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Showing posts with label science fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label science fiction. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
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Science fiction that ponders whether an artificial mind is truly conscious is hardly breaking new ground. As far back as 1921 Karel Čapek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) explored the idea of lifeforms that are almost human, but not quite. Since then they've been a mainstay in all eras of cinema, from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, through The Day The Earth Stood Still, up the modern day via stone cold classics like 2001, Alien, Blade Runner, The Terminator, The Matrix and Her.
So what new angle does Alex Garland bring to this crowded field? Set in an unspecified near future, our protagonist Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is a hotshot programmer working for competition crushing search engine BlueBook. He wins a company lottery, his prize a week long visit to the home of the reclusive genius and company CEO Nathan (Oscar Isaac). Nathan lives in isolation with his non-English speaking maid Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) in the beautiful Alaskan wilderness. His mostly underground home is ultra high-tech and tastefully decorated, looking like a nuclear bunker as designed by IKEA.
Soon we learn the reason for such isolation. Nathan has made a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, and her name is Ava (Alicia Vikander). Ava is intelligent, beautiful and ultraperceptive, yet also sheltered, childlike and naive. Nathan quickly confesses that the reason for Caleb's visit isn't a holiday, he's to be part of an quasi-Turing test designed to evaluate Ava to conclude whether she's truly conscious. The rest of the film revolves around a series of interviews between Caleb and Eva, as they open up to each other the film gradually reveals more about Ava, Nathan's ulterior motives and Caleb's true role in the experiment.
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| Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) and Nathan (Oscar Isaac) |
I don't want to spoil too much, so I'm going to leave the plot there. Much of Garland's screenplay is concerned with misdirection, sending both Caleb and ourselves down paranoid trains of thought while keeping 'the truth' in plain sight. With a pared down cast of four (one of whom doesn't speak), the claustrophobic and increasingly sinister surroundings and the precise pace at which the film proceeds, the tension gradually ratchets up scene by scene as the truth is slowly unfurled.
On a basic structural level, Ex Machina is a series of philosophical conversations in confined spaces. Consequently, though the film is beautifully shot by Rob Hardy, boasts deeply impressive production design, a great synth score and seamless special effects, it lives and dies on the quality of the actor's performances. All are excellent, though Isaac's vaguely Steve Jobsian tech guru stands out. The programming geek stereotype is completely absent and with his shaved head and masculine beard he looks a bit like Russell Crowe's Noah, the epitome of the dirt-under-the-fingernails mythic paternal figure. Isaac continually finds some fascinating new angle on Nathan, or fresh mood in each scene, both actor and character taking a sadistic pleasure in constantly pulling the rug out from underneath us.
Good as Isaac is, the true star of Ex Machina is Alicia Vikander's Ava. A trained ballerina, Vikander moves with inhuman grace. She's so subtle in this that it's difficult to pin down individual moments; more that every action is millimetre precise, adding up to a queasy combination of sexuality and uncanny valley 'wrongness'. Ava is intentionally designed to express sexuality, but some dark thing twinges in your brain when you realise you're turned on by a creature whose skin is a metallic lattice and whose robot guts you see whirring away in her belly.
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| Ava (Alicia Vikander) |
Learning to love (and lust) for this bundle of fibre-optics, carbon fibre and rubber skin is at the heart of Ex Machina, which treats its subject matter as a sober examination of what it will mean to live in a world where beings like Ava exist. Thing is, though this is all very well conveyed, it's not exactly breaking fresh ground. It's been more than thirty years since Blade Runner and though the world has seen a quantum leap in technology, the central questions of Ex Machina are almost identical to what Roy Batty and Rick Deckard violently debated on the rainy roof of the Bradbury Building.
Even the aesthetics are a bit familiar; Caradog James' excellent and underrated The Machine did the beautiful translucent robot girl (who, bizarrely, was also named Ava) thing a year ago, and the cosy pastel and natural materials set design is strongly reminiscent of Her. This isn't to say that there's anything remotely lazy here, just that the visual punch of Ava is slightly dulled if you've seen a robot sci-fi film in the last ten years or so.
Ex Machina finally breaks fresh ground when it eventually reveals itself not as a robot philosophy film, but as feminist science fiction. As we explore Ava's humanity, both audience and characters objectify her. As she is an object, this provides a useful path into a thorny subject. As we learn more about her creator, we come to understand Ava as a sex slave; most notably when Nathan proudly explains the myriad features of her robot vagina. Later developments underline the idea the female body as equipment for men to use, the film gradually becoming less about the ethics of artificial intelligence and more about emancipatory feminist ideology.
