Cinema Futura (edited by Mark Morris) Read online

  That’s the most memorable moment, but RoboCop is loaded with humour both sharp and corny. RoboCop himself is wisely played completely straight, but the world of RoboCop is filled with ridiculous TV commercials, wacky verbal exchanges (the funniest being the criminal with hostages asking, as one of his demands, for a car that gets ‘really shitty gas mileage’), and the wonderful moment of cartoonish gore where a villain gets drenched in toxic waste, does a Troma-style meltdown, and then explodes like a water balloon when he gets hit by a car. Gotta love it. It’s a world where everybody stops what they’re doing and laughs out loud if the show It’s Not My Problem comes on, where a horny old man tells the camera, ‘I’d buy that for a dollar!’ after every lewd sex joke.

  And the villains! Has there ever been a more gleefully reprehensible set of scumbags? There are no tragic figures here, no conflicted souls – they’re all happily and shamelessly evil. Of special note is Kurtwood Smith as Clarence J. Boddicker, my all-time favorite screen bad guy, written and played to absolute perfection. Though we meet the character in a moment of comedic rage (the explosives they detonated to break into a bank safe burned the money inside), it is in his moments of calm that he becomes a truly chilling figure. The brutal execution of Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is another classic moment of cinematic dark humour, except that instead of the shock of the ED-209 scene, it’s an uncomfortable, squirmy kind of humour.

  ‘You probably don’t think I’m a very nice guy,’ says Boddicker, as his associates laugh hysterically. It is cold-hearted, terrifying menace delivered with a playful tone. It gets worse as he aims his shotgun at Murphy, making science fiction sound effects as he moves the gun around, trying to decide where to shoot. We have a grown man behaving like an eight-year-old in the middle of an act of torture, and it’s scary as hell.

  He blows Murphy’s hand off (in another gorier-than-expected moment) and says, ‘Give the man a hand!’ This pun doesn’t diminish the horror of the scene, because it’s not about the filmmakers throwing in a crowd-pleasing one-liner perfect for the film’s trailer, but rather about a psychopath trying to amuse his buddies. Boddicker walks away, but the cruelty continues as the villains open fire on Murphy, and any pretence at wit is abandoned in favour of sadistic taunting (‘Does it hurt? Does it hurt?’ delivered as if talking to a child with a boo-boo). Ultimately it’s Boddicker who decides that the fun is over, as he does several times during the film, and fires the final shot to the head, preparing Murphy for life as a heroic cyborg.

  Yeah, he’s also cowardly – he completely sells out his boss when RoboCop’s interrogation turns violent (‘It was Dick Jones! Dick Jones!’) and then walks into Dick Jones’ office, after obnoxiously flirting with his secretary, without a trace of shame. Whatta guy. Norman Bates, Hannibal Lecter, The Terminator… all great villains, but in my opinion none of ‘em top Mr Clarence J. Boddicker.

  There are a lot of thrilling action sequences in RoboCop, and though the special effects haven’t all dated well, they were pretty amazing in the late 80’s. It certainly has its cheesy moments – one suspects that Dick Jones could have come up with a more subtle manner of dispatching a helpless RoboCop than setting ED-209 on a rampage of destruction in the upper floors of his corporate office building, and I have to believe that overriding RoboCop’s inability to take action against senior officers at Omni Consumer Productions would require more involvement from the Human Resources department than simply a shout of ‘You’re fired! – but underneath the gunfire, explosions and wild car chases is an ingenious black comedy, both hilarious and disturbing, and for me, this elevates RoboCop to the level of one of the all-time science fiction classics.

  DELICATESSEN

  (Directors: Marc Caro, Jean-Pierre Jeunet; starring: Pascal Benezech, Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac, Jean-Claude Dreyfus - 1991)

  Philip Palmer

  The first science fiction novel I ever read was an apocalyptic story of a world where law and order has broken down and cannibals stalk the streets; shockingly, in the final chapter, the narrator was eaten alive.

