I have just wasted 88 minutes and am writing this posting to warn you so that you might avoid doing the same. Having recently seen violent action movies set in historic times: 'Centurion' (2010) about the destruction of the IX Legion in Scotland; 'The Eagle' (2011) about the attempt to recover the IX Legion's standard twenty years later and 'Apocalypto' (2006) about a tribesman escaping from capture by the Mayan Empire in 1527 just as the Spanish are landing, I bought a second hand copy of 'Valhalla Rising' (2009) which is set in the 11th century in parts of Scotland where the Norwegians were to maintain holdings until the 15th century. The lead character is called One-Eye and is played by Mads Mikkelsen one of the best known Scandinavian actors in Britain. The box of the movie warns that it is violent. It begins with One-Eye as a gladiator for a Scottish lord to win money. He is persuaded to sell One-Eye to a neighbouring lord and during the transfer One-Eye escapes along with a boy who was charged with feeding and securing him between fights. They fall in with a group of crusaders who seem to have just killed some male unbelievers and stripped the women. They are heading to Middle East to fight in the crusade. They persuade One-Eye to go along. Out at sea they are becalmed for many days in a thick fog. When it clears they are miraculously in North America. One-by-one they are all killed by natives firing very accurate arrows and only seen at the end of the movie, others kill each other until only the boy remains.
The three movies I mentioned are not top quality, but they have characters, they have dialogue, they have jeopardy, decent photography and they have narrative. Aside from the photography which even then is often limited to rainy glens, 'Valhalla Rising' is lacking in all of these. There is very little story and very little dialogue. Frequently all the actors simply stand in poses like a tableau with no purpose to it simply to waste more time. There is actually not a great deal of violence it is bunched up at the beginning and end and scenes are often repeated as One-Eye keeps getting premonitions of what is going to happen including his own killing. These premonitions add to the very psychedelic feel of the movie. At one stage for no reason they crusaders and One-Eye and the boy all drink from a bottle and then seem to go on a hallucinogenic trip, wading in mud, piling up stones and basically zoning out, again adding nothing to the story. It might be metaphysical. Certainly you might think that One-Eye represents the god Odin from Norse myths as he had one eye pecked out to gain enlightenment. However, the bulk of the movie involves men wandering around craggy areas in dull weather in Scotland and largely sunny weather in America. They achieve nothing except to die in different ways. There is no epic battle or indeed any real sacrifice or redemption. They walk around, they die. That is it. This movie looks like a student project or one of those psychedelic shorts from the early 1970s.
Given how many good movie projects never get made and even those that are often do not get distributed, it seems criminal that such a poor piece of work should have been green-lighted, made and distributed. Mikkelsen and the other actors should be embarrassed to have appeared in this movie. I am angry that it was made and will take more care with what I buy even second hand, in the future. Do not bother watching this movie; there is probably no point even if you are high on drugs, what you are imagining is likely to be far more engaging. I will certainly stay far away from anything written or directed by Nicolas Winding Refn and why he needed Roy Jacobsen to help him, let alone Matthew Read for supposed 'additional writing' to quote Imdb, I have no idea. There is so little narrative and dialogue in it, I imagine they did it all during their lunch breaks. A real crime that this movie ever got further than a discussion in a pub.
Showing posts with label movie comments. Show all posts
Showing posts with label movie comments. Show all posts
Sunday, 8 June 2014
Monday, 9 January 2012
The List For 2011 Which Interested Me The Most
For some reason many in the media seem an urge at the end of the year to compile lists usually related to things that have occurred in the preceding year. I suppose it is a very easy way to fill up newspaper and webspace without really having to put much effort into composing something. 'The Guardian' which along with the BBC news website, is my media source of choice was not immune to this tendency. However, rather than the 'Five Things We've Learned About Fashion' (despite it being penned by the very sexy Jess Cartner-Morley) or 'Five Things We've Learned About Television/Art/Food/Science' and definitely skirting Grace Dent's 'Five Things We've Learned About Celebrity' I was ironically drawn to the more eclectic almost surreal 'Famous List Words': lists produced by a range of 'celebrities' including former Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling and teleivsion presenter Lorraine Kelly to the puppet character Sooty. The items listed included Scottish anthems, top people called Jones and favourite past shapes (with spaghetti, penne and fusili rounding out the top three). The one that attracted my attention most and I felt was worthy of comment was '8 Movie Characters You Wouldn't Want To Fuck With' as selected by current pop star Jordan Stephens (born 1992) of Rizzle Kicks, a hip hop group from Brighton, southern England.
Of the movies listed I have only seen six but hope that I know enough of the work of the actors featured to comment on the list as a whole and I may come back to this posting if I see the remaining two movies. I replicate the list here for reference with some additional information for ease of subsequent discussion:
1) Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills in 'Taken' (2008) - Literally slaps up most of Paris in 96 hours.
2) Brad Pitt as Mickey O'Neil in 'Snatch' (2000) - One-hit wonder.
3) Gary Oldman as Stansfield in 'Leon' (1994) - No one plays gun-toting villains like Gary Oldman
4) Vincent Cassel as Jacques in 'Mesrine' (2 parts; 2008) - He holds up a judge at gunpoint. Enough said.
5) Keanu Reeves as Neo in 'The Matrix' (1999; but presumably too in the sequels both 2003 in which the character becomes stronger) - Can literally do ANYTHING.
6) Denzel Washington as Eli in 'The Book of Eli' (2010) - Can batter people while wearing a backpack.
7) Samuel L. Jackson as Jules in 'Pulp Fiction' (1994) - Just wants to be the shepherd.
8) Sir Ben Kingsley as Don Logan in 'Sexy Beast' (2000) - Doesn't take no for an answer.
This is the kind of list you would expect men in their thirties sitting slumped in front of the television, perhaps portrayed by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in the movie version. It is notable that all the characters are male and what is interesting is that what seems to have got them into the list is not simply that they can be physically violent but also that they have an attitude. The nature of each is very different, but you could argue that all are self-righteous, and in a couple of cases righteous too. I suppose that is something that is very scary about such an opponent that they have blind faith in what they are doing and believe that to challenge that is utterly unacceptable even if, on an objective moral judgement their own behaviour would be condemned. This is particularly the case with Stansfield and Logan, both of whom are evil men and yet it is their indignation that anyone would challenge their world view that gives them real nastiness. Jules is a little like this but his indignation really stems less from his world view which in the course of the movie seems to be moving towards some kind of Christian religious revelation but rather irritations to his day-to-day life; he is most angered not by immoral behaviour but by people disturbing his coffee drinking. That mundanity of violence is another aspect of evil and shows a complex character who seems to feel that he is moving towards good whilst at the same time behaving in an evil way without thought.
Eli and Neo are different, both being at least prophets if no messiahs. I have not seen 'The Book of Eli' but it is about a blind traveller carrying a braille copy of the Bible across the USA thirty years after a nuclear apocalypse. In many ways it panders to the US view that much of the population of North America could survive a nuclear war and in some ways the world would be a better place if American society could start from scratch, in this way the premise is very similar to 'The Postman' (novel 1985; movie 1997). Having Washington play a blind character also references martial arts movies with blind action heroes. In parts of the movie Eli seems able to dodge bullets as if protected. Thus his violence fighting against Carnegie played by Gary Oldman, is righteous as he is seemingly on a mission from God. Washington's action characters tend to be rather stoic almost relaxed in many of his movies such as 'Devil in the Blue Dress' (1995), 'Fallen' (1998), 'The Siege' (1998), 'Man on Fire' (2004) and especially 'Deja Vu' (2004). Keanu Reeves struggles as an actor and whilst Washington can show a wider range of emotions Reeves is a one-note actor. 'The Matrix' is engaging due to its premise, but Reeves is so emotionless that he might as well have played a construct of the computer system. Yes, Neo can do everything, but in many ways that is what makes him unappealing. There are times when we feel Neo is in jeopardy, not through Reeves's portrayal but because it is explained to us, yet ultimately we know he has the power to overcome everything and an invulnerable hero is no hero at all. Even Stansfield and Logan have a vulnerability if their plans do no go right. They suffer the double hit of things not working out and them becoming apoplectic that other people have derailed what they felt was the thing that had to be done.
Gary Oldman seems to be coming down to two settings. One is a quirky almost pleasantly, camply sinister bad guy as he has portrayed not only in 'Leon' but also almost taking off that role in 'The Fifth Element' (1997) and producing something similar in 'Airforce One' (1997), 'Lost in Space' (1998) and more recently voicing Lord Shen in 'Kung Fu Panda 2' (2011) and funnily I always see him in mind's eye rather than Tim Roth, playing Archibald Cunningham in 'Rob Roy' (1995) - perhaps since they were in 'Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead' (1990) together. The other is a warmer, usually bearded character, notably in the Harry Potter series (movies feauring Oldman 2004-11) and perhaps 'Red Riding Hood' (2011) though I have yet to see that. To some degree he seems to have lost the range of his early work notably 'Sid and Nancy' (1986) and 'Prick Up Your Ears' (1987) which may explain his movie hiatus 2001-4. I find Oldman's warmer characters far more credible than his evil ones which he tends to ham up. This was no doubt intentional in 'The Fifth Element' which was a light-hearted movie, but I feel weakens his portrayal in 'Leon'. His best bad character is probably the title role in 'Bram Stoker's Dracula' (1992). The elements of the mundanity and self-righteousness that makes the others listed here often so sharp is lost in Oldman's ostentatious portrayals.
Brad Pitt plays against type in 'Snatch' which is a gritty movie. It has elements of humour but having lived in East London, I also felt it managed to catch the everyday harshness and easy criminality of the area. Pitt plays an Irishman rather than an American (something he also did in 'The Devil's Own' (1997)) whose dialogue is deliberately inaccessible. He is a traveller who also bareknuckle boxes, an illegal sport in the UK. The part draws on the muscular build Pitt gained for 'Fight Club' (1999) through boxing and other martial arts. O'Neil is a violent man for his living but that fits the context in which he lives. Ultimately what he does is for his family especially when their caravans are torched by gangsters. Thus, while not showing the indignation of Stansfield or Logan, O'Neill still adheres to a rule, one which I think would be more broadly accepted in UK society and probably even more so in the USA or looking out for your family and taking revenge on anyone who harmed them. I think people like his character because people underestimate O'Neil and yet he bides his time until he can have the situation to his greatest advantage. The character in 'Snatch' that I despise is Brick Top portrayed by Alan Ford, who like Logan and Stansfield creates his own selfish rules and viciously punishes anyone who steps over the line of his self-imposed laws. These people believe they are in the 'right' because they have created their own 'moral' universe simply based on their base desires.
I think the reason why Mills is at the top of the list is for much the same reason that O'Neill is favoured. Mills is a retired CIA operative (as with war veterans, the USA seems to be full of such men) who goes after the slavers who snatch his daughter while on holiday in France. He is the manifestation of millions of fathers sitting in the audience imagining what they would do if their own daughter was taken. Mills shows a lot of paranoia in the early part of the movie, which actually turns out to be well placed. 'Taken' taps right into the fear that parents especially in the UK and USA have about even letting their 18 year old children out of their sight and into the dangerous place called 'Europe' (most British people do not see the UK as part of Europe). Mills has both to fight authority in the typical way of many cop and spy movies as well as beating up and shooting the bad guys who turn out to be the 'acceptable' racial stereotyped enemy of the past two decades: Arabs. Mills does appear vulnerable and he appears human too; he seems motivated by the best of intentions, which for the average cinema goer is defence of family well above religious or other moral motives. It seems no surprise that Neeson is starring in 'Taken 2' (2012) set in Istanbul and featuring Mills and his wife taken prisoner by the father of the man he killed in the first movie.
Finally I turn to Jacques Mesrine. Unlike the other characters the two movies featuring Cassell are biographies of a renowned French gangster from the 1960s and 1970s who carried out the acts featured in the movies for real even if these have been dramatised. I have not seen these movies by Cassell is an accomplished actor. His bady guys can be rather camp like Oldman's, for example in 'Dobermann' (1997) [Tcheky Karyo as Inspecteur Sauver Cristini is actually more terrifying in that movie], 'Brotherhood of the Wolf' (2000), 'Ocean's Twelve' (2004) and 'Ocean's Thirteen' (2006) and I hope has been able to channel more of the edginess which was apparent in 'La Haine' (1995).
Even though Stephens is only 20, he has produced an interesting list that certainly provoked thoughts for me. I think what it shows is that a 'hard nut' character in movies is not necessarily the most violent character, there has to be something more. Perhaps it is the righteouness of the character that makes them appear unstoppable that adds that edge to what they do and means that you would not want to cross their paths as you would know that they would never let up. In some cases, notably Mills and O'Neil this gives heart to the audience. In reality we know that if our child is snatched there is very little that we can do and the authorities have very little more power, so being shown even a fictional case of someone getting something back, some revenge at least for their family heartens us as viewers and it also allows us to watch the violence without feeling uneased by it.
Of the movies listed I have only seen six but hope that I know enough of the work of the actors featured to comment on the list as a whole and I may come back to this posting if I see the remaining two movies. I replicate the list here for reference with some additional information for ease of subsequent discussion:
1) Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills in 'Taken' (2008) - Literally slaps up most of Paris in 96 hours.
2) Brad Pitt as Mickey O'Neil in 'Snatch' (2000) - One-hit wonder.
3) Gary Oldman as Stansfield in 'Leon' (1994) - No one plays gun-toting villains like Gary Oldman
4) Vincent Cassel as Jacques in 'Mesrine' (2 parts; 2008) - He holds up a judge at gunpoint. Enough said.
5) Keanu Reeves as Neo in 'The Matrix' (1999; but presumably too in the sequels both 2003 in which the character becomes stronger) - Can literally do ANYTHING.
6) Denzel Washington as Eli in 'The Book of Eli' (2010) - Can batter people while wearing a backpack.
7) Samuel L. Jackson as Jules in 'Pulp Fiction' (1994) - Just wants to be the shepherd.
8) Sir Ben Kingsley as Don Logan in 'Sexy Beast' (2000) - Doesn't take no for an answer.
This is the kind of list you would expect men in their thirties sitting slumped in front of the television, perhaps portrayed by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in the movie version. It is notable that all the characters are male and what is interesting is that what seems to have got them into the list is not simply that they can be physically violent but also that they have an attitude. The nature of each is very different, but you could argue that all are self-righteous, and in a couple of cases righteous too. I suppose that is something that is very scary about such an opponent that they have blind faith in what they are doing and believe that to challenge that is utterly unacceptable even if, on an objective moral judgement their own behaviour would be condemned. This is particularly the case with Stansfield and Logan, both of whom are evil men and yet it is their indignation that anyone would challenge their world view that gives them real nastiness. Jules is a little like this but his indignation really stems less from his world view which in the course of the movie seems to be moving towards some kind of Christian religious revelation but rather irritations to his day-to-day life; he is most angered not by immoral behaviour but by people disturbing his coffee drinking. That mundanity of violence is another aspect of evil and shows a complex character who seems to feel that he is moving towards good whilst at the same time behaving in an evil way without thought.
