Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #223 (26 page)

Dreamworks is also testing the axle
load of the 3D bandwagon with its above-average
Monsters vs Aliens
, an affectionate tribute to the first golden age of sf cinema in the fifties, which even the target audience's accompanying adults can't be counted on to remember. Reese Witherspoon's suburban bride is turned into a fifty-foot woman by space radiation, and finds herself forcibly enlisted as weapon V in a secret government superteam along with a modern-day Blob, Fly, Creature, and Mothra combatting an alien invasion in a plot that homages
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(again) in a series of self-consciously monstrous IMAX set pieces featuring wantonly colossal ships, robots, and heroes. Not all the jokes are as funny as they think they are, and while it's rare and refreshing to see a family action comedy with an empowered female lead at the centre, the film has to surround her with sexually unthreatening male colleagues and to culminate in her renunciation of her original aspirations to romantic partnership. But it's disarmingly aware of the pitfalls ("Did you see how strong I was? There probably isn't a jar in this world I couldn't open!"), and the sheer affection on display for the childhood of sf cinema is like a reboot to the golden age.

By far the most welcome reboot of the season has been the career of Henry Selick, the
stop-mo wizard behind
Nightmare before Christmas
and
James and the Giant Peach
whose only feature in the thirteen years subsequent was 2001's live-action
Monkeybone
, a should-have-been-brilliant film made boneless by studio intervention. Selick was on his way back anyway thanks to his recent work with Wes Anderson, but his eyepopping adaptation of Neil Gaiman's
Coraline
shoots him right back into the big time. It's particularly felicitous for Selick's brand of setbound stop-motion that the novel takes place in the literally closed universe of a single house and garden, with a series of game-level set pieces each bound to a single room-sized set. Selick has run riot with the book's more restrained fantasy sequences and developed the garden into the biggest of them all, but the plot and the imagery track the book almost scene for scene. The addition of a second child, ostensibly to give Coraline another human to talk to, is the thing that works least well, and Coraline herself, while beautifully crafted in her own right, is a different and in some ways less appealing figure as a sassier, Americanised version of herself. But book and film both serve one another well, and the character animation and showpiece flights of fancy are extraordinary; so fluid and technically dazzling is the 3D animation that you frequently have to pinch yourself to recall that you're watching stop-motion rather than CG.

A distinctively British version of sf
nostalgia is celebrated in
Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel
, a
Shaun of the Dead
-style pub comedy about a couple of genre fanboys and their mundane drinking buddy discovering a leak in the temporal plumbing in the gents’ toilet, through which they get sucked into a web of time paradox ineffectively policed by Anna Faris’ agent from the future, while a detachment of future assassins seeks to terminate our heroes because of something they do that night that will turn them from nerdy losers into history-making global celebrities. An amiable first half spins the gag out nicely in a time-twisting plotline strewn with geeky in-jokes and elegant genre turns; the plot puzzle of what will turn out to be in the unexplored end toilet is particularly satisfyingly resolved. But though a lot of effort is put into bringing the fans onside with in-jokes and genre appreciation, around the midpoint the film stops pretending that it's interested in making proper sf sense, and the hard-earned goodwill is rather thrown away in an ending that shows rather regrettable indifference to the virtues of science-fictional logic and closure that its heroes supposedly uphold.

Not many sf action films announce
themselves with the opening caption “Norway", which may explain why
Outlander
has had a few false starts in its effort to fight its way off the shelf. But it's a welcome arrival, since this is to all intents and rather gloriously
Aliens vs Beowulf
, even if the finished film is unconvincingly coy about its (fairly unmistakable) roots as a science-fictional reimagining of the history behind the myth—with Jim Caviezel's monster-killing hero a planetwrecked space warrior fallen among Norsemen, and Grendel and mum giant Patrick Tatopoulos aliens that have followed him down to avenge the planetary genocide of their kind. The principal narrative gimmick is the challenge of stopping the unstoppable with only mediaeval levels of firepower, helped out by some truly epic Viking mugging from a glorious support cast of coarse veterans encompassing John Hurt, Ron Perlman, and an unfeasibly feisty Sophia Myles who is introduced rejecting marriage proposals with a quarterstaff in revealing combat leathers. It goes on a bit, with some pretty silly plotting and stretches of slack in middle and end that should have been taken up; but the action-beat score is almost as high as the concept, and it hits its buttons remarkably well, as indeed you'd expect from a film about monsters that hunt by motion detection rather than old-fashioned optics. In the future, we won't need eyes at all; we'll just have buttons that the machines will press for us, and when we're naughty, a simple reboot will terminate all our bad processes.

Copyright © 2009 Nick Lowe