Battle Beyond the Stars (1980, Jimmy T. Murakami)

Battle Beyond the Stars answers that age-old question… what if you mixed the star-fighting of Star Wars, the visual grandeur of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and some of the production design of Alien, but also had all the sexy babes in the galaxy hot for John-boy Walton’s bod. Also, it’s a remake of Seven Samurai.

I should also mention the budget—approximately twenty percent of the original Star Wars (two million, which mostly went to the respectable special effects). Stars has shockingly good space effects. They just don’t have enough of them and sometimes reuse the same footage. They can’t do multiple ships in a frame, which limits the visuals after a certain point, but it’s a fine effort. James Francis Cameron did the special effects for the film.

Unfortunately, even though the space stuff looks good, the sets and “exteriors” are rather wanting. There are some okay matte shots of the alien worlds, but the actual sets are… I wanted to say iffy, but they’re much closer to bad. There are good exterior shots, but they’re models without any people. Sorry, I really want to talk about how Stars somehow didn’t know what trench warfare meant, but we’ll have to wait a bit.

The movie opens with intergalactic (literally, screenwriter John Sayles likes to talk about all the galaxies) bad guy John Saxon showing up at the peaceful world of Akir (home of the Akiras, which is more amusing now than when Stars originally came out) and threatening to nuke them from orbit if they don’t promise to be his subjects. The Akira are a peaceful people ruled by the Varda, a guide to a pacifist lifestyle, but Sayles didn’t write more than a rule and a half. Or they cut the rest. Some of Stars definitely got cut; you have to wonder about other parts.

Saxon’s seen Seven Samurai so he knows he’s got to threaten the yokels and then give them a deadline so they have time to mount a resistance, and there can be a movie. So, he leaves to go mess with some other planet.

Young farm boy with a hankering for adventure, Richard Thomas, decides he’ll go round up some mercenaries to defend the planet—he hasn’t seen Seven Samurai but the town elders explain it to him—and he takes Obi-Wan Ke… he takes Jeff Corey’s space ship, which has an AI on board named Nell (voiced by Lynn Carlin). The spaceship looks like a part of the human anatomy. Well, two parts, but parts in a pair. In fact, from different angles, it looks like two different pairs of parts of human anatomy.

Anyway.

Thomas’s first stop is Corey’s old friend Sam Jaffe, who isn’t going to a lost cause but also wants to breed Thomas with his daughter, Darlanne Fluegel. Fluegel seems like she’s going to be quite bad in Stars and she might be quite bad, but once Sybil Danning shows up, Fluegel improves, thanks to the comparison. It might not be Fluegel’s (or even Danning’s) fault. While director Murakami is good at the space stuff and some of the dramatic stuff, he’s utterly inert with the romance. And since Stars becomes a low-key race between Fluegel and Danning to bed Thomas, the romance will be important. Ish. I mean, it’d have been nice for Fluegel not to oscillate between love interest and exposition blatherer, and it’d really have been nice if Danning weren’t a scantily clad star warrior, but I’m not sure it’d have made too much difference.

But it would’ve made some kind of one.

Fluegel and Thomas team up to save his planet; he goes one way to get more help, she goes another. He’ll bring in George Peppard (as future Earth hillbilly space trucker Space Cowboy, one half of Stars’s Han Solo), Robert Vaughn (the other half of Han Solo, this one a soulless space assassin), and these nice Borg, led by Earl Boen, in a lot of makeup.

Plus Danning, who demands he let her fight alongside, but Thomas doesn’t like pushy women, so he tells her to bug off. She’ll tag along because that bod’s too hot.

Meanwhile, Fluegel gets kidnapped by space lizard Morgan Woodward, who, it turns out, hates Saxon–so, lucky timing.

Thomas is an affable, likable enough lead, but the best performances are Vaughn and Peppard. Peppard takes a while to warm up, but Vaughn’s on from his first scene. Carlin’s a lot of fun–unfortunately, Saxon’s awful. The supporting cast’s okay; there are no standouts either way.

The sublime editing from Allan Holzman and R.J. Kizer is the standout of the entire film (besides James Horner’s proto-Star Trek score). They cut the effects sequences just right and the non-effect sequences just right. Holzman and Kizer’s cutting is responsible for many effects sequences’ success. They cut just as the limitations are about to show.

Daniel Lacambre’s photography is good, too. Stars is visibly cheap but never bad-looking. Well, never too bad-looking.

It’s a peculiar, always diverting, usually engaging oddity.

Even if someone thought fighting in the trenches meant digging wide corridors where they could have battles on the same set but pretend they’re somewhere else.

Finally, look fast for Julia Duffy and faster for Kathy Griffin.

The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959, Ranald MacDougall)

The World, the Flesh and the Devil is one of those rare films where even the opening titles are spoilers. Devil is an end-of-the-world picture, all about coal miner Harry Belafonte emerging from a cave-in to discover he’s the last man alive. Except we’ve had the titles, so we know we’re also watching a movie with Inger Stevens and Mel Ferrer. They really should’ve asked SAG for an exception. Or filled the picture with cameos, like Belafonte watches a very special clip from “Bonanza,” and they can get some more names in the credits.

The first act is all Belafonte, starting with the cave-in drama. Devil only runs ninety-five minutes, but they could’ve gotten another four good minutes in montage of Belafonte waiting to be rescued especially since he appears to run out of food at some point. On the other hand, it might’ve just been another Belafonte singing sequence, so maybe not. Director MacDougall often does quite well within constraints—and his suspense finale is spectacular—but he can’t figure out a way to shoehorn in Belafonte’s singing. The sequences are usually charming—Belafonte’s a great lead when he’s the lead—but they’re practically commercial breaks. They could be commercial breaks. He could sing jingles.