Eli and Neo are different, both being at least prophets if no messiahs. I have not seen 'The Book of Eli' but it is about a blind traveller carrying a braille copy of the Bible across the USA thirty years after a nuclear apocalypse. In many ways it panders to the US view that much of the population of North America could survive a nuclear war and in some ways the world would be a better place if American society could start from scratch, in this way the premise is very similar to 'The Postman' (novel 1985; movie 1997). Having Washington play a blind character also references martial arts movies with blind action heroes. In parts of the movie Eli seems able to dodge bullets as if protected. Thus his violence fighting against Carnegie played by Gary Oldman, is righteous as he is seemingly on a mission from God. Washington's action characters tend to be rather stoic almost relaxed in many of his movies such as 'Devil in the Blue Dress' (1995), 'Fallen' (1998), 'The Siege' (1998), 'Man on Fire' (2004) and especially 'Deja Vu' (2004). Keanu Reeves struggles as an actor and whilst Washington can show a wider range of emotions Reeves is a one-note actor. 'The Matrix' is engaging due to its premise, but Reeves is so emotionless that he might as well have played a construct of the computer system. Yes, Neo can do everything, but in many ways that is what makes him unappealing. There are times when we feel Neo is in jeopardy, not through Reeves's portrayal but because it is explained to us, yet ultimately we know he has the power to overcome everything and an invulnerable hero is no hero at all. Even Stansfield and Logan have a vulnerability if their plans do no go right. They suffer the double hit of things not working out and them becoming apoplectic that other people have derailed what they felt was the thing that had to be done.
Gary Oldman seems to be coming down to two settings. One is a quirky almost pleasantly, camply sinister bad guy as he has portrayed not only in 'Leon' but also almost taking off that role in 'The Fifth Element' (1997) and producing something similar in 'Airforce One' (1997), 'Lost in Space' (1998) and more recently voicing Lord Shen in 'Kung Fu Panda 2' (2011) and funnily I always see him in mind's eye rather than Tim Roth, playing Archibald Cunningham in 'Rob Roy' (1995) - perhaps since they were in 'Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead' (1990) together. The other is a warmer, usually bearded character, notably in the Harry Potter series (movies feauring Oldman 2004-11) and perhaps 'Red Riding Hood' (2011) though I have yet to see that. To some degree he seems to have lost the range of his early work notably 'Sid and Nancy' (1986) and 'Prick Up Your Ears' (1987) which may explain his movie hiatus 2001-4. I find Oldman's warmer characters far more credible than his evil ones which he tends to ham up. This was no doubt intentional in 'The Fifth Element' which was a light-hearted movie, but I feel weakens his portrayal in 'Leon'. His best bad character is probably the title role in 'Bram Stoker's Dracula' (1992). The elements of the mundanity and self-righteousness that makes the others listed here often so sharp is lost in Oldman's ostentatious portrayals.
Brad Pitt plays against type in 'Snatch' which is a gritty movie. It has elements of humour but having lived in East London, I also felt it managed to catch the everyday harshness and easy criminality of the area. Pitt plays an Irishman rather than an American (something he also did in 'The Devil's Own' (1997)) whose dialogue is deliberately inaccessible. He is a traveller who also bareknuckle boxes, an illegal sport in the UK. The part draws on the muscular build Pitt gained for 'Fight Club' (1999) through boxing and other martial arts. O'Neil is a violent man for his living but that fits the context in which he lives. Ultimately what he does is for his family especially when their caravans are torched by gangsters. Thus, while not showing the indignation of Stansfield or Logan, O'Neill still adheres to a rule, one which I think would be more broadly accepted in UK society and probably even more so in the USA or looking out for your family and taking revenge on anyone who harmed them. I think people like his character because people underestimate O'Neil and yet he bides his time until he can have the situation to his greatest advantage. The character in 'Snatch' that I despise is Brick Top portrayed by Alan Ford, who like Logan and Stansfield creates his own selfish rules and viciously punishes anyone who steps over the line of his self-imposed laws. These people believe they are in the 'right' because they have created their own 'moral' universe simply based on their base desires.
I think the reason why Mills is at the top of the list is for much the same reason that O'Neill is favoured. Mills is a retired CIA operative (as with war veterans, the USA seems to be full of such men) who goes after the slavers who snatch his daughter while on holiday in France. He is the manifestation of millions of fathers sitting in the audience imagining what they would do if their own daughter was taken. Mills shows a lot of paranoia in the early part of the movie, which actually turns out to be well placed. 'Taken' taps right into the fear that parents especially in the UK and USA have about even letting their 18 year old children out of their sight and into the dangerous place called 'Europe' (most British people do not see the UK as part of Europe). Mills has both to fight authority in the typical way of many cop and spy movies as well as beating up and shooting the bad guys who turn out to be the 'acceptable' racial stereotyped enemy of the past two decades: Arabs. Mills does appear vulnerable and he appears human too; he seems motivated by the best of intentions, which for the average cinema goer is defence of family well above religious or other moral motives. It seems no surprise that Neeson is starring in 'Taken 2' (2012) set in Istanbul and featuring Mills and his wife taken prisoner by the father of the man he killed in the first movie.
Finally I turn to Jacques Mesrine. Unlike the other characters the two movies featuring Cassell are biographies of a renowned French gangster from the 1960s and 1970s who carried out the acts featured in the movies for real even if these have been dramatised. I have not seen these movies by Cassell is an accomplished actor. His bady guys can be rather camp like Oldman's, for example in 'Dobermann' (1997) [Tcheky Karyo as Inspecteur Sauver Cristini is actually more terrifying in that movie], 'Brotherhood of the Wolf' (2000), 'Ocean's Twelve' (2004) and 'Ocean's Thirteen' (2006) and I hope has been able to channel more of the edginess which was apparent in 'La Haine' (1995).
Even though Stephens is only 20, he has produced an interesting list that certainly provoked thoughts for me. I think what it shows is that a 'hard nut' character in movies is not necessarily the most violent character, there has to be something more. Perhaps it is the righteouness of the character that makes them appear unstoppable that adds that edge to what they do and means that you would not want to cross their paths as you would know that they would never let up. In some cases, notably Mills and O'Neil this gives heart to the audience. In reality we know that if our child is snatched there is very little that we can do and the authorities have very little more power, so being shown even a fictional case of someone getting something back, some revenge at least for their family heartens us as viewers and it also allows us to watch the violence without feeling uneased by it.
Saturday, 3 December 2011
The Movie 'Gorky Park' (1983)
It is interesting where you can pick up unexpected movies. I guess this is nothing new, I remember petrol stations selling video cassettes in the 1980s and these days you can get DVDs not only there but from newsagents and supermarkets too. Sometimes it seems incredibly random what is available and especially for movies that a more than a couple of years old you do sometimes wonder how they were selected to be put on the shelf. It was through a supermarket that I recently picked up a copy of 'Gorky Park' (1983) for £3. Due to my love of crime authors like Leonardo Sciascia, Josef Škvorecký and to a lesser degree Philip Kerr, I have always been drawn to detective stories set in regimes which prevent the normal processes of 'standard' crime fiction, i.e. that the detective finds the criminal and s/he is brought to justice. In dictatorships with their vested interests and often competing factions, the resolution of the crime is often the detective's least concern especially when set beside staying alive in the internecine wars between different factions of the regime.
Thus, it is of no surprise that I was drawn to 'Gorky Park'. Around 3 million copies of the book, written by American Martin Cruz Smith and first published in 1981, were sold. It remained in the US book charts for 144 weeks in the 1980s in hardback and paperback editions. I do not know the sales figures for the UK but they must have been similarly high. Cruz Smith went on to write another six books featuring the same detective Arkady Renko down to 2010, however, the original novel remains the most successful book he has produced, though he has been publishing since 1970. It is difficult to place precisely why the novel was such a success. I think, in part, it was due to the setting of the USSR at the time of the so-called Second Cold War. For English-speaking readers it was an alien setting. In addition, the hero of the novel is a high-ranking Soviet police officer, Captain Arkady Renko, Chief Investigator in the Moscow Militsiya, which despite its designation (i.e. 'militia') and military ranks, was the police force. In this first novel the prime suspect is an American businessman, Jack Osborne, a dealer in sable furs, which at the time the USSR had a monopoly over. Thus, for the reader, the usual sympathies are over-turned even though Renko roots out corruption in the Soviet system rather than viewing it as an idyll. Ironically, in many ways he is purifying the crumbling USSR of its corruption. Unlike many Soviets, however, he views the West (he visits the USA briefly in 'Gorky Park') as similarly corrupt.
Aside from these perspectives which differ from most English-language detective stories, there is an interesting crime. Three bodies, two men and a woman are found in Moscow's Gorky Park with their faces and fingertips sliced off to prevent identification. Investigating the crime drags Renko not only into the business of Osborne but also KGB officers and high-ranking Militsiya officers, thus creating the kind of vested interest tension that you look for in such novels. Renko is at risk of his life for much of the novel and one of his men, Senior Lieutenant Pasha is shot dead by a KGB agent.
Anyway, when I saw the DVD I decided to buy it, to pass some time in my lodgings watching it on my laptop. I had seen it before, but cannot remember how long ago and in some ways it impressed me less than the first time. However, this does not mean it is not worthwhile watching. The movie was directed by British director Michael Apted (born 1941) who has directed numerous movies but is probably best known for 'The World Is Not Enough' (1999) and 'Enigma' (2002). The screenplay was written by British scriptwriter and playwright, Dennis Potter (1935-94), probably best known for his television dramas, notably 'Pennies from Heaven' (1978), 'The Singing Detective' (1986) and 'Brimstone and Treacle' (1987 adapted by himself from his 1982 play).
The movie has loads of British actors in it. Ian Bannen (1928-99) plays Chief Prosecutor (Lieutenant-Colonel?) Iamskoy, Renko's boss; Michael Elphick (1946-2002) plays Senior Lieutenant Pasha; Richard Griffiths (born 1947) plays Anton, a lawyer friend of Renko's; Ian McDiarmid (born 1944) plays Professor Andree,v an archaeologist who reconstructs faces from skulls something commonly seen in programmes nowadays but a novelty in 1983; Rikki Fulton (1924-2004) plays the leading KGB antagonist, Major Pribluda; and Alexei Sayle (born 1952) plays petty criminal Golodkin, interesting given his Russian heritage. I guess this fits in with the casting of British actors in Hollywood movies to play all kind of European roles. The stars: William Hurt (born 1950) as Renko, Lee Marvin (1924-87) as Osbourne and Brian Dennehy (born 1938) who plays New York detective William Kirwill who comes to Moscow seeking his dead brother were all American; the sole female character, Irina Asanova, was played by Polish actress Joanna Pacula (born 1957).
Given that the movie was filmed not long after it is set, it was unsurprising that the company could not get access to the USSR and instead it was shot in Finland (a number of Finnish actors appear in smaller roles) and in Stockholm, where the action of the movie transfers to in the closing phase, rather than to the USA as in the novel. In many ways this is actually a more feasible plot as Osbourne has been smuggling sables out of the USSR and it would be comparatively easier to get them overland to Sweden than overseas to the USA without arousing the attention of both the Soviets and US authorities.
The movie makes good use of the setting, showing both the dreary life of the USSR in the 1980s plus locations such as Iamskoy's dacha and the police headquarters. The different kinds of crime of the USSR such as smuggling out icons and dealing in Western electrical goods feature as do run down buildings and ugly apartment blocks. Of course, since the 1980s the market for furs has largely evaporated and it is interesting that this factor dates it a great deal more than if it had been icons or people that were the items being smuggled out. The motive of wanting to escape to the West is one that does not appear in most crime stories and is an interesting driver for the behaviour of Irina. Osbourne is driven in turns by greed and lust. Many of the Soviet characters are motivated by financial greed or fear of running into the KGB. Renko as all good detectives should do, stands for something more moral, even though though morals are seen through a Soviet lens. There is violence. The defacing of the three victims and the gutting of Kirwill are noticeable. However, they tend to generate a rather muted reaction from the audience, perhaps because we are aware that in such a totalitarian system life is pretty cheap and any murder can be excused if it fits political expediency. This is notable with the fate of Iamskoy and arguably Pribluda.
All of these elements could have made for an excellent thriller with particular piquancy at the time it was released when we were all aware of the issues of the Cold War and at least could have an idea of how the Soviet people suffered under their regime. The key problem is the acting. Many of the actors make a great effort. Bannen, Griffiths and Pacula are good, even Fulton in a limited role; Marvin does not do badly even though in large part he is acting himself; Dennehy is similarly capable given he is playing a role pretty familiar to him. Sayle is simply Sayle no different in manner really to his performances on numerous comedy shows and even advertisements. However, to some degree that is tolerable especially if you do not know his comedy work as he is playing a cocky 'wide boy' or spiv. However, it jars if you recognise the act as well as I do.
The thing that really brings down the movie is how wooden so much of the dialogue is. Hurt is very badly served in this respect. He comes over as cold and emotionless when in fact he should be twisted by the different drivers and fear. His affection for Irina seems particularly cold. Given that he is a man motivated by what he feels is right, so much of this weakened by him appearing like some kind of android. Elphick did not have a wide range as an actor, but he is served even worse in this movie than say in his television series 'Boon' (1992-5). I believe Apted was rather limited by how Soviets were expected to be portrayed in movies of the time. We can see a similar situation in 'Red Heat' (1988) in which Arnold Schwarznegger plays Captain Ivan Denko of the Moscow Militsiya. Whilst this is a much more light-hearted thriller, like Hurt, Schwarznegger in a similar role has simply to come across as almost a robot, with a fixed life and monotone delivery. Schwarznegger resembles his android assassin character in 'The Terminator' movies (1984-2003); Hurt should be nothing like that. In many ways the Soviet characters in 'Gorky Park' are shown as having a range of motives and many pressures on them, but they bear them with a lifeless stoicism which undermines their credibility as people we engage with. I guess at a time when it still seemed possible that the USA and USSR would engage in war, it would have seemed unpatriotic to actually show Soviets as human even in fiction.
Whilst I enjoyed revisiting 'Gorky Park', I am always going to be conscious that if Apted had been able to break away from the stereotypical portrayal of Soviets, it could have been an excellent detective thriller.
Thus, it is of no surprise that I was drawn to 'Gorky Park'. Around 3 million copies of the book, written by American Martin Cruz Smith and first published in 1981, were sold. It remained in the US book charts for 144 weeks in the 1980s in hardback and paperback editions. I do not know the sales figures for the UK but they must have been similarly high. Cruz Smith went on to write another six books featuring the same detective Arkady Renko down to 2010, however, the original novel remains the most successful book he has produced, though he has been publishing since 1970. It is difficult to place precisely why the novel was such a success. I think, in part, it was due to the setting of the USSR at the time of the so-called Second Cold War. For English-speaking readers it was an alien setting. In addition, the hero of the novel is a high-ranking Soviet police officer, Captain Arkady Renko, Chief Investigator in the Moscow Militsiya, which despite its designation (i.e. 'militia') and military ranks, was the police force. In this first novel the prime suspect is an American businessman, Jack Osborne, a dealer in sable furs, which at the time the USSR had a monopoly over. Thus, for the reader, the usual sympathies are over-turned even though Renko roots out corruption in the Soviet system rather than viewing it as an idyll. Ironically, in many ways he is purifying the crumbling USSR of its corruption. Unlike many Soviets, however, he views the West (he visits the USA briefly in 'Gorky Park') as similarly corrupt.
