THEY CAME UPON A MIDNIGHT CLEAR
O'Brien, Tom
Screen SPACED OUT THEY CAME UPON A MIDNIGHT CLEAR IF YOU'VE BEEN watching the televised sky shows lately, you would think the space shuttle designers had copied 2001. Real astronauts tether out...
...Supergirl herself, played by Helen Slater, is a cipher, the film is a bore...
...Naturally, other earth I ings don't understand the starman, a staple of sentimental sci-fi...
...Maybe that was the point: humanity does survive, even here...
...The brother is played by Joe Morton, who says nary a word in the film but speaks volumes through touch and gesture...
...Arthur Clarke, Kubrick's collaborator for 2001, wrote the story on which this sequel is based...
...in other locales we get Moorish architecture, Venetian interiors, Victorian wood paneling, officials in Czarist Russian uniforms, punk sadists in gold plated briefs, some outer space guerrillas like rubberized Michelin men...
...In reality, how awful the thing must smell...
...TOM O'BRIEN 11 January 1985: 19...
...what we gain in clarity we lose ten times over in mystery and sublimity...
...Just as Arthur Penn gave us a "reinvented" Western in Little Rig Man...
...Packed with unusual action and a strong political message, it compels more interest and thought than the standard shootouts in the sky of Dune or Star Wars...
...Night of the Comet, on the other hand, inventively plays with the notion that Chicken Little was right...
...in short, is a derivative sci-fi film where we are supposed to learn the real enemy is ourselves — a half-truth, no doubt, but by this point, a twice-told tale...
...and finally Arthur Clarke's infamous black monolith beckoning "beyond...
...What is missing is Stanley Kubrick's eccentric genius...
...dollar for dollar, it probably provides the best emotional value from a science fiction film in years...
...Lynch formerly made Elephant Man and Eraserhead...
...Finally, 2010 contains a topical anti-war message: the rescue mission takes place aboard the Leonev, a Soviet craft with a mixed crew of Russians and Americans who maintain their cooperation even as a superpower confrontation threatens nuclear war...
...Now that movie has a sequel...
...The only thing the NASA productions need is music by Richard Strauss...
...In reality our probes into space probably involve some unpoetic mix of science, commerce, and weaponry — in short, the same old earth, aloft...
...The shoot-'em-up, for example, pits a hero named Paul Atreides (for epic's sake), in the "Luke Skywalker" role, against some boil-covered villains and their punk rock henchman...
...The villains live in the city of Harakonnen, a seamy futuristic Pittsburgh...
...The Brother from Another Planet is more substantial, a genial satire on contemporary racism...
...The acting — and the whole style of the movie — is understated...
...Buckaroo Banzai is worth a look as the best of the end-of-the-world punk costume-drama visions pervading film, MTV, and even late night commercials lately: it's a hip Buck Rodgers, in red leather...
...Unfortunately, most science fiction — and the 11 January 1985: 17 current holiday .season of new films is no exception — never manages to convey a sense of real revelation...
...Oh for a film that would really give us Jupiter and all its gas, just like the rainbow swirls in service station puddles...
...Kubrick gave us a new vision of science fiction in 2001...
...the frozen moon Europa and volcanic lo...
...Buckaroo is whimsical, with deliberately wacky loose ends...
...the tone of the film is neutered...
...Periodically, a new writer, or new director, brings to a genre like this a genuine revision of possibilities...
...On a subway ride, for example, he is accosted by a frenetic card trickster who, after several high-speed sleights of hand, asks him simply, "Wanna see me make all the white people disappear...
...Special effects, at least, live up to their name in 2010, particularly the computerized re-creation of Jupiter for motion picture purposes using stills generated by the Voyager II flyby...
...The virtues and the defects of 2010 are directly related...
...HAL becomes a regular Boy Scout, a distinctive degradation of his cool COBOL satanism...
...The disproportion between machinery and moral content is cosmic...
...But the extraterrestrial visitor is shot at as it enters American air space Commonweal: 18 and, adding things up quickly, hides by cloning itself into the form of a young man recently dead (Jeff Bridges) after finding a lock of hair tenderly saved by his widow (Karen Allen...
...The ads for Dune tell us it presents "a world beyond experience, beyond imagination": what Dune really gives us are bad dreams blended in a cuisinart...
...Thus art forecasts life...
...The bulk of the film is a battle of survivors: young innocents versus cannibalistic mutants, a random punk rocker or two, and some government types who knew what was coming and now want to suck the blood of the other survivors to remain healthy...
...Indeed, what gives zest to this B-movie update is the tackiness of the production...
...The hero of the film (and title character) is a black escaping via spacecraft from a planet still permitting official slavery...
...but like Spielberg's sensitive human "contact" figures, she grows to see that the apparently dangerous alien is really a cube pie with a heart of God-knows-what...
...Basically, Herbert's strategy, imitated by Dune's director David Lynch, is to hide a paucity of real invention behind a multiplicity of mumbo jumbo...
...But judged — as it inevitably will be — by its famous predecessor, the film is a letdown...
...It turns oit...
...No wonder the secret spice was called melange...
...Real astronauts tether out in zero-G, trekking the soft black edge of outer space, their silver spacesuits hermetically sealed against the void...
...Once again a humanoid alien has to flee an endangered planet...
...Preferred by Columbia Pictures over E.T...
...For example, as in 2001...
...In 2010, confronted with a moral choice...
...he also stayed in close (computer) touch with Peter Hyams who wrote, directed, and produced 2010 — if nothing else, an epic labor...
...We are treated here to the giant Red Spot and its ominous, slow-motion, ammonia thunderstorms...
