Favorite Sci-Fi Films #1 and A Note

     Before I get started, I'd like to thank everyone who's viewed my blog for the 2,000 views I've gotten in the past 1/2 year.  So thanks for that!  

    Now, I'd like to explain how I'm going to do this next installment here.  I was originally planning to do a list of my top 20 sci-fi films... and I realized I couldn't push it down to 20.  Then I decided to separate it into sub-genres.  The problem there was that so many of these films have overlapping genres.  Therefore, I'm going to do a continuing series of posts on my favorite science fiction films without them being in any order of greatness or limited to a specific number.  So this will be a continuing series that I do from time to time.  This also means I won't get burned out on a specific genre as I did with horror films back in October.  I still plan to do a set of posts on my favorite Christmas films/specials come December, however.  

So without further ado, here's the first of my discussions on specific science fiction films...

When Worlds Collide - (1951)

     

     There was a time when science fiction sold.  And it sold well.  This trend lasted from the late 1920s on until we went to the moon in 1969.  After that, science fiction pretty much died until 1977 and George Lucas brought it back.  Sure, there was science fiction in the early 70s, but it was very dark and cynical with films like Logan's Run, Silent Running, the Planet of the Apes films, and Soylent Green.  Dystopias abounded.  But in the 1950s was when science fiction was at it's strongest.  From giant animals or beasts caused by nuclear radiation to traveling to other worlds...  Our hope and gung-ho attitude about science and space had not yet produced the sad results we got when we sent our probes to mars and noticed it was nothing more than a dead rock or went to the moon and didn't know what to do when we got there.  No, we knew little about our solar system at the time.  Mars could have an atmosphere or hold a long-dead civilization.  Maybe the moon had some importance we didn't know about yet.  We couldn't possibly be alone out here.  Alas, science and discovery hit us where it hurts.  We would be alone for the forseeable future.  There was no long lost civilization.  We couldn't go to Mars.  There's nothing out there in the immediate vicinity.  With those sad discoveries, we lost our interest in space.  We've shrunk NASA's budget to miniscule proportions.  We don't want to know any more depressing facts.  

    Travel back to 1933.  Science fiction was Buck Rogers, John Carter, and other pulp creations.  Then Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer wrote a very successful book about our world being collided with by a rogue planet and sideswiped by another before that.  It was called When Worlds Collide.  It would influence the creation of two new comic book characters, Superman and Flash Gordon.   The book being a huge success, it would only be a matter of time until it was made into a film.  Enter George Pal.

   George Pal was a film producer who had made the very popular science fiction film Destination Moon in 1950.  That was the first film that showed the dangers and trials of space travel in a time when space fever was beginning to engulf the world.  It also won an award for Best Special Effects at the Academy Awards that year, and was one of the first sci-fi films shot in color.  To follow that success up, he chose When Worlds Collide.  Not only was it a cracking good science fiction story, but it was also a doomsday film.  It's about a scientist who discovers that two rogue planets are on a collision course with Earth.  The first one, Zyra, will merely pass dangerously close to earth.  Enough to cause tidal waves, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc. due to it's gravitational pull. (Flimsy science, I'm sure, but it's all in good fun.)  The second planet, Bellus, is on a true collision path and will destroy our planet.  Well, the rest of the scientific community scoffs at this idea and the world once again puts it's head up it's butt refusing to fund attempts at a "space ark" which will launch and piggyback onto Zyra before Bellus hits the earth with some people on board to restart the human race on their new home.  Okay, the story may be silly and unbelievable, but you have to understand...  This was the early 1950s.  We knew little about rocket capabilities, the movement of planets, space, or anything like that.  Also, there's a bit more to the story than what I told, but I don't want to give away some of the more moral and ethical dilemmas present.

    

George Pal was a very visual man. He would go on to produce War of the Worlds right after this film, which has become known as one of the most quintessential science fiction films ever made. He knew he would need to have the film shot in color, have an epic scale with lots of danger, and that he'd need astounding visual effects. And he got all three. The film would go on to win Best Visual Effects for 1951. In fact, George Pal films won the award 3 times in just 5 years! George Pal was Roland Emmerich before Roland Emmerich or Dean Devlin were even around! He was destroying the world before even Irwin Allen was doing his stuff in the 1960s and 70s! It's such a shame the man isn't remembered as he should be.