  I have no idea now what this book was called or who wrote it – but I was 11 years old at the time, and the story made a huge impression on me. I might even say that it’s the reading experience that has made me the writer I am today (in other words, all too fond of gory blood-fests in which characters die, horribly.)

  And for this reason, Delicatessen is a movie close to my heart. It’s a quirky, brilliant movie: and it is in essence an apocalyptic science fiction story about a world where law and order has broken down and cannibals stalk the streets. It tells its tale in an unconventional way; though the first time I saw it, I didn’t even realise it was science fiction until I was half way through. Because it doesn’t look like a futuristic world: the characters all wear 1950s clothes, the TV set is black and white and depends on dodgy aerial reception, and one female character wears big horn-rimmed glasses just like my mother used to wear in the years after the war.

  But as the story unfolds, it becomes apparent that this is not 1950s France as we know it, Jim. Rather, it is a vision of a world in which some kind of disaster has caused the breakdown of society. A terrible yellow fog hangs over everything; technology exists (there’s a taxi cab) but there’s no police force, no army and no supermarkets.

  So is this a future world in which, for unknown reasons, the people have reverted to wearing their parents’ cast-offs? Or is it an alternate reality version of the 1950s, in which a nuclear holocaust has caused the collapse of civilisation?

  I’ve no idea: the film doesn’t say, and what’s more, the film doesn’t care. It’s not that sort of science fiction – the kind I love and write, where the facts of the future history have to be logical and consistent. No, the authors of this film – directors and screenwriters Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and their co-writer Gilles Adrien – come from a totally different tradition. They are lovers of the surreal and the strange, and the magically realist. (Their movie Amelie, for instance, is a sweet, sometimes too sweet, piece of magic realism in which everything we see is an exaggerated and more colourful version of real life.)

  And so, in Delicatessen, we shouldn’t ask too many questions about the logic of the scenario. Why, for instance, do the fugitive ‘Troglodists’ wear goggles and look like World War I airmen? The answer: Don’t Ask. Why is there a fog? What kind of holocaust or disaster would cause such an atmospheric effect? The answer: Don’t Ask.

  In other words, to enjoy this movie, you have to surrender to it, and savour the wonderful mix of genre styles and traditions. There are elements of Victorian melodrama here; the murdering butcher, for instance, is straight out of Sweeney Todd. Yet the characters dress and behave like people out of a 1950s sitcom. And the lead character, Louison (played by Dominique Pinon), is a professional clown with a face that appears to be made out of rubber, evoking two traditions – music halls/circus acts and silent movie comedies. In the movie’s most memorable sequence, Louison paints the ceiling of his room by swinging back and forth on his elasticated braces that are tied to the door; meanwhile an amorous couple make love on their bed, causing the springs to creak wildly; and, intercut with all this, the other characters go about their business, in a wonderful montage that culminates in a shot of the butcher with his bloody cleaver.

  It’s a set piece scene of pure surreal slapstick farce, with Pinon channeling Buster Keaton. And the Troglodists too – outlaws who live in the sewers and who later come to the house to rescue Louison – are comic caricatures out of a psychedelic version of a Keystone Cops movie.

  The story is simple. Food is scarce, so the butcher regularly places an ad for a handyman to come to work in the house where his shop is located. And, in due course, the handyman is murdered, butchered, and sold; and all the tenants in the apartment block get their pound of meat to see them through the week.

  Then along comes Louison, and is hired as the new handyman. (The fool!) However, the butcher’s daughter Julie falls in lov
e with Louison, and in order to save him she enlists the aid of the Troglodists, who sneak into the house to capture and rescue her beau. The rest is comic escalation of a delightful variety, which I shan’t describe for fear of spoiling the fun of the climax; but suffice to say, the toilet is flushed at just the right moment.

  And for me the power of the film lies in the fact that the story is simple, yet immaculately plotted and incredibly suspenseful. We know Louison is in deadly peril right from the start; and we fear for him at every stage. And the nightmare world of fog and cannibals is evoked with wonderful understated rigour; there are deliberate anachronisms galore, but it all makes sense.