That Ex Machina looks for all the world like it's about one thing, yet secretly turns out to be about something completely different feels pleasantly appropriate given the film as a whole. I really hope this finds an audience: it's got some really striking images, a bevy of fascinating performative tics and an absolute humdinger of an ending. That intellectual, firmly adult science fiction films like this can be made gives me the warm fuzzies. I hope it does well. It deserves to.
★★★★
Ex Machina is released 23 January in the UK, 10 April in the US.
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
Tuesday, May 27, 2014
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I bet every review of Edge of Tomorrow is going to mention Groundhog Day, but the comparison is irresistible. The blood of the Bill Murray classic has been transfused into the still warm body of the Starship Troopers franchise and the resulting film is a bit of a Frankenstein's monster. But instead of Punxatawny Phil we have Tom Cruise in science fiction hero mode, Andie MacDowell is wielding a giant sword and the cute groundhog is replaced with a horde of bloodthirsty tentacled monsters.
I've got a pet theory that Tom Cruise works best in a film where he plays a smarmy bastard that gets taken down a peg or two, and at the beginning of Edge of Tomorrow he's rarely been smarmier. Faced with a somewhat generic alien invasion of Europe, he's Cage, a former advertising executive turned military PR man with designs on staying as far away from any actual fighting as possible. His oily cowardice angers a General (a largely wasted Brendan Gleeson), who promptly pressgangs him into the front lines of an upcoming invasion of Europe. Sweaty, terrified and miserable as hell, Cage is strapped into a clunky robot exoskeleton and tossed into the beach sequence from Saving Private Ryan. He dies horribly.
Then he wakes up. It's the same day all over again. Once again he's thrown onto the battlefield, but this time survives a little longer before once more biting it. As he undergoes this endless cycle of death and rebirth he gradually becomes a better soldier, learning how to fight the monsters, use his equipment and stay calm on the battlefield. The problem is, no matter how hard he fights, the monsters always win. Enter the Full Metal Bitch (Emily Blunt). She knows exactly what's going on with Cage's time loop, and the two resolve to use it to end the war once and for all.
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| Tom Cruise is about to die horribly. Again. |
Very quickly it turns out that the concept of being trapped in an endless time loop is intrinsically pretty funny, even if the human race is on the brink of destruction. Liman can't resist working through a series of extremely Groundhog Dayish time travel gags, the highlight being a short montage of Tom Cruise dying in various silly ways which amused me no end. I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Cruise: while I can't deny his supercharisma and basic everyman likeability I take a sadistic pleasure in watching horrible things happen to him. Whether he's getting his face ripped off in Vanilla Sky or murdering clones of himself in Oblivion I'm enjoying myself, so any film where the most expedient way out of a sticky situation is to shoot Tom Cruise in the head (thus resetting the timeline) is a-okay in my book.
By quite a wide margin Edge of Tomorrow boasts the highest Cruise-deaths-per-minute in cinema to date, and I'd recommend it for that alone. Fortunately it's also got more going for it. Emily Blunt is quietly excellent as the buttoned down supersoldier, a warrior that's precisely as robotic and precise as the exoskeleton that powers her. Initially she seems a bit flat, but quickly you realise her emotional numbness is the logical psychological result of dying thousands of times and ultimately failing. She's so impressive as a cold-blooded monster-murderer extraordinaire that it becomes a bit disappointing when she begins to thaw and show her true personality. But Blunt keeps a tight leash on the character and Liman never quite lets Cruise overshadow her in the badass stakes.
Similarly impressive are the robotic exoskeletons. Though they must be computer generated they have an utterly believable clunky weight to them, the soldiers fighting and moving like Ripley in the Power Loader in the climax of Aliens. We're never quite allowed to take them for granted, and with weapons bristling out of them like a Swiss Army Knife designed by 2000AD they serve to keep the action sequences full of surprises and neat moments right up to the climax.
Unfortunately the same can't be said for the rather uninspired alien designs. They're essentially a blob of tentacles with a mouth in the middle, and though they move in a disarmingly quick manner the film never quite shows what they do to kill a man. Paul Verhoeven in Starship Troopers knew enough to show them disembowelling a man in the opening sequence, immediately underlining how dangerous his bugs were. By comparison, Liman's monsters are a bit bland and chew their way through the soldiers in a boringly antiseptic manner.
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| They've basically got to get a doohickey to find out where that space onion lives. |
The screenplay also has a worringly tendency to dip into clunky exposition and technobabble to the point where characters look like they're trying not to crack up at the rubbish they're forced to say. Harold Ramis and Bill Murray knew better than to explain the 'how' of their time loop, but as science fiction Edge of Tomorrow seems to feel obliged to try, leading to some largely tedious scenes where characters stare at spinning holograms and blithely spout a load of portentous sounding drivel.
