Cinema Futura (edited by Mark Morris) Page 23

  Yet the film doesn’t drown in its message. Wit and friendly sarcasm offer lighter moments as well as an insight into believable characters. As in previous works such as Buffy the Vampire-Slayer, Whedon creates unusual speech-patterns which don’t just illustrate the development of a space-faring society but add cohesiveness to the gang. Serenity’s crew stand shoulder to shoulder. In real life the actors demonstrated an equal camaraderie, a sense of belonging happily both on the set and in Serenity‘s universe.

  Above all, though, Serenity is an adventure combining rollicking bravado and humour with slick set pieces and nail-biting stunts to convey a universal message: there will always be good and evil, oppressors and the oppressed. We must stand up for our beliefs. As the captain says, ‘We aim to misbehave.’

  And the final love-story? It’s Mal Reynolds’ care for his ship and his crew. Belief and love are what make us who we are.

  V FOR VENDETTA

  (Director: James McTeigue; starring: Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, Stephen Rea, Stephen Fry - 2005)

  Ian Irvine

  I should state at the outset that I’ve sworn a solemn and binding oath never to watch another superhero movie as long as I live, nor any movie with hyperbolic aerial martial arts scenes a la The Matrix. Fortunately in V for Vendetta, V, though superficially a superhero, in fact shows few of the characteristics of that irritating and juvenile breed. The occasional fight scenes, while undoubtedly balletic, are so underplayed that they barely qualify as action, so I’m able to weasel my way past that oath here.

  V for Vendetta is unlike any other such movie I’ve ever seen, and must have displeased many of the fans of the graphic novel of the same name, which was written in the early 1980s by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd. It certainly vexed Moore, who refused to see the completed movie or allow his name to be associated with it (as with other filmed versions of his works), though Lloyd is reported to have been pleased with the production.

  As the trailer shows, V for Vendetta was marketed as yet another violent, dystopian fantasy, but at its heart it’s a film about the power of ideas. The two or three set-piece action scenes are underplayed: the violence is matter-of-fact, almost cartoonish, while the many gouts and sprays of blood are as watery and unconvincing as red cordial. The outcomes of these fights are so inevitable that they are quite free of tension, and maybe that’s the point.

  The movie has a very British feel to it. It’s more like a BBC political thriller than a superhero movie, and in places reminds me of the classic 80’s TV series Edge of Darkness, perhaps because both stories were crafted around the same time and in the same political climate – the brutal early days of Thatcher’s Britain. The movie has been updated, however, and the regimes it is taking swipes at are allied with the Iraq War and the War on Terror. The beginning strikes only one false note, where the Chancellor rails about godless Americans (America has been ruined by pestilence and civil war). Given the powerful and longstanding role of religion in American politics it seems an odd thing for a godless Briton to say.

  Britain in 2027 is ruthlessly oppressed under the fascist Norsefire dictatorship led by Chancellor Adam Sutler (John Hurt). Citizens are monitored by the Eye and the Ear, and enemies of the state are taken in the night, with black bags over their heads, by Finger, the secret police.

  Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), a young woman whose parents were killed by the regime, is breaking curfew to visit her boss, TV host Gordon Dietrich (Stephen Fry), when she is attacked by three thugs working for Finger. She is saved from their attempted rape by a man in a Guy Fawkes mask, V (Hugo Weaving) who appears to be impervious to normal weapons. Weaving wears the mask throughout the film both to hide V’s disfigurement and to emphasise the idea of vendetta and revolution, rather than the man trying to bring it about, though to me it didn’t quite work – the mask was too plastic, the barrier too rigid.

  V takes Evey with him to see a show, his blowing up of the Old Bailey to the sounds of the 1812 Overture, and it is a show – it is fireworks and spectacle more than destruction. When Sutler tries to cover it up as a planned demolition, V broadcasts his message to the people, calling them to join the revolution and overthrow the fascist government in a year’s time. On the fifth of November next, he plans to emulate Guy Fawkes and blast the Houses of Parliament to bits, apparently to underline the message about what Britons have lost under the dictatorship, though the logic of destroying the abandoned home of Parliament escapes me. V is overly fond of making speeches and sometimes gives the impression of being in love with his own voice – a characteristic he shares with many comic book villains.