What I’m saying is apparently World, the Flesh and the Devil didn’t have enough corporate or brand synergy in 1959, and they should remake it as an ongoing streaming series with integrated commercials and so on.

Or not.

Anyway.

Belafonte comes out of the mine to discover everyone’s gone. He was in the mine five days. The bad guys poisoned the atmosphere, and the nuclear war-obsessed populace all went into their shelters. They came out on the second day. And all got poisoned and evaporated (there’s nary a corpse in Devil, something they really should have addressed). If you stayed in until five days, you survived. Presumably. We never find out Ferrer’s story. Devil tries to be a human drama in a sci-fi setting without much sci-fi, but MacDougall’s approach is to entirely avoid the subject, even when there’s pronounced details. So the film—and its characters—need to pretend they’re not sitting right on the table.

When you’re the last man on Earth, there’s only one place to go: New York City. It makes sense from a movie perspective—Belafonte running through the city’s empty streets provides many a striking visual—but we never find out why Belafonte’s going there. Is he from there? Family? Doesn’t matter. He finds a nice apartment building and some transport and starts setting up the new world, complete with a radio transmitter to broadcast to other survivors.

Like Stevens, who enters the picture in the second act, which is when Devil becomes a very strange race drama. The film was banned in the South, but it certainly seems like the distributors were still hopeful. Stevens and Belafonte are the last people alive. She likes him, likes him, but she’s a young white woman, and he’s a Black man. White supremacy might not exist right now, but add another white person, and it will. Some of it is subtext—Belafonte never really gets to talk about what he’s saying, and Stevens always seems super ignorant—but there are some honest moments in their burgeoning relationship.

And they’re both incredibly sympathetic and likable.

So when Ferrer arrives—the harbinger of the third act—and all of a sudden, there is another white person, and it’s a white man, it’s clear the film’s headed towards some kind of conclusion. It just takes the movie forever to get there, as Ferrer and Belafonte keep avoiding the potential for conflict and instead mope around. Belafonte mopes productively, saving relics of the old world like books and paintings—it’s not even a subplot, just something for Belafonte to be doing as he exits scenes with Ferrer and Stevens. Meanwhile, Ferrer keeps telling Stevens the clock is ticking on when he cares whether or not she’s at all enthusiastic about her consent.

The third act’s suspense finale on the rooftops of New York City almost saves Devil. The movie cops out, but the sequence itself is superb. It’s also where the film’s always admirable, but only sometimes successful matte paintings shine, and editor Harold F. Kress doesn’t have any bad cuts. Devil usually looks fine or better—Harold J. Marzorati’s black and white photography is solid—but either MacDougall didn’t get enough coverage, or Kress’s got no cutting rhythm because sometimes the editing is way too jumpy.

The Miklós Rózsa could be better at times, but it’s not like it breaks anything.

Belafonte’s always good; Stevens’s is usually good (in a tricky role; while she doesn’t consciously acknowledge white supremacy, she does realize she doesn’t like the patriarchy much), and Ferrer’s solid… enough. Ferrer’s successful as far as the part goes, but there’s nothing else to it. The part’s got more subtext than Belafonte’s or Stevens’s, so Ferrer doesn’t have to flex. And he doesn’t.

Devil’s okay. It’s trying too hard to be milquetoast, but it’s far from a failure.

The Zero Theorem (2013, Terry Gilliam)

I had been planning on opening this post about The MacGuffin—sorry, I mean The Zero Theorem—with a quip about how it’s faster to just Google “Terry Gilliam Brexit” than to watch the movie but Gilliam’s actually not one of the bad Pythons on Brexit. So I had to fall back to The MacGuffin quip.

Zero Theorem’s an interminable 107 minutes ruminating on the human condition through the eyes of Christoph Waltz’s dystopian future worker-bee. Waltz “crunches entities,” which are like little AI equations or something. It doesn’t make sense and doesn’t have to make sense. Pat Rushin’s script is terrible, but also, there’s a left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. We watch Waltz do his work, which is done with a juiced-up video game controller, and the interface is very “this is a Unix system, I know this,” until it’s clear it’s just a CGI block animation with some equations written on the blocks. So he’s a gamer, only Waltz clearly wasn’t seeing these video animations because he might’ve done something to move along with the video.

It gets worse later on when Waltz gets a teen sidekick, played by Lucas Hedges. Hedges will wrest control of the game—sorry, entity cruncher—from Waltz; only the CGI won’t change at all. In fact, they just more boldly reuse the same animations from before when Hedges is doing it. So Waltz’s work doesn’t matter because the visual representation is nonsense but also because it doesn’t make any sense but also because it relates to the Zero Theorem, which is just a MacGuffin.

The movie’s layers of pointless stacked.

About the only good thing in Theorem is David Thewlis, who occasionally stops by as Waltz’s boss. Everyone in Theorem is a thin caricature, usually with some exaggerated costume design to imply depth, but Thewlis is the only one with enough costume oddities to get anything out of it. He’s got a terrible toupee, but he also enjoys the potential for dress up. It’s nearly a character.

It’s not, but nearly.

And better than anyone else.

Hedges has a lousy part but is also bad. Waltz is fine. He trusts director Gilliam and gives it his all. Gilliam doesn’t deliver and will occasionally embarrass Waltz to no end, but Waltz’s loyalty doesn’t waver. I guess he gets a gold star.

The main characters are Waltz, Hedges, and Mélanie Thierry. Thierry is the virtual sex worker—virtual sex; she’s real, the sex isn’t—with a heart of gold who falls for Waltz, even though there’s a pronounced age difference. The age difference comes up when Waltz’s computer psychiatrist (Tilda Swinton in another Tilda Swinton cameo—this time, she raps… yawn) points it out, so they turn off the computer. Thierry’s at least not a teenager.

She’s also awful.

