Cinema Futura (edited by Mark Morris) Page 24

  It’s very tempting to say more about how very clever this film is, and certainly there is more to say, but in doing so, I’m worried that I might perhaps present The Fountain as a rather remote, cold, intellectual exercise in filmmaking, and it certainly isn’t that.

  For all the intelligence and bravery, the film also manages to be a moving and deeply emotional meditation on dying, and in particular the notion of death as a creative act. From the Mayan myth of First Father, who sacrificed himself so that the world could be born, to the dying woman writing her novel about the tree of life, to the present-day scientist struggling to cure cancer so that he might save her, death, life and creativity are come knotted together again and again here. It’s a theme that is mirrored beautifully in the film’s visual language, many of its scenes taking place in long narrow environments – tunnels, corridors, roads – with characters always moving away from the camera, and moving from dark towards light.

  Perhaps the most wonderful thing about The Fountain is the sheer amount of creativity, thought and attention to detail that has clearly been invested in every single area of the production. There is so much to see here, so much to think about. Every element of every shot has been lovingly crafted to talk to you, to tell you something, even though most of it will go – must go – unnoticed.

  This is a rare feast of a film. I will be watching and re-watching it, and nodding in awe, for many years to come.

  THE MIST

  (Director: Frank Darabont; starring: Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden, Laurie Holden, Andre Braugher - 2007)

  Steven Erikson

  The headlines wing round the world virtually every time. Cougar attack. Black bear attack. Grizzly attack. A child is snatched from a backyard. A cyclist is stalked and taken down on a mountain trail. Bodies are found half-eaten. Armed men pour out into the bush to hunt down and kill the offending beast.

  Why?

  Families are in shock. We’re all in shock, apparently. The hunters are fired by a manic zeal, a desire for vengeance; they’re ready to kill anything on four legs. You see their faces and you see outrage. Outrage.

  I’ve had my share of encounters in my younger days, on wilderness trips, and later during archaeological surveys in the wilds of Canada. To this day I recall the preternatural chill creeping up my back when, walking the Precambrian Shield, something made me turn round – to see that a black bear had been stalking me, silent as a ghost on the ancient bedrock. Was just having fun, I suspect, the actions of a bored animal with a belly full of blueberries. Or maybe just curious. At other times, well after that moment, my encounters with bears have been a lot more direct. I was knocked down once, left lying in the dark with my trousers round my ankles. A tipsy reveler who’d mistaken a bear for a bush (when a man needs to pee a man needs a target). And I’ve been chased into a lake when I stumbled between mommy and her cubs. But oddly enough, it was that first time that remains with me, as if the confidence of the dominant species is in fact subject to experience, and like a virgin once the cherry’s plucked, there’s no going back.

  When I see the video images following an animal attack, more often than not the news segment ends with that most satisfying of shots – the animal lying dead at the feet of its slayers. We all sigh in relief; the world is set right once again. Nobody messes with humans. But still, it’s the earlier outrage that has me mulling things. The cougar was doing what cougars do. The black bear can get hungry in a bad season just like anyone else – and with all these damned two-legged things pouring into its territory, until there’s almost nowhere left to go without seeing those blobby faces and listening to their piercing blather, well, sometimes a bear thinks: enough of this shit. If you want into the wilds, you gotta accept the risk. But of course we don’t, do we? We don’t accept those kinds of risks. We haven’t done so for a long time.

  Outrage. It’s born of our arrogance, and that arrogance comes from generations of sustained slaughter of all things that would challenge us. We kill the wolves. We gun down the bears and the cougars and the big cats. We butcher the sharks.

  But I keep going back to that shiver, there on the Shield’s four billion year old bedrock, in the midst of jackpines, black spruce and swaths of juniper; under a hot August sun. Spinning round, seeing a soft blur of something black as it slipped behind a tree-fall. Standing, breath held, heart loud in my chest, and nothing to fill the air but the buzz of insects. Unarmed, miles from any refuge. Potentially… prey.

  When bones of our hominid ancestors are found in Africa, more often than not they’re found with the bones of other victims, heaped in the ancient lair of leopards or hyenas. There are gouges on the skull fragments, from fangs biting deep. Longbones are gnawed and crushed.