  The TV station is attacked and Evey saves V, but is compromised and he takes her with him. Later she finds refuge at Dietrich’s house. However he, a secret homosexual and collector of banned artworks and beautiful old books such as the Koran, is beaten to death by Finger agents for featuring a subversive skit about the Chancellor on his show.

  After escaping, Evey is captured and tortured (in scenes reminiscent of the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, or perhaps Abu Ghraib, or perhaps both) but refuses to give V away, even under threat of death: ‘I’d sooner be shot behind the chemical sheds.’ Subsequently she discovers that Finger wasn’t behind her torture at all. It was V himself, and he did it in order to free her from fear – a neat reversal of the expected – though I can’t help feeling that he enjoyed it, just a little. Or maybe that was the mask.

  As V embarks on a series of murders of high officials, public dissent grows and Sutler becomes increasingly Hitler-like. When he threatens Creedy, his party chief and head of Finger who is the real power behind Norsefire, the regime begins to totter.

  While investigating the murders, Inspector Finch (Stephen Rea), pieces together the bloody history of the regime, its rise to power and the story of V himself. In the book the world outside Britain has been ruined by war and a devastating nuclear winter, though the cause of the world’s woes is not stated in the film.

  Fourteen years ago the fascist Norsefire party, led by Sutler, took advantage of the chaos caused by an enfeebled British government to carry out a series of Nazi-style purges of the usual undesirables (homosexuals, Muslims etc), then consolidated power by using a genetically engineered virus on the British people, claiming it was a terrorist attack. After 80,000 deaths, the public rallied behind Norsefire and Sutler has been in power ever since.

  The virus was created at the Larkhill camp through experimentation on imprisoned undesirables. The camp was eventually destroyed by V (V being his cell number) who escaped, horribly burned, swearing to kill all the doctors and officials who worked there, and then to destroy the Norsefire regime that needed Larkhill to maintain its grip on power.

  Late on the fourth of November, Creedy brings the Chancellor to an exchange with V, who had previously agreed to surrender, then kills Sutler. Instead of surrendering, V kills Creedy and all his men in another of those watery and tensionless melees, but is fatally wounded. He’s not a superhero at all – he’s wearing bulletproof armour under his clothes, but some of the bullets have gone through. He dies in front of Evey, telling her that he loves her and leaving her with a choice: to send the explosives-laden train through the Underground and destroy the Houses of Parliament, or abandon the cause and, symbolically, himself. No conflict of interest there.

  As thousands of people in Guy Fawkes masks gather outside, Big Ben strikes midnight. Evey pulls the lever, the Houses of Parliament are destroyed in a second gorgeous fireworks demonstration and, we presume, the Norsefire regime with it, though it does seem a little bit too easy.

  I like V for Vendetta because it isn’t what I had expected and constantly surprises me. V appears to be a superhero but is merely an ordinary man wearing body armour. He shows his love for Evey by torturing her because it’s the only way he can save her, and sacrifices himself because he has no other means of getting his message across. I also like the film because he doesn’t blow up lovely buildings to glory in
their destruction, as is usually the case in movies of this type (most recently in Avatar), but rather as a spectacle – bread and circuses – that will help to create an enduring symbol of the ideas of liberation and freedom.

  CHILDREN OF MEN

  (Director: Alfonso Cuarón; starring: Clive Owen, Juan Gabriel Yacuzzi, Michael Caine, Mishal Husain - 2006)

  James Miller

  I do not believe that the future will be better than the present. The most I think we can hope for is that it will be just as bad. More likely it will be worse. I have never believed in the hi-tech sci-fi dream of intergalactic travel, alien worlds, teleportation or hyper-space. I have always felt the future will be rather like the past, a time and a place where the dark ghosts of our history will repeat themselves in forms all the more terrible for their uncanny familiarity.