It’s not her fault; it’s just her performance is she isn’t a native English speaker, and so has an awkward accent. Plus, she gets scantily clad and then naked (Waltz also gets naked, though the camera doesn’t linger in the same ways). What more do you want from a part?

Besides the script, Zero’s problem is the budget. Gilliam can’t make hash out of a low budget, instead utilizing cheap (and bad) CGI. He’s also desperate enough to reference some of his previous movies directly (did he forget he didn’t make Blade Runner though?). But it’s not just the CGI. Gilliam doesn’t get any help from his crew.

David Warren’s production design is the most obvious detriment. It’s all very early 2010s—Warren’s convinced the future is young people filming themselves on iPads. Aren’t they terrible? The young people, not the iPads. Waltz just can’t understand them but will eventually work his redemption arc by changing himself (not really, but the script says they have to say the lines, so they do) to fit Hedges’s requests.

Most of the movie takes place in Waltz’s home, an old church. So lots of unlikely future tech and religious imagery. Sure, let’s try that one again.

Also working against the film are cinematographer Nicola Pecorini and composer George Fenton. Fenton’s just bland and repetitive, while Pecorini’s bland, repetitive, and downright bad at a lot of the lighting. The composite shots are particularly dreadful.

The film doesn’t exactly have any moments, but there are times when Waltz gets some traction out of nothing.

Oh, I forgot. Matt Damon’s the big boss. At times even he seems to know he’s in a lousy movie.

Battle of the Worlds (1961, Antonio Margheriti), the American version

Battle of the Worlds is, thankfully, fifteen minutes or so shorter in its dubbed American version than the original Italian. While the film’s got its low budget, early sci-fi charms… another fifteen minutes would’ve been long. Though they might have sorted out Umberto Orsini’s seeming love triangle with Maya Brent and Carol Danell, which actually starts the film.

Brent is running around the island astronomy observatory where she’s stationed with Orsini; she just got permission to leave with him to get married. They start making out, then Danell interrupts them and then asks them to continue so she can watch.

Later on, Orsini and Brent break up so they can have human conflict for the finale—and give Brent a chance for girl talk with another wife, Jacqueline Derval—but when they’re on the outs, Danell can’t keep her hands off Orsini. Then there’s the whole “is twenty-something Brent supposed to be in love with sixty-something boss Claude Rains” question. Brent spends the movie making eyes at him, but she’s pretty bad, so it’s unclear what they’re supposed to mean.

Worlds has some impressively bad acting, both the dubbing actors and the physical ones. Brent’s somewhat sympathetic even though she’s bad. Second-billed Bill Carter is not, and he’s seemingly dubbing himself. Rains too, and a handful of the rest of the cast appears to have been speaking English. Brent and Orsini not.

Orsini seems like he’s going to be pretty bad in the first act, but once Carter starts getting more to do, it’s clear he’s going to be the worst. It’s also clear every scene with Rains, as a blowhard math genius who can predict the future’s future, is going to be delightful. At least for Rains. He consumes the scenery, chewing through it with barely a bite, then on to the next thing. There’s this whole subplot about him hating everyone about Brent, and he tells everyone what he thinks of them, so it’s this cheap, silly, sci-fi movie with “mean” Rains. Quotation marks because whenever he starts a scene, the music’s cute and cartoonish. It’s strange and just what the movie needs to maintain.

Ennio De Concini’s script is terrible, but the plot’s all right. He’s got a decent enough sense of an action sci-fi story. In the future, when Earth has colonized the moon and Mars, a rogue asteroid travels to Earth, surprising everyone when it goes into orbit around the planet. Oddball genius Rains warns them to blow it up before something bad happens—he can tell it’s inevitable from the calculus—and they don’t listen to him until it’s too late.

By then, they’re all going to have to go to the asteroid with a collection of ragtag deep sea miners to blow… wrong movie.

There’s a big, thoughtful sci-fi finish, terribly executed because they don’t have anywhere near the budget for the story if the technology even existed.

It’s bad, sure, but it’s not insincere. Great music by Mario Migliardi, who ranges from Rains’s goofy themes to jazzy otherworldly ones to plain old melodrama. Worlds gets very melodramatic. But De Concini’s good ideas also extend to some of the scenes; director Margheriti doesn’t direct them well, but there’s clearly wasted potential.

But, whatever, Rains is an absolute hoot.

Plus, Worlds's future appears to be one where the Soviets won.

Code 46 (2003, Michael Winterbottom)

Code 46 is a budget future-noir, down to the male lead being a fraud investigator (though it’s unclear why there’d be a third-party contractor investigating identity theft). But it’s not just a budget future-noir; it’s also a future eugenics thriller; the title refers to the legal code forbidding procreating with your near relatives. Cousins would probably be all right. The movie opens with the explanation as two title cards; it doesn’t matter for half the movie.

And once it does matter, it’s another ten or fifteen minutes before someone explains there are clones everywhere. Most people never know their birth parents—just their “nurture” parents—so you’d never know if someone was actually your genetic sibling. Though without ever really breaking it down, the exposition has to be opaque to some degree because not everyone’s going to know about the Code 46. Or at least not at the same time. Though it’s unclear how some people find out about it because Code 46 has some very broken noir-ish narration. Screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce writes just to the edge of the plot hole and then leaves it up to director Winterbottom to cover.

“Cover” is another of the film’s MacGuffins. To get around in the future, you need to have “cover,” which is basically either a travel pass or a living permit. Some people get to live in the nice cities, and some people live outside the nice cities. Those living outside don’t have “cover.” Though when you want to go someplace and can’t, it’s because you don’t have “cover.”

Samantha Morton works at a cover manufacturer. Since Code 46 is pre-smartphone (though people do have video phones), the “cover” is a physical object. Tim Robbins is investigating someone making counterfeit cover and giving it to undesirables. Though it turns out, they might not be so much undesirable as in danger. Code 46 doesn’t pay its oppressive future society enough attention—or define it enough—because it seems generally altruistic.