  We were prey. We died often in the jaws of a big cat, or encircled by lunging hyenas. We shrieked in the night, we scrabbled higher in our trees, trembling with terror. We lived watchful lives, rising on our back legs to scan the grasses, to stand guard as our kin crept down to drink from the water hole. Our only defense was that diligence, that nervousness.

  The best of horror, in film, television and written form, seems to me to reach back to that primordial state of being. We find ourselves in a moment of powerlessness, and that which stalks us, that which now finds us, bears the face of death. Our death. Through the years of collectively reveling in that fiction, the nature of the monster has evolved and spun off in many directions. From mythical demons, dragons and all the other ‘children of Cain,’ to Great White sharks, giant anacondas and resurrected dinosaurs; to humans in all their guises, ghostly, vampyric, shape-shifting, undead. To serial killers, to the neighbour in the house next door, to the husband or wife at your side.

  Of course the evolution is not nearly as straightforward as that, but we do seem to be drawing our terrors ever closer. And the flavours change to suit the time in our history. Foreigners (Dracula), communists (The Thing), rampant technology (The Terminator, Jurassic Park, etc), helpful strangers (all these miserable torture-flicks of late); and we have had our monsters behind familiar faces showing up as notions of isolation and alienation sink deeper into our cultural consciousness.

  All of these endeavours seek that thrill of horror, that icy chill clambering up the spine, that recognition of peril before which one is helpless. Outclassed, outgunned, a victim. And while no-one likes being a victim, it seems we take some kind of twisted pleasure in others as victims, at least as played out on the stage of fiction, be it film or literary (or, as revealed in psychology experiments, in ‘real’ life, too).

  In recent years, the only ‘horror’ film on my list that has affected me in any way (beyond boredom) has been – quite unexpectedly – the recent adaptation of Stephen King’s The Mist. I imagine that the homage paid to Lovecraft and the Cthulu mythos would come first and foremost in any discussion of this film, but I find that, if I will touch on it at all, it will be at the end of this essay. I am not as much interested in deconstructing the film to reach back to Lovecraft and thereby launching into some kind of treatise on the forms of horror explored by Lovecraft, Smith, Derleth and their cohorts. Rather, what fascinates me with The Mist is what was for me a profoundly successful foray into the nature of prey; more specifically, of humans as prey, and the extent to which that state of being breaks down social norms, ultimately leading to self-destruction.

  This is an unsettling film, as it takes the nature of threat and both physically and metaphorically hides it behind a blinding fog. The monster is the unknown, at least to begin with, and while a kind of ‘scientific’ context is eventually established, the central driving force for the characters trapped in the supermarket is their ignorance of what has happened. Even the scientific explanation serves little in allaying this ignorance, for it is not known how extensive this other-world invasion is.

  As befits King’s best works, much of what drives the story is character-based, and the events inside the supermarket reveal the real horror: that of social disintegration, the monsters withi
n the community. Invariably, blood is spilled, ratcheting up the peril when to remain inside the supermarket becomes almost as dangerous as venturing out into the mist.

  This film virtually tracks the evolution of horror, from the threat of the unknown and the danger of the ‘other’, through to the demons in the human spirit itself (culminating in the final act, born of utter despair, which is preceded by the true Cthulu moment, one that emphasizes our terrifying insignificance). In the course of that evolution we witness a broad spectrum of all that threatens us (and society), from outright denial to willful ignorance, from passivity to mob rule and religious fanaticism. We get the trope of the military messing with forces beyond their control. We actually see the birth of a cult, in answer to the fear of the unexplainable forces in nature, and the leader of that cult becomes herself as monstrous as any clichéd stand-in you might find in others films (the zombie, the vampire, etc), and perhaps more so in the transformation of her face through the course of the film. The culmination of the blood-sacrifice proves one of the most disturbing scenes in the tale.