      When Worlds Collide isn't as well known anymore, sadly. Perhaps this is due to it's less well known director in comparison to War of the Worlds' Byron Haskin who had already done Disney's Treasure Island. In comparison, Rudolph Mate, director of When Worlds Collide was mainly known for cheap film noirs like D.O.A and The Dark Past. In fact, he's better known for his cinematography work than his directoral work. He did cinematography for such films as Foreign Correspondent, Passion of Joan of Arc, To Be or Not To Be, and Vampyr. (All those are in the Criterion Collection, by the way.)

      I'm sorry if I've made the film sound like a cheesy 1950s science fiction film. I mean it is all those things, but it's also not something to really make fun of. The film isn't all that stilted as the lower budget science fiction of the time routinely was. This was a big budget film done by a major studio that gave it a wide fanfared release. It was a huge moneymaker. In fact, I find it possibly less cheesy than some of the 1970s disaster films that I love so much. And the ending surprised me greatly. You think that in a 1950s film they wouldn't dare actually have the planet hit the Earth and kill everyone... But they do. (Sorry for the spoiler, but the movie IS over 60 years old.) Still, the film ends on a message of hope and perseverance anyway. I highly recommend those that loved Roland Emmerich's 2012 to watch the film, as it's got a lot of the same ideas in it. In fact, this one makes more sense, though that isn't saying much.

The film can be streamed for free in HD if you have Amazon Prime, and is also available on DVD for cheap. See this sadly forgotten film if you can. I like it better than War of the Worlds. I mean how can you not like a film that depicts a rocket being launched like a roller coaster?!

Ingenious!

Many Days of Friday the 13th - Parts VI & VII

Friday the 13th VI: Jason Lives (1986)

    

     It's been a while since I wrote one of these so let me remind you...  The series was supposed to end on Friday the 13th: The Final Friday, which was part 4.  The very next year Paramount brought the series back to life with Part V: A New Beginning, which featured a regular homicidal guy wearing a hockey mask sort of copycatting Jason.  Well, that didn't go so well with fans that were expecting Jason back.  You always give the fans what they want, so come the next year, it was decided that Jason had to come back. 

    The studio hired Tom McLoughlin, who had made a PG rated horror film three years before to write and direct.  He decided to inject humor into the by now clearly dying series, and to cut down on the gore.  What he created was the last good Friday film until the 2000s.  The film is so markedly different from the films that came before and come after it that it of course stands alone.  The story sort of picks up from Part V.   Tommy Jarvis escapes from his mental institution and feels the urge to go to Jason's grave to make sure he's dead.  So he and his reluctant friend dig up Jason's maggot infested corpse and he sees he's truly dead.  However, as he's not mentally well, Tommy takes an iron stake from the fence lining the graveyard and decides to stab Jason repeatedly with in when, what do you know, lightning strikes it and gives Jason life again.  So now Jason is a superhuman zombie that's even more powerful than he was before.  For instance, the first death he commits is punching the friend through the chest and grabbing his heart as his hand punches through the guy's back.  And that's probably the goriest part of the film.

     McLoughlin decided he wanted to go for a classic Universal Monster/Hammer horror film with this one, so what we get is less blood and gore, but more atmosphere.  They filmed the installment in Covington, Georgia instead of up north as the prior films had been, so the camp has this humid feel to it.  There's lots of fog, the camp is noticeably different from the past films... even the woods look different.  And I love the fact that the film is the first to not take the series seriously.  Take for instance the very scene I referred to earlier with the heart punch.  And the way that scene ends... With a Bond tribute?!