Like, preventing unnecessary deaths and in-breeding isn’t villain activity.

Such observations do not matter, however. Any observations about Code 46’s plot or any details with potential are useless; it all goes nowhere; Code 46 has a sparse script, which just draws attention to the worse aspects. Like Morton’s MacGuffin dream sequence. The film opens on her birthday and promises to be about her recurring dream and then is never, ever, ever about her recurring dream. Partially because it’s not a real detail, it’s just something to kill time.

The film’s only ninety-three minutes. It’s concerning how much time they waste.

The whole thing hinges on Robbins and Morton having chemistry, which they do not. He becomes infatuated with her and frames someone else for her crime. She apparently has a thing for much older men. Part of Robbins’s character involves him being on an “empathy virus,” which lets him read minds. Including passwords. No one in the future uses good passwords, it turns out.

The film could get away with all the future silliness and plot conveniences if it didn’t go spectacularly off the rails in the second half and then just keep going, making less and less internal sense as it goes along.

Morton and Robbins do better than expected. In the first half, anyway, when it seems like Morton’s got a character. She will not, with the film increasingly restricting and erasing her development in the second half. At the same time, it’ll turn out Robbins doesn’t have anything going on either.

There’s good photography from Alwin H. Küchler and Marcel Zyskind, though Peter Christelis’s editing is probably more impressive, even though the film uses his cutting abilities for questionable purposes. Okay music from Stephen Hilton and David Holmes. Mark Tildesley’s production design is excellent.

Winterbottom’s direction is just okay. He makes some big swings—having Morton stare directly into the camera a lot, a Coldplay song—and they don’t often connect.

Code 46 is an unfortunate fail; it seems like there might be a decent picture in the cast, crew, and concept, but Cottrell-Boyce’s script isn’t it. It doesn’t help Winterbottom’s checked out too. There are some solid moments and efforts, but they’re nowhere near enough to compensate for the problems.

Gattaca (1997, Andrew Niccol)

Gattaca is a science fiction triptych character study by way of film noir. And while the film’s a murder mystery, it only uses the film noir device—narration—for a non-mystery section of the film. The narration ends with the murder mystery, not coming back until the finale. It’s an absolutely fantastic structure from writer and director Niccol, who’ll then lean into the character study elements, sometimes employing noirish visuals but always slightly not.

But Gattaca doesn’t take place in a dangerous world, and noir’s all about danger.

The film takes place in the near future when parents-to-be go to their location geneticist, and they pick out the best egg to grow into a baby. The film actually doesn’t get into whether or not the mother carries the baby at all, but it seems like maybe not. Not important. The film takes place in the future, where the next pandemic kills off all the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers, and the rich liberals need to figure out what to do about the icky poors.

Anyway.

Ethan Hawke is a “God-child;” his parents left his genetics up to fate, and fate delivered them someone with a bad heart, among other ailments. We find out Hawke’s origins in the summary flashback, which he narrates. It starts a few minutes into the film, five or seven minutes; the film opens with Hawke scrubbing loose skin from his body and being a neat freak, shows him getting tested at work, then the flashback to explain he’s not like everyone else at the Gattaca installation; additionally, because he’s pretending to be someone else.

The Gattaca installation is a future NASA, where the best of the best prepare to explore the galaxy—or at least the solar system—and the even better best get to actually go on the missions. It’s finally Hawke’s turn, boss Gore Vidal tells him; one more week. The week will be the present action for most of the film but first is the thirty-plus minute flashback establishing Hawke and the future.

A murder kicks off the flashback, but that murder’s got nothing to do with the material it covers. Niccol lucks out at Hawke’s ability to narrate and make his character more sympathetic—he comes off like a prick in the pre-flashback setup, just another prig in a world of them—just through his vocal performance. The film traces his childhood, as mom Jayne Brook wants the best for her son, and dad Elias Koteas just wants a better son next time. Then the younger brother excels because he’s got the right genes, and how even mom gives up on young Hawke. It’s devastating, especially since Hawke—narrating from the future—doesn’t remark on the obvious psychological turmoil.

He runs away from home as a teenager, and in the next scene in the flashback montage is Hawke, now a custodian at the Gattaca installation. Since he was a kid, he’s been a space junkie, and everyone thought cleaning the spaceships would be the closest he ever would get, but he’s got a plan. Just because you’ve got perfect genes doesn’t mean you might not get hit by a car or fall down the wrong stairs, and then what can you do. Tony Shalhoub brokers a deal for Hawke to assume partially paralyzed Jude Law’s identity, which requires lots of cosmetic and mental work; in exchange, Hawke supports Law. Presumably, Gattaca pays well. They never talk about money in the future. Maybe there isn’t any.

The flashback changes speed throughout, emphasizing teenaged Hawke’s adversarial relationship with his brother (Chad Christ and William Lee Scott play the teenage versions, respectively), then also Hawke and Law’s initially testy relationship. In addition to being a depressed drunk, Law thinks Hawke’s genetically inferior and resents having to be in this arrangement. Especially since it means sobering up (at least occasionally).

As the flashback gets closer to the present, Hawke explains he’s running out of time with his heart defect—they can predict when your body’s going to give out with 99% surety, and he’s passed due—and the only thing impeding his space dream is this one crappy mission director at work.

Who turns out to be the murder victim.

And Hawke carelessly left an eyelash near the scene. His eyelash; not one of the ones Law plucks for him to plant.

The film runs 106 minutes, so the next seventy minutes (minus credits) take place over the few days before Hawke’s mission is scheduled to depart. The police show up at work, initially led by old school detective Alan Arkin, who’s convinced the eyelash guy must be the killer—one of the other things they screen out in the eugenics is the propensity for violence and criminal behavior—so Hawke’s got to stay on his toes.

