Cinema Futura (edited by Mark Morris) Page 19
INDEPENDENCE DAY
(Director: Roland Emmerich; starring: Will Smith, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Mary McDonnell - 1996)
Joseph Lidster
I’m not going to pretend that Independence Day is a clever film. There are no hidden depths or subtext. Aliens arrive. They blow us up. We blow them up. The end. It is, however, funny, scary, exhilarating and wonderfully camp. It’s got great effects, some beautiful production design, smashing direction and a score you can sing along to. The actors all manage to keep a straight face (although Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman are practically doing a knowing wink to camera throughout). And things blow up! Buildings! Helicoptors! Aeroplanes! Cities! Spaceships! They all blow up!
Okay, so it’s sexist, homophobic, jingoistic and has some of the dodgiest dialogue this side of Plan 9 From Outer Space. As a namby-pamby, leftie, gay, liberal writer I should be offended on pretty much all counts. There are three main female characters: one is a stripper/mother/ girlfriend, the second chose a career over her man but recognises that mistake by spending the end of the film comforting children before welcoming said man back from the battle, and the third is the President’s wife who ignores his request to leave a city and is suitably punished with death. There’s an overweight, balding gay who minces and squawks throughout his scenes until the audience cheer when he’s roasted alive. Jeff Goldblum’s Comedy Jewish Dad is a walking stereotype and the rest of the world apparently spends the entire invasion sitting around waiting for the American President to tell them what to do.
But you know what? I don’t really care. For once, all those things that really should bother me don’t matter. Because the whole thing is just so very, very entertaining.
It’s brilliantly funny and knowing, with dogs escaping fireballs in slow-motion and our first glimpse of a terrifying alien punctuated by a punch and a quip from Will Smith. In fact, Smith’s character seems to respond to every single thing he witnesses or experiences with a quip. The President’s rousing speech manages to be sincere, sickening, hysterical, camp and somehow, despite yourself, you find yourself cheering at the end of it.
And there’s some genuinely great storytelling. The opening section is a fantastic bit of writing and production – simple and effective. We’re on the moon and we see the American flag, completely still, reminding us there’s no atmosphere and therefore no breeze on the moon. So what’s causing the dust that sifts over the astronauts’ footprints? It’s a bloody big spaceship and it’s heading to Earth! From the outset, we’re shown that these invaders are unstoppable. They dwarf us physically and scientifically. We don’t stand a chance. We then cut to a scientist playing golf at SETI, then to the Pentagon where that man who always plays growly army captains can growl, ‘What the hell is it?’, then over to the nice President who’s on the phone to his lovely wife and so on. It’s all very simple, all very concise. Unambiguous personality types and jobs are established with minimal dialogue and, just a few minutes into the film, we know who and where the majority of our main characters are. What’s also effectively established is that this is ‘our’ world. Newsreaders play themselves. Characters are watching The Day the Earth Stood Still on TV. There are references to E.T., Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Roswell and Area 51. This is our world – a world where we know about alien invasions because we’ve watched them on the screen. When the spaceships arrive over the cities, there are a few moments of awe before mass panic – the President and the governments might not know what’s going to happen but the cannon fodder public do. They’ve seen War of the Worlds. They’ve seen it.
And when it happens, it’s truly fantastic. We’ve spent three quarters of an hour enjoying the impending doom, the one-dimensional characters establishing their one-dimensional relationships, the dramatic music, Will Smith looking great in a vest, Vivica A. Fox looking great in anything, and then Jeff Goldblum announces what we the audience already know – that the aliens are going to strike! Everyone starts running to helicopters and planes and cars, but it’s too late.
‘Time’s up.’