...Starman...
...As a result, however, it has none of 2001's sparse, spooky visual poetry and suggestiveness...
...it remains stuck in three ruts — sentimentality, space fantasy, and stratospheric cnps-and-robbers...
...despite all its arcana it is basically nothing more than an old shoot-'em-up-plus-adolescent-rite-of-passagc in outer space...
...The Russian actors (some recognizable from Moscow on the Hudson) give the English screenplay a special spice, particularly Oleg Rudnick, with his dour, monosyllabic stolidity...
...it also manages that rare artistic achievement, making goodness genuinely attractive...
...The end of 2010, moreover, involves a hokey message about peace, a literal deus ex machina, stolen straight from the fifties' sci-fi classic...
...The rest of the set is downtown Los Angeles, and that locale's hollow glitz is another fit setting for Doomsday...
...On one level, there's just too much in Dune...
...too much happens, all of it spelled out in full...
...In my memory, it's the only sci-fi movie filmed primarily in back alleys, where it always looks like the end of the world...
...we are told, that HAL was inaccurately programmed, and could not help turning murderer, he wasn't really meant, we are assured, as a lesson in how our tools inherit our defects...
...in Dune he pursues the monstrous with a ghoulish revamping of Star Wars...
...The starman is equipped, of course, with E.T.'s holy, healing touch, and — lest we miss the religious theme — he makes love to the widow, previously barren, and promises her a very blessed male event...
...there's no spunky character to balance the superhumanoid's relentless goodness from its own side of the good/evil divide...
...Why do we persist in the sentimental myth that something up there will solve all our problems down here...
...As the extraterrestrial's human "contact," the widow is first repelled by her resurrected "spouse...
...The two sides contest ownership of a desert planet whose arid soil contains "melange," a super potent spice containing the secrets of life and that sort of thing...
...Discovery, spinning dizzily above lo's viscous red dust...
...the only new element involves the speculative and spectacular astronomical idea that Jupiter, one day, might evolve into a second sun...
...Of course I must confess a prejudice: Dune is faithful to its source, Frank Herbert's 1965 "classic" novel that became a big hit in some quarters, a book I detested for its freakish gobblcdygook and spurious spirituality...
...Here the sky yields neither bird nor plane but apocalyptic disaster when a comet provides earth all too close an encounter...
...Judged on its own terms, 2010 is a (mostly) engrossing thriller, a standout among recent sci-fi movies...
...In invoking it, 2010 becomes a liberal fairy tale, missing the grander dimensions of its original...
...once again he/she engages in high moral combat with the forces of evil, here personified by the evil witch, Selena, portrayed (how the mighty have fallen) by Faye Dunaway...
...ADVERTISED AS the "first science fiction love story," Starman begins with a cute premise: an extraterrestrial craft speeds toward earth as a result of an invitation, the recording and pictures placed aboard the Voyager II...
...several years ago, Starman is a Spielberg-type film without the Spielberg wit needed to redeem the romanticization of the stranger from far away...
...but the remnant is mostly a duo of lo-Cal Valley girts and two new Adams (or were they named Sean...
...Unfortunately the conglomeration of effects is created simply to tell us that pure-hearted young men and damsels will save the universe from evil meanies...
...It all brings back Stanley Kubrick's images from his fictional spaceship Discovery...
...we hear a few bars of Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustru, or a passage from Ligeti's Requiem, but in 2010 we are rushed into a new sequence of action, with no chance to let the music match the visual text, or, better still, match the silences of space...
...DUNE AND Starman — two other big budget sci-fi films — provide major disappointments...
...In pleasant contrast, comedies — Buckaroo Banzai and The Brother from Another Planet — provide strong new sci-fi angles...
...2010 is like Pope rewriting Homer...
...The Day the Earth Stood Still...
...but on a deeper level, not enough...
...Mining the spice provokes the appearance of Dune's only intriguing novelty: giant worms the size and appearance of Moby Dick...
...But Night of the Comet dares no metaphorical message...
...Worst of all...
...For example, the computer HAL is reawakened here (remember his dying, pathetic recital of Daisy when disconnected in 2001...
...But even Dunaway's thick and sometimes inspired campiness with the role cannot counteract the stupor the movie induces...
...He lands in Harlem, blends in naturally, and begins to discover similarities and differences with his home...
...Brother from Another Planet isn't a perfect film, but its spirit is generous and its screenplay inventive...
...Dune is pseudoinventive...
...But Hyams has created a cluttered product, both visually and dramatically...
...Their malice necessitates a highspeed, cross-continent sequence of chase scenes as starman seeks a spaceship rendezvous at Crater Monument in Arizona — a dead-ringer for Devil's Tower in Close Encounters of the Third Kind...
...2010 also graphically re-creates the perils of space odyssey in scenes involving the rescue of 2001's abandoned spacecraft...
...Science fiction has always looked for something wildly different, something exuberantly out of the ordinary and beyond our mundane compromises: extraterrestrial life, cosmic disaster, or spiritual deliverance...
...Moreover, 2010 provides answers which are far less interesting than the questions posed by 2001...
...it has none of the verve of the original Superman, typified by Lois Lane's memorable inquiry, meant to test Superman's X-ray vision,'' What color is my underwear?'' The screenplay leaves no room for such a question...
...When the train rolls into Columbus Circle, last stop on the express run till Harlem, and the announcer blares "125th Street next," Director John Sayles scores his heaviest point...
...Well, not quite...
...SVPERGIRL is simply a sex-change operation...
Vol. 112 • January 1985 • No. 1