  There’s an earlier film by Caro/Jeunet/Adrien, which in many ways prefigures Delicatessen – a short movie called Bunker of the Last Gunshots, a stylistic tour de force which is shot as if it were a black and white German Expressionist silent movie (there’s no dialogue and the only sound effect consists of bullets being fired). It tells a strange tale of a German bunker where medical experiments are going wrong, and features goggle-clad characters that are clearly the visual inspiration for the Troglodists in Delicatessen. It’s a wonderful curiosity; but for my money it errs on the side of obliquity, and perhaps even self-indulgence, and I find it ultimately rather frustrating.

  Delicatessen, however, is that rare and delicate flower – an art house movie with a cracking narrative, and a heart. Many of the joys of this movie are about the visual style, the moments of beauty and pathos, the framing of shots, the exquisite lighting, and the endlessly inventive action set-pieces. I love the movie for those opening scenes where the screen images are bleached and almost-sepia; I adore the frequent establishing shots of the butcher’s shop, silhouetted against the night sky; I revel in the way the camera captures all the nooks and crannies of the characters’ memorable faces. All this makes it as much an art gallery as a movie.

  But there’s a story. And, surreal or not, however strange it may all be, there’s a tantalising credibility to the nightmare vision. The fact the characters are all so ordinary – ordinary to and beyond the point of cliché – makes the fantastical story all the more believable.

  And the characters, too, are achingly real. (Except, arguably, for the woman with the horn-rimmed glasses, who is a joke character, and whose attempted suicide is played for laughs – well, no film is perfect.)

  And Dominique Pinon and Marie-Laure Dougnac as the lovers Louison and Julie are adorable. She is pretty, bespectacled and painfully shy; he, by contrast, has a face that looks as if it’s been built up out of plasticine and left to dry, but hasn’t, yet. In one scene she takes her glasses off because she thinks it makes her look prettier (it doesn’t); and he goes to agonising pains to avoid telling her that she’s about to pour the tea over his hand, or on the table. It’s a minuet of social embarrassment that is also adorably sweet. And the birth of the love between them is enchanting and moving; they are a couple who deserve their chance at happiness…

  TWELVE MONKEYS

  (Director: Terry Gilliam; starring: Joseph Melito, Bruce Willis, Jon Seda, Michael Chance - 1995)

  Michael Cobley

  Evil: ‘If I were creating the world I wouldn’t mess about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers, eight o’clock, day one!’

  [Zaps one of his minions accidentally. Minion screams.]

  Evil: ‘Sorry.’

  (Time Bandits)

  Like Terry Gilliam’s second movie, Twelve Monkeys is about time travel, but it is also about post-apocalypse humanity. The film begins thirty years after a deadly virus almost depopulated the entire planet in 1996. The survivors now live in underground habitats, sealed away from the still-lethal contaminations on the surface. Society is run as an authoritarian technocracy whose senior scientists have discovered a way to send people back in time for limited periods. James Cole (played by Bruce Willis) is a convict living in a cage next to dozens of others. He is chosen to be a test subject for the time travel project, and his task is to go back to 1996 and find out the truth about how the virus was released and how the Army of the Twelve Monkeys was involved.

  The time travel technology itself has a gloriously ramshackle, Heath Robinson look to it. Cole is wired up and laid out in a transparent, flexible cocoon-like container which is then raised up a sheer metallic face to an opening from which electric blue light blazes, implying a time vortex of some kind (perhaps a sidewise homage to the old Time Tunnel series). The transparent container is then shoved into the bright opening, the cocoon concertinas and Cole is off into the past.

  Except that the imperfect temporal technology lands him in 1990, where he is picked up by the police. Dr Kathryn Railly (Madeleine Stowe) has him transferred to her care at an asylum, where he meets Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt), the unbalanced son of famous virologist Leland Goines (Christopher Plummer). Later on, during Cole’s second jaunt into the past (to 1996) we find out that Jeffrey Goines has become a leader in the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, an animal liberation group, the ones that the future scientists think were behind the release of the virus.