  There are a host of brilliant details in The Mist, not least the fragile nature of the barrier between the victims and the threat beyond, between the known and the unknown. The supermarket front’s thin panels of glass raise notions of both looking in and looking out, reinforcing the delusion of safety in a random, unpredictable world. And of course it is ultimately destined to shatter.

  Status and station in the community also undergo unexpected transformations, as strength emerges from unlikely sources.

  There is also that chilling recognition of an alien ecosystem, intruding upon our world and proceeding in a fashion so blithely opportunistic as to regard us humans as no more than an alternate food source. The scene at night where the lights from inside the supermarket draw huge insects against the glass, eventually breaking through (and themselves being preyed upon), emphasizes the incidental but otherwise unimportant place of humans.

  As an exploration of humans as prey, The Mist is exceptional, and given its grim conclusion, I suppose it is not too surprising that the film did not garner quite the attention it deserved. Musing on the reasons for that, I suppose I am drawn back to those tales of cougar and bear and shark attacks. We don’t like reminding. And despair’s taste makes us cringe. No one left the cinema feeling good, that’s for certain.

  And if that isn’t the raw core of horror, then what is?

  One last thing to note: all those bones found in caves and whatnot? Many of them display the evidence of cannibalism. When we’re done with all the predators beyond the fire, why, we turn on each other.

  The Mist held up a mirror. But we didn’t like what we saw.

  Now, why do I find that so bizarrely satisfying? Well, as King has said many times, seeing the monster makes the fear go away.

  STAR TREK

  (Director: J. J. Abrams; starring: Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Leonard Nimoy, Eric Bana - 2009)

  Toby Litt

  Sandra Bullock. For quite a few years, I was fascinated by Sandra Bullock. It seemed to me that she was the first post-digital film star. Her body had the kind of no-fat, no-bounce muscularity that digital superheroes have. But it was her face that was the really innovative thing. Even without the contribution of a design team, it seemed to have been influenced by 3-D modeling. The planes of the nose and cheeks were simplified, wireframed, Disneyfied. Halle Berry had been a move in this direction, but Sandra Bullock seemed to be the finished product – even before digital film-making was common. Of course, this computer-generated quality of hers wasn’t really put to use the way it should have been. She was wasted in rom-coms where the made-ness of her was never emphasized. (However, early in her career she had been a rebuilt person in Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman.) What Sandra Bullock demonstrated was this: When you have a vast enough pool of actors to choose from, casting equates to creating.

  On the DVD extras of Star Trek, there’s a whole twenty-five minute documentary on Casting. The director, J.J. Abrams (Lost, Cloverfield, Alias), says, ‘We knew, going in, that writing the script would be hard, and figuring out how we wanted to do all we wanted to do would be difficult, but, no question, the hardest thing was how do you cast these iconic characters, again?’ The solution, it seems to me, was to take another step on from Sandra Bullock. Rather than looking like the characters in a computer animated feature, the Star Trek cast look like the action-toys that would be created based on the characters in an animated feature. Chris Pine as Kirk, Zachary Quinto as Spock, Zoe Saldana as Uhura – all of them have an incredibly dinky, doll-like quality. It’s not just that they are small and neat with simple-planed, big-eyed faces. It’s that they look injection-moulded. You don’t want to watch them so much as pick them up and play with them. And as an overall take on the Star Trek universe, this film is both playful and traumatizing.

  There’s something very moving in seeing an old beat-down franchise get up off its knees and – like Rocky Marciano – come out fighting. I’m not joking. It’s a joy of late capitalism we all know: of seeing a beloved brand return with a product you actually want to buy.

  To me, though, Star Trek was never a particularly beloved brand. I was ruined for The Original Series by Star Wars. After I’d felt that Imperial Star Destroyer thunder over my head and onto the screen of the Odeon Marble Arch, I went right off small screen sf. Doctor Who, Blake’s 7 – I could see round the edges of it; I wanted to be inside it. The opening trumpet of Star Trek sounded like the Last Post; the theme to Star Wars was the Last Judgement. And don’t even mention jokey TV sf. I could deal with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy because it was knowing about how rubbish the rest of TV sf was. Me and my friends happily mocked Zaphod Beeblebrox’s inferior second head. But accept Red Dwarf or Sylvester McCoy’s Doctor, even after ten years had passed? Never.

  I didn’t want engaging characters, I wanted The Force – an infinite mystery that, one day, after long apprenticeship, I might come to understand. Looking back, I think it was the Zen Buddhist element of Star Wars that really appealed.

  And this, a metaphysical level, is something Star Trek has always fallen down on. Star Trek is profoundly materialistic. Star Trek is to Star Wars as Batman is to the Silver Surfer. The only mysterious, all-powerful force in its galaxy is The Human Spirit.

  The most embarrassing moments of The Original Series are where it aims for intergalactic gravitas. I remember being trapped on a plane with Star Trek: The Final Frontier as the only in-flight movie. William Shatner’s Kirk comes face-to-face with a God-like being, asks him the Big Questions and I vow never to watch anything Star Trek related again.

  Where the new Star Trek is truest to its originator, it’s in having Kirk’s never-say-die spunk win out against the bad guys and their planet-crunching Red Matter. This brings the film back home to the United States, where heart must always be seen to win out over head. As new-McCoy puts it to new-Spock, who has just made another error of perfectly rational judgement, ‘Are you out of your Vulcan mind?’ Although Kirk and Spock are shown throughout to need one another, Spock’s decisions are all wrong – until he starts to lead with his chin.

  In this contemporary update, the good guys are very much the 1950s good guys. They are clean-cut, short-haired and work efficiently within military hierarchies. (Kirk’s problem through most of the film isn’t his rebelliousness, it’s just that he hasn’t been made Captain yet.) This is interestingly retrogressive. It’s as if Easy Rider and even Han Solo never happened.

  The bad guys, the Romulans, are long-haired, tattooed. Essentially, they look like a wussier version of Slipknot. But, in a real departure from The Original Series, the bad guys have serious motivation. All the main characters have serious, Hollywood-script-meeting-type motivation. And nowadays that means traumatic motivation.

  The film’s opening sequence shows the heroic death of Kirk’s father just a few moments after his son, James Tiberius, is born and named. Spock
’s back-story involves being constantly bullied, due to having a human mother (Winona Ryder, so there’s some upside) as well as a Vulcan father. As an adult, he is unable to save his mother when their home planet is destroyed. Similarly, Nemo and all the Romulans have seen their home planet fritzed by a supernova – and have come back through time intent on inflicting similar suffering upon the man who failed to save their loved ones, Spock. That’s Leonard Nimoy’s Spock rather than Zachary Quinto’s.

  This is because – do you really want to hear this? – the new-Enterprise Crew exist in a universe that’s jinked sideways. Everyone is on a different timeline; anything could happen. As Spock says, ‘Whatever our lives might have been, if the time continuum was disrupted – our destinies have changed.’ But, of course, the human heart is the strongest force in the galaxy. And so, Kirk remains essentially Kirk, Spock keeps it Spock, Uhura is foxy like Beyoncé is foxy like Uhura etc. J.J. Abrams performs the perfect reboot. The franchise is up and punching. And I can’t even be bothered to do the line about To Boldly Prosper, etc.

  AVATAR

  (Director: James Cameron; starring: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver, Stephen Lang - 2009)

  Ian Whates

  The best time, arguably the only time, to experience anything that’s innovative is as soon as it’s available, whilst whatever it delivers is still new and fresh. Oh, you can do so later by all means, but the chances are that the ‘Wow’ factor will have gone or been diluted by then, because the path it pioneered has since become well trodden.

  A year or so ago I had a heated online debate with a young fan and critic whose opinion I generally respect. He’d just seen the film Silent Running for the first time and declared it to be truly awful. I disagreed, insisting that he should have seen the film in the era it was produced. A pointless debate, because neither of us could affect the other’s opinion. He argued this was a fundamentally poor film which would have been dreadful whenever it was viewed, while I tried in vain to make him understand the sense of wonder and emotional connection the film inspired when I first saw it (at an all-night SF film showing in Leicester Square back in 1974 or ‘75), outshining such notable offerings as The Andromeda Strain and Barbarella which were on the same bill.