Aside from these perspectives which differ from most English-language detective stories, there is an interesting crime. Three bodies, two men and a woman are found in Moscow's Gorky Park with their faces and fingertips sliced off to prevent identification. Investigating the crime drags Renko not only into the business of Osborne but also KGB officers and high-ranking Militsiya officers, thus creating the kind of vested interest tension that you look for in such novels. Renko is at risk of his life for much of the novel and one of his men, Senior Lieutenant Pasha is shot dead by a KGB agent.
Anyway, when I saw the DVD I decided to buy it, to pass some time in my lodgings watching it on my laptop. I had seen it before, but cannot remember how long ago and in some ways it impressed me less than the first time. However, this does not mean it is not worthwhile watching. The movie was directed by British director Michael Apted (born 1941) who has directed numerous movies but is probably best known for 'The World Is Not Enough' (1999) and 'Enigma' (2002). The screenplay was written by British scriptwriter and playwright, Dennis Potter (1935-94), probably best known for his television dramas, notably 'Pennies from Heaven' (1978), 'The Singing Detective' (1986) and 'Brimstone and Treacle' (1987 adapted by himself from his 1982 play).
The movie has loads of British actors in it. Ian Bannen (1928-99) plays Chief Prosecutor (Lieutenant-Colonel?) Iamskoy, Renko's boss; Michael Elphick (1946-2002) plays Senior Lieutenant Pasha; Richard Griffiths (born 1947) plays Anton, a lawyer friend of Renko's; Ian McDiarmid (born 1944) plays Professor Andree,v an archaeologist who reconstructs faces from skulls something commonly seen in programmes nowadays but a novelty in 1983; Rikki Fulton (1924-2004) plays the leading KGB antagonist, Major Pribluda; and Alexei Sayle (born 1952) plays petty criminal Golodkin, interesting given his Russian heritage. I guess this fits in with the casting of British actors in Hollywood movies to play all kind of European roles. The stars: William Hurt (born 1950) as Renko, Lee Marvin (1924-87) as Osbourne and Brian Dennehy (born 1938) who plays New York detective William Kirwill who comes to Moscow seeking his dead brother were all American; the sole female character, Irina Asanova, was played by Polish actress Joanna Pacula (born 1957).
Given that the movie was filmed not long after it is set, it was unsurprising that the company could not get access to the USSR and instead it was shot in Finland (a number of Finnish actors appear in smaller roles) and in Stockholm, where the action of the movie transfers to in the closing phase, rather than to the USA as in the novel. In many ways this is actually a more feasible plot as Osbourne has been smuggling sables out of the USSR and it would be comparatively easier to get them overland to Sweden than overseas to the USA without arousing the attention of both the Soviets and US authorities.
The movie makes good use of the setting, showing both the dreary life of the USSR in the 1980s plus locations such as Iamskoy's dacha and the police headquarters. The different kinds of crime of the USSR such as smuggling out icons and dealing in Western electrical goods feature as do run down buildings and ugly apartment blocks. Of course, since the 1980s the market for furs has largely evaporated and it is interesting that this factor dates it a great deal more than if it had been icons or people that were the items being smuggled out. The motive of wanting to escape to the West is one that does not appear in most crime stories and is an interesting driver for the behaviour of Irina. Osbourne is driven in turns by greed and lust. Many of the Soviet characters are motivated by financial greed or fear of running into the KGB. Renko as all good detectives should do, stands for something more moral, even though though morals are seen through a Soviet lens. There is violence. The defacing of the three victims and the gutting of Kirwill are noticeable. However, they tend to generate a rather muted reaction from the audience, perhaps because we are aware that in such a totalitarian system life is pretty cheap and any murder can be excused if it fits political expediency. This is notable with the fate of Iamskoy and arguably Pribluda.
All of these elements could have made for an excellent thriller with particular piquancy at the time it was released when we were all aware of the issues of the Cold War and at least could have an idea of how the Soviet people suffered under their regime. The key problem is the acting. Many of the actors make a great effort. Bannen, Griffiths and Pacula are good, even Fulton in a limited role; Marvin does not do badly even though in large part he is acting himself; Dennehy is similarly capable given he is playing a role pretty familiar to him. Sayle is simply Sayle no different in manner really to his performances on numerous comedy shows and even advertisements. However, to some degree that is tolerable especially if you do not know his comedy work as he is playing a cocky 'wide boy' or spiv. However, it jars if you recognise the act as well as I do.
The thing that really brings down the movie is how wooden so much of the dialogue is. Hurt is very badly served in this respect. He comes over as cold and emotionless when in fact he should be twisted by the different drivers and fear. His affection for Irina seems particularly cold. Given that he is a man motivated by what he feels is right, so much of this weakened by him appearing like some kind of android. Elphick did not have a wide range as an actor, but he is served even worse in this movie than say in his television series 'Boon' (1992-5). I believe Apted was rather limited by how Soviets were expected to be portrayed in movies of the time. We can see a similar situation in 'Red Heat' (1988) in which Arnold Schwarznegger plays Captain Ivan Denko of the Moscow Militsiya. Whilst this is a much more light-hearted thriller, like Hurt, Schwarznegger in a similar role has simply to come across as almost a robot, with a fixed life and monotone delivery. Schwarznegger resembles his android assassin character in 'The Terminator' movies (1984-2003); Hurt should be nothing like that. In many ways the Soviet characters in 'Gorky Park' are shown as having a range of motives and many pressures on them, but they bear them with a lifeless stoicism which undermines their credibility as people we engage with. I guess at a time when it still seemed possible that the USA and USSR would engage in war, it would have seemed unpatriotic to actually show Soviets as human even in fiction.
Whilst I enjoyed revisiting 'Gorky Park', I am always going to be conscious that if Apted had been able to break away from the stereotypical portrayal of Soviets, it could have been an excellent detective thriller.
Saturday, 1 October 2011
Britain's Cultural Perception of Cold War Spying
You will probably not be surprised when I say this posting has been prompted by me seeing the recently released movie of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' based on the novel of the same title (1974) by British author John Le Carré. I am slightly too young to remember the BBC television series of the novel which was broadcast in 1979 (when I was 12 and very into spying) though as a strangely avid viewer of feedback programmes about television, notably 'Points of View' I remember the complaints about the complexity of the story and the call for subtitles not to translate foreign dialogue but to inform the viewers about what was happening in the plot. I also remember well the spoofs of the series especially in sketches by the 'Not the Nine O'Clock News' series (1979-82). The success of the series revived interest in non-glamorous spy stories in the way which had not been seen since the trilogy of Harry Palmer movies, based on novels by Len Deighton and featuring Michael Caine, released 1965-7.
This latest version of Le Carré's novel has received very good reviews and so I went to the cinema for the first time in ages. Even on a Wednesday night there was a good turnout, though I did notice that some people found the lack of dramatic action tedious and either left or started sending messages on their mobile phones. This demand for violent action on a regular basis, whilst admittedly enjoyable does seem to push out movies which may be on cognate topics but adopt a more cerebral approach. I think of the criticisms of 'Glorious 39' (2009) a thriller set in Britain in 1939 featuring a heroine who is utterly out of her depth and struggles to uncover the conspiracy. Rather than seeing that as an interesting approach, complaints came that it was leaden and frustrating. This is interesting as in the past thriller readers have enjoyed out-thinking the detective or spy, nowadays we are far more passive consumers and insist the hero/ine works harder, faster and more effectively than we are willing to do ourselves.
In this way 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' is both old fashioned and yet possibly part of a small clutch of more thoughtful thrillers to sit alongside and complement more action-focused movies, notably the Bourne trilogy (2002-7; a fourth movie is promised). The complexity of Le Carre's story and the dramatisations is exaggerated. If you can follow an television version of an Agatha Christie story then you will have not trouble with this movie. In many ways, like quite a few of Le Carre's stories, it is as much a 'whodunnit', a detective story which happens to be set among the world of spies, as it is a spy story per se. There are five suspects including the 'detective' himself, George Smiley (played wonderfully by Gary Oldman; he does not even speak for the first twenty minutes and yet imposes the character on to us) and in classic detective story style he gathers information and sets a trap to tease out the true guilty one from among the suspects. Oldman resembles Alec Guinness in his portrayal of Smiley without trying to replicate it. It is interesting the focus on the feature of a rather dull, late middle aged man, though interesting one quite happy to swim in rivers and wield a pistol. The fact that at times we are looking right into the face of Smiley with his rather bland, aged features seems symptomatic of the style of the movie.
Whilst the movie has an excellent ensemble cast, the real 'star' is the evocation of London, Paris, Budapest and Istanbul in 1973. This is a movie where you slip into a different time and you certainly feel that the past is another country. The attention to detail down to clothing, hairstyles, cars, street furniture, office equipment, food, crockery, leaflets and advertisements, even the lighting is wonderful and really encompassing. The behaviour is spot on and it is fascinating to see a 1972 works Christmas party so lovingly reproduced. I think I only spotted two errors. Too many of the male characters wear wedding rings, something which was uncommon for men, certainly those who were not Catholic, in 1973. It is a fashion which has only caught on in the UK in the past twenty years. In addition, there seems to be an error with the Trebor mints that Smiley eats near the end. They are clearly extra-strong mints but wrapped in a Trebor mint wrapper making it far larger in diameter than Trebor mints of the time which were far smaller, shinier discs of mint.
This movie could certainly not have been relocated to the USA even if it was still set in 1973. I imagine, having seen the acclaimed Danish crime drama 'Forbrydelsen' (2007) that it could have been set in northern Europe, anywhere from France through Germany and Scandinavia, into the former Eastern bloc countries. However, I wondered why I could not envisage a US version and I realised that it stemmed from the different genuine history that Britain experienced during the Cold War. It is not an issue of style, Britain certainly being painfully bleak in the 1970s despite the occasional garish colours; in sharp contrast to the excess of US culture at the time, it is more about what the British experienced in terms of spying.
For the Americans, their greatest spying scandal was the sharing of atomic secrets in the 1950s by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; David Greenglass - Ethel's brother, Harry Gold, Morton Sobell and Klaus Fuchs. Their arrest, the execution of the Rosenbergs and imprisonment of other conspirators, certainly fuelled the US hysteria about the Communist threat in the 1950s and the era of McCarthyism which affected so many people on a scale massively out of step with Soviet spying operations. However, the bulk of these spies were seen anyway was 'outsiders'. The Rosenbergs and Gold were Jewish and unashamedly Communist; Fuchs has been born a German and held British citizenship. These were the type of spies that the Americans had always expected, associated with the dictatorships of Germany and Russia (even if they had fled them) and not Christian. For the Americans counter-espionage is about identifying someone who 'does not fit' not only in the views they espouse but in other characteristics. This approach persists to today which explains why the Americans are far happier seeking to tackle Islamist terrorism associated with people with a Middle Eastern or South-Central Asian connection than terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, who, to many 'mainstream' Americans resembles them too much for them really to believe that his actions were evil.
For the British the situation is utterly the reverse. The key spy scandal in the UK was associated with the so-called 'Cambridge Spies' due to the university they studied at. These were Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess who fled to the USSR in 1951; 'Kim' Philby who followed them in 1963; Anthony Blunt, revealed as part of the circle in 1979 (though this had been uncovered as early as 1963 but kept secret) and John Cairncross, who was confirmed as a member of this set of Soviet agents in 1990. What was distinctive about these spies is that they were everything that the US atomic spies were not. Both sets were intelligent, but the Cambridge spies were certainly not outsiders, they were very much insiders. Whilst Cairncross came from a lower-middle class background, he still attended Cambridge University at a time when only a tiny elite did and he rose rapidly to high levels within the civil service. Burgess was the son of a naval officer, Maclean was the son of a knighted MP, Philby was son of a civil servant in the British colonial service and Blunt was highest status of all, related to the present queen's mother. Thus, for the British rather than seeing danger coming from outside the danger even before the Cold War started was more from within. The fears of Nazi sympathisers among the British elites in the 1930s mutated into evidence of Communist sympathisers among the British elites in the 1950s-90s. Of course, unlike in the USA where the good upstanding, usually white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant was set to hunt down the Soviet agents, in Britain it has been others of the same class and background as the traitors who is set to find them out.
I suppose in some ways, British spy novels have always reflected the British class system in which the bulk of the population is really seen as the 'outsider' to the elite whose attitudes drive how Britain progresses. Deighton's Harry Palmer (not named in the novels) is a working class character who emphasises his outside nature and yet penetrates the deceptions of those who see him as his superiors. He is hampered by the machinations of those above him not only because of their official status but because of social capital they can put into use against him. In Le Carré's stories, with the traitors and their hunters on the same social level, it comes down to wits and cunning in order to catch them or escape from the hunt. For those of us not among the elites, it is also nice to see those abusing Britain caught and brought down a peg supposedly in the broader interests of the country. Of course, the elite protects their own and even once the Cambridge spies were known they were allowed to escape or their dirty secrets kept secret with official collusion. I believe the exasperation of this is why in the movie the traitor is assassinated to give the audience some sense of retribution when the traitor is on the verge of being traded, as so often happened with Cold War spies.
Commentary on 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' has noted that these days it would seem peculiar for anyone to betray their country on the grounds that they believed it was pursuing the wrong ideology. It is interesting that in the movie, the traitor's explanation for their treachery is that the West has become so 'ugly', such a sentiment is believable when you see London in 1973, though as one reviewer noted, Moscow, even these days, is no better. The explanation is much the same as that given by the traitor in 'The Whistle Blower' (1986 - based on the novel by John Hale). One wonders why they are given such world-weary explanations rather than the one which the Cambridge spies did. They all believed that Communism was the correct ideology, particularly at the time when it seemed like the only system that was not willing to compromise with Nazism (bar of course 1939-41) in the way that Britain seemed more than eager to do. They also believed, despite their elite positions, that Communism was the correct ideology for the world as a whole and anything which advanced the standing of the USSR as the leading proponent of Communism was to be for the global good.
Whilst even Communist states such as China seem to have lost such faith in the ideology, it does not mean that world-perspective ideologies could not be the basis of a motivation to betray one's country. Ideology such as anti-capitalism or environmentalism have no 'host' nation to which the traitor could turn, so the approach would be something simply like Wikileaks. However, since the rise of fundamentalism in Iran in 1979 and the spread of such views to a number of countries, one could certainly envisage someone turning over British secrets to another states on the grounds of an Islamist perspective. Interestingly, Kim Philby's father was a convert to Islam. In time, other world view ideologies and countries associated with them may rise to provide the kind of context that permitted the kind of developments seen with spies in the Cold War.
Whilst a Cold War conspiracy movie might seem to be based on a dated concept, it does not mean it cannot be engaging, just as a story set at the court of King Henry VIII can engage us, even though the tensions between Catholics and Protestants at the time might seem inscrutable nowadays. What is interesting for me, is that British history impinges on the fiction and means that a story carries a 'baggage' brought by the audience that allows us to engage with the 'game' of the story on this basis, whereas if we had had a history like the USA or many other countries, we would not see it as feasible. Anyway, I will add my voice to the recommendations of the movie. However, do not expect a British version of 'The Bourne Ultimatum', see something instead, that is a puzzle presented incredibly well in terms of portrayals both by the actors and the settings they appear in.