  For these reasons, Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men is one of my favourite science-fiction films. Look at the opening sequence. Our hero, Theo Faron (Clive Owen) is getting a take-away coffee from a crowded cafe where everyone is transfixed by a news story about the death of ‘baby Diego,’ the youngest person on earth. Following our hero into the street, we see that we are in London – St Paul’s is in the background – but it is a city transformed. The grimy, oppressive ambience evokes the London of Orwell’s 1984 with its ‘vistas of rotting nineteenth century houses’, while the video screens and digital advertising hoardings on shabby double-decker buses and ramshackle blocks hint at the stygian technopolis of Blade Runner. But there is more. The streets are filled with dirty, rattling motorised rickshaws, as if London has transmogrified into Calcutta or Dhaka. Seconds after Theo leaves the cafe a bomb destroys the venue. Smoke and ash fill the street. A screaming woman emerges from the chaos, her arm blown away. Welcome to the dystopian nightmare of Children of Men.

  The opening scene can be taken as an example of everything that is so exciting and important about this film. For me, the real interest is never so much in the story itself – a fairly conventional chase-escape plot in which our apathetic hero is forced by circumstances beyond his control to engage with the world – no, the real interest lies in the background details. Set in 2027, Children of Men presents us with a world in which no children have been born for eighteen years. Mass infertility brings mass despair. With no future for humankind all the values which hold society together have become meaningless. Cuaron’s representation of this repressive and hopeless world turns Children of Men from sci-fi thriller into an acute diagnosis of the ideological crisis of late capitalist society.

  Formally, Children of Men presents itself as a collage of contemporary anxieties. Cuaron skilfully re-stages iconic images and scenes drawn from 9.11, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Middle East, as well as the darkest episodes of twentieth century history (particularly the Holocaust). These chillingly familiar images are repeated, reiterated and reworked into a typically English setting to suggest a future of irrevocable rupture. We all recognise these images but in the present, at least, we have the consolation that the events they allude to have unfolded elsewhere. As long as the bad things stay on the TV or in the far away countries, one version of reality remains uncontested and the capitalist dream of ceaseless consumption continues. However, by grafting these images into an English setting Cuaron invades our collective social consciousness and upsets the comforting distance that usually shields the viewer from the events shown on the screen. The uncanny quality of both image and setting serve to make Children of Men much more than an escapist or allegorical work of science-fiction and bring it closer to the realm of critique. A refugee camp at Bexhill becomes Falluja or Gaza, Kalashnikov wielding Islamic insurgents battling government troops. Trafalgar Square is crowded with apocalyptic religious extremists begging God for mercy. Housing projects and railway stations are raided by black-suited storm-troopers rounding up illegal immigrants. In the de-populated countryside once bucolic fields are now filled with the burning corpses of slaughtered cows. Through a haze of media hysteria and government propaganda we see soldiers forcing hooded prisoners into orange jump suits, armoured cars opening fire on civilians and masked riot police, a melange of horrors that make us question whether this is really the future or just another version of the present.

  As an ideology, capitalism is only meaningful when wedded to a narrative of economic growth in which increased production and consumption leads to increased individual freedom. Without any possibility of a future to grow into this ideology is bankrupt and so society begins to grind itself down in a cannibalistic reiteration of past horrors. The powers of the authorities are no longer dedicated to the preservation of life but are instead organised around the management of death. The French philosopher Michel Foucault’s assertion that ‘genocide is the dream of modern government’ finds its fulfilment in Children of Men with state sanctioned ‘Quietus’ suicide packs sent out to the whole population. The remainder of the government’s energy is focused around the expulsion of illegal immigrants, a political struggle that seems futile in the face of impeding extinction but has the plausible texture of a deranged bureaucratic reason. Cuaron shows how our efficient, rational, technocratic society can be re-orientated to other ends. Underneath the rhetoric of individual choice and freedom that underpins our liberal democracy lurks a dark counter-narrative of control and repression.