That all said, Edge of Tomorrow is inarguably a superior summer blockbuster. The time loop gimmick is a beautiful, if unoriginal, storytelling tool and Liman exploits the possibilities of it to the fullest. The whole thing falls apart like a house of cards if you think about it too much, but though there's the odd creaky moment the whole affair just about hangs together. Much as I hate to admit it, science fiction Tom Cruise is a safe bet right now. After all, the man enjoys silly alien stories so much he literally made it his religion - what finer recommendation could you ask for?
★★★★
Edge of Tomorrow is on general release from May 30th. Don't bother with 3D on this one.
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
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The Machine is has an rather cheesy script, some slightly iffy performances and a rather Torchwood vibe to proceedings. But then I enjoy cheese, and I also enjoy ambition in film-making. So it's deeply refreshing to see a relatively low-budget indie film punching way above its weight, and not only that, doing it with style.
Set during a future cold war between the West and China, The Machine is almost entirely set within an underground weapons research laboratory somewhere in Wales. Within they're developing the technology with the potential to turn the tide: implants for brain-damaged veterans, bionic prosthetics to replace severed limbs and artificial, problem-solving intelligence. But these are only facets of a larger, more complex project; an endeavour to create an autonomous android super-assassin - able to infiltrate the enemy and decapitate the leadership in one fell swoop.
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| ^ a good shot |
The lead researcher is the grumpy Vincent (Toby Stephens), whose young daughter has one of those tragic movie medical conditions whose symptoms only kick in at conveniently dramatic times. He's trying to discover an intelligence that can beat the Turing Test, and finally finds it in Ava (Caity Lotz) - the developer of an intelligent, questioning and curious programme that's able to teach itself through conversation. For a while everything's hunky-dory, and just perhaps there's a hint of romance in the air between these two two robot researchers...
Then some Chinese guy stabs Ava to death. Vincent, feeling pretty guilty about the whole affair, decides to model the new robot's face and mannerisms on Ava - resulting in a very strong, very smart, very attractive and very naked killer robot. The rest of the film ponders pretty well trod philosophical ground as Vincent struggles as to whether to consider Ava a person or a thing, while the weapons researchers grow impatient as to whether this friendly, kind and personable thing they've created is ever going to shape up into the brutal murder machine they've been promised.
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| ^ another good shot |
There's next to nothing in The Machine that's new. The film wears its influences on its sleeve; a jigsaw of bits of Blade Runner, RoboCop, Universal Soldier, The Terminator and I, Robot. But there's a difference between plagiarism and homage and this film largely falls on the right side. Tiny little references from classics abound; the way the cyborg soldier's eyes light up in the darkness; the men learning to use robotic limbs; the distress of a robot being lobotomised; or the simply the score, which doesn't so much reference Vangelis' iconic Blade Runner synths as transplant them wholesale into the film. I guess if you're going to steal, you may as well steal from the best.
It's easy enough to forgive this ransacking of the robot sci-fi genre though - because what's assembled out of these parts is worthwhile stuff. Nicolai Bruel's cinematography is outstanding - every set-up considered and balanced, often straying into the genuinely beautiful. Similarly impressive are the seamless visual effects, which to my eyes to take cues from the work of Chris Cunningham. The bionics and robotics in the film all pulse a deep red, glowing underneath the artificial skin around them. There's no practical reason for this within the film (and maybe making your undercover robot glow bright red isn't such a smart move), but it looks amazing - a visually encoding the power, emotion and vibrancy going on within these creations. When all this comes together it's stunning - a particular stand-out a scene where Ava dances on top of a thin sheet of water. In a film where damn near everyone is downtrodden, depressed and living a rather dank existence this moment is a ray of sunshine and beauty: a cocktail of perfect CGI, great choreography and dynamic camera movements.
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| ^ basically what I'm saying is that this film looks good |
Obvious effort has gone into making this film look as good as possible under a presumably limited budget - though one upshot is that this is one of the darkest military facilities I've ever seen on film. Presumably the global recession in the film has curtailed the purchase of lightbulbs, because trying to get any work done in a series of gloomy rooms can't be good either for productivity or for your mental state. This underlighting gets a little annoying, though it's mitigated by the fact that lighting a film like this keeps the set dressing budget low, smoothing over any rough edges.
There's a lot to admire here, though at its heart The Machine is ultimately a good-looking and smart b-movie - territory that comes with its expected downsides. Caity Lotz is the obvious stand-out performance, both as the optimistic and curious researcher Ava and her robot doppelganger. In the latter half of the film she's impressively controlled physically, making us believe in a creation that's very definitely not human, but neither completely artificial. Unfortunately she's by far the stand-out, with Toby Stephen's scientist hero neither particularly likeable nor convincing as a genius roboticist. Worse is Denis Lawson's chief baddie Thomson - the administrator of the facility. He's mired firmly in one-dimensional villainy; acting like an evil prick for no obvious rhyme or reason.