This latest version of Le Carré's novel has received very good reviews and so I went to the cinema for the first time in ages. Even on a Wednesday night there was a good turnout, though I did notice that some people found the lack of dramatic action tedious and either left or started sending messages on their mobile phones. This demand for violent action on a regular basis, whilst admittedly enjoyable does seem to push out movies which may be on cognate topics but adopt a more cerebral approach. I think of the criticisms of 'Glorious 39' (2009) a thriller set in Britain in 1939 featuring a heroine who is utterly out of her depth and struggles to uncover the conspiracy. Rather than seeing that as an interesting approach, complaints came that it was leaden and frustrating. This is interesting as in the past thriller readers have enjoyed out-thinking the detective or spy, nowadays we are far more passive consumers and insist the hero/ine works harder, faster and more effectively than we are willing to do ourselves.
In this way 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' is both old fashioned and yet possibly part of a small clutch of more thoughtful thrillers to sit alongside and complement more action-focused movies, notably the Bourne trilogy (2002-7; a fourth movie is promised). The complexity of Le Carre's story and the dramatisations is exaggerated. If you can follow an television version of an Agatha Christie story then you will have not trouble with this movie. In many ways, like quite a few of Le Carre's stories, it is as much a 'whodunnit', a detective story which happens to be set among the world of spies, as it is a spy story per se. There are five suspects including the 'detective' himself, George Smiley (played wonderfully by Gary Oldman; he does not even speak for the first twenty minutes and yet imposes the character on to us) and in classic detective story style he gathers information and sets a trap to tease out the true guilty one from among the suspects. Oldman resembles Alec Guinness in his portrayal of Smiley without trying to replicate it. It is interesting the focus on the feature of a rather dull, late middle aged man, though interesting one quite happy to swim in rivers and wield a pistol. The fact that at times we are looking right into the face of Smiley with his rather bland, aged features seems symptomatic of the style of the movie.
Whilst the movie has an excellent ensemble cast, the real 'star' is the evocation of London, Paris, Budapest and Istanbul in 1973. This is a movie where you slip into a different time and you certainly feel that the past is another country. The attention to detail down to clothing, hairstyles, cars, street furniture, office equipment, food, crockery, leaflets and advertisements, even the lighting is wonderful and really encompassing. The behaviour is spot on and it is fascinating to see a 1972 works Christmas party so lovingly reproduced. I think I only spotted two errors. Too many of the male characters wear wedding rings, something which was uncommon for men, certainly those who were not Catholic, in 1973. It is a fashion which has only caught on in the UK in the past twenty years. In addition, there seems to be an error with the Trebor mints that Smiley eats near the end. They are clearly extra-strong mints but wrapped in a Trebor mint wrapper making it far larger in diameter than Trebor mints of the time which were far smaller, shinier discs of mint.
This movie could certainly not have been relocated to the USA even if it was still set in 1973. I imagine, having seen the acclaimed Danish crime drama 'Forbrydelsen' (2007) that it could have been set in northern Europe, anywhere from France through Germany and Scandinavia, into the former Eastern bloc countries. However, I wondered why I could not envisage a US version and I realised that it stemmed from the different genuine history that Britain experienced during the Cold War. It is not an issue of style, Britain certainly being painfully bleak in the 1970s despite the occasional garish colours; in sharp contrast to the excess of US culture at the time, it is more about what the British experienced in terms of spying.
For the Americans, their greatest spying scandal was the sharing of atomic secrets in the 1950s by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg; David Greenglass - Ethel's brother, Harry Gold, Morton Sobell and Klaus Fuchs. Their arrest, the execution of the Rosenbergs and imprisonment of other conspirators, certainly fuelled the US hysteria about the Communist threat in the 1950s and the era of McCarthyism which affected so many people on a scale massively out of step with Soviet spying operations. However, the bulk of these spies were seen anyway was 'outsiders'. The Rosenbergs and Gold were Jewish and unashamedly Communist; Fuchs has been born a German and held British citizenship. These were the type of spies that the Americans had always expected, associated with the dictatorships of Germany and Russia (even if they had fled them) and not Christian. For the Americans counter-espionage is about identifying someone who 'does not fit' not only in the views they espouse but in other characteristics. This approach persists to today which explains why the Americans are far happier seeking to tackle Islamist terrorism associated with people with a Middle Eastern or South-Central Asian connection than terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, who, to many 'mainstream' Americans resembles them too much for them really to believe that his actions were evil.
For the British the situation is utterly the reverse. The key spy scandal in the UK was associated with the so-called 'Cambridge Spies' due to the university they studied at. These were Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess who fled to the USSR in 1951; 'Kim' Philby who followed them in 1963; Anthony Blunt, revealed as part of the circle in 1979 (though this had been uncovered as early as 1963 but kept secret) and John Cairncross, who was confirmed as a member of this set of Soviet agents in 1990. What was distinctive about these spies is that they were everything that the US atomic spies were not. Both sets were intelligent, but the Cambridge spies were certainly not outsiders, they were very much insiders. Whilst Cairncross came from a lower-middle class background, he still attended Cambridge University at a time when only a tiny elite did and he rose rapidly to high levels within the civil service. Burgess was the son of a naval officer, Maclean was the son of a knighted MP, Philby was son of a civil servant in the British colonial service and Blunt was highest status of all, related to the present queen's mother. Thus, for the British rather than seeing danger coming from outside the danger even before the Cold War started was more from within. The fears of Nazi sympathisers among the British elites in the 1930s mutated into evidence of Communist sympathisers among the British elites in the 1950s-90s. Of course, unlike in the USA where the good upstanding, usually white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant was set to hunt down the Soviet agents, in Britain it has been others of the same class and background as the traitors who is set to find them out.
I suppose in some ways, British spy novels have always reflected the British class system in which the bulk of the population is really seen as the 'outsider' to the elite whose attitudes drive how Britain progresses. Deighton's Harry Palmer (not named in the novels) is a working class character who emphasises his outside nature and yet penetrates the deceptions of those who see him as his superiors. He is hampered by the machinations of those above him not only because of their official status but because of social capital they can put into use against him. In Le Carré's stories, with the traitors and their hunters on the same social level, it comes down to wits and cunning in order to catch them or escape from the hunt. For those of us not among the elites, it is also nice to see those abusing Britain caught and brought down a peg supposedly in the broader interests of the country. Of course, the elite protects their own and even once the Cambridge spies were known they were allowed to escape or their dirty secrets kept secret with official collusion. I believe the exasperation of this is why in the movie the traitor is assassinated to give the audience some sense of retribution when the traitor is on the verge of being traded, as so often happened with Cold War spies.
Commentary on 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' has noted that these days it would seem peculiar for anyone to betray their country on the grounds that they believed it was pursuing the wrong ideology. It is interesting that in the movie, the traitor's explanation for their treachery is that the West has become so 'ugly', such a sentiment is believable when you see London in 1973, though as one reviewer noted, Moscow, even these days, is no better. The explanation is much the same as that given by the traitor in 'The Whistle Blower' (1986 - based on the novel by John Hale). One wonders why they are given such world-weary explanations rather than the one which the Cambridge spies did. They all believed that Communism was the correct ideology, particularly at the time when it seemed like the only system that was not willing to compromise with Nazism (bar of course 1939-41) in the way that Britain seemed more than eager to do. They also believed, despite their elite positions, that Communism was the correct ideology for the world as a whole and anything which advanced the standing of the USSR as the leading proponent of Communism was to be for the global good.
Whilst even Communist states such as China seem to have lost such faith in the ideology, it does not mean that world-perspective ideologies could not be the basis of a motivation to betray one's country. Ideology such as anti-capitalism or environmentalism have no 'host' nation to which the traitor could turn, so the approach would be something simply like Wikileaks. However, since the rise of fundamentalism in Iran in 1979 and the spread of such views to a number of countries, one could certainly envisage someone turning over British secrets to another states on the grounds of an Islamist perspective. Interestingly, Kim Philby's father was a convert to Islam. In time, other world view ideologies and countries associated with them may rise to provide the kind of context that permitted the kind of developments seen with spies in the Cold War.
Whilst a Cold War conspiracy movie might seem to be based on a dated concept, it does not mean it cannot be engaging, just as a story set at the court of King Henry VIII can engage us, even though the tensions between Catholics and Protestants at the time might seem inscrutable nowadays. What is interesting for me, is that British history impinges on the fiction and means that a story carries a 'baggage' brought by the audience that allows us to engage with the 'game' of the story on this basis, whereas if we had had a history like the USA or many other countries, we would not see it as feasible. Anyway, I will add my voice to the recommendations of the movie. However, do not expect a British version of 'The Bourne Ultimatum', see something instead, that is a puzzle presented incredibly well in terms of portrayals both by the actors and the settings they appear in.
Saturday, 11 June 2011
Atlas Of Imaginary Worlds 14: World Of The Elemental Benders
Back in March, along with the 9-year old who lives in my house and his mother, I watched the movie, 'The Last Airbender' (2010). This movie had been panned by critics who saw the special effects as poor and the story as very confused. It was portrayed as the nadir of director M. Night Shyamalan's career. Everything was apparently wrong with this movie, with even 'The Guardian' complaining that the word 'bender' (misused as an outdated derogatory term for transvestites and homosexuals) was used too much in the movie. The movie is based on the very successful 'Avatar: The Legend of Aang' (2005-8) animated television series which ran for three seasons. It was aimed at 6-11 year old children though was one of the most successful series for under-14s run in the USA.
The series is heavily influenced by various Asian cultures, the word 'avatar' being used in the sense that it is in Sanskrit, to be a reborn descendant of a previous incarnation rather than the way we tend to use it as a substitute for an individual operating in a different realm. Interestingly, there are also elements of Western culture, notably the focus on the four elements: air, earth, fire and water, in contrast to the five Chinese elements, earth, fire, metal, water and wood. The stories are set in an imaginary world, which I look at in more detail below, with tribes that are associated with one of the four elements. Each tribe has 'benders', people who can manipulate their particular element for defence or offence. Those bending different elements use different martial art forms: for air it is Bāguàzhǎng; for earth it is Hung Ga kung fu; for fire it is Northern Shaolin kung fu, notably with projecting kicks and for water is it Tai Chi. There is reference to a person's chi (in Japanese ki) being able to keep them warm.
Each generation an avatar comes, a person with ability to manipulate all four elements, though originating in turn from among one particular type of people. S/he is also able move into the spirit world to speak with the various spirits who control aspects of the world. Whilst this seems somewhat like Shintoism, you have to remember that in the West, especially in Classical epics, heroes went into the Underworld to speak with the dead or the as-yet unborn. In the movie and the television stories, the current avatar is Aang awoken from where he was frozen in ice. He is the sole remaining airbender following the massacre of all other airbenders. The key antagonists are the Fire Empire, with steampunk technology, and populated in the movie by people looking like those from our Indian subcontinent. The earth people appear Chinese; the water people are Anglo-Saxon/Nordic in the South living like Inuit and in the North like Russians or Swedes of the 18th century and the air people, of whom we only see monks and nuns who are airbenders seem to be Tibetan or Khmer, as their culture seems Buddhist; this is poignant given that Aang wanders passed numerous shallow-buried skeletons in the movie in a location looking like Angkor Wat.
As to the movie's story being too complex, I would say if it can be followed by a 9-year old, then it is not overly complex. Basically it is as follows: the Fire Empire wants to conquer the world; a boy with powers is revived and helped by friends to gain powers; a son of the Fire Empire ruler tries to capture the boy to win back the affection of his father; both this son and the avatar are opposed by a power-hungry general; there is a climax in which the avatar beats the Fire Empire forces besieging a city and the emperor's son escapes, so setting up events for the sequel (this is supposed to be a trilogy). The special effects are fine and are certainly as good as anything you would see in the 'Narnia' movies, in fact, used in a more imaginative way. I think the key thing which upsets reviewers, especially in the USA, is that 'The Last Airbender', like 'The Golden Compass' (2007 which has people's souls manifested as animals) and 'Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief' (2010 featuring a demi-god son of Greek god Poseidon, growing up in contemporary USA) draw from concepts outside the Anglo-American interpretation of the Judaeo-Christian approach. The Narnia movies (2005-10) and 'The Lord of the Rings' movies (2001-3) laud and even the Harry Potter movies (2001-11) appear to fit into. In many ways these other movies bring a refreshing approach to fantasy rather than rehashing very tired concepts, yet that seems to open them up to harsh criticism, judging them on a different basis to fantasy movies from the kinds of contexts that so many reviewers seem to feel are the only acceptable ones.
'The Last Airbender' is certainly far from being Shyalaman's nadir and in fact even as an adult I am interested to see what happens next, but I fear no sequel will never be made as too many reviewers have done a good job of burying this movie as they did 'The Golden Compass'. I do also think that many UK-US reviewers have an issue with movies in which Asians are the lead characters; they have to be either poor people eliciting sympathy as with 'Slumdog Millionaire' (2008), comic characters like Jackie Chan's roles in Hollywood movies or the baddies as with Jet Li's roles in movies he has made in the West. How long that attitude will be permitted in a world in which China and India wield such economic might remains to be seen.
Anyway, setting aside my view of the movie, I was interested to see what the world featured in 'The Last Airbender' looked like. Maps of this world, for which I can find no name, feature in the movie and I was able to find a number online shown below. Doing a search I found a number of interesting versions from a website called 'Deviant Art' but I avoided those as it seemed to be something pornographic and I worried that in some perverse way this setting was being suborned for inappropriate uses.
These maps show us locations appearing in the television series and the movie. The Fire Empire laid siege to Basing Se for 100 days without success and in the movie goes to attack the main city of the water tribe of the North, but is defeated due to the intervention of Aang the Avatar who by this stage has mastered water bending in addition to air bending.
Looking at these maps we see classic elements of fantasy worlds which I discussed at length back in 2007-8. There are the compulsory inland seas at the centre of the main continent. Other features remind me of other fantasy locations. The Fire Empire reminds me of Melnibone in the Elric series by Michael Moorcock: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/08/atlas-of-imaginary-worlds-3-islands-and.html The two polar regions look like distorted versions of Antarctica in our world. Seeing the movie, I had wondered if it was set on our world in some distant future after significant geological changes. We see a strange flying rodent creature large enough to carry people, reminiscent of the animal that carries the hero in 'The Never Ending Story' (1984) and there is a lemur-bat creature reminding of some of the envisaged evolved creatures in 'After Man: A Zoology of the Future' (1981) and the other similar books that followed. The landscapes are pretty varied something the movie makes good use of and it is often difficult to tell when what you are seeing is not part of New Zealand and where it is CGI-generated, especially with the air monasteries. This is an interesting fantasy series which adds another fantasy world to the canon. In my view, if you have a child 11 or younger, ignore the view of the critics and rent the movie on DVD; you may find that, like me, you pretty much enjoy it too.