Simultaneously, his coworker Uma Thurman starts getting interested in him romantically, but in Gattaca, romantic interest comes after running a potential partner’s genetic code. Thurman’s good enough for Gattaca in the brains department, but she’s not going to get a shuttle mission because she’s got a bum heart; sometimes, even with the eugenics, things still go wrong with the science.

Back at home, Law’s preparing for a year without an identity—Hawke’s leaving the planet; he can’t be in two places at once, which means Law can’t be anywhere.

Then there’s Loren Dean’s genetically superior police commander, who thinks presumably regular guy Arkin’s investigating the wrong leads, but Arkin thinks Dean’s all genes and no gut. The murder investigation gives the film a different, contentious structure running through the already established one-week-to-lift-off structure. It throws a wrench in Hawke and Law’s plans, but they need to adjust around it. Similarly, Thurman’s last-minute romantic interest in Hawke further complicates things.

The film gradually becomes that triptych character study: Hawke, Thurman, Law. Maybe Dean sharing some of the third spot with Law. The script mixes drama—family drama, as Hawke and Law have become the brothers neither had—romance, the general hard sci-fi of future eugenics and spaceflight, and murder mystery. Niccol’s script is phenomenal.

Along with that already considerable success is Niccol’s breathtaking direction. Gattaca’s a muted future, filled with people genetically engineered not to be impressed with the wonders around them. Niccol and cinematographer Slawomir Idziak shoot it clear but saturated with color. Then there’s the Michael Nyman score, which tracks the emotions of Hawke and the other actors throughout. The colors and the music mix and mingle, creating an encompassing backdrop for the actors’ performances.

Niccol does a great job with the actors. Hawke, Law, Thurman, Dean. Arkin’s kind of an extended cameo, along with Xander Berkeley, Ernest Borgnine, and Shalhoub. Everything about Gattaca—except Nyman’s score—is controlled or constrained. The music soars with the possibility of breaking free, and when characters actually get to do it too, Niccol scales appropriately.

Gattaca’s an exceptional film.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979, Robert Wise), the restored director’s edition

Star Trek: The Motion Picture: The Restored Director’s Edition occasionally feels like a fan project. Or at least a temp project. Like the new opening titles, set in gold. They look like they were done using an iPhone app. Then there are shots where they couldn’t find the original materials, so the picture suddenly looks terrible, like a hacky up-convert to 4K. There are plenty of spectacular restored shots, but when they’re bad, they’re really bad. And they’re usually during effects sequences.

The reason for restoring the director’s edition is because it was made for DVD, and they didn’t do the new special effects in high definition. It took the restoration team a while to convince the studio. The end credits break out the first and second teams, and some of the names are the same; they came back twenty years later to do the same work again, just with eight million more pixels.

The result’s… okay?

In addition to the bad titles and the damaged original footage or whatever, there are a few times the changed special effects don’t work in high definition. Only once is it distracting, when William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley all lose the edges of their bodies in front of a starfield because portrait mode choked on their pajama costumes.

Some of the CGI is good, some of it is middling, and a couple shots are lousy. It’s sometimes annoying but usually forgivable; they’re well-intentioned.

Content-wise, the narrative is unchanged from the last director’s edition (as far as I remember it). A space cloud of enormous power invades the galaxy, headed straight toward Earth, and the only starship in intercept range is the Enterprise. Except they’re undergoing a massive retrofit to make the ship movie-ready in 1979, not impressive for TV in 1966; plus, they’ve got a new captain, Stephen Collins, leading the same old crew.

But not Shatner, who’s a desk jockeying admiral now, or Kelley, who’s retired to take up some weird future New Age thing if his gold medallion is any indication, or Nimoy, who’s retired to his home planet Vulcan to give up all emotion and… get a more blinged-out gold medallion as a reward. They really missed the chance for Kelley and Nimoy to compare bling.

When Star Trek: The Motion Picture isn’t meandering through its sci-fi thriller plot, it’s vaguely about Shatner desperately wanting to relive his glory days and using catastrophe to do it, dragging Kelley along because Shatner can’t do it without him. There’s actually maybe the argument Admiral Kirk’s going through some depression and saving the known universe is just the way to get out of that funk. So long as he gets some help from his friends.

Shatner and Kelley act that arc, which is occasionally in the script. Nimoy shows up later and sort of figures in, but not really. Shatner’s arc stops when he and Kelley get to worry about Nimoy instead. But more significant than either of those arcs is Collins’s G-rated romance with Persis Khambatta. They used to know each other when he was stationed on her free love planet. They’ve got a bunch of unresolved feelings—not to mention Shatner assuming command of Collins’s ship and everyone on the crew being thrilled—and it gets more runtime than any of the other arcs. Also, it figures into the A-plot of the alien spaceship out to destroy Earth.

There is lots of good acting from Shatner, but Kelley’s an absolute deadpan riot throughout. Nimoy’s okay once he gets over his “logical means rude” bit. Collins is bland but affable. Wise directs the heck out of Shatner and Khambatta in entirely different ways but to similarly strong effect. Even as the finale plods—before racing too quick to the finish—Khambatta’s mesmerizing.

Sturdy support from the rest of the crew—Walter Koenig gets the most fun, George Takei and Nichelle Nichols get lots of background busywork, James Doohan’s around in the first act, then relegated to occasional “dannae ken if she can take any more” scenes. Unfortunately, Motion Picture’s got a clunky story, something the director’s editions improve but can’t fix.

Still, the special effects are glorious, the Jerry Goldsmith’s music’s peerless, and the movie’s generally great looking. Except for the pajama costumes, of course. Wise and the very large cast do wonders even with those silly, silly costumes. There are lots of people around at all times; even if they don’t get lines, they do have to react to the dire circumstances, all while in onesies.