These criticisms aside, The Machine is a hard film to dislike. At a shade under 90 minutes it's admirably concise, never wasting our time with any extraneous characters or subplots, keeping a laser focus on the central narrative at all times. It's an ambitious endeavour to produce an indie film with this much VFX - let alone to end up with an end product this stylish. So, though it approaches the genre with a kleptomaniac's eye, The Machine is one of the best British science fiction films I've seen in a long time and more than deserves to find its audience.
★★★★
The Machine is released in cinemas on March 21st, and on DVD/Blu-Ray 31st March 2014.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
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A new Terry Gilliam film? A twisty-turny philosophical acid-trip set in an insane future metropolis? Starring Christoph Waltz, Tilda Swinton, David Thewlis, Matt Damon and Mélanie Thierry? Get me a ticket already - no wait, get me five! With that directorial pedigree, a cast stocked with my acting heroes and a really intriguing trailer I figured this was as sure a sure cinematic bet as I could get.
So it's with a sense of crushing disappointment and mild depression that I report that The Zero Theorem is a load of ugly, confusing bullshit. It's probably a bad sign when, mid-way through a movie you realise you're straining every single neuron in an effort to enjoy something - and still finding it confusingly boring. I wanted so much to enjoy this ambitious, intellectual, endlessly imaginative film, served with a bag full of good ideas, interesting visual flourishes and bizarre performances - but it all adds up to, well, zero.
Set in a future city that looks as if every single contemporary trend has been jacked up to 11, The Zero Theorem tells us the story of Qohen Leth (Christoph Waltz), a mentally ill savant living a reclusive life in a rotting church. Referring to himself throughout as 'we', Leth is morbid, fatalist and pessimistic - convinced that he and everyone around him is dying. His principle obsession is waiting for a phone-call that never comes, a phone call that will apparently give him some kind of spiritual salvation. The only reason he ever leaves his sanctuary is for work; crunching "entities" for typically dystopian 'does everything' megacorp Mancom.
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| If only the entire film was this interesting... |
Pleading with his supervisor Joby (David Thewlis) to be able to work from home, Qohen is brough to the attention of the camouflaged and vaguely inhuman 'Management' (Matt Damon) - a combination of Half-Life's G-Man and The Matrix's Agent Smith. He tasks him with solving the titular zero theorem, an equation that will prove that zero equals 100% and apparently therefore that all life is ultimately pointless. This impossible task has driven everyone who's tried to solve it insane, though perhaps Qohen's existing insanity means he has a leg-up on them. The rest of the film is him slowly going (more) bonkers in his church, being visited by a gallery of grotesques who may or not may not be there to help him.
What's most frustrating is that Gilliam's futuropolis looks amazing - for the brief moments we get to experience it. It shares a lot of DNA with Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan and STUDIO4°C's Tekkonkinkreet - though with keenly idiosyncratic Gilliam twists. The city is a blizzard of animated billboards, day-glo synthetic fashion and buzzing futureslang. Everything is extrapolated from modern trends; citizens have iPads all but surgically attached to their hands, infomercials advise you to join 'The Church of Batman the Redeemer' and work appears to be an abstracted videogame with little obvious point.
This is all in the first ten minutes and it's dazzling stuff - so dense and overpowering that it gives you a sense of dislocation, making you feel 'old' and out of place in this sugar dosed, hyper energetic, jam-packed cityscape. At this point I settled into my seat happily, eager for Gilliam to explore the exciting future he'd so deftly sketched. But then it's over - at least 90 minutes of remaining runtime set in one static location. It's an interesting, detailed location granted, but it's entirely shot with nauseating dutch angles and neon lighting. Claustrophobia soon sets in and the film becomes an unrewarding, unpleasant grind.
Without the distraction of the visuals you soon realise that these characters are cyphers; caricatures that spout metaphysical bullshit so overwritten that it'd make the Wachowski's blush. There is nobody remotely relatable in the entire film and the mental tics of our protagonist quickly become deeply annoying. Waltz, who prior to this had an aura of actorly invincibility, is completely at sea, given an utterly thankless role without any redeeming characteristics whatsoever. The rest of the cast seems similarly lost, going through the motions with a vague sense of confusion and probably trusting that everything's going to work out in the edit. It doesn't.