    It's pretty certain from there that you aren't getting the same type of Friday film that you've come to accept.  This one is just out to have fun.  Oddly enough, though this is supposedly more tame than the prior films, this is the only Friday film to have kids actually at the camp when the murders take place.  And it actually adds to the humor.  In fact, the filmmakers here used the humor, a lot of it self-referential, to disarm the MPAA.  They already cut out a lot of gore, there's no nudity here, only one (clothed) sex scene and little language.  In their place you have car chases, gunfighting, and more inventive kills.  There's little machete action here, as part of the way they played the MPAA was having Jason do kills that regular people couldn't imitate.  For example, there's folding someone backwards til their spine breaks, the aforementioned heart punch, chopping 3 heads off in one swing of the machete, twisting someone's head off, etc.  This way there would be less pushback about possible copycats. 

     The humor is great here, and the film never lets up on it.  There's a moment when the graveyard caretaker sees that Jason is gone and his grave dug up.  He knows he'll get into trouble if it's found out, so he just re-covers the grave mumbling to himself.  Then he turns directly towards camera and says "Some folks sure got a strange idea of entertainment."  Or there's when a couple (one of them the wife of the director, the other the sleazy bad guy from Ghost) is driving through the woods and sees Jason in front of them holding the iron fence stake from earlier blocking their path.  The guy doesn't see him at first and asks his wife why she stopped.  "I've seen enough horror movies to know any weirdo wearing a mask is never friendly."   So with this film, postmodernism came to slashers a good ten years before Scream.

     This is probably my second favorite Friday the 13th film after Part II.  It's just a lot of fun.  It's got a great original screenplay, and is competently directed.  I don't really miss the huge amounts of gore from the prior films, as the humor and atmosphere make up for it.  I'd feel comfortable showing this one to a 13 year old, it's that tame.  Also, this one's got two or three songs Alice Cooper wrote especially for the film, and that's too cool.  I do highly recommend this one.  Can't say that about the next one, however....

Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988)

      And here's where everything goes to shit.  After such a good movie like Jason Lives, they go kind of back to formula for this one, but bring in a telekinetic teenager.  (Yes, lame.)  If you thought they were scraping the bottom of the barrel before, well...  The teenagers in this film are for the most part horrible people that you want to see killed unlike the last film.  The story here is that Tina accidentally killed her father with telekinesis  after he hit her mother when she was younger.  Now her fame-seeking manipulative doctor has decided that she needs to go back to the scene to "deal with her grief", but really he wants to bring out more of her abilities by making her an emotional mess.  Well, she gets there and accidentally brings up Jason out of the bottom of the lake, and of course he kills the teenagers who are partying next door one by one.  And thank god for that, because they are the worst ones in the series.  Honestly, only two have redeeming qualities.  Even the nerdy guy who writes science fiction stories is a jerk.  In a way, this film is a semi-remake of Part IV.  You have the family and the partying teens next door, and you want most of those teens to die.  Sadly, Part IV was much better.  Even the acting, as the acting in this one is some of the worst in the series.  

     Whereas the last film tried to tone down the gore, sex, language and nudity, all four are back in full force here.  (Or at least the filmmakers tried to bring the gore back.  More on that later.)  There's ample sex, the language is.. okay, there isn't much language, but there is a bit of nudity.  However, no one in this film is good enough looking for a nude scene in my opinion.  The kills are also not as inventive here.  There's another punch through the chest (without the heart this time), and a cool death that's remembered by everyone.  That's right, the one with the woman in the sleeping bag being thwacked against a tree!  However, most of the deaths here are severely trimmed, due to the MPAA.  You see a quick shot of something happening, and you see the after effect.  Now, on the DVD you can see what was trimmed, but that's in very bad quality.  Sadly, this fact makes a bad movie all the more worse.  And Jason's "demise" at the end of the film is probably the worst in the series.  It's too unbelievable even for a Jason film.  And like a few of the other films, this one takes place near Crystal Lake, but not at the place.  