I do wish they didn’t have that really bad footage in this version, but otherwise, all drive systems are good to go.

Aliens (1986, James Cameron)

Thirty-six years after its release, recreating the original Aliens (albeit on home media) experience is difficult. Not only has there been a direct sequel, there have been multiple reboot sequels, and the extended, “special edition” version has been readily available for nineteen years now. I’m not ready for an Aliens canon deep-dive, but when did a much later sequel, they did it with details from the special edition.

So it’s entirely possible to watch Aliens, the theatrical version—running a spry 137 minutes (the extended edition adds seventeen minutes)–in the context of what’s changed for the franchise since it was the traditional version of Aliens. Probably starting with thinking of Aliens as a franchise entry, not a sequel. I should also preface—I’ve seen Aliens a dozen times; I’ve seen the theatrical version thrice, including this time. “My” version is the special edition version.

And I was worried it’d be hard to watch Aliens without that perspective getting in the way.

Luckily, Aliens is not a vacillating memory, it’s a movie; once I stopped thinking about how the film works as a proto-old [man or woman] franchise—like Sigourney Weaver as a (mentally) more mature action hero, I was able to just let it play. Because Aliens is less about Weaver’s arc than I remembered. There’s one big missing character motivator in the theatrical version and it only changes the impact. Instead of Aliens leaning in on the motherhood allegory in the theatrical version, it’s about Weaver proving herself in an entirely different context than before. She’s still got a great arc with Carrie Henn, it’s just less the focus of the film. The focus is, of course, survival in extremely hostile, constantly worsening conditions.

Aliens starts with an Alien epilogue. Weaver gets in trouble for blowing up her spaceship; they fire her. She ends up back on Earth in a shitty apartment, hanging out with the cat (the only other returning character), working a crap (compared to her previous position) job, and smoking too many cigarettes. She can’t convince the Company stooges to investigate her story, though she’s got an ally in self-described “okay guy” Company man Paul Reiser. Writer and director Cameron and Weaver do a very quick job setting up Weaver’s character, post-resolution. They start the development arc once Weaver wakes up—almost sixty years after she expected—when it’s unclear she’s going to get scapegoated, which runs one character development arc under another, not letting the subtle one through until the plot requires it.

Then one day, Reiser shows up at Weaver’s door with a Marine lieutenant, William Hope. That planet no one believed Weaver about? They’ve lost contact with the colony. Reiser wants Weaver to come with him and Hope (and Hope’s Marines); just an observer, though. The Marines will have it. After some cajoling (and because otherwise it’s a very different movie), Weaver agrees and now Aliens proper is underway.

For most of the runtime, Aliens never looks, sounds, or feels like an Alien sequel. Not in terms of the filmmaking. If it weren’t for the three hyper sleep scenes, it wouldn’t at all. There’s the opening, where Weaver—asleep in her pod—gets rescued. Then there’s the Marines waking up from their hyper sleep, which goes from feeling vaguely Alien to being very much Aliens. And then there’s another hyper sleep sequence where Cameron ties it back to the original even more. Though, stylistically—even when he’s doing the Alien reference—he often adds something to it. Something more akin to a 2001 reference, actually. There are a number of 2001 homages in the first act, but also Cameron doing something of his own. Aliens is a very thoughtful, thorough film. A verisimilitude achievement, requiring a lot of subtleties to navigate the film’s constraints. Even if the budget had been bigger, for instance, there were technological limits as far as creating the omnipresent special effects; Aliens is a special effects bonanza. And it’s all from scratch.

The film occasionally will let Weaver’s observations determine a scene’s narrative distance. She’s seeing it new, the audience is seeing it new, also now the characters (the Marines) who are not seeing it new… they then get othered enough to become subjects. It’s one of Cameron’s neat narrative moves. He has a number of them, in addition to his neat directorial moves. The film’s chockfull of good moves.

Aliens proper is the story of the Marines mission. They wake up, they banter and bicker, they find out in a briefing it’s an Alien sequel, then it’s basically down to the planet and the film never takes a break until the denouement. Aliens’s biggest chunk of runtime has a present action of maybe twenty-four hours, and short segues between the contiguous scenes. The film introduces ten supporting characters at the same time and requires you track them for the next two hours. It’s rushed but they’re rushed too. Got to get down to the planet.

Once they’re on the planet and at the colony, the film changes gears again. Cameron’s done his take on Alien-style space travel, he’s done a back to Earth bit, but the colony’s something again. It’s a little bit of a Western, just one where they’re in high tech future rooms instead of an Old West town with a false front. And they’re on an alien world, which gives the characters no pause. With one exception—the space station in the first act—Cameron’s utterly devoid of wonderment when musing about the future and its strange new worlds. He never forces it to be grim and gritty though; it’s simply unimaginable it could be any other way.

There’s some more setup in the second act with Weaver, Reiser, and the Marines finding out what’s going on with the aliens. They’ve also got to pick up Henn—a little girl who survives for weeks, hiding from the monsters in the vents. Aliens is all about the vents. Henn’s character started the still strong entertainment trope of lone survivor kid showing up to give some necessary exposition—the not-always Feral Kid—but Cameron isn’t craven here. He never treats Henn as functional, because he never makes any bad moves in the script. It’s such a good script.

The Marines. There’s Hope as the lieutenant, but he’s new and doesn’t have any combat experience. One of the “funny” things about Aliens is realizing, even with third act twists, most of the problems are because Hope’s bad at his job. Al Matthews plays the sergeant. He’s more likable and memorable than good, but also he doesn’t have much he’s got to do. When he does have bigger moments, it’s usually to support someone else’s character development, like Michael Biehn. Biehn’s the corporal, he’s succinct not laconic, and kind of a Western hero. Biehn’s got the most interesting performance in the film because he’s the only one who defaults to trusting Weaver’s judgment. The movie’s often about the two of them problem-solving.

