Four SF Movies of little merit
[Lost in Space, Starship Troopers, Deep Impact and Armageddon]
What is it about modern science fiction movies that makes them so meretricious? I appreciate that SF at the movies has mostly been second-rate SF with only the occasional gems of worth shining through the morass of mediocrity. But nowadays there seems to be no relief from the unending tedium of the SF product.
The SF movie has become the captive of the producers who exploit it but don't appreciate it. Whereas, in the past, some "real" SF writers might have been involved, the modern SF movie is the product of the hack Hollywood writer. Ask any producer and s/he'll tell you that any hack can write any genre of movie but that doesn't matter a tinker's damn because, in their view, the script is the least important part of the movie.
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Special effects (sfx) - that's what it's all about. That's the legacy that Lucas and Spielberg, directors with some verve and imagination, and not a little skill, have bequeathed to their successors. I guess the thinking is that, with all that money spent on sfx, directors have to make damn sure that it's seen on the screen.
That the successors of the seventies' wunderkinder have seen their films but learned the wrong lesson is obvious from the latest clutch of SFnal flicks. The new directors have derived the lesson that sfx, combined with quick cut editing and sententious music, makes for successful (ie money-making) SF movie. But the Spielbergs and Lucases, in their best movies, at least, started not with "the bing, the bang and the boom" as documentary maker Paul Buchman would have it, but with the words. The basis of a good SF movie, indeed of any great movie, is a coherent script with a well-thought-out plot. You'll find very little of that in these movies.
Lost in Space
This is derived from the 1960s cult (a synonym for "little or no redeeming merit but it has some element of camp fun") television series produced by the awful Irwin Allen. He of the burning Van Allen belt and the race of giants. So the source material wasn't strong. The film is damn close to the start of the original series: a family - mum, dad and 2.5 children - is sent off to go where no-one had gone before, accompanied only by a space-jock pilot whose seen The Right Stuff once too often, a cowardly scientist/saboteur, and a robot.
The script was produced by the writer of the two most recent Batman movies and two John Grisham adaptations and looks like it. The acting is uninspired except for the part of pilot Don. Here the producers were truly inspired. They engaged one of the stars of Friends. Unfortunately instead of engaging Matt LeBlanc, they ended up with Joey Tribiani. He affects a basso profundo voice at the start only for it steadily to rise in tone through the movie until his voice coach reminds him of the role, and down it goes again into Paul Robeson territory for a while. William Hurt and Mimi Rogers sleepwalk through their parts and Gary Oldman, unable to camp up Zachary Smith as Jonathan Harris had, falls back on scenery chewing.
There are the usual swag of space adventures: the mechanical/arachnid life form - done better and more convincingly in Runaway - on the abandoned spacecraft; the crash; the repairs and take off, derived as usual from The Flight of the Phoenix; the boy and his robot; the girl and her space-monkey; the pilot and his love affair.
Ho and, of course, hum.
It's hard to get worked up much over this mediocrity.
Starship Troopers
This travesty has even less excuse than the previous one. In the case of Starship Troopers the writer had a great book on which to base his script. Only he didn't. Out went the major themes of the book: loyalty and service; the development and maturation of the protagonist; and the encouragement of the sense of adventure. In came, well, nothing really, except maybe an indoor football game and all kinds of inconsistencies.
The "McGuffin" is that we find an alien species and they turn out to be an arachnid hive culture with inimical feelings towards us. So we send in the infantry, transported by the space navy, and our boys (and girls) get wiped out consistently until we get our revenge. Oh, and a boy falls in love with the wrong girl until he realises that the right girl had been there all along and by that time it's too late because she's dead.
This film is infested with graduates of, or failed auditioners for, Melrose Place and 90210. The one acceptable exception is Rasczak, who also takes the part in the book attributed to Rico's morals' teacher, Dubois. He looks lived in and, at least, partly human. The pretty faces that inhabit the other parts are too vacuous and too glib. They perform suboptimally. The major players have nice Hispanic names, and are supposed to come largely from Buenos Aires, and yet they have incredibly Anglo features.
The one aspect of the movie I really liked was the use of a sort of combined video/web news service that acted as the link between scenes early in the movie and provided the audience with the sort of information that is usually carried by a narrator - like Charlton Heston's turn in Armageddon. The web/video news rings true as an interesting extrapolation on future news delivery and demonstrates the sort of thinking that might have provided some depth to other parts of the movie.
I have heard it said that Starship Troopers is of that post-modern school of film-making: that is deliberately ironic and taking the piss on SF films. This is an interesting and glib assertion that sounds, to me, post hoc. Paul Verhoeven's previous movies have not evinced such a charm and the script-writer's previous efforts, such as Robocop and Frankenstein Unbound, are similarly without much comic relief. It seems to me that the producers, seeing as how audiences were laughing at their seriously intentioned film, decided to play up the only saleable angle they had. And it's not much of an angle.