     The one thing some people like about this film is that it introduced the most famous Jason.  Or rather the guy who played him.  Kane Hodder plays Jason in this film and the next three, being the only actor to ever portray Jason more than once.  He's actually a stunt guy, which means he's more bulky and better suited to be put through all sorts of painful stuff.  I'm actually not a huge fan of his tenure, as he starred in some of the worst entries in the series, and seriously, he's just a big lumbering lug to me.  Not much to do there.  Although he did do the longest uninterrupted on-screen body burn in history, which is shown towards the end of the film. Now, there is one actor very good at what he does.  That's the character of Tina's doctor, Dr. Cruz.  He's so hateable, and he can actually act unlike the rest of the cast.  I don't think I've hated a character this much in a Friday film, so kudos to him.  He even uses Tina's mom as a human shield when confronted with his eminent death by Jason.   The director of the film John Carl Buechler hasn't had a great career since the film, mainly doing direct-to-video films.  Before this film he directed Troll, which is actually a lot of stupid fun and is mainly known for it's sequel which has nothing to do with Troll.

     Absolutely not recommended.  For some reason this film did better than the last one did, which led to Part VIII, which we will get to in the coming weeks.   

Ender's Game and Thor: The Dark World reviews

Thor: The Dark World

     Just a word of warning before you start to read this review.  I'm one of the few that enjoys Thor more than any of the other Marvel Universe storylines.  I know it's considered by many to not be as good as the Iron Man and Captain America films, but better than the Incredible Hulk film.  Well, I've enjoyed all the Marvel Universe films, with Iron Man actually being the least interesting to me.  I mean sure, Robert Downey Jr. is great in the role and all, but the films themselves just don't grab me like the others do.  Steve Rogers annoys me to no end with his everprevelant nationalism and old fashioned morals (yes, I know that's part of who he is, and I like the fact that they make fun of it), and I wish they could finally settle on a person to play Bruce Banner.  (Mark Ruffalo is perfect, by the way.)  However, Thor has everything going right for it.  The storyline is different, it's got less to do with SHIELD, it's more fantasy than action, and it's the funniest of the franchise.

   I thought that the first Thor film was just about perfect.  I know I'm alone in that assumption.  I liked it's small scale, I liked the fact that it didn't take itself too seriously (Are you listening DC Comics?), and the casting was superb.  I feel like the Asgard setting takes the franchise to another level over the other films.  It makes the franchise approach the genre of sci-fi or fantasy to a larger degree than the other films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which are mostly just action films with some sci-fi elements.  And with this, the second Thor film, the franchise is taken even farther into the fantasy realm.

     So the story here is that an ancient race that Odin's father defeated long ago, the Dark Elves, aren't as defeated as the Asgardians had hoped.  The villainous Malekith awakens and searches for the old weapon that will make him invincible, the Aether, which Odin's father hid in a stone column.  Well, back on Earth, Jane (Natalie Portman) is pining away over her Thor who has been gone for two years when he said he'd be right back.  She discovers these portals in an abandoned building and accidentally falls through one which, wouldn't ya know it, leads to the Aether, which overtakes her body.  Now when people touch her, they sort of... explode.  Thor finds out about this, returns to Earth to take her to Asgard.  (Daddy is none to pleased with that, as he dislikes the fact that Thor loves a mortal.)  Then Malekith and his enhanced Kursed Dark Elves attack Asgard and do some friggin' serious damage.  Then there's some stuff with Loki, who's in the Asgard prison after what he did in The Avengers, there's more stuff with portals, Stellen Skarsgard goes around in the nude ranting and raving and hugs people without any pants, cars suddenly become weightless...  Lots of stuff, people, that would take me hours to explain.

     As goofy as the plot is, the movie is very fun and easy to keep interest in.  There's more time spent on Asgard in this one, which is a blessing.  The CGI workers on this film have made a fantastic city that I just wanted to spend more time seeing, and they give you lots of time to do so here.  The stuff on earth is kept to about 1/3 of the screen time, which is enough so that people expecting just another run of the mill action superhero film will stay happy.  However, Thor's realm is Asgard, and that's where the franchise should base itself.  Sure, you have to have the Earth in peril to get people interested, but you can get that in any other superhero film.  