The series is heavily influenced by various Asian cultures, the word 'avatar' being used in the sense that it is in Sanskrit, to be a reborn descendant of a previous incarnation rather than the way we tend to use it as a substitute for an individual operating in a different realm. Interestingly, there are also elements of Western culture, notably the focus on the four elements: air, earth, fire and water, in contrast to the five Chinese elements, earth, fire, metal, water and wood. The stories are set in an imaginary world, which I look at in more detail below, with tribes that are associated with one of the four elements. Each tribe has 'benders', people who can manipulate their particular element for defence or offence. Those bending different elements use different martial art forms: for air it is Bāguàzhǎng; for earth it is Hung Ga kung fu; for fire it is Northern Shaolin kung fu, notably with projecting kicks and for water is it Tai Chi. There is reference to a person's chi (in Japanese ki) being able to keep them warm.
Each generation an avatar comes, a person with ability to manipulate all four elements, though originating in turn from among one particular type of people. S/he is also able move into the spirit world to speak with the various spirits who control aspects of the world. Whilst this seems somewhat like Shintoism, you have to remember that in the West, especially in Classical epics, heroes went into the Underworld to speak with the dead or the as-yet unborn. In the movie and the television stories, the current avatar is Aang awoken from where he was frozen in ice. He is the sole remaining airbender following the massacre of all other airbenders. The key antagonists are the Fire Empire, with steampunk technology, and populated in the movie by people looking like those from our Indian subcontinent. The earth people appear Chinese; the water people are Anglo-Saxon/Nordic in the South living like Inuit and in the North like Russians or Swedes of the 18th century and the air people, of whom we only see monks and nuns who are airbenders seem to be Tibetan or Khmer, as their culture seems Buddhist; this is poignant given that Aang wanders passed numerous shallow-buried skeletons in the movie in a location looking like Angkor Wat.
As to the movie's story being too complex, I would say if it can be followed by a 9-year old, then it is not overly complex. Basically it is as follows: the Fire Empire wants to conquer the world; a boy with powers is revived and helped by friends to gain powers; a son of the Fire Empire ruler tries to capture the boy to win back the affection of his father; both this son and the avatar are opposed by a power-hungry general; there is a climax in which the avatar beats the Fire Empire forces besieging a city and the emperor's son escapes, so setting up events for the sequel (this is supposed to be a trilogy). The special effects are fine and are certainly as good as anything you would see in the 'Narnia' movies, in fact, used in a more imaginative way. I think the key thing which upsets reviewers, especially in the USA, is that 'The Last Airbender', like 'The Golden Compass' (2007 which has people's souls manifested as animals) and 'Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief' (2010 featuring a demi-god son of Greek god Poseidon, growing up in contemporary USA) draw from concepts outside the Anglo-American interpretation of the Judaeo-Christian approach. The Narnia movies (2005-10) and 'The Lord of the Rings' movies (2001-3) laud and even the Harry Potter movies (2001-11) appear to fit into. In many ways these other movies bring a refreshing approach to fantasy rather than rehashing very tired concepts, yet that seems to open them up to harsh criticism, judging them on a different basis to fantasy movies from the kinds of contexts that so many reviewers seem to feel are the only acceptable ones.
'The Last Airbender' is certainly far from being Shyalaman's nadir and in fact even as an adult I am interested to see what happens next, but I fear no sequel will never be made as too many reviewers have done a good job of burying this movie as they did 'The Golden Compass'. I do also think that many UK-US reviewers have an issue with movies in which Asians are the lead characters; they have to be either poor people eliciting sympathy as with 'Slumdog Millionaire' (2008), comic characters like Jackie Chan's roles in Hollywood movies or the baddies as with Jet Li's roles in movies he has made in the West. How long that attitude will be permitted in a world in which China and India wield such economic might remains to be seen.
Anyway, setting aside my view of the movie, I was interested to see what the world featured in 'The Last Airbender' looked like. Maps of this world, for which I can find no name, feature in the movie and I was able to find a number online shown below. Doing a search I found a number of interesting versions from a website called 'Deviant Art' but I avoided those as it seemed to be something pornographic and I worried that in some perverse way this setting was being suborned for inappropriate uses.
Maps of the World of the Elemental Benders
This one shows the different elements bent in the different regions. Red is the Fire Empire, blue are the water nomads, beige is the earth regions and white are the air regions, though from what I know of the story all but one air bender has been killed, I assumed along with many of the people of these regions. The water regions are polar, the other areas temperate or tropical.
A slightly different map including the symbols for the different elements next to the regions where they are predominant.
Looking at these maps we see classic elements of fantasy worlds which I discussed at length back in 2007-8. There are the compulsory inland seas at the centre of the main continent. Other features remind me of other fantasy locations. The Fire Empire reminds me of Melnibone in the Elric series by Michael Moorcock: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2007/08/atlas-of-imaginary-worlds-3-islands-and.html The two polar regions look like distorted versions of Antarctica in our world. Seeing the movie, I had wondered if it was set on our world in some distant future after significant geological changes. We see a strange flying rodent creature large enough to carry people, reminiscent of the animal that carries the hero in 'The Never Ending Story' (1984) and there is a lemur-bat creature reminding of some of the envisaged evolved creatures in 'After Man: A Zoology of the Future' (1981) and the other similar books that followed. The landscapes are pretty varied something the movie makes good use of and it is often difficult to tell when what you are seeing is not part of New Zealand and where it is CGI-generated, especially with the air monasteries. This is an interesting fantasy series which adds another fantasy world to the canon. In my view, if you have a child 11 or younger, ignore the view of the critics and rent the movie on DVD; you may find that, like me, you pretty much enjoy it too.
Wednesday, 11 May 2011
Why I Like The Movie Of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' (2003)
I was reading last month that the movie, 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' (2003), ended Sean Connery's movie acting career. The fact that he was 73 at the time and commanded a fee of US$17 million (equivalent to £10.9 million at current exchange rates) per movie, may be other feasible explanations. A multi-millionaire tax exile, Connery is known to have strong views on who he works. Certainly, director Stephen Norrington and Connery did no get along well in making this movie. Norrington also retired from movies following the release of this one. The movie took US$179 million (£115 million) across the world. Added to this has been a further US$48 million (£30 million) from video and DVD rentals and sales. Yet, you read it was a 'flop'. I think this is, partly, because it garnered poor reviews from the media, though I would have anticipated that even before it was released.
I have been reading how actors found 'The Matrix' difficult to understand even though school children I know have no difficulty with the concept of people being downloaded into computer systems. We know from the example of the 'Fatherland' (1994) movie how audiences dislike movies which mess around with history. They are often not certain of what really happened, so feel uneasy when this is subverted. 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' is both a counter-factual and a steampunk movie. Outside Japan, steampunk is not familiar to the general movie-watching public, so this movie was always going to face difficulties in being accepted. In turn, however, it was also going to battle with finding support among a 'cult' audience, partly because they always expect very close adherence to the original novel/graphic novel in any movie adaptation. Similar problems were encountered producing the 'Watchmen' movie (2009) based on Alan Moore/Patrick Wilson's graphic novel (1986/7) of the same name. Like 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' (1999-2009) graphic novels, 'Watchmen' was authored by Moore and had counter-factual elements.
Alan Moore always distances himself from any movies made of the graphic novels he has authored. Moore responded as equally negatively to the 'V for Vendetta' (2006) movie. Kevin O'Neill, the illustrator of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' graphic novels, argued that 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' movie failed because it was too far from the original source material. Moore and O'Neill seem ignorant of the fact that no movie can be like a novel. Directors are very constrained by the expectations of their audiences, as channelled through producers and movie-making companies, and, as noted above, the expectation especially in the USA is for movies which are eye-catching but do not seriously challenge the audience intellectually.
Things which can be explored in a graphic novel, especially with illustrations as detailed as Moore/O'Neill's work, would be very bitty and messy in a movie. Authors seem to believe that their ideas will work in any media, but this is unlikely to be the case and they have to yield to a whole different set of constraints: to expect anything else is very naive. Novels of any kind can conjure up entire universes and refer easily in passing to many background elements that it can be very difficult to introduce into a movie without seriously disrupting it, or at best, slowing the pace of the movie to an extent which loses audience. This has been recognised at least since '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968) if not longer. It seems that many authors, even of graphic novels which have a 'cinematic' aspect to them, do not really comprehend, not only the 'language of film' but also what limits there are to its 'vocabulary' and 'grammar' when people are trying to make money out the movies they produce.
It does seem that Moore has great difficulty with the whole movie industry. He was angered by the case brought by Larry Cohen and Martin Poll against 20th Century Fox who had made 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen'. Cohen and Poll argued that the movie had plagiarised their work called 'Cast of Characters' which they had offered to Fox in the mid-1990s. The case was settled out of court. Moore felt he personally was being challenged by Cohen and Poll and wanted a court case to exonerate himself of plagiarism. He missed the entire point. First, the case was not brought against him, even though his graphic novel came after their proposal. Second, Hollywood finds difficulty in really engaging with good stories; see my posting: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/03/lack-of-good-stories-in-hollywood.html Consequently as they have often done with other good styles/characters they scrabbled around for a plotline to hang that setting/characters on. Hence, they used that of Cohen and Poll, which, featuring some of the same characters as Moore's work, would have seemed ideal. Again, this is more about the state of how the US movie industry and its prime audience (Americans) sees the right way to make a (financially) successful movie.
Of course, Cohen, Poll, Moore and O'Neill, had all raided a lot of other people's work, who in fact, seem to get no attribution anywhere. The graphic novel of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' features, amongst others, characters such as Allan Quatermain based on the Allan Quatermain of the novels of H. Rider Haggard (published 1885-1927), Wilhelmina 'Mina' Harker from Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' (1897); Captain Nemo from 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea' (1870) and 'The Mysterious Island' (1894) by Jules Verne; Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde from 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' (1886) by Robert Louis Stephenson and Dr. Hawley Griffin from 'The Invisible Man' by H.G. Wells (1897).
The graphic novels of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' make a point of taking characters from numerous Victorian and 20th century novels and yet, Moore/O'Neill seem to feel that the characters have become theirs rather than being the property of the original authors. O'Neill laughably complained that he did not recognise the characters as portrayed in the movie script; I wonder if Verne, Stoker, Stephenson, Haggard, et al, would recognise their characters at all in Moore/O'Neill's work? Even the title of the graphic novel was borrowed from 'The League of Gentlemen' (1960 movie; from 1958 novel of the same name by John Boland). This preciousness about the graphic novels helped damp cult following of the movie.
A particular criticism of the movie is that characterisation is shallow. This is again a laughable complaint. Movies are far shorter than people think and lack time to fill in characters, especially as in 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' in which there are so many lead characters. In the movie, in addition to the characters listed above, there is also Dorian Gray who is pictured in the graphic novel, but is not a character. Gray comes from 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' (1890) by Oscar Wilde.
To appeal to the US audience and to have a character who is younger, Tom Sawyer is also featured; he appeared in four novels by Mark Twain published 1876-96. Sawyer in the movie is shown as being 18, though if in 'Tom Sawyer, Detective' (1896) set in 1896 and showing Sawyer as 17, then by 1899 when 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' is set he should be at least 20. The League's opponent in the original graphic novel was Fu Manchu, but such stereotypical, dated portrayals of Chinese would have gone down poorly in the 21st century. Consequently, in the movie, he is replaced by Professor James Moriarty from a number of Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, though he also referred to early on in the movie as 'M' a reference to James Bond's boss. His use of the disguise of the 'Phantom', described by Quatermain as 'operatic', references the phantom of the opera in Gaston Leroux's 'Le Fantôme de l'Opéra' (1909-10).
The movie, then, has to sketch in eight major characters with Rodney Skinner replacing Dr. Hawley Griffin as an invisible man after Fox were unable to secure the rights to Wells's character. Of course, there is a benefit that many of the audience would know these characters from other movies and the various novels. Some will know them from the graphic novels (I have read all of these), though despite O'Neill's complaints against the movie, their characters are not particularly well developed in those stories either (graphic novels, like movies, lack the space novels have to develop characters, except over sustained editions).
I think the movie presents a very exotic bunch of characters and in the limited space shows not only their personalities and some of their difficulties with their particular traits, but also the tensions between them. In an action movie with such a large ensemble I would not expect there to be time for much more; compare it to 'The Magnificent Seven' (1960) which similarly has seven heroes and one opponent to detail. Quatermain (who in the original novels died in 1885) is weary of his adventuring life and is patronising to Harker as a young woman. Jekyll fears being controlled by the beast of Hyde and this generates friction especially with Nemo, though the respect between the two grows. Nemo is shown as a worshipper of Kali and is described as a pirate, reflecting his anti-hero standing in the novels. Despite being an Indian (a Hindu but dressing more like a Sikh), he is accepted by the white characters in a way that may have been unlikely in genuine 1899, though given that all the characters can be seen as 'outsiders' they may have muddled along. Gray is a hedonistic snob who has had an intimate encounter with Harker, but whilst out for himself, seems also vulnerable given that Moriarty holds his painting. Skinner is the one looked down upon and suspected, reflecting the real class divisions of the time; he is a burglar anyway, but he seems to be along for the adventure.
The character with least substance in the movie is Sawyer who seems to be an insensitive American, rather arrogant towards European ways and foolishly being brash about Quatermain's personal losses and over-confident in believing he can seduce Harker; hardly a positive character. He also wastes bullets in the way Americans are renowned for doing in numerous novels and movies. This was always going to be a challenge for this movie in the USA: it is full of middle-aged European characters.
I like the movie because it quickly gives us a variety of characters that are different from the usual run of heroes and I think everyone has their favourite. It is nice to see a movie without too many of the stereotypes of Hollywood action movies, though Connery comes close in his portrayal to many of his other roles. The fist fight in his club in Kenya at the start of the movie reminds very much of his fist fight when his character goes to prison in 'Family Business' (1989) and his fight in a bar using just one of his thumbs in 'The Presidio' (1988). Mr. Hyde appears very similarly running across Parisian rooftops as he does in 'Van Helsing' (2004) even down to the bloated upper body. However, in 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' he is captured (as in the graphic novel) rather than killed as he is by Van Helsing.
In the movie there is ambivalence (in contrast to the graphic novel) as to whether the League is genuine or simply been created by Moriarty. In the novel it is real and has been subverted by him so he can get his hands on cavorite (the material used in 'The First Men in the Moon' (1901) by H.G. Wells to propel Dr. Cavor's spaceship to the Moon) stolen by Fu Manchu. In the movie it is to get elements of the various members of the league to sell to the rapidly arming powers of Europe. This fear, that individuals were seeking to profiteer from the clear steps towards war of the 1890s-1910s by fostering these developments, featured in novels of the time, such as 'The Thirty-Nine Steps' (1915).
The world portrayed in 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' both the movie and graphic novels, is not our world. It is a steampunk world, i.e. with anachronistic and fantastical machinery present. However, the portrayal of cities of the movie is even more distinct. In the shots of London in July 1899 only horse-drawn vehicles are shown, but, in fact, the car, though rare, had appeared; by 1911 there were 240,000 cars in the UK. Of course, none of them would have looked like the 1930s-style limousine (especially one with a hard roof rather than one of canvas or leather) used by Captain Nemo, but he would not have had to introduce intelligent people like the rest of the league to the word 'automobile' which had been in use in US newspapers since 1897.