What happens next is a genuinely brilliant bit of cinema. Not just because of the amazing effects as the spaceships unleash their city-destroying beams, and not just because of the sheer scale and spectacle of cars flying, people burning, fireballs ravaging cities. The brilliance of what happens next is that for just over two minutes, there’s no music. Even the diegetic sound is muted: people scream as they flee but they’re screaming quietly. Buildings crash and cities burn, but whilst it all looks utterly huge and dramatic, the sounds are distant and more often expressionistic than realistic. And for those two minutes, you forget about the camp and the silliness and the fun ‘ooh, I’m watching a 90s B-movie’ and you’re in a state of shock. We see various characters on Air Force One and none of them are screaming or talking or anything – they’re all sitting there, silently lost in their own thoughts, as the plane attempts to escape the fireball. It’s truly brilliant because for two minutes, every single character and, most importantly, we the audience are actually in a state of shock. The destruction of everything is simply too overwhelming to take in. So there’s no music and hardly any screaming. Just an eerie near-silence.
And then, once those two genuinely shocking moments have passed, the music strikes up once more and we watch a dog escape a fireball.
And that’s why I love Independence Day. It’s a film that exists purely to entertain on an emotional level. There’s no depth and no attempt to engage your brain. You’re laughing at jokes, anticipating the attack, cheering during dogfights and applauding the ridiculous. And, for just two minutes, in the middle of all the entertaining nonsense, you’re witnessing a genuinely chilling view of the destruction of civilisation.
GATTACA
(Director: Andrew Niccol; starring: Ethan Hawke, Uma Thurman, Gore Vidal, Xander Berkeley - 1997)
Ken MacLeod
Gattaca is a science fiction movie without embarrassments. Social scientists and natural scientists in the fields it centres on can recommend it as a starting-point for discussion. It’s a regular at bioethics film festivals, and stands up well to repeated viewing. It consistently refuses to become a thriller – the plot is a succession of anti-climaxes, with moments of unexpected violence – but it’s gripping, and cumulatively tense. Minor details – the keyboards and computers, the state of knowledge about Titan – have dated, but as a vision of the future it hasn’t faded. This is achieved by giving everything a retro look, with a twist – tomorrow’s yesterday’s tomorrow. The central building in the story is by Frank Lloyd Wright. The electric cars have 1960s styling – itself futuristic, back in the day. The everyday costumes are 1960s office suits – worn even by astronauts taking ship – the evening gowns 1930s glam. Outdoors, the sunlight has a yellow tinge, as if something has gone wrong with the atmosphere.
Gattaca is a dystopia without totalitarianism. The harshest divide of the society is between those who have an ideal genetic endowment – the Valids – and those who don’t. The social and job discrimination that arises from this is the result of personal choices, and is, at least formally, illegal. The film doesn’t even postulate any mass conversion to a new ideology. What we see is the working out of an idea widely held today: that our most significant attributes – our health and our abilities, our life-span and our potential – are determined by our genes above all else. The story is of a man who refuses to accept this as a limitation, at least of himself.
Vincent was conceived naturally, in the back of a car. His first yell is barely out before analysis of a drop of blood from his heel tells everyone that genetic roulette hasn’t made him a winner: he’ll grow up with short sight and an irregular heart, which will probably give out before he’s thirty-two. His parents take no chances with their second child, who gets pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, embryo selection, a little discreet genetic editing, and his proud father’s name (denied to Vincent). The favoured son Anton rapidly outgrows his older brother, much to
Vincent’s chagrin. Perhaps this sibling rivalry is what drives Vincent, who has his eyes on the stars. He studies celestial navigation textbooks, and uses them as weights when he works out.
His parents point out that all this swotting and sweating is useless: the genetically perfect are Valids, the genetically imperfect are in-Valids, and despite anti-discrimination laws, no in-Valids are going to get a job in space. The only work he’s going to get at the space agency Gattaca, his father tells him, is cleaning the floor.
Which he does, vanishing from his family’s knowledge. A shadowy broker puts him in touch with an athlete – left crippled by (we later learn) an unsuccessful suicide attempt – who is willing to sell his perfect genetic identity and his name, Jerome Morrow. The two men are similar enough for the deception – not uncommon, it seems – to pass.