On paper this is very much my kind of film. I always prefer an ambitious failure to a safe success - a preference that makes Gilliam my kinda director. But it's difficult to detect exactly what ambitions this film has. In writing about film it's often useful to try and work out what the original spark of inspiration that gave rise to the film was. Here I genuinely can't tell - is it a parable for dealing with loneliness and isolation through technology? A satire of our already information dense world? Perhaps something that posits technology as a modern religion? All at once? These strands and many more all run through the bloodstream of the film yet none of them are even close to being fully realised ideas.
In the end all you're really left with is some interesting production design and the sense that whatever this is, it's at minimum an individual vision. Granted it's a deeply frustrating and aggressively unfriendly vision (and one with an impressive disregard for commercial viability) but it is, I guess, the film an artist wanted to make. Unfortunately there's so much wrong here that I can't even classify The Zero Theorem as a noble failure. It's just a failure. And that's a damn shame.
★★
The Zero Theorem is on general release from March 14th.
Friday, August 30, 2013
Friday, August 30, 2013
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| Riddick is finally back! ... You know.. Riddick! That guy from Pitch Black and Chronicles of Riddick? Yeah, him. |
It's been thirteen years since Pitch Black. Nine since The Chronicles of Riddick. Was anyone really clamouring for the return of Vin Diesel's fantasy/sci-fi superhero? Pitch Black was an above par science fiction actioner - a B-movie with a few touches of real class - though nowhere near classic status. The ill-advised Chronicles of Riddick was an aesthetic and narrative disaster, an expansion of a daft, confusing universe nobody particularly cared much about in the first place. Chronicles took a well-deserved critical and financial mauling and the franchise was left for dead.
Yet this franchise, much like its central character, has proved difficult to kill. I don't think anybody was expecting Riddick to return, yet here he is, clawing his way back onto screens apparently by sheer determination. Riddick is Vin Diesel's pet character, developed from games of Dungeons and Dragons he played as a kid. Diesel's love for the character is palpable, for example to finance Riddick he leveraged his own house as collateral. The appeal of this film, produced on a relatively $40 million budget, with a very quick shooting schedule is obvious: it's the scrappy underdog in a market of high-gloss focus-grouped assured successes. This is a labour of love. But is it any good?
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
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Finally a genuinely lefty action flick! Elysium is an unapologetically blunt political allegory, designed from the ground up to showcase inequality, cruelty and economic enslavement. But the politics are just the jam stuffed deep inside a delicious cinematic doughnut. The dough surrounding this tasty socialist jam is a visceral science fiction survival story with astonishing special effects, cool as hell future technology and several great performances.
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
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I’ve always detected a faint whiff of fascism in Star Trek that makes me wary. To some extent it’s the militaristic uniforms, but mainly it's the weird paternal, imperialist overtones of the whole thing. Fair enough, Star Trek presents a scientific utopia that’s free of class, racial and sexual discrimination, but then so does Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. I always find a disconnection between the mission to "explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations" and the overtly militaristic, naval overtones of Star Trek.
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Tuesday, April 16, 2013
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| Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Brendan in Brick |
From the off Rian Johnson seems like a pretty cool guy. Having noticed that The Prince Charles Cinema was screening a double feature of Brick coupled with The Maltese Falcon he got in touch with the cinema and offered to turn up and do a question and answer session. Taking a quick break from his holiday in Paris he popped up to London to chat with us about chat with us about film-making for an hour so. The Prince Charles figured that if they’re having the man himself there, they may as well make this a Johnson double feature, and swapped out The Maltese Falcon for his 2012 sci-fi thriller Looper. I’ve already talked about Looper at length here, so for the majority of this article I’ll be talking about Brick.
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
Wednesday, April 10, 2013
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If only Tom Cruise would stick to being in bad films my life would be a lot easier. A constant drip drip of stinkers like the atrocious Jack Reacher, or Rock of Ages would be easy to avoid. But oh no, he's got the arrogance to go and be in good films as well. The bastard. There's an absolute embarrassment of riches in Oblivion, the only fly in the ointment being Cruise. It's a film that succeeds despite Cruise starring in it, rather than because of his presence.
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
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Robot & Frank is the story of a friendship between man and robot. It sounds a bit silly in synopsis; retired jewel thief Frank (Frank Langella) is given a carer robot by his concerned son. After his initial dislike of the nannying robot, the elderly man realises he can train the robot to help him revive his career as an expert cat burglar. But Robot & Frank quickly reveals a surprising amount of depth and sensitivity as it negotiates some timely and unique territory.
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Saturday, July 14, 2012
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In the Coach and Horses last night I was a stranger in a strange land. TFFCon was a meeting set up by 'The Future Fire', who publish new writing in "Speculative, Cyberpunk and Dark fiction". The room was packed with the authors and fans, and worryingly, everyone except me seemed to know everybody else. When I was invited, I figured it sounded like a neat change of pace and was attracted by the fact that they profess to promote fiction with a socio-political, queer, feminist or ecological focus. At the very least I thought it'd be a fun thing to write about after the fact.