      The humor is well balanced throughout the film.  It never becomes too serious, which I think is what makes these Marvel films so popular.  You want serious, go see a modern DC Comics film.  I'm not sure that having Stellen Skarsgard's character become quite eccentric was the right way to go, as it becomes a bit cliche after a while.  He basically turns into the Walter Bishop character from Fringe.  Everyone else is played pretty much as they were in the first film.  Loki is in this film quite a bit, obviously.  It wouldn't be a Thor film without him.  He's Thor's sort of brother and is the x factor for the whole franchise.  He's played more sympathetically than he was in The Avengers or the last Thor film, which was refreshing.  I like my villains to have feelings sometimes.  They don't all have to be Michael Myers or The Joker or Green Goblin.  Sometimes you need a Doc Oc or a Two-Face, villains that still have something of a sense of empathy or remorse however buried.  In fact, I thought Loki was in a way a better character in this film than Thor himself was, mainly due to some character development between films, which Thor has had little of.  Odin has become an even bigger jerk, however.  

     Overall, I thought the movie was fantastic.  I can't wait to own it on blu-ray in a few months.  It's up there with Pacific Rim as my favorite popcorn film of the year.  I was about to give this film  6 1/2 stars out of 7, but for the scene before the end credits.  Due to that scene and it's implications, I must remove a full star from my total.  It was that disappointing, that bad, so much of a stupid moment it's unforgivable.  

Final score:  5 1/2 out of 7

Ender's Game

      The 1985 book Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card is one of my favorite books.  I first read it my first year of college, which means I read it almost exactly 10 years ago now.  I quickly went from that book to reading it's companion novel which came out years later, Ender's Shadow, which is the same story told from the perspective of the character Bean.  In other words, it's Bean's story during the same time-frame.  The book series split off into two.  There's the continuing story of Ender, which is a very meditative and spiritual series after the first book (no more action folks, sorry), and then there's the story of Bean, Petra and the other former Battle School kids back on Earth under the rule of Peter Wiggin while Ender is on his spiritual journey away from the others.   I recommend both series for different reasons.

     I've been waiting for this movie to come out for years now.  I had figured it would never get made, at least not in live action due to Ender being such a young character in the novel (he's like 8 or 9 in the novel) and the cost of the special effects.  Also it wasn't your usual science fiction story.  Still, I was proven wrong after the film had been in development hell for many years.   I was not looking forward to it when I heard that the guy that directed the horrible X-Men Origins: Wolverine was writing the screenplay and directing.  Nor did I like the fact that they were upping the age of the main character by about 8 years.  However, my concerns were surprisingly unwarranted.  This is a fine film with just a few small problems.

     The movie has a lot going for it.  It's got a great cast with Harrison Ford, Asa Butterfield, Ben Kingsley, and Abigail Breslin among others.  It didn't raise the ages of all the kids in Battle School, which was a relief.  The special effects are really very good and the Battle Room came out exactly like I had imagined it.  (The Battle Room is a zero gravity room with obstacles that the cadets train in.)  

    There's only a few things wrong with the film, and they are quite minor, even unnoticable, if you haven't read the book.  First of all, the film is sadly very streamlined.  The characters other than Ender have become archetypes or cliched.  Graff has no redeeming qualities in the filmed version, Petra warms up to Ender straight away, and it almost feels as if the whole film takes place in a matter of days instead of years, Stilson isn't killed, there's no mention of Demosthenes or Locke (which are very much important in the sequel books of both series), and a lot of the morality themes are gone.  Now this may seem like a lot, but as the film probably won't be getting a sequel due to it's mixed reception and not that great box office, it doesn't matter.  This is an adventure film a moral base.  Think of it as the inverse of Starship Troopers.  Heck, it even has big bugs!  I stand by my assessment that those that did not read the book will not notice all of the subplots that are missing, nor would they want them.  For those that did read the book and wanted a great adaptation, I think you've pretty much got it.  The film is interesting, great to look at, well acted, and sticks pretty darn close to the book.  There aren't many, if any, plot changes here.  There's simply omissions for the sake of time and pacing.  

     I loved this film, which is remarkable as it's an adaptation that I believed could not be done.  It was amusing, fun, thought-provoking, and well adapted.  I highly recommend it, even if the book's author is a homophobic evil person.  (Seriously, look up the stuff he's said or done in the past twenty years.  It ain't pretty.  However, he's a good story-teller, and that's all that matters here.  If you want to read the books, I would suggest your local library instead of giving him money through book sales, but that's just me.)

Final score: 6 out of 7