  In this sense, Children of Men is anti-science fiction: without children there can be no progress, no development, no future. If science-fiction is an allegory or a myth of the present in which contemporary anxieties and aspirations are transposed and magnified through technological enhancements into new forms and imaginary worlds, then Children of Men subverts these generic tropes. Rather than looking forward, this is a trapped film, a film that can only look back. In contrast to the aspirations of traditional science fiction – in which the perfection of technology is always equated with new forms of social organisation – Children of Men presents us with an entropic, de-territorialised world, a world without alternatives, a world in which the aspiration of the classic science fiction narrative is inconceivable.

  However, Children of Men is not entirely pessimistic. True to the genre, it features a space-ship and the promise of deliverance from a dying planet. Due to his government connections, Theo Faron is roped into providing transit papers for an illegal refugee by the Fishes, an insurgent organisation fighting for equal rights for refugees. This handy MacGuffin ropes Faron into the action and soon he is evading both the Fishes and the government as he tries to escort an African girl called Kee to the coast where she can make contact with the Human Project, a mythical group that offers sanctuary from the collapsing world. Why? Kee is pregnant – a living miracle and an emblem of hope for mankind. The film ends with the couple in a small boat, adrift in the foggy channel. Faron dies quietly of a bullet wound incurred earlier. He is part of the past. Then, from out of the fog appears a boat named ‘Tomorrow.’ Here is the space ship, come at the last minute to save Kee and whisk her from the doomed world. Here is the future.

  THE FOUNTAIN

  (Director: Darren Aronofsky; starring: Hugh Jackman, Rachel Weisz, Ellen Burstyn, Mark Margolis - 2006)

  Steven Hall

  Once in a while a film comes along that is so confident, so brave, so challenging and so unlike anything else around that – nobody seems to get it. Enter Darren Aronofsky’s often overlooked masterpiece, The Fountain.

  The Fountain’s ambitious triple narrative sees a Spanish Conquistador named Thomas searching the brutal jungles of South America for the secret of eternal life, a modern-day scientist called Tommy attempting to save his wife from a brain tumour, and a nameless futuristic monk taking an ancient and dying tree to a distant nebula in his air-bubble spaceship. A powerful Hugh Jackman gives one hundred percent to all three roles.

  The big game of this film – and one of the things that makes The Fountain such a joy for the active viewer – is the act of getting to grips with how these three narrative strands fit together. Because they do,
wonderfully. In fact, the ‘past’ ‘present’ and ‘future’ sections fit together so beautifully that each time a new part of the puzzle is revealed, a new link presented, I still hear myself making an admiring ‘aah’ sound, and I realise that I’m nodding, not in agreement, but with a sort of wonder.

  For some examples (these all caused especially vigorous head nodding), look out for the gift Izzy gives Tommy in the hospital, the Space Monk’s tattoos, exploding flowers on top of the pyramid and what Tommy puts in the ground at the end of the film. If you’ve already seen The Fountain, you’ll probably know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t – I realise that looks like quite an odd list. Trust me though, these are all very impressive things, and they’re made even more so because the meanings and connections are revealed beautifully, and never clumsily underlined.

  It’s to Aronofsky’s great credit that he never feels the need to spoon-feed his audience, or to give us any kind of heavy-handed round up of what we’ve seen. Instead, he remains totally committed to trusting the viewer’s intelligence. The Fountain asks us to understand and think about what we see, and to bring that understanding and thought back to the film as we continue to watch. It’s a movie that is hugely rewarding for those willing to actively engage with it on this level, inviting reasoning and creative thought, and thereby making the viewer not simply a viewer, but an active collaborator in the putting together of the story, almost a part-owner of the end product.

  If all of that sounds like too much work, this probably isn’t the film for you, but if you’re willing to roll your sleeves up and get involved, The Fountain will pay you back handsomely.