It's a bit ironic that with this focus on social inclusiveness that I felt like an interloper. There were conversations where names or references would be dropped, and I would have no idea what was being talked about. Everybody there was nice and friendly, but at the same time I felt like I was interacting with people with a totally different set of cultural reference points to me.
The meat of the night was people reading excerpts from their long-form work, short stories or poems. These varied in quality. There seems to be some difficulty in finding the sweet spot between good writing and good oration. You can have a fantastic bit of writing, but if you mumble through it then it's all for naught. Conversely, you can speak as clear as day, but if what you're reading is terrible, then it's just easy to understand terribleness.
I think one of the main problems with these short readings is that science fiction or fantasy writing focuses on world-building more than pretty much every other genre of writing. Indeed, it seems at times that the world is the focus, and the characters and plot are an afterthought. So how do you pick an excerpt to read? If you leap right into the action then you're throwing the audience into something they cannot possibly hope to understand. This is a perfectly effective literary device in book form, where the reader can trust that all of these out there concepts will be explained further down the line, but in short form it tends to lead to confusion. On the other hand, if you do a reading that's more focussed on the nitty gritty of your fictional space then you run the risk of it being overly dry and technical. Without some kind of emotional connection why should we care about your fictional universe? Is it enough to just admire someone's imagination in setting it up?
The objectives of 'The Future Fire' in providing inclusive and socially conscious fiction are laudable, but on some level seem to me to run counter to the genres they promote. Part of the allure of science fiction and fantasy writing has to be a sense of escapism, to spend a few hours in worlds where good and evil are clearly defined and the individual can empower themselves or realise they're a 'chosen one'. I think the type of fiction that 'The Future Fire' publishes is a reaction against cliche on some level, but with mixed results. Naturally, a talented author can (and should, I think) make fiction in any setting relatable to the life of the reader, but the further away from a recognisable reality we travel, the harder it becomes to explore social issues in a concrete way.
That's why I think the best things I heard last night were those which took absurd concepts and wrapped them up in the mundane. Tori Truslow's work in progress piece about a gay royal wedding in 2030s London was both thoughtful, considerate and, importantly, funny. It successfully reframed the contemporary debate about gay marriage through the lens of the future, a tactic which exposes modern arguments against it as regressive and shortsighted. There were also some hilarious and creepy extrapolations of how social media and surveillance technology might combine. My favourite was the notion of a sentient Boris Bike (now in the future referred to simply as a 'Boris') implying that someone might need to lose a bit of weight, or that they should ride in order to gain 'Oyster Points'. I find myself more impressed with someone that can twist recognisable aspects of the modern world into a believable nightmare than with some of the other readings which seemed to recombine existing fictional devices in a different order rather than to innovate.
The success of this piece also underlines the effectiveness of humour in conveying a message. There is a rich British tradition of satirising the modern world through logically extending trends into the future, the most notable example being Judge Dredd's Mega-City One, or Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan, both of which Truslow's reading reminded me of. Along similar lines, another reading I enjoyed was Paul Graham Raven's surreal story about an editor being a badger (incidentally, small woodland creatures popped up alarmingly frequently in various stories throughout the night). I'm a fan of stories which rely on one very surreal aspect in an otherwise realistic universe and explore the consequences and effects of this one change. Again, the author grounded the fantastic in something we can identify with, both in the behaviour of the characters and the world they inhabit, while also keeping a somewhat ironic and detached viewpoint on events. A great recipe for success.
At one point in the night there was an experiment where authors read stories in their native languages of Portuguese and Polish. The Brazilian author, Fabio Fernandes, seemed to have taken the time to pick something that worked lyrically without necessarily having to understand the content. Even so, there were handholds for the English-speaking audience to cling to. Names like Orville and Wilbur Wright, or Henry Ford were easily comprehensible, giving us an (extremely) vague idea of what Fernandes was talking about. Being able to understand just a few words is almost like having a Rosetta Stone, and rightly or wrongly we feel we might have a chance of working out some kind of meaning from it.
Unfortunately, the reading in Polish was less successful. The author chose to read a seemingly random page from his diary. Telling us this this lowers our expectations dramatically, as does telling the audience that this is a mere example of what the Polish language sounds like. That's all well and good, but I'd at least like to think I'm missing out on something wonderful rather than not being able to understand his personal record of a dinner in Islington.