The streets of East London where Dorian Gray lives and, especially, those of Venice shown later, are fantastical versions of these locations. Venice from the air resembles the city in our world, but its size as a whole and the width of the roads running through it are both far larger than in our world. You certainly could not raise a submarine in any of the canals and in reality the city has only one enclosed bridge crossing the canals, the famous Bridge of Sighs. Leonardo Da Vinci produced maps of Imola and the Chiana Valley, but his plan of the foundations of Venice is a fictional McGuffin for the movie. Thus, despite the huge hangar of Zeppelins in Berlin, we see a world where there are greater advances in technology (throughout history, given Da Vinci's work shown) but which have been kept by the privileged.
Like many steampunk stories, the technology that Moriarty and Nemo use, has simply been brought back in time by twenty-thirty years. The tank used to attack the Bank of England is very characteristic of those used on the Western Front by the British from 1915 onwards, though it is manned by soldiers dressed in the uniforms adopted by the Germans in the middle of the First World War (when the spikes were no longer put on the helmets). The uniforms of the men guarding the bank are typical of British soldiers on the Western Front during the war, notably the particular style of helmets. Interestingly the Metropolitan police officers outside, wear the capes of Parisian police rather than the longer British style. The radio signal that Nemo follows to track Moriarty to the Amur river on the border between Russia and China, had been public demonstrated in the mid-1890s and transatlantic signals were demonstrated in 1902, though with some possibly successful attempts preceding this, thus this technology is not too advanced. The 'Nautilus' itself is probably larger even than a modern day submarine, but the missile it fires locking on to a radio signal, even just a couple of kilometres across Venice was not seen in our world until anti-ship missiles introduced by the Germans in 1943.
We see flamethrowers used by Moriarty's men. Flamethrowers date back to the 7th century CE but in their modern form were first demonstrated to the German army in 1901, so not out of step with the movie. We also see assault rifles used by Moriarty's men in the movie. The Italian Army had been experimenting with them as early as 1890; the Russian Army issued assault rifles in 1915 and through the First World War the French Army developed what can be seen as assault rifles in large numbers. So, again, this is not an unfeasible development. Nemo's crew have even more advanced weapons, using silver engraved versions of the British sten gun submachine gun produced from 1941 onwards in our world, though, of course, never as elegantly as the weapons Nemo's men have. His own pistol is something unique that I cannot identify having an actual parallel. The Winchester rifle used by Tom Sawyer is presumably an 1894 version as from 1895 onwards they were produced with magazines rather than rounds being held in a tube under the barrel; these were sold in a variety of calibres and 7 million of these rifles had been sold by 2006. Quatermain's 'Matilda' is a so-called double rifle. These guns are custom made and hand-fitted. It may be a Holland & Holland, 'express' rifle firing often hollow or explosive tipped rounds; typically of .450 calibre aimed at stopping big game animals. Such guns, with the two triggers as shown in the movie, had been around right through the Victorian period.
Though no submarine was the size of the 'Nautilus', they had been used during the American Civil War of 1862-5 and the first British submarine was launched in 1901, so the concept would not have been alien. One interesting thing about the 'Nautilus' is that it uses solar power to charge its batteries for undersea travel. In both world wars submarines tended to travel on the surface of the water as much as they could as they were reliant on batteries charged off diesel engines when underwater. This is something which critics of the movie 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' (1981) miss. (It is interesting that if you search on Google 'submarine controversy' comes up as one of the commonly selected options). Yes, the submarine in that movie does not look precisely right, but certainly Indiana Jones could have remained on board as it went across the Mediterranean. Remember that movie is set in 1936 and the world war has not started, so there would be no need for the submarine to submerge.
Submarines in the First World War typically had a naval gun on deck and often this would be their prime weapon rather than torpedoes. It is only people who have grown up in the age of nuclear-powered submarines who expect them to be submerged for more than a minority of the time. To some extent, Nemo in 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlement' falls into this trap of aiming to submerge when he has no need. Of course, he might be about to enter the fictional undersea tunnel beneath the Suez Canal which allowed him, in the novels, to by-pass Africa when heading towards Asia.
The climax of the movie occurs close to the Amur river at a base that resembles some Russian palace but is filled with an extensive industrial plant. This is very much in the ilk of the evil mastermind's lair in many movies and novels, which, of course blows up at the end. Fortunately the 'Nautilus' is vast enough to take away all the scientists and families and other workers from the base, once Moriarty has been killed.
'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' is an action movie, but one that I feel rises above many of its kind. Its range of characters and its steampunk setting make it stand out. It could never have been a close portrayal of the graphic novel, and yet it avoids being an entirely Hollywood version either. Possibly this is due to its primarily non-American cast and portrayal of events, settings and behaviour that do not form part of current US consciousness. In the time it has, I believe, it lays out a far more interesting range of characters and, in many ways, those who come out best from it are those who would not do so in a mainstream Hollywood movie. Mina Harker is shown as a scientist, eschewing male attention and patronising attitudes. She is a vampire and fights as effectively, if not more so, than her male counterparts. Captain Nemo is probably the first Hindu hero I can think of in mainstream movie from the USA, bar perhaps those in 'A Passage to India' (1984) and the biopic 'Gandhi' (1982) and the recent, 'The Last Airbender' (2010), featuring many Asian actors though set on a fantasy planet. He is gracious, innovative and a good fighter, also a conciliator. As a consequence of these traits, it is a movie that I return to on DVD and enjoy. I accept that given my taste for steampunk it would attract me more than the average movie watcher, but I certainly do not feel it should be remembered simply as the movie which seemingly ended Sean Connery and Stephen Norrington's movie careers. Even if it is, they should feel no shame about being involved with it.
I have been reading how actors found 'The Matrix' difficult to understand even though school children I know have no difficulty with the concept of people being downloaded into computer systems. We know from the example of the 'Fatherland' (1994) movie how audiences dislike movies which mess around with history. They are often not certain of what really happened, so feel uneasy when this is subverted. 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' is both a counter-factual and a steampunk movie. Outside Japan, steampunk is not familiar to the general movie-watching public, so this movie was always going to face difficulties in being accepted. In turn, however, it was also going to battle with finding support among a 'cult' audience, partly because they always expect very close adherence to the original novel/graphic novel in any movie adaptation. Similar problems were encountered producing the 'Watchmen' movie (2009) based on Alan Moore/Patrick Wilson's graphic novel (1986/7) of the same name. Like 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' (1999-2009) graphic novels, 'Watchmen' was authored by Moore and had counter-factual elements.
Alan Moore always distances himself from any movies made of the graphic novels he has authored. Moore responded as equally negatively to the 'V for Vendetta' (2006) movie. Kevin O'Neill, the illustrator of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' graphic novels, argued that 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' movie failed because it was too far from the original source material. Moore and O'Neill seem ignorant of the fact that no movie can be like a novel. Directors are very constrained by the expectations of their audiences, as channelled through producers and movie-making companies, and, as noted above, the expectation especially in the USA is for movies which are eye-catching but do not seriously challenge the audience intellectually.
Things which can be explored in a graphic novel, especially with illustrations as detailed as Moore/O'Neill's work, would be very bitty and messy in a movie. Authors seem to believe that their ideas will work in any media, but this is unlikely to be the case and they have to yield to a whole different set of constraints: to expect anything else is very naive. Novels of any kind can conjure up entire universes and refer easily in passing to many background elements that it can be very difficult to introduce into a movie without seriously disrupting it, or at best, slowing the pace of the movie to an extent which loses audience. This has been recognised at least since '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968) if not longer. It seems that many authors, even of graphic novels which have a 'cinematic' aspect to them, do not really comprehend, not only the 'language of film' but also what limits there are to its 'vocabulary' and 'grammar' when people are trying to make money out the movies they produce.
It does seem that Moore has great difficulty with the whole movie industry. He was angered by the case brought by Larry Cohen and Martin Poll against 20th Century Fox who had made 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen'. Cohen and Poll argued that the movie had plagiarised their work called 'Cast of Characters' which they had offered to Fox in the mid-1990s. The case was settled out of court. Moore felt he personally was being challenged by Cohen and Poll and wanted a court case to exonerate himself of plagiarism. He missed the entire point. First, the case was not brought against him, even though his graphic novel came after their proposal. Second, Hollywood finds difficulty in really engaging with good stories; see my posting: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2010/03/lack-of-good-stories-in-hollywood.html Consequently as they have often done with other good styles/characters they scrabbled around for a plotline to hang that setting/characters on. Hence, they used that of Cohen and Poll, which, featuring some of the same characters as Moore's work, would have seemed ideal. Again, this is more about the state of how the US movie industry and its prime audience (Americans) sees the right way to make a (financially) successful movie.
Of course, Cohen, Poll, Moore and O'Neill, had all raided a lot of other people's work, who in fact, seem to get no attribution anywhere. The graphic novel of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' features, amongst others, characters such as Allan Quatermain based on the Allan Quatermain of the novels of H. Rider Haggard (published 1885-1927), Wilhelmina 'Mina' Harker from Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' (1897); Captain Nemo from 'Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea' (1870) and 'The Mysterious Island' (1894) by Jules Verne; Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde from 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' (1886) by Robert Louis Stephenson and Dr. Hawley Griffin from 'The Invisible Man' by H.G. Wells (1897).
The graphic novels of 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' make a point of taking characters from numerous Victorian and 20th century novels and yet, Moore/O'Neill seem to feel that the characters have become theirs rather than being the property of the original authors. O'Neill laughably complained that he did not recognise the characters as portrayed in the movie script; I wonder if Verne, Stoker, Stephenson, Haggard, et al, would recognise their characters at all in Moore/O'Neill's work? Even the title of the graphic novel was borrowed from 'The League of Gentlemen' (1960 movie; from 1958 novel of the same name by John Boland). This preciousness about the graphic novels helped damp cult following of the movie.
A particular criticism of the movie is that characterisation is shallow. This is again a laughable complaint. Movies are far shorter than people think and lack time to fill in characters, especially as in 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' in which there are so many lead characters. In the movie, in addition to the characters listed above, there is also Dorian Gray who is pictured in the graphic novel, but is not a character. Gray comes from 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' (1890) by Oscar Wilde.
To appeal to the US audience and to have a character who is younger, Tom Sawyer is also featured; he appeared in four novels by Mark Twain published 1876-96. Sawyer in the movie is shown as being 18, though if in 'Tom Sawyer, Detective' (1896) set in 1896 and showing Sawyer as 17, then by 1899 when 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' is set he should be at least 20. The League's opponent in the original graphic novel was Fu Manchu, but such stereotypical, dated portrayals of Chinese would have gone down poorly in the 21st century. Consequently, in the movie, he is replaced by Professor James Moriarty from a number of Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, though he also referred to early on in the movie as 'M' a reference to James Bond's boss. His use of the disguise of the 'Phantom', described by Quatermain as 'operatic', references the phantom of the opera in Gaston Leroux's 'Le Fantôme de l'Opéra' (1909-10).
The movie, then, has to sketch in eight major characters with Rodney Skinner replacing Dr. Hawley Griffin as an invisible man after Fox were unable to secure the rights to Wells's character. Of course, there is a benefit that many of the audience would know these characters from other movies and the various novels. Some will know them from the graphic novels (I have read all of these), though despite O'Neill's complaints against the movie, their characters are not particularly well developed in those stories either (graphic novels, like movies, lack the space novels have to develop characters, except over sustained editions).
I think the movie presents a very exotic bunch of characters and in the limited space shows not only their personalities and some of their difficulties with their particular traits, but also the tensions between them. In an action movie with such a large ensemble I would not expect there to be time for much more; compare it to 'The Magnificent Seven' (1960) which similarly has seven heroes and one opponent to detail. Quatermain (who in the original novels died in 1885) is weary of his adventuring life and is patronising to Harker as a young woman. Jekyll fears being controlled by the beast of Hyde and this generates friction especially with Nemo, though the respect between the two grows. Nemo is shown as a worshipper of Kali and is described as a pirate, reflecting his anti-hero standing in the novels. Despite being an Indian (a Hindu but dressing more like a Sikh), he is accepted by the white characters in a way that may have been unlikely in genuine 1899, though given that all the characters can be seen as 'outsiders' they may have muddled along. Gray is a hedonistic snob who has had an intimate encounter with Harker, but whilst out for himself, seems also vulnerable given that Moriarty holds his painting. Skinner is the one looked down upon and suspected, reflecting the real class divisions of the time; he is a burglar anyway, but he seems to be along for the adventure.
The character with least substance in the movie is Sawyer who seems to be an insensitive American, rather arrogant towards European ways and foolishly being brash about Quatermain's personal losses and over-confident in believing he can seduce Harker; hardly a positive character. He also wastes bullets in the way Americans are renowned for doing in numerous novels and movies. This was always going to be a challenge for this movie in the USA: it is full of middle-aged European characters.
I like the movie because it quickly gives us a variety of characters that are different from the usual run of heroes and I think everyone has their favourite. It is nice to see a movie without too many of the stereotypes of Hollywood action movies, though Connery comes close in his portrayal to many of his other roles. The fist fight in his club in Kenya at the start of the movie reminds very much of his fist fight when his character goes to prison in 'Family Business' (1989) and his fight in a bar using just one of his thumbs in 'The Presidio' (1988). Mr. Hyde appears very similarly running across Parisian rooftops as he does in 'Van Helsing' (2004) even down to the bloated upper body. However, in 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' he is captured (as in the graphic novel) rather than killed as he is by Van Helsing.
In the movie there is ambivalence (in contrast to the graphic novel) as to whether the League is genuine or simply been created by Moriarty. In the novel it is real and has been subverted by him so he can get his hands on cavorite (the material used in 'The First Men in the Moon' (1901) by H.G. Wells to propel Dr. Cavor's spaceship to the Moon) stolen by Fu Manchu. In the movie it is to get elements of the various members of the league to sell to the rapidly arming powers of Europe. This fear, that individuals were seeking to profiteer from the clear steps towards war of the 1890s-1910s by fostering these developments, featured in novels of the time, such as 'The Thirty-Nine Steps' (1915).
The world portrayed in 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' both the movie and graphic novels, is not our world. It is a steampunk world, i.e. with anachronistic and fantastical machinery present. However, the portrayal of cities of the movie is even more distinct. In the shots of London in July 1899 only horse-drawn vehicles are shown, but, in fact, the car, though rare, had appeared; by 1911 there were 240,000 cars in the UK. Of course, none of them would have looked like the 1930s-style limousine (especially one with a hard roof rather than one of canvas or leather) used by Captain Nemo, but he would not have had to introduce intelligent people like the rest of the league to the word 'automobile' which had been in use in US newspapers since 1897.
The streets of East London where Dorian Gray lives and, especially, those of Venice shown later, are fantastical versions of these locations. Venice from the air resembles the city in our world, but its size as a whole and the width of the roads running through it are both far larger than in our world. You certainly could not raise a submarine in any of the canals and in reality the city has only one enclosed bridge crossing the canals, the famous Bridge of Sighs. Leonardo Da Vinci produced maps of Imola and the Chiana Valley, but his plan of the foundations of Venice is a fictional McGuffin for the movie. Thus, despite the huge hangar of Zeppelins in Berlin, we see a world where there are greater advances in technology (throughout history, given Da Vinci's work shown) but which have been kept by the privileged.