In between shooting at alien monsters with acid blood.

There are nine more Marines, but Bill Paxton and Jenette Goldstein are the most important ones. Paxton’s the wiseass who breaks under pressure and Goldstein’s the badass who doesn’t. Cameron’s got a really interesting approach with Paxton—he makes the other characters rein him in when he spirals and turns it into character development for all involved. It’s really effective.

Of the Marines, only Biehn and Hope really get arcs. Paxton’s panicking always plays out in active scenes. Goldstein gets a little more character work than most but it’s about thirty seconds worth. Aliens is an action movie, after all.

There aren’t any bad performances. Paxton gets the most tiring (but just imagine being under siege by aliens and stuck with him), but it’s never bad. Best performances are Weaver, Biehn, Reiser, Henn, and Lance Henriksen. Henriksen is the ship android who Weaver doesn’t trust because of the last movie. Cameron’s very obvious about their arc, which is the least of Weaver’s four character relationship arcs—Henn, Reiser, Biehn, then Henriksen–and makes sure every scene is excellent. The scenes are good showcases for Henriksen too.

The whole movie’s a showcase for Weaver. Going back and fighting the monsters from her nightmare strips her to the id. It’s a great performance in what’s really just an action hero part. Weaver and Cameron make it seem like more, but it’s the performance and the direction.

Lots of technical greats. James Horner’s music, Ray Lovejoy’s cutting, Peter Lamont’s production design, Emma Porteous’s costume design. Adrian Biddle’s photography is successful, competent, and good, but when Aliens betrays itself as a very grim, very gritty Flash Gordon serial, it’s usually because of Biddle’s lighting.

The special effects are usually outstanding. There’s one bad composite shot—though Cameron directs the heck out of it—and some of the alien planet exteriors look too soundstage (Biddle’s lights). Otherwise, the effects are stellar. Including the slimy aliens, which is the most important part. Stan Winston does a singular job with the aliens.

After the first act, Cameron’s direction tries to be more functional than flashy. It works. He asks a lot from the actors and they always deliver; it’s masterful action suspense.

Thanks to Cameron, Weaver, and everyone else, Aliens is a resounding success. Special edition or theatrical version, it’s always spectacular.

Reminiscence (2021, Lisa Joy)

I did give Reminiscence a fair shake. I really did.

It’s not my fault it opens with an all-CGI “helicopter” shot introducing the setting—a future, flooded Miami—and a terrible voice-over from star Hugh Jackman. It’s writer and director Joy’s fault. And her producers. And whoever thought doing low-to-middling CGI on a fake helicopter shot was a good idea. And whoever told them no one would remember Dark City, which is the first obvious… um… “homage.” Unless the helicopter shot is a Birdcage nod.

Reminiscence is what happens when you put Unforgettable, Blade Runner 1, Blade Runner 2, Waterworld (Joy didn’t have the courage for the urine filtration, sad to say), the aforementioned Dark City, and Dredd into a mixer and then bake them in a Big Sleep-shaped pan. I’m only including Unforgettable on the list because it’s got the same MacGuffin, but I’m not sure Joy’s familiar with it—though the movie ends up lifting a scene from The Departed trailer, so nothing’s too obvious. A Bugs Bunny cameo would’ve improved Reminiscence a lot. Especially since femme fatale Rebecca Ferguson is based more on Jessica Rabbit than anyone else.

That Departed lift jumps out because all the other prominent references outside Blade Runner 2049 are at least twenty years old. Wait, no… Dredd. But I feel like if you made Reminiscence you assumed no one saw Dredd, because if they had, why would they be watching your movie (outside the eventual and then frequent Jackman beefcake, which at fifty-two is still very impressive, as is his ability to emote in underwater close-ups). From the first few seconds of the film, Reminiscence is a fail. It’s just going to be two annoyingly tedious hours to figure out exactly how it’ll fail. Who it’ll fail. Spoiler: Thandiwe Newton. It completely and utterly fails Thandiwe Newton, particularly when it turns out the Occam’s razor on why Jackman falls for Ferguson instead of long-time best friend Newton (he’s Bogart, she’s Dooley Wilson, wish I was kidding) is because… you guessed it… she’s a Black woman.

There’s a lot of backstory to Reminiscence’s dystopian future, and we get every single bit of it from terrible voice-over narration. Even before the end of the first act, you’ve got to wonder how Jackman—who’s sort of been trying to do everything as a neo-noir (superhero neo-noir, sci-fi neo-noir)—didn’t get someone to try to fix the film. Somewhere in the third act, he does such a good impression of Clint Eastwood saying yes to a movie he really shouldn’t have, and you all of a sudden remember Jackman’s the movie star, and Reminiscence completely fails him.

Anyway.

In the ruins of the old world (Miami and the Gulf of Mexico flooded, Americans banded together to force Mexicans, brown people, and poor people of all colors drown), Jackman is a former interrogator (for the Americans) who uses the technology they developed to go into people’s memories to sell people “reminiscences.” You pay to relive your good memories from before the world went to shit while Jackman and Newton watch it all. Jackman’s a good guy though, he turns his head when there’s nudity. Even when femme fatale Ferguson wants him to look.

After sweeping Jackman off his feet because she can sing and apparently no one’s left who can sing, Ferguson leaves him, and he becomes a memory junkie. But when he and Newton have to go consult on a case for the cops—they need Jackman to talk calmly to the suspect while Newton watches the computer in case it tells her to tell Jackman to stop (the district attorneys and cops in Reminiscence are abject morons because Joy can’t figure out another way to do the Big Sleep nod)—he sees Ferguson in a memory and has a new lead.