It's telling that throughout the night there was no real criticism of any piece of work. There were a few really bad readings, but you wouldn't be able to tell from hearing or seeing the audience. With a few small exceptions, everyone politely and quietly paid attention to the person speaking, even if what they were reading out wasn't very good. At times like this the atmosphere seems to transform into that of a self-help group; a place where anyone can present their work and get validation from their peers. A telling moment was at the end when an author got a response from their publisher about their book and read out the praise and criticism to the group. It had a mild tinge of the confessional to it, of self-flagellation, and at that moment I fully appreciated the sense of community and mutual support in the room. I still have my suspicions that events like this function as a kind of echo-chamber of praise, but if the worst case scenario is that someone writing godawful fiction gets a boost to their confidence then how harmful can that be?
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
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‘Sound Of My Voice’ is a modest, smart little film about the dangers of faith and the nature of belief. It centres around a cult led by a woman who claims to have travelled back in time from the year 2054 in order to save a group of ‘chosen ones’ from danger. Our protagonists are documentary film-makers who set out to expose her as a fraud, but become more involved than they’d originally planned. The film is co-written by director Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling, who stars in the film with Christopher Denholm and Nicole Vicius.
It’s a lean film, clocking in at only 85 minutes, but it possesses an admirable confidence in its premise. The ‘time travel’ genre is riddled with clichés and plot holes, and it’s a credit to the film that it largely avoids these. It does this not through some rigorous application of logic (as in the incredibly complex ‘Primer), rather, the film chooses not to dwell on the hows and whys and tends to treat events poetically rather than mechanically. As Maggie tells it, she just woke up in a motel bathtub one day and stumbled around until someone realised she was from the future.
Our viewpoints into this strange cult are Peter (Christopher Denholm) and Lorna (Nicole Vicius), two documentary film-makers. Peter is motivated by the death of his mother from cancer, she was in a cult and refused any medical treatment. Lorna is Peter’s girlfriend, an ex-model and party girl who’s cleaned up her life and is trying to do something of worth. They’re a good pair, and as audience substitutes express just the right amount of incredulity at the cult’s strange behaviour. During the cult meetings, they’re ‘undercover’, which adds quite a bit of tension to these scenes. The audience is in a conspiracy with the characters during these scenes, and the actors do a great job in expressive but subtle non-verbal communication. They manage to say an awful lot with the occasional glance to the other, with a flick of their eyes, or with a suppressed smile.
Christopher Denham as ‘Peter’ has the largest emotional arc in the film, and has the most at stake personally. It’s apparent to us pretty early on that his documentary is a revenge on the type of system he hold responsible for killing his mother. He’s a rational character, though somewhat self-centred and begins the film with absolute surety that he’s doing the right thing. Denham is very good at showing this self-assuredness, and how it begins to crumble as the film progresses. In an examination of the nature of faith and belief it’s quite refreshing to have our skeptical protagonist be eminently relatable and even when things get a bit weirder than he anticipates, he never completely loses his sense of self awareness. With such a nice bit of efficient characterisation, it’s a pity that Nicole Vicius’ ‘Lorna’ doesn’t get quite as much development. Her background as an ex-‘party girl’ seems to put her in the position of someone who would be susceptible to being given purpose by a cult, but the film never really explores this in enough detail. She is shown as getting into the spirit of things a lot more than Peter though, and has a great, tense scene in the woods with a ‘true believer’ cult member. In a tightly focused film like this, and without an overt motivation, she tends be used as a sounding board for Peter’s ideas and thoughts, only really gaining agency in the final act.
Brit Marling, as ‘Maggie’, the woman who claims to be from the future, is the magnetic lynchpin of the film around which everything else revolves. The film doesn’t waste time - it is not long before we meet Maggie, who’s on screen within the first 10 minutes or so. Even so, her introduction instils in the audience precisely the kind of religious awe that she inspires in her on-screen followers. We understand pretty quickly why they believe her farfetched story of being sent from the future. Her pure white robes, controlled body language and long wavy hair make us view her as holy and angelic. But it’s explicitly calculated religious iconography, within the context of the film it is shown to be designed to make us and her onscreen followers react to her with reverence. This illusion is consciously stripped back at various points, and we see her more as a relatable person rather than as a messiah.
The question that we puzzle over throughout the film is whether she is telling the truth? Is she consciously manipulating her followers? Is she mentally ill and being manipulated herself ? Could she genuinely be from the future? As usual, pondering the question is far more interesting than knowing the answer, and we’re teased back and forth, sometimes being lead one way, and sometimes another. As such, our (and our protagonist's) perception of the character swings from awe to suspicion and back again throughout the narrative. It’s always clear though, that whether she is from the future or not, that there is something special about her.