Like many steampunk stories, the technology that Moriarty and Nemo use, has simply been brought back in time by twenty-thirty years. The tank used to attack the Bank of England is very characteristic of those used on the Western Front by the British from 1915 onwards, though it is manned by soldiers dressed in the uniforms adopted by the Germans in the middle of the First World War (when the spikes were no longer put on the helmets). The uniforms of the men guarding the bank are typical of British soldiers on the Western Front during the war, notably the particular style of helmets. Interestingly the Metropolitan police officers outside, wear the capes of Parisian police rather than the longer British style. The radio signal that Nemo follows to track Moriarty to the Amur river on the border between Russia and China, had been public demonstrated in the mid-1890s and transatlantic signals were demonstrated in 1902, though with some possibly successful attempts preceding this, thus this technology is not too advanced. The 'Nautilus' itself is probably larger even than a modern day submarine, but the missile it fires locking on to a radio signal, even just a couple of kilometres across Venice was not seen in our world until anti-ship missiles introduced by the Germans in 1943.
We see flamethrowers used by Moriarty's men. Flamethrowers date back to the 7th century CE but in their modern form were first demonstrated to the German army in 1901, so not out of step with the movie. We also see assault rifles used by Moriarty's men in the movie. The Italian Army had been experimenting with them as early as 1890; the Russian Army issued assault rifles in 1915 and through the First World War the French Army developed what can be seen as assault rifles in large numbers. So, again, this is not an unfeasible development. Nemo's crew have even more advanced weapons, using silver engraved versions of the British sten gun submachine gun produced from 1941 onwards in our world, though, of course, never as elegantly as the weapons Nemo's men have. His own pistol is something unique that I cannot identify having an actual parallel. The Winchester rifle used by Tom Sawyer is presumably an 1894 version as from 1895 onwards they were produced with magazines rather than rounds being held in a tube under the barrel; these were sold in a variety of calibres and 7 million of these rifles had been sold by 2006. Quatermain's 'Matilda' is a so-called double rifle. These guns are custom made and hand-fitted. It may be a Holland & Holland, 'express' rifle firing often hollow or explosive tipped rounds; typically of .450 calibre aimed at stopping big game animals. Such guns, with the two triggers as shown in the movie, had been around right through the Victorian period.
Though no submarine was the size of the 'Nautilus', they had been used during the American Civil War of 1862-5 and the first British submarine was launched in 1901, so the concept would not have been alien. One interesting thing about the 'Nautilus' is that it uses solar power to charge its batteries for undersea travel. In both world wars submarines tended to travel on the surface of the water as much as they could as they were reliant on batteries charged off diesel engines when underwater. This is something which critics of the movie 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' (1981) miss. (It is interesting that if you search on Google 'submarine controversy' comes up as one of the commonly selected options). Yes, the submarine in that movie does not look precisely right, but certainly Indiana Jones could have remained on board as it went across the Mediterranean. Remember that movie is set in 1936 and the world war has not started, so there would be no need for the submarine to submerge.
Submarines in the First World War typically had a naval gun on deck and often this would be their prime weapon rather than torpedoes. It is only people who have grown up in the age of nuclear-powered submarines who expect them to be submerged for more than a minority of the time. To some extent, Nemo in 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlement' falls into this trap of aiming to submerge when he has no need. Of course, he might be about to enter the fictional undersea tunnel beneath the Suez Canal which allowed him, in the novels, to by-pass Africa when heading towards Asia.
The climax of the movie occurs close to the Amur river at a base that resembles some Russian palace but is filled with an extensive industrial plant. This is very much in the ilk of the evil mastermind's lair in many movies and novels, which, of course blows up at the end. Fortunately the 'Nautilus' is vast enough to take away all the scientists and families and other workers from the base, once Moriarty has been killed.
'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' is an action movie, but one that I feel rises above many of its kind. Its range of characters and its steampunk setting make it stand out. It could never have been a close portrayal of the graphic novel, and yet it avoids being an entirely Hollywood version either. Possibly this is due to its primarily non-American cast and portrayal of events, settings and behaviour that do not form part of current US consciousness. In the time it has, I believe, it lays out a far more interesting range of characters and, in many ways, those who come out best from it are those who would not do so in a mainstream Hollywood movie. Mina Harker is shown as a scientist, eschewing male attention and patronising attitudes. She is a vampire and fights as effectively, if not more so, than her male counterparts. Captain Nemo is probably the first Hindu hero I can think of in mainstream movie from the USA, bar perhaps those in 'A Passage to India' (1984) and the biopic 'Gandhi' (1982) and the recent, 'The Last Airbender' (2010), featuring many Asian actors though set on a fantasy planet. He is gracious, innovative and a good fighter, also a conciliator. As a consequence of these traits, it is a movie that I return to on DVD and enjoy. I accept that given my taste for steampunk it would attract me more than the average movie watcher, but I certainly do not feel it should be remembered simply as the movie which seemingly ended Sean Connery and Stephen Norrington's movie careers. Even if it is, they should feel no shame about being involved with it.
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
The Tedium of 'Twilight: Eclipse' (2010)
I made a mistake a couple of weeks back of buying a friend the DVD of 'Twilight: Eclipse' (2010). She had enjoyed the previous two movies and watched them more than once on DVD. As the gift-giver, on the day of her birthday I was invited to come and watch the movie, which I had not seen, with her. I like contemporary vampire movies and have seen 'Blade' (1998) and 'Underworld' (2003) on numerous occasions. I had reasonably enjoyed the first two instalments of the 'Twilight' movie series: 'Twilight' (2008) and 'Twilight: New Moon' (2009). I found the setting in the North-West of the USA a suitable one, and the tension between the werewolves and vampires seemed interesting. Of course, the sexual/relationship tension of the late-teenaged heroine Bella choosing cerebral vampire Edward but still feeling affection for more muscular werewolf Jacob was sufficiently engaging. Both of these earlier movies tempered the teenage romance angst with genuine action first against renegade vampires and then interacting with the Volturi, a powerful organisation of vampires based in Italy. Interestingly, Martin Sheen who plays a werewolf fighting vampires in 'Underworld' and 'Underworld: Rise of the Lycans' (2008) appears as an elder vampire in 'Twilight: New Moon' of the same year.
Having seen 'Twilight: Eclipse' billed as 'the best Twilight movie yet', I had high hopes that it would build on the strengths of the previous two movies and provide new step. However, I give nothing away if I reveal that it adds nothing to what had been explored in the previous movies of the series. I know that the novels by Stephenie Meyer (published 2005-8) stretch the story of the romance between Bella and Edward over four novels, but that is probably far too long for a movie. In 'Twilight: Eclipse' all you have is continuing prevarication from Bella about turning into a vampire and ire from Jacob who believes she should be with him rather than with Edward. The tension between Jacob and Edward and Bella wanting to remain with Edward and yet not wanting to harm Jacob's feelings simply rehashes what happened in 'Twilight: New Moon'. The main opponent Victoria, who appeared in 'Twilight' assembles a powerful army of new vampires but this element is neglected in favour of repetitive sullen behaviour from the three main protagonists.
References to other incidents such as the rise of a powerful vampire army at the time of the American Civil War are skirted over. I know Bella is the heroine, but with these apparently large threats to humanity and the vampire community going on, you would think she could lift her gaze from her own angst over fancying two young men, for even just a short time, to look at something else. Sympathy for Bella is beginning to wear thin. Even the woman I bought the DVD for, who is not a teenager, but certainly is very much a Jane Austen fan so into stretched out romance punctuated with minor 'crises', was tiring of it all by the end of the movie which runs for 2 hours 4 minutes meaning you see far too much of drippy teenagers moping around a rainy landscape. There was enough of this in the second movie; cutting this one to 93 minutes would have improved it immensely and restored much of the tension felt in the first movie.
I know Meyer is a devout Mormon who is married and has three children; her husband who she married when they were both 21, has given up work to look after the children since his wife's career took off. Meyer wrote the novels at a time when George W. Bush was in power and not only advocating abstinence as the only form of contraception for unmarried couples, but also pouring federal funds into the teaching of this approach in schools. Unsurprisingly teenage pregnancies are the highest in the USA of all industrial states. I can only find figures for 1996 when the rate was 55.6 births per 1000 women under the age of 20 compared to 29.6 in the UK, 13 in Germany, 9.4 in France and 6.6 in Italy. In the USA 80% of teenage pregnancies were unintended and of these 50% were from women not using contraceptives. I have no problem with people having religious messages in their movies. I have watched many of the movies of Christ's life and others with explicit or implicit religious themes from 'The Nun's Story' (1959) to 'Minority Report' (2002). However, perhaps it was because I found 'Twilight: Eclipse' so dull that these elements jarred most strongly with me when watching it.
I accept that Edward Cullen is supposed to be 104 years old and brought up during the Victorian period, or in fact an idealised version of the Victorian period. As Ian Hislop's very engaging series 'The Age of the Do-Gooders' currently running on UK television has demonstrated, one reason why so many Victorians had to be active in combating vice was because so much of it was happening. Cullen reflects a 20th century view of the Victorian era rather than the context in which Sherlock Holmes was operating, which though fictional, shows us a great deal of Victorian society. Consequently, when Bella proposes to have sex with Edward he refuses insisting they would only do it after they were married. He proposes to the 18-year old Bella, who rightly, even in the movie, feels she is rather being blackmailed into it. Edward wants to turn her into a vampire before they are married and only have sex after they are. I know the USA has movements like the Silver Ring Thing which gets young people to make a commitment to abstinence until married, but even their website claims only 465,000 people have attended their events and 161,400 have made the commitment. This is compared to around 74 million people under the age of 18 living in the USA. The other thing is, Bella agrees to marry and even back in Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About Nothing' (1598) the priest marrying a couple acknowledges that they are likely to have already had sex. This was at a time far more religious than our own.
I would not be surprised if Bella would not be suspicious of Edward. She has accepted that he is a vampire, but certainly in many stories, vampires are infertile and in some are unable to even have erections, being, in theory, 'dead'. If the Bella and Edward are engaged, they need to discuss their future together and one thing they definitely do not talk about is sex and children. Any couple needs to have such conversations before their relationship develops certainly to the stage of marriage. However, in the movie reflecting the novels, this is indefinitely postponed. In the fourth novel, Bella finally marries Edward and gets pregnant by him while still a human. This, again, reflects Bushite views of sex; i.e. that a married woman's role is to produce children. One minute before the marriage ceremony she must not have sex, one minute after she must be getting pregnant. Viewers of the movie certainly can feel that Bella has been locked into a kind of production line, with no reference to her own pleasure, just simply to what is 'right'. Free will, certainly from the woman's perspective seems to have gone out of the window. This is ironic given Meyer's own history. I accept that she was a young wife and mother, but now her husband is the main child-rearer and her wealth has allowed her choices in her own life she seems to deny her heroine.
The other thing that is missing is the fact that teenagers get incredibly aroused and a lot of sex just happens in the heat of the moment. Letting your passions run away with you is frowned upon in the movie with reference both in 'Twilight: New Moon' and 'Twilight: Eclipse' to a werewolf who turned and injured his human partner, scarring her for life. This is why Bella could never be with the werewolves as they are the analogy for unbridled human passion and the vampires, are, in fact there to represent humans in clinical control of their emotions and consequently lacking in passion and if not quite 'dead' then at least 'cold fish'. I know this is a movie series which features fantastical creatures, werewolves and vampires, but its credibility breaks down, when Bella begins to undress for sex and simply because Edward says, not overly forcefully, that they must wait until marriage, she stops and accepts it. This suggests she feels no passion for Edward at all and the sex would have simply have been going through the emotions. This presents a very artificial view of sex to the audience and seems to suggest that love and passion are divorced from each other, and, in fact, implies that true love is only true when passion is absent from it. It is ironic to compare such an attitude with movies of an era people like Meyer might look back to. Compare this to 'Casablanca' (1942) which with no explicit reference to sex, shows how loyalty, love and passion are all vital ingredients for relationships which can endure the harshest environments. Whilst Ilsa goes off with Victor, Rick and Ilsa still have the passion of Paris to warm their lives.
Overall, not only does 'Twilight: Eclipse' provide nothing new for the series, it presents a very cold portrayal of love and relationships, not really driven by feelings, rather following very stringent regulations that fixes the woman into a lifestyle that has very little to do with her own happiness and is shaped purely by the men in her life. It shows an unrealistic portrayal of the passion in an intimate relationship and the challenges there in handling that. Meyer said she wanted to keep sex out of her novels, but in fact, by showing it in this distorted way, which does not reflect how real teenagers even in the past behaved, let alone today, distorts the expectations and behaviour of her core audience. Many teenager will find it immensely harder to behave like Edward and Bella and simply switch off arousal because they have been told to do so. That will damage relationships not only in the teenage years but beyond and the USA does not need any more damage to relationships than it already has.
Having seen 'Twilight: Eclipse' billed as 'the best Twilight movie yet', I had high hopes that it would build on the strengths of the previous two movies and provide new step. However, I give nothing away if I reveal that it adds nothing to what had been explored in the previous movies of the series. I know that the novels by Stephenie Meyer (published 2005-8) stretch the story of the romance between Bella and Edward over four novels, but that is probably far too long for a movie. In 'Twilight: Eclipse' all you have is continuing prevarication from Bella about turning into a vampire and ire from Jacob who believes she should be with him rather than with Edward. The tension between Jacob and Edward and Bella wanting to remain with Edward and yet not wanting to harm Jacob's feelings simply rehashes what happened in 'Twilight: New Moon'. The main opponent Victoria, who appeared in 'Twilight' assembles a powerful army of new vampires but this element is neglected in favour of repetitive sullen behaviour from the three main protagonists.
References to other incidents such as the rise of a powerful vampire army at the time of the American Civil War are skirted over. I know Bella is the heroine, but with these apparently large threats to humanity and the vampire community going on, you would think she could lift her gaze from her own angst over fancying two young men, for even just a short time, to look at something else. Sympathy for Bella is beginning to wear thin. Even the woman I bought the DVD for, who is not a teenager, but certainly is very much a Jane Austen fan so into stretched out romance punctuated with minor 'crises', was tiring of it all by the end of the movie which runs for 2 hours 4 minutes meaning you see far too much of drippy teenagers moping around a rainy landscape. There was enough of this in the second movie; cutting this one to 93 minutes would have improved it immensely and restored much of the tension felt in the first movie.