The mechanics of the impersonation are given in convincing detail. On the morning of his interview at Gattaca, Vincent obsessively scrubs and exfoliates. Jerome gives him samples: hair, blood, piss. The interview, it turns out, is nothing but the urine test. One piss in a cup and he’s in. But he has to repeat the routine every day: painstakingly removing his own skin traces and hairs from his keyboard, and planting Jerome’s; having sachets of Jerome’s blood and urine always concealed about his person for biometric ID and spot checks; even carrying a recording of Jerome’s heartbeat during exercise for his own sessions on the running machine.
Vincent eventually wins a place in the crew of an expedition to Titan. Shortly before the launch, however, things start to go wrong. The assistant director is murdered in his own office, and Vincent has inadvertently left one of his own eyelashes lying around. Inevitably, the stray hair is found, and the hunt for an in-Valid infiltrator is on. In the course of the investigation, Vincent becomes the object of attention of one of his colleagues, Irene. Despite initial appearances, her interest in him is based on attraction, not suspicion. Soon enough, she has grounds for suspecting the worst. And one of the detectives assigned to the case has a particularly good chance of seeing through ‘Jerome’ to Vincent.
How this tangle works out is the main winch of the plot’s tension, and I’ll cut no ropes here. Enough to say that the central issues, of whether genetic determinism is valid and whether genetic discrimination could ever be fair, are squarely posed and, by some of the characters, confronted – with the realisation that Vincent’s ambition and achievement render these notions invalid. The ending is both triumphant and disturbing, and not at all easy to accept.
Ethan Hawke gives a solid performance as Vincent, Jude Law is magnificently petulant as the self-pitying, self-damaged athlete, Uma Thurman’s Irene comes across as intelligent and sexual, and Alan Arkin distills every gloomy gumshoe we’ve ever seen on celluloid. This is a film where every shot has been thought through, and that leaves you thinking afterwards. It’s one of the best pieces of science fiction cinema, set in – as one opening caption says – ‘the not too distant future.’ Like 1984, it is in itself a small contribution to preventing that future from coming about.
PI
(Director: Darren Aronofsky; starring: Sean Gullette, Mark Margolis, Ben Shenkman, Pamela Hart - 1998)
Pat Cadigan
Sine, cosine! Cosine sine! 3.14159!
How did you remember pi back in the day? It was a matter of sheer brute memorization for me. Not until years later did I come across the helpful little rhyme above. I’ve included it here as a favour to readers. You may have no reason to use it (I certainly don’t), but no matter how math-impaired or number-anxious you are, and whether you know what a sine is or not, you’ll always remember pi to five decimal places (I certainly do). Language is full of little tricks like that.
Mathematics is also a language, one that I wish I could be fluent in. Unfortunately for me, I’ve always had a few problems where numbers were concerned. For one thing, I saw numbers backwards – 34 was 43, 85 was 58, 71 was 17. The more similar the numbers were in structure, the more likely I was to reverse them: 3s, 8s, and 5s; 1s and 7s. You get the idea. I couldn’t ask for help; back in those days, even dyslexia was unheard of. The idea of telling a teacher that the 38 she was pointing to on my paper had been an 83 when I started working was – well, are you kidding? Who would believe that?
Then, as if things weren’t hard enough, the school changed its curriculum and introduced the New Math. The success of this innovation was measureable only in negative numbers; they scrapped it the following year and went back to plain old math that even parents could do, but for me, the damage was done. I scraped by but I was barely numerate. Not to mention heartbroken – I had discovered science fiction and, naturally, science, and I was eager to learn. But there’s no such thing as a scientist who can’t do math. My dreams of accepting the Nobel Prize for improving on relativity were shattered.
When I got to secondary school, I was sentenced to algebra. On the first day of class, I opened the textbook to discover that the New Math had actually been a misguided if well-intentioned attempt to introduce algebra to children earlier in their education. I was back in the nightmare!