There are two scenes which stand out as exemplary bits of acting from Marling. The first is where she breaks down Peter’s emotional barriers and gives him what is later described as ‘an emotional orgasm’. Marling’s characterisation of Maggie is so strong by this point in the film that we already accept that susceptible people would follow her, but this scene proves that she has ‘something else’ that allows her to see through people’s lies and into their past. The character of Maggie is consistently tactile, touching and rubbing people, trying to get them to be what she considers honest with themselves. In this scene she asks questions about Peter’s past, probing him both physically and mentally, trying to get him to admit that he’s emotionally “lame”. While this is seen as ostensibly therapeutic by the rest of the cult members, we see in close up Maggie’s subtle and sadistic predatory glee. Breaking someone down into a sobbing, vomiting mess obviously counts as a ‘win’ for her, but even so this still supports both readings of the character. If you’re working on the basis that she is from the future and wants to help her followers, then the emotional breakdown she induces must be for the good of Peter. If you’re assuming that she’s a con artist, then this scene is an exhibition of her talent for turning sceptical resistance into malleability.
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| Peter (Christopher Denholm) and Maggie (Brit Marling) |
The second scene I’d like to highlight reverses the roles. Again the scene takes place with Maggie holding court among her followers, but this time she is the one being interrogated by them. She describes music in the post apocalyptic future as not being recorded, being passed around vocally, with people teaching each other songs in a vocal tradition. Quite reasonably, her curious followers ask her to sing them a song from the future. Suddenly the spotlight is on her, and it’s fascinating to watch her squirm. She lamely claims that she doesn’t sing, but it’s quickly clear that this isn’t going to be good enough. Asking her disciples to close their eyes, the camera unblinkingly focuses on her face. She looks nervous, cornered, and extremely suspicious. Nervously she starts singing, first tentatively, then more confidently. It’s a good song and for a moment she looks relieved like she’s managed to dodge a bullet. Then one of her followers points out that she just sang ‘Dreams’ by the Cranberries. “But, that was a song from the 90s, like, the 1990s”. Immediately she makes a lame excuse that someone called “Bennett” made it famous in the future. It’s a wonderful bit of acting as she’s cornered, thinks she’s escaped, but then is seemingly found out. When she was stalling, was she trying to think of a song obscure enough that not many people would automatically recognise it? Or was she actually trying to think of a song from the future?
It’s interesting that even among the audience there are two ways to view this scene. I knew the song sounded familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Before it was revealed as a Cranberries song my view of the scene was that the character had miraculously plucked a great song from nowhere. “Hey, this is good – maybe she is from the future.” Meanwhile, the friend who accompanied me to the cinema immediately recognised the song and straightaway concluded that the character must be a fraud. Throughout the film Marling’s performance swings subtly between her being a villain or a saviour, and her actions can be interpreted as either. Without the audience being able to interpret her performance in two ways the film would fall flat on its face. It’s impressive to say the least.
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| Magnetic and creepy. |
The film is minimalist in both structure and in its production design. Most of the cult action takes place in a calm, empty cream room with very little distractions and with the exception of the finale there is no obvious location filming. But, as I said, this is a modest film that recognises its limitations and plays to its strengths. The script is intelligent, fairly pacy (although it does slightly drag before the conclusion) and does the smart thing of giving us just enough information to come to our own conclusions as to what’s going on. It’s difficult to pigeonhole this film into a genre, on one hand the time travel elements seem to peg it as science fiction, but the film goes out of its way never to explore the mechanics or rules of its time travel, so it strays into the realm of magic realism. So if you’re the kind of viewer that wants everything tied up neatly and explained, then this film is likely to frustrate you with its opacity.
Fairly uniquely, the ‘chapter’ numbers pop up throughout the film as intertitles. It’s an interestingly overt structural device, one which constantly reminds us that we’re watching a fiction. The use of this device demonstrates that whilst the director and writers are concerned with philosophical issues, they also recognise the importance of the narrative. The film is occasionally a little too coy plotwise, and we are generally invited to deduce connections rather than rely on direct exposition. In one sense this means the film is ultimately slightly frustrating - the final scenes definitely raise more questions than they answer. In fact, the events of the film could easily be condensed into the first act of another, more epic and action-packed film. Having said that, the climax is undeniably powerful and is only improved by the ambiguity surrounding it.
Batmanglij is admirably focused for a first time director. He recognises the limitations of his budget he’s got to work with and doesn’t over-reach, but at the same time it’s clear that he knows how to accentuate what does work, namely three great central performances (one of them outstanding) and a smart, well-paced, literate script. I hope he doesn’t abandon his restraint when he’s given a bigger budget, as he’s proved here that less can very often be much much more.
'Sound Of My Voice' is on general release from 3rd August 2012
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