I was hoping the bugs would win.
Deep Impact and ...
Just when you thought it was safe to go outside, suddenly it's raining large celestial objects. It's not safe to let a smile be your umbrella in these days, not even an umbrella can be your umbrella. It's been many years since the Earth has been so threatened by misguided Newtownian mechanics from space but it's the millennium, baby, so bring on your wars, famine, disease and death, the four horsemen ride again.
What is amazing is the similarity between this synthetic disaster movie and its close cousin, Armageddon. Big something from outer space; space mission to plant nukes at depth by means of drilling; one older (sorry, Bruce) guy among those sent with more moxie than the rest; Presidents making presidential speeches about the end of the world; mini-disasters, especially to the east coast of the US - perhaps Hollywood has coastal envy; last minute transmission to say goodbye to loved ones before the act of self-sacrifice, together with heart-rending scenes of personful tears from all parties; and (Danger: Warning: endings about to be revealed) disaster avoided at the very last moment - or just after it - by the aforementioned self-sacrifice.
And, of course, both movies have more holes in them than a swiss cheese moon.
Deep Impact is from the Spielberg stable and is directed by Mimi Leder, good at directing up close and personal hospital dramas on television but not so good with wide-ranging action flicks, as shown by The Peacemaker. The script, given the credentials of the two writers, should be better and it has some good stuff but not enough. Every time it looks like developing in interesting ways, they fall back on cliche: the boy and girl love interest; the family problems of the reporter; the blinding of the astronaut team leader; the heroics of "Fish"; the citizenry's reaction to the caves option.
Tea Leoni is a winning actress and she is very good. Morgan Freeman was born to be President. And Robert Duvall can get as laid back as any fighter jock with tons of the right stuff. But the rest, mostly alumni of various hit television shows, a doctor from ER here, a lawyer from Murder One there, farmer Hoggett very briefly, are not as inspired and the overdone, synthetic tear-jerking overshadows the "gosh-wow" sfx that engulf Tea and her father.
You'd have thought that, with a year to plan it, the boffins would have been able to work out how much gunpowder was needed to blow that baby apart the first time.
... Armageddon
The Armageddon boffins only have a couple of weeks because their chunk of rock sneaks up on us. This contrasts with the Deep Impact comet which gives us plenty of warning, even if it comes at us, like some WWI fighter ace, out of the sun. For some reason ("We only look at 3 percent of the sky") we never see Armageddon coming and, by the time, some loony on the boonies sees it, it's already thwacked smaller asteroids into us, holing a shuttle and singling out New York for punishment. Damn sneaky for something "the size of Texas"!
So the small time-frame gives NASA little time to prepare. Lucky it had a couple of upgraded shuttles just warehoused for the occasion. But then it gets silly: instead of sending astronauts trained to drill, like the Deep Impacters do, they send drillers given a week or two to learn all about space. So good is the training that the drillers are able to adjust to 11g of acceleration and operate effectively in what is supposed to be, although it doesn't look like, about one-tenth of Earth's gravity.
That is but one of the ultra-ridiculous story elements in Armageddon. The credits list five writers - one in two capacities - and the Internet indicates that at least four more writers worked on parts of the script, and this diversity of input is reflected in the mess resulting. The characters, except for Billy Bob Thornton's NASA flight director and Will Patton's gambling driller, are weak and caricatured. The science is just plain outlandish. We get reaction shots around the world at various times in the movie - and it's always daylight, no matter where on the globe we are. The detritus thrown at us by the bogey hits New York, Hong Kong and Paris - ignoring the oceans and deserts. The Evil Knievil stunt was funny - although that was not the makers' intent.
Many others have singled out Bruce Willis for criticism. This isn't fair. He is no better or worse than those around him. Having decided under-play his part, he is at least consistent. The same cannot be said for the ingenues or for Steve Buscemi or for many of the minor parts.
The worst aspect of the movie, however, is the sound, particularly the dialogue during the drilling scenes on both Earth and the space rock. The combination of shouted, incomprehensible words with loud disconrdant music and pseudo-drillers' jargon means that it is almost impossible to follow what is going on part of the time. Something of a relief, really. Given the fact that much of the plot lines and devices are based on the drillers of Abyss and their interaction with the SEALs sent to assist them, you'd have thought the movie-makers would have learned the lesson of clarity of dialogue in an enclosed environment which James Cameron taught.
Having read the biblical description of the imagined pyrotechnics near Megiddo, I've always thought it best to avoid Armageddon. I wish I had paid attention to myself.
[Note: Information about the movies mentioned, including cast and crew lists and all sorts of trivia, is available at the Internet Movie Datebase (IMDb).]