He wasn’t actually investigating her before just reliving the memories (there’s even a massive clue to where she might be hiding the movie doesn’t notice because Joy’s a bad writer). But now he’s on the case, and he’s going to meet drug dealer Daniel Wu–Reminiscence forgets for the first act the majority of the population is addicted to some drug you can never, ever kick, and it’s ruining the ruined society—and crooked cop Cliff Curtis. Wu’s terrible, but Curtis is good with horrible writing. Like he’s trying. No one else in Reminiscence tries. Hopefully.

It’d be much, much worse if Jackman and Ferguson are trying. Jackman’s on autopilot. Ferguson’s got what Joy thinks is a great part, kind of an empowered femme fatale, but it’s actually this very weird slut-shaming, aggressively misogynistic, classist take. Also, Ferguson and Jackman have zero chemistry. Probably because of the bad script and bad direction, but neither actor should’ve believed Joy telling them they were Bogart and Bacalling it.

For some of Reminiscence, it seems like Jackman will at least escape unscathed. Joy must have something to say about these genres she’s blending together. When it turns out she doesn’t, and then there’s still another forty minutes in the movie, it’s just a descent into mainstream mediocrity. Jackman doesn’t have to be embarrassed by his performance, just agreeing to be in the project. Though maybe the voice-overs.

Newton’s not great. She’s fine. But not really anything more because her writing is terrible and her part is worse. She’s believable in this lousy production, which makes her definitionally infinitely better than anyone else. Must be Newton’s experience working with Joy on the similarly insipid “Westworld” show.

Technically, Reminiscence is without highlights. Paul Cameron’s photography is bad or worse. Worse on the green screen composite shots. Ramin Djawadi’s music is terrible. Waterworld Miami isn’t great, but not as good as it should be—so either Howard Cummings’s production design just misses it or Joy’s direction screws it up. The fail on the flooded city, which has tropical noir overtones, seems mostly to be Joy’s impatient direction–Reminiscence is such a chore to watch; Joy’s predictable, contrived, impatient, and tedious. So the movie’s rushing to do things slowly. The relatively short and hilariously bad epilogue goes on forever. Even the last fade-out is too long.

So maybe it’s all editor Mark Yoshikawa’s fault. Perhaps he could’ve saved us. Or at least made Reminiscence’s seemingly endlessly bland, unimaginative mediocrity move at a better pace instead. The film’s a bad memory and hopefully one easily forgotten.

I Come in Peace (1990, Craig P. Baxley)

I Come in Peace is a Dolph Lundgren versus alien movie. It’s from the period before Lundgren went to acting classes but had gotten rid of his Swedish accent, which ends up working against the picture. The terrible one-liners might have some personality if Lundgren had some accented inflection. Or if he just lost the accent. But no. He’s monotone. He’s not unlikeable; he’s just monotone.

Brian Benben is his partner. Benben’s unlikeable but not incompetent. The bad guy–Peace doesn’t have Predator, Robocop, Terminator 1, maybe Trancers money, so the bad guy is just tall guy Matthias Hues. He’s got in opaque white contact lenses, and he grins in what someone thinks is maniacal. He’s unlikable and incompetent.

Peace has some ingredients for being a good sci-fi action camp, but it always messes them up. Lundgren without the accent, Hues in general, Benben. Then the supporting cast. First is Lundgren’s girlfriend, Betsy Brantley. She’s got too good of timing for the movie. Director Baxley likes to blow things up and shows his most enthusiasm when there are pyrotechnics going off. And he’s apparently competent enough with them to convince Lundgren, Benben, and Brantley they’re safe enough they don’t need stunt people for all the shots. So when Peace goes “boom,” the booms are impressively boomy. The scenes aren’t, you know, well-directed or even better directed, but the boom is impressive.

Baxley’s also particularly bad with things like headroom. And, what’s that other sort of important one… actors. He’s terrible with the actors. The best performance in the film is Sam Anderson. He’s got one scene. It’s the same lousy material, but Anderson does better with it than anyone else. Anderson’s the vice president of the yuppie gang in the movie—The Whiteboys. Peace is shot on location in Houston (which it doesn’t really emphasize until the third act set pieces, so it’s got more a Toronto vibe), and a better movie could’ve done something with a yuppie gang. The script’s from Jonathan Tydor and David Koepp; Koepp wanted more work in the future, so he went with a possibly Pychonian pseudonym Leonard Maas Jr. (cousin of Oedipa?); one of them definitely knew what worked in Robocop. Then there’s the alien thing.

Hues is an intergalactic drug dealer, come to Earth to harvest our endorphins. How do you get the best endorphins from humans? You o.d. them on heroin then suck out their brain juices. So it’s remarkably similar to Predator 2 at times. Peace is an entirely inconsequential bad sci-fi action movie from the era of bad sci-fi action movies. It’s a knock-off twice removed but still (academically) interesting.

Good guy alien Jay Bilas is trying to stop Hues, Houston is their battleground, Lundgren is the toughest cop in the city with a heart of gold and great taste in wine, of course, titans will collide. It’s so much more entertaining when you pretend the aliens are Battlefield Earth Psychlos (because they’re alien in their height and discount store Predator weapons). I Come in Peace: A Saga of the Year 1990; they wish.

Jim Haynie’s terrible as the police captain. Ditto David Ackroyd as the FBI suit (though Haynie’s worse). No one knew yet in 1990 to get actual good actors in supporting roles to legitimize a picture instead of getting good performances out of middling character actors. Or at least not Baxley.

Sherman Howard’s appropriately slimy as the lead “Whiteboy.”

For some reason, Michael J. Pollard is also in the movie.

Bad photography from Mark Irwin doesn’t help anything—especially not with Baxley’s wanting composition.

Peace is a laborious ninety minutes. Its lack of personality makes even its badness bland.