I know Meyer is a devout Mormon who is married and has three children; her husband who she married when they were both 21, has given up work to look after the children since his wife's career took off. Meyer wrote the novels at a time when George W. Bush was in power and not only advocating abstinence as the only form of contraception for unmarried couples, but also pouring federal funds into the teaching of this approach in schools. Unsurprisingly teenage pregnancies are the highest in the USA of all industrial states. I can only find figures for 1996 when the rate was 55.6 births per 1000 women under the age of 20 compared to 29.6 in the UK, 13 in Germany, 9.4 in France and 6.6 in Italy. In the USA 80% of teenage pregnancies were unintended and of these 50% were from women not using contraceptives. I have no problem with people having religious messages in their movies. I have watched many of the movies of Christ's life and others with explicit or implicit religious themes from 'The Nun's Story' (1959) to 'Minority Report' (2002). However, perhaps it was because I found 'Twilight: Eclipse' so dull that these elements jarred most strongly with me when watching it.
I accept that Edward Cullen is supposed to be 104 years old and brought up during the Victorian period, or in fact an idealised version of the Victorian period. As Ian Hislop's very engaging series 'The Age of the Do-Gooders' currently running on UK television has demonstrated, one reason why so many Victorians had to be active in combating vice was because so much of it was happening. Cullen reflects a 20th century view of the Victorian era rather than the context in which Sherlock Holmes was operating, which though fictional, shows us a great deal of Victorian society. Consequently, when Bella proposes to have sex with Edward he refuses insisting they would only do it after they were married. He proposes to the 18-year old Bella, who rightly, even in the movie, feels she is rather being blackmailed into it. Edward wants to turn her into a vampire before they are married and only have sex after they are. I know the USA has movements like the Silver Ring Thing which gets young people to make a commitment to abstinence until married, but even their website claims only 465,000 people have attended their events and 161,400 have made the commitment. This is compared to around 74 million people under the age of 18 living in the USA. The other thing is, Bella agrees to marry and even back in Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About Nothing' (1598) the priest marrying a couple acknowledges that they are likely to have already had sex. This was at a time far more religious than our own.
I would not be surprised if Bella would not be suspicious of Edward. She has accepted that he is a vampire, but certainly in many stories, vampires are infertile and in some are unable to even have erections, being, in theory, 'dead'. If the Bella and Edward are engaged, they need to discuss their future together and one thing they definitely do not talk about is sex and children. Any couple needs to have such conversations before their relationship develops certainly to the stage of marriage. However, in the movie reflecting the novels, this is indefinitely postponed. In the fourth novel, Bella finally marries Edward and gets pregnant by him while still a human. This, again, reflects Bushite views of sex; i.e. that a married woman's role is to produce children. One minute before the marriage ceremony she must not have sex, one minute after she must be getting pregnant. Viewers of the movie certainly can feel that Bella has been locked into a kind of production line, with no reference to her own pleasure, just simply to what is 'right'. Free will, certainly from the woman's perspective seems to have gone out of the window. This is ironic given Meyer's own history. I accept that she was a young wife and mother, but now her husband is the main child-rearer and her wealth has allowed her choices in her own life she seems to deny her heroine.
The other thing that is missing is the fact that teenagers get incredibly aroused and a lot of sex just happens in the heat of the moment. Letting your passions run away with you is frowned upon in the movie with reference both in 'Twilight: New Moon' and 'Twilight: Eclipse' to a werewolf who turned and injured his human partner, scarring her for life. This is why Bella could never be with the werewolves as they are the analogy for unbridled human passion and the vampires, are, in fact there to represent humans in clinical control of their emotions and consequently lacking in passion and if not quite 'dead' then at least 'cold fish'. I know this is a movie series which features fantastical creatures, werewolves and vampires, but its credibility breaks down, when Bella begins to undress for sex and simply because Edward says, not overly forcefully, that they must wait until marriage, she stops and accepts it. This suggests she feels no passion for Edward at all and the sex would have simply have been going through the emotions. This presents a very artificial view of sex to the audience and seems to suggest that love and passion are divorced from each other, and, in fact, implies that true love is only true when passion is absent from it. It is ironic to compare such an attitude with movies of an era people like Meyer might look back to. Compare this to 'Casablanca' (1942) which with no explicit reference to sex, shows how loyalty, love and passion are all vital ingredients for relationships which can endure the harshest environments. Whilst Ilsa goes off with Victor, Rick and Ilsa still have the passion of Paris to warm their lives.
Overall, not only does 'Twilight: Eclipse' provide nothing new for the series, it presents a very cold portrayal of love and relationships, not really driven by feelings, rather following very stringent regulations that fixes the woman into a lifestyle that has very little to do with her own happiness and is shaped purely by the men in her life. It shows an unrealistic portrayal of the passion in an intimate relationship and the challenges there in handling that. Meyer said she wanted to keep sex out of her novels, but in fact, by showing it in this distorted way, which does not reflect how real teenagers even in the past behaved, let alone today, distorts the expectations and behaviour of her core audience. Many teenager will find it immensely harder to behave like Edward and Bella and simply switch off arousal because they have been told to do so. That will damage relationships not only in the teenage years but beyond and the USA does not need any more damage to relationships than it already has.
Tuesday, 5 October 2010
The Point of the Movie 'Dune' (1984)
A few weeks back for the first time in ages I watched the movie 'Dune' (1984) and as is my habit on this blog it triggered off memories of an irritation associated with the movie that I felt a desire to air. That irritation came not from the movie itself, but from the critiques of it. I remember a friend of mine back in the late 1980s and early 1990s who could not hear reference to the movie without complaining that it was 'a torso', too heavily edited to allow it to be rational. I have read and heard similar criticisms that it diverges away from the novel. That latter comment seems to be levelled at any television or movie telling of a well-known book whether it be the Sharpe or Hornblower series on television or the Harry Potter movies. Whilst modern technology allows the creation of very elaborate settings, what can be conjured up in words on a page will always exceed even what can be produced using the latest CGI technology, though the gap is far narrower than it was even a decade ago let alone back in the 1980s.
People mistakenly think that movies are vast and can encompass a novel. This is generally not the case. You can make a movie of a short story or a slim novel. A classic Agatha Christie novel of 60-70,000 words provides more than enough for a full-length movie, of 90 minutes to 2 hours' duration. The first novel in the 'Dune' series, i.e. 'Dune' (1965) written by Frank Herbert (1920-86) is 412 pages long, at my estimate probably 100,000 words, which could easily supply a 3 hour long movie even if the content was not as complex as it is in 'Dune'. A detective story such as Christie's often use stereotypes and tropes, and in the movies even casting particular actors in certain roles, in order to speed up the audience's engagement with what we are being introduced to. Look at 'The Lord of the Rings' cycle. The books are not as long as the Dune books and certainly not the Harry Potter books (usually 700-800 pages long) but because of the setting and parallel stories this provided enough material for 9 hours' worth of movie (2001-3). Making the eight Harry Potter movies (2001-12) based on seven such lengthy novels has needed the suppression of sub-plots and removal of certain characters and even then you are left with lengthy movies. Since the mid-1960s the length of novels has grown and now whereas 200 pages would be the norm now 400-800 pages is typical; naturally this will impinge on any visual media production based on them.
The average novel these days needs a mini-series to give it a worthwhile airing and this is ultimately what has happened to 'Dune' with 'Frank Herbert's Dune' in 2000 running at 4-5 hours in total depending on the version you watch. The second and third novels in the series ('Dune Messiah' (1969) and 'Children of Dune' (1976)) formed the basis of a 2003 mini-series 'Frank Herbert's Children of Dune' which was another 4 hours in duration. So, you might say, 'alright contemporary novels are too large to make the basis of a movie so David Lynch should not have bothered with his 1984 effort'. This is where today's posting comes in. My view and I certainly am not alone in this, is that the 1984 movie was worthwhile simply because it was tight.
The key problem with the Dune series is that certain elements are greater than the sum of its parts. Herbert is best as an author in his short work not in the bloated novels that came from the success of the first Dune book. After 'Children of Dune' there was 'God Emperor of Dune' (1981), 'Heretics of Dune' (1984) and 'Chapterhouse: Dune' (1985). I read all these books in a single year in the 1990s and soon lost the will to continue; I only completed them because I had bought them and in the hope that they would recapture the original excitement, the failed to do so. They are overloaded with stodgy text and the ideas run out. By the end even though people say the final book is a 'cliffhanger' you basically do not care what happens next, all the life has been sucked out of the concepts. Of course, financially it was in Herbert's interests to keep writing because these books were bestsellers, but I believe that they would be more appreciated if there had only ever been the first book. There are some sparky passages but everything quickly becomes laboured which is not surprising when you have covered thousands of pages even if they straddle centuries. Thus, a movie of just over 2 hours to almost 3 hours, depending on which cut you watch, keeps the flabbiness down and concentrates on the elements which drew readers to Herbert's work in the first place. Interestingly Herbert seems to have known this himself. Wikipedia gives an interesting quote from Herbert when interviewed by Kevin J. Anderson, saying 'They've got it. It begins as Dune does. And I hear my dialogue all the way through. There are some interpretations and liberties, but you're gonna come out knowing you've seen Dune.' Herbert was more supportive of the movie than many of his fans.
The trouble is that the Dune series like The Lord of the Rings and to a lesser extent, the Harry Potter stories, has almost become the property of the fanatical fans who love nothing than to pore over the minutiae so as to eke out the buzz they first got from engaging with the stories. It is unsurprising that there was 'The Dune Encyclopedia' (1984) which was like an encyclopedia of a real universe and in some ways with its short (and not so short entries) is more readable than the novels. In addition, Herbert's son, Brian and Kevin J. Anderson have produced prequels 'Dune: House Atreides' (1999), 'Dune: House Harkonnen' (2000) and 'Dune: House Corrino' (2001) set a short time before 'Dune'; 'Dune: The Butlerian Jihad' (2002), 'Dune: The Machine Crusade' (2003), and 'Dune: The Battle of Corrin' (2004) set 10,000 years before 'Dune' and then two books which drawing on Frank Herbert's notes apparently complete the first cycle: 'Hunters of Dune' (2006) and 'Sandworms of Dune' (2007). Then there are the so-called 'interquels', books set between events shown in the original five books: 'Paul of Dune' (2008), 'The Winds of Dune' (2009) with two others promised. The pair have also written four short stories set in the Dune universe. A phrase involving a dead horse and flogging comes to mind. However, it is clear that there is such a loyal fanbase that these things can continue to be produced. Saying that I cannot comment on the quality not having read any of the Herbert & Anderson books and I accept they may be good in their own right. However, this focus on all the tiny details and exploring these as far as is humanly possible is why the 1984 movie is then seen as being dismembered or not being sufficiently authentic.
In this context I want to stick up for the movie. I think Lynch with his eye for the visually striking was ideal as director for this movie. He kept it pacy and though it is rather front loaded in terms of setting the context of the struggles between House Harkonnen (backed by the galactic emperor) and House Atreides which has spawned a messiah, this pays off and to have adhered to the book too closely would have meant rather repetitive battle scenes at the end. Herbert conjures up a wealth of characters with a range of motivations. While some of them are typical they do catch our attention and Lynch communicates this with who he selects to play them and thus I believe derives the true essence of 'Dune' rather than the blow-by-blow reproduction that many fans seemed to expect but would have been tedious.
Herbert engaged readers by conjuring up a universe which differed from what they expected from a science fiction story and remember he did this in 1965 before the appearance of the more experimental science fiction of the late 1960s and early 1970s in my mind focused in particular on Michael Moorcock. Herbert was an antidote to the hard science Asimovian science fiction. He showed a universe with many parallels to our own. The houses remind us of Renaissance Italy city-states with a different family ruling a planet, though with a Russian-Polish-German styling (well captured by Lynch) even their council is called the Landsraad (very similar to the German Landsrat).
The bulk of Herbert's influences, however, come from the Middle East. Remember this was a time in which the word 'jihad' was unknown to most of Europe and the USA and no-one had heard of units like Fedaykin (from Feda'yin) certainly far fewer among the US population than post-colonial Britain which had until recently ruled over Iraq, Jordan and Palestine. Arrakis is a desert planet and the obsession over the narcotic melange, 'spice', can easily be seen as an analogy to oil in the Middle East; the spice even helps space travel in the way oil processed allowed road, rail, sea and air travel on Earth in the post-war period. The emperor of the galaxy is the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV. Padishah is the Farsi (i.e. Iranian) word for 'great king' ; it was also applied to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Now Saddam Hussein is well-remembered we can see a name not too far from his in this emperor of Herbert's books. Iran was the focus of tensions between the Russians and the British and then in the Cold War between the Soviets and the Americans; control of oil was the issue. It is easy for an American author writing at the height of the Cold War to have the Harkonnens as some stand-ins for the USSR and the Atreides as more Anglo-American in approach.
Of course, being a decent author, Herbert does not make a simple analogy and everyone can see other parallels from the region, notably between the rise of Paul Atreides to be leader of the Fremen people of Arakkis and the career of the British officer T.E. Lawrence ('Lawrence of Arabia') who led the Arabs in the overthrow of their Ottoman rulers during the First World War. David Lean's movie 'Lawrence of Arabia' was released in 1962, just three years before 'Dune' was published. Yet again, though, Herbert mixes in other elements and though the Fremen might be considered to be parallel to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) formed in 1964; one can also see parallels to the Jewish terrorist groups trying to expel the British from Palestine in order to establish the state of Israel in 1948; especially in terms of the female fighters, notably Chani (it is an Jewish contraction of the name Channah [who in the Old Testament is the mother of Samuel and wife of Elkanahr] which was a traditional one among Jewish women; the women called Chani these days, especially in the USA seem predominantly to have been named that due to the Dune series) who ultimately becomes Paul Atreides's wife. There is a feminist critique of the Dune series in that the women appear mainly as 'witches' shown predominantly as members of the Bene Gesserit clairvoyant order and other female roles such as the emperor's daughter and other noblewomen are characteristic of medieval/early modern roles, e.g. either as abbesses or as consorts to produce heirs. Even Chani ends up in such a role though she is an active freedom fighter too. Saying that Herbert was writing in the mid-1960s before the feminist movement had taken off and his women are certainly a step on from the more brainless beauties of some of the science fiction around at the time.
By weaving together unfamiliar references to the 20th century Middle East with elements from 19th century and Renaissance Europe, Herbert was able to create a real flavour for his science fiction, which is clear engaged people in the way that J.R.R. Tolkien did through using Nordic legends to create his Middle Earth. Herbert intentionally stepped away from the 'hard' science fiction and whilst there are laser guns and spaceships there are elements that emphasise the non-technical. Following the Butlerian Jihad ten centuries before what is shown in 'Dune' technology is held in suspicion (after a machine ordered the termination of a foetus, topic which clearly chimes with many in the USA) and so other methods are used. Notable are the mentats, i.e. human computers whose minds are accelerated by an addictive narcotic. Of course, before the 1940s the word 'computer' in our world did not refer to a machine but to a person who did calculations. The Atreides develop sonic rather than laser weapons, powered by trigger words. Herbert refers to Zen Buddhism (and even creates a philosophy Zensunni combining Zen with Sunni strain of Islam) and the shout (kihai) a person doing Karate makes when they strike can easily be seen as being a parallel of this. In individual combat people have personal force shields that bounce off laser fire or fast moving bullets, only a slowly moving blade or boring bullet can penetrate, so allowing individual combat back into a science fiction setting (and one can see parallels in the light sabre combat of the Star Wars series). This is a useful device because it allows old fashioned heroics back into science fiction stories. For space travel, space is 'folded' