrop, and in the power of the naked brand to pull audiences into something they’ve never heard of, just because, you know, Marvel. But don’t think there isn’t a bottom line in there.

At any rate
Guardians
is a pleasantly disarming, if surprisingly timid and old-school, space opera that occasionally would be quite exciting if it wasn’t apologising for itself and winking so much of the time. The 2008 Abnett/Lanning
Guardians
comics reboot came as the accidental detritus of the Annihilation event, leaving a randomised superteam of minor figures (plus the very non-minor Adam Warlock, who has sensibly fled the coop here) to repopulate what had thitherto been a far-future team brand. Their wild storylines, heavy with timeline-twisting Marvel metaphysics, have been pretty much ignored here for a much more conventional story, insistently retro and ironic, rooted in a model of space opera that remains stuck in 1983, when Peter Quill was abducted from Earth and his cultural lexicon never since updated. It’s a shame that the favourite thing in the first new space opera in years is a talking tree, but Marvel knew what they were signing. Gunn has been making versions of this film for a while, right back to the millennial dawn of modern superhero cinema; the year of Bryan Singer’s
X-Men
also inconspicuously threw up Gunn’s
The Specials
, an eyewateringly cheap film about the off-duty lives of a
Guardians
-like low-ranking superteam with dumb powers, lashings of body paint, and hit-and-miss character banter. The old Troma hand has sharpened his tools since those days, but he was never going to be the man to charge with a sense of wonder; the plot is surely the last we will ever tolerate of those Marvel boilerplate numbers about chasing an Infinity Stone around for an hour and a bit till something woah-sized falls out of the sky in the third act.

O
ver in a comics universe next door, Brett Ratner’s
HERCULES
has boldly chosen to honour the memory of the late Steve Moore by ignoring his final wishes and plastering his name all over this Rock-headed adaptation of his comic series
Hercules: The Thracian Wars
, while still not paying Moore’s estate a penny. Even before this indignity, Steve’s mentee Alan Moore was urging a boycott, and while the film can seem entertaining enough as a big-budget, low-forehead extended episode of
Xena
, it’s certainly not the memorial one of British comics’ mightiest bronze-age heroes would have wished. (That would be
Unearthing
, Alan Moore’s psychogeographical biography from 2006, particularly in its Crook&Flail audio incarnation.)
The Thracian Wars
wasn’t Steve’s best work in comics, but it had a lot of fun with the conceit of a league of extraordinary gentlefolk recruited from the heroic names of pre-Trojan myth cycles, with Herc heading up a super-team of Theban and Calydonian celebrities in a euhemerised age of myth. Ratner’s version has taken bits of this, randomised the characterisations, scrambled the plot, and jollied it up with a jokier tone, while cheerfully shredding much of Moore’s careful regard for sources and canon. Despite a Greek co-writer, Amphiaraus and Sitalces can no longer pronounce their own names, and the opening scene is captioned “358 B.C.” without anyone apparently noticing there was probably meant to be a 1 on the front of that. Dwayne and McShane seem heartily amused by the whole thing, but when Herc introduces his buddies as “Atalanta of Scythia, Amphiarus of Argus, Autolycus of Sparta”, you can hear the distant sound of Steve Moore’s ashes spinning on the wind.

SIN CITY: A DAME TO KILL FOR
takes us back to the dark inside of Frank Miller’s head after nine years’ respite, to find that even the few light switches that used to work are now broken. This second tour is a perplexing narrative space, in which old faces who ought to be dead (Mickey Rourke, Bruce Willis) play alongside old faces who aren’t (Jessica Alba, Rosario Dawson, Powers Boothe) and new faces playing old ones (Josh Brolin as Clive Owen, Dennis Haysbert as Michael Clarke Duncan) at variously later or earlier stages of their timeline, some of them so completely warped by time that they might as well be completely new characters, while new new faces Eva Green and Joe Gordon-Levitt try to out-noir the noirest of them with still more preposterously overblown character arcs that it’s fair to expect will not end well for either. The film as a whole is set in a kind of
Pulp Fiction
hole in the first film where the Willis/Alba story has happened but the Rourke one hasn’t, so that anyone reliant on nine-year-old memories is going to find themselves as frazzled as Rourke’s punchdrunk vigilante Marv, who can’t remember why he’s beating up whoever he’s beating up tonight, but knows they must have deserved it. The stories are pretty infantile, the underlying misogyny trumped by the overarching misanthropy, and the sadism as stupid as ever. The old hands are better than the new at making their characters seem actable, even if the indomitable Green gives it her heaving best as the titular dame: “a witch, a predator, destroying men sometimes for profit, sometimes for power, sometimes for sport.” But even old Dwight and Nancy are tainted now by long marinading in Miller’s imagination: “This rotten town,” she sums up. “It soils everybody.” The film has now tanked in the States but cleaned up in Russia, so for worse or better we may not have seen the last.

T
hirty years ago, when Syd Field’s three-act model of screenplay structure was starting to establish itself as the industry paradigm, Columbia University’s Frank Daniel fought back with a model that broke a film down into eight “sequences” of ten to fifteen minutes, corresponding to the reels of early cinema. Now Noel Clarke seems to have been studying the sequence model in his latest exercise in shoestring Brit-skiff
THE ANOMALY
, a bodyjacking thriller whose gimmick is that the hero only wakes to consciousness and ownership of his body for 9
'
47
"
intervals while the system reboots after a crash. The rest of the time he’s possessed by Brian Cox, which is a bit of a hardcore thespian challenge for our Noel but luckily happens mostly in insterstitial downtime, as the film is constructed of a series of ten-minute sequences during which the hero has to do his
Source Code
thing before the window closes. The idea is cool, but the execution risible, with diabolical performances and dialogue, cheesy slo-mo fight sequences, and a scheme-chain of villainy that swiftly spirals off into the outer reaches of absurdity: “The acid between the sheets is gradually spreading towards your son’s body. It’s a little much, I know, but I have a penchant for theatrics.” (Everyone: oh no you don’t! Villain: oh yes I do! Repeat and fade into oblivion.)

EARTH TO ECHO
is a found-footage homage to
ET
with a dash of
Super 8
, as a group of ten-year-olds rescue a spacewrecked alien owlbot and go on a geocaching quest to return him to his ship in defiance of the government’s men in orange who want to do horrid things to our heroes’ little space buddy. It’s a film with little obvious reason to be than the technical challenge of finding a child-friendly version of a film genre otherwise associated with scary movies, which on the whole it does with sufficient ingenuity to pass the time. The kids are all rather good, and seem to have been cast for their willingness to go all in with the on-screen crying; and there’s quite a sweet framing plot about the disruption of childhood friendships as parents move away from town, and how the universe gives you ways to keep distant friends close. Particularly affecting is a
Boyhood
-style final scene where we revisit the young cast a year later, and see that growth spurts and breaking voices haven’t changed the bond between them despite their months apart. I’m not sure that happens in life, but it’s a nice bit of manipulation.