Still, I persisted, working as hard as I could to get my brain around the subject, for the same reason I persevered in a number of other things at that time: I was chasing a boy. Okay, I was shallow, but I was thirteen and people have done less constructive things for worse reasons.
It wasn’t long before I lost interest in the boy (well, that one) but by then, I was completely in love with numbers. I had discovered they had a mystical side. They actually knit the universe together in a very real way. Things so incredibly large or fantastically small that their scale overwhelmed the human mind were subject to numbers, which put handles called light-years and Ångstroms (among others) on them.
Then I came across a fascinating article by Isaac Asimov in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction explaining why the speed of light could not be exceeded. In the course of this explanation, he also used an equation to demonstrate why it was impossible to divide by zero. This was as enthralling to me as any science fiction I had ever read. So were imaginary numbers and topology, which showed there was no difference between a doughnut and a cup (even with coffee) and had me cutting up Moebius strips the way I had once cut out paper dolls.
I went on trying to explore the mystical side of mathematics. Xeno’s Paradox, which proves forward motion is impossible – how much fun is that? Imagine calling the office to say you won’t be in today because it’s infinitely far away from your house. (I always wanted to do that but I never had a boss who’d have gotten it.) It’s a short step from there to fractals – Mandelbrot is as psychedelic as LSD wishes it were, farther down the rabbit hole than The Matrix could ever go or even imagine, red pills my ass.
Which brings me to Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, which predates The Matrix by a year. Watching Pi gave me the same feeling I had when I cut a Moebius strip into thirds for the first time(1). i.e. while the everyday world may seem drab, un-mystical and non-wondrous, you can find points here and there where the remarkable pokes through into the world of what is ordinarily perceptible to us.
Max Cohen was, at that time, an unlikely hero, a mathematical genius who can discern mathematical patterns everywhere, a gift that allows him to predict movements and behaviours that everyone else cannot. Pursuing him is a businesswoman who wants to use his ability for stock market predictions. Then there is Lenny Mayer, a Hasidic Jew who wants Max to solve mathematical mysteries in the Torah. Max’s attractive neighbour Devi is interested in him romantically; another neighbour’s young daughter watches for him every day and asks him to solve complex math problems mentally, checking his answers on her calculator.
At the same time, he is engaged in a personal quest to discover the one thing no one else ever has: a pattern within the infinite number of digits on the other side of pi’s decimal point. To date, pi is the one thing in all of human experience that has no pattern, no rhythm, and thus no predictability; it would seem to be the only truly random th
ing in the universe. The cobbled-together super-computer Max calls Euclid, which takes up most of his apartment, isn’t quite up to the task – the last thing it prints out (on paper, rather than a screen) is a 216-digit number that Max takes for garbage and throws away. However, after visiting his old mentor he learns differently. The number is not only crucial but also dangerous.
Aronofsky chose to tell this story in black-and-white, turning up the contrast here and there, which makes Max Cohen’s world look, at different times, defined, harsh, stark, vivid, and inflexible. Patterns stand out. At other times, however, when Max is outside of his comfort zone, there are greys that could almost be fogs of varying densities (some of it is, in fact, Lenny Mayer’s cigarette smoke).
We have had movies about secret codes, riddles, ciphers, hidden messages in texts and/or pictures – and let’s not forget cyberspace and virtual reality. Just about all of their ‘secrets’ are made up. Darren Aronofsky took something as mundane as a water glass and built a story that is scary, thrilling, compelling and even at times funny, and at the same time demonstrating it is not actually mundane at all. It is a glimpse of the truly remarkable nature of the universe. But you don’t have to be any good at math to understand it, or enjoy it. Max Cohen doesn’t seem to be the kind of hero most people identify with, but you’ll understand how he feels confronting various aspects of existence – material, spiritual, emotional – that are ready to take but fall short in what they offer in return.
As everyone knows, a filmmaker can spend gazillions on sfx that will make people ooh and ahh in cinematic ecstasy. Pi, however, did all that and more in my mind, a neat trick that, to date, only books have accomplished.