  But it turns out that the Army of the Twelve Monkeys is a red herring: Jeffrey Goines’ mania really is focused on animal liberation, such that he and his buddies break into the city zoo and release all the creatures. Considering his previous incarceration in the mental hospital, it is easy to see the origins of that motivation.

  The true villain turns out to be his father’s assistant, Dr Peters (David Morse), a man obsessed with apocalyptic destruction. He is the one who spirits the vials of the original virus out of the Goines lab and then leaves on a continent-hopping plane journey. The list of his stopping-off points were earlier mentioned to Cole by the future scientists, who only know the locations from which the plague spread.

  This is a key part of the movie’s setup. The future scientists’ knowledge of events surrounding and leading up to the release of the virus is very patchy. They are convinced that the Army of the Twelve Monkeys was instrumental, which is why they send Cole back to gather data about them. Yet they are adamant that the near-extinction of humanity cannot be changed, because it has happened. What they ultimately want is a sample of the original virus in order to devise an antidote against its effects in the future, thus making the surface habitable again.

  The inevitability of the viral release and Cole’s death at the airport comes together like the jaws of a trap crashing shut. Time itself seems to have become an inescapable cage of events and motivations, reflected in the extensive use of cage and imprisonment motifs in the first half of the film; James Cole lives in a cage and humanity’s survivors live underground, caged away from the lethal surface environment; on his first trip to the past he is first seen in a police lockup before being transferred to the mental hospital with its barred windows and doors; the HQ of the Army of the Twelve Monkeys has its windows postered and papered over, creating an enclosed, somewhat claustrophobic scene; the city zoo, like the mental hospital, is full of cages and enclosures; Leland Goines’ lab is a secure facility designed to keep hazardous materials safe.

  And while escapes are made from all these literal prisons, humanity is unable to escape from the time-prison of its own near-extinction.

  But why should that be? Cole’s actions in the past affect the flow of information, both to himself and Railly and to the future. This comes through in the way his dreams about the airport finale change as events unfold, but we also see it more concretely when Railly’s spray-painted words (on the outside of the Army’s HQ) and her phone calls to a mysterious cleaning company’s answer phone sends new information to the scientists in the future. Then again at the airport, when Cole’s own phone call to the answer phone prompts the future scientists to send back another agent with a gun for Cole so that he can finish the job. At this point Cole and Railly have realised that Goines’ Army of the Twelve Monkeys has nothing to do with the virus – then Railly spots Dr Peters, Leland Goines’ assistant, heading for the departures gate. She
knows he was an apocalypse obsessive, figures out that he’s the one and tells Cole, who breaks through the gate crowds, aiming the gun he was just given, only to be gunned down by airport police.

  Peters had already opened one of the deadly vials when his luggage was being examined and now, escaping Cole, he reaches the plane that will set him on his world-girdling voyage of annihilation. The seat next to his is occupied by a familiar middle-aged woman, namely one of the technocrat scientists from the future. She introduces herself as Jones and holds out her hand. Peters shakes her hand, and she says, ‘I’m in insurance.’

  For a moment the audience might think that she has been sent back to really finish the job Cole failed at… but the virus has already been released. At which point it is worth remembering the future technocrats overall objective, that of retrieving a sample of the original virus. Attempting to change history would lead to the circular time paradox – stopping Peters from releasing the virus would eliminate the post-apocalyptic future, which means that Cole would not be sent back in time to stop Peters releasing the virus…

  And yet they sent back the agent with the gun. To me, this was to make sure that Cole was gunned down before he could get near Peters and stop him getting on the plane. The circle completes itself and the great majority of humanity is still on course for mass-death, yet the future scientists have the sample they wanted and there is a glimmer of hope for the wrecked world of thirty years hence. The hope of humanity escaping from their underground cage.

  Twelve Monkeys sends the viewer on a marvelous journey, yo-yoing between future and past. And its sense-of-wonder conceptual breakthrough reveals its full ramifications only in that final scene on the plane, leaving the viewer with a spectrum of thoughts and feelings that cry out for pondering.