Friday 16 May 2008

5 Sci-Fi-Ish Films I Really Like

Here's 5 science fiction / fantasy type films that I really quite like. Actually, two are more sort of superhero films, and one's definitely a bleak 70s conspiracy piece. Hmm. Thoroughly misleading title aside, here's some words.

The Incredible Shrinking Man

Pop sci-fi Tom Thumb nightmare adapted from a novel by Richard Matheson. Rotten 50s radioactive glitter cloud coats strapping Grant Williams in shrink stink. Within months he's diminished into an impotent tin pot sex tyrant harassing and berating his simpering wife from his dollhouse abode. After catching the hassle end of a playful murder cat attack, Williams ends up trapped in murky basement purgatory, battling giant spider monsters for possession of stale cake rock. Incredible sets and scaled up tiny items, combined with exciting micro tension as Williams copes manfully with mundane domestic death trap hell. The ending winningly hints at further voyages with Williams as a sub-atomic cosmological adventure God.

Electric Dragon 80,000 V

Black and white punk-hero urgency as Tadanobu Asano's id suppressing, lightning rod pugilist does battle with Masatoshi Nagase's bored mob-killing superhero: Thunderbolt Buddha. 55 minutes of monochrome rooftop emptiness and Frankenstein's dungeon bondage - Asano
wanders the city by day, looking for physical representations of the dragon inside. Asano is frothing, animalistic violence: we love him. Nagase is literally a half divine vigilante, he's also a bit snotty: he must be destroyed. The two share a psycho-sexual magnetic attraction - their final confrontation is less good vs evil, than curiosity reflection termination. Electric Dragon screams along to a punk sentai apocalypse, complete with pose-downs and trash talking. Mise en scene is frequently shattered and consumed by violent, exploding manga text monologue.

The Parallax View

The definitive 70s paranoia film, Parallax View has a confused, enigmatic quality. Scenes aren't specifically tied together through rhythm or pace, the film seems more assembled through association and motifs. Beatty's character is like a phantom idea, wistfully breezing through people and events tied to overall conspiracy. The downside to this is at times the film feels sketchy and disjointed, but this also helps evoke the queasy machinations of events that are primarily out of Beatty's control.

The American Astronaut

Enormously inventive space-musical. Astronaut shoots about the galaxy making dodgy deals and friends. The design of the film is very much Flash Gordon gee-whizzery bred with range emptiness and Scott's space-truckin' Co. Giant steam press planets - complete with emasculated sweaty workforces - sit alongside space-worthy wooden barns built by hyper-intelligent silver miners. Folksy bluesy mountain man rock-numbers pop up with welcome regularity, and long stretches are dedicated to anecdotal tales that careen wildly out of control. The American Astronaut is hilarious, full of great music, and displays an insane amount of on-the-cheap technical proficiency. It's like a particularly witty album inlay card has come to life and made a film about itself.

Hulk

One of the more successful of the comic-book-to-movie adaptations. Ang Lee's film starts out obnoxiously slow, full of zombie-like protagonists and dead-end (for now) Jungian images and dream-scape noodling all wrapped up in a comic book panel mimicking, Thomas Crown aping, split-screen ideas factory. It all culminates in laboratory haphazards and nuclear weapon low frequency re-verb imagery signalling birth. Me loves!

Lee takes the origin template - usually the first forty-five minutes or so of a franchise-kicker and stretches it out to feature length. Hulk is essentially a typical superhero first act treated with an exciting amount of seriousness and single-minded vision. Lee's hero is born of repressed memories, unconscious rage and the manifestation of the id as dominant identity. Hulk has a cursory nod to superheroics (he saves an F16 pilot, who mistakes the gesture for an attack), but on the whole the character is played as a frightened, enormously powerful infant. He just wants to be left well alone in his perpetual search for a loving mother figure - easily the most interesting take on Jack Kirby's Hyde.

Hulk is charm itself. A shrugging, pouting, pre-occupied bundle of physical emotion. His CG desert jump / wander has a shocking amount of warmth and character. Hulk leaps and soars only to land awkward. In a world where everyone is recycling decades old Disney school face ticks in lieu of actual craftsmanship, the acting the CG creature does in Hulk is a revelation. Shrinking and contentedly repressing in on itself when it sees Betty - the oedipal love interest. The end is dark and unclear as Hulk battles his absorbing man-ified Freudian bad father in a pitch black scorched desert. Father manifests as various personifications of natural strength - electricity (looking like Arkham Asylum's Maxi Zeus in the process), earth and finally water. Each fold under the sheer infinite weight of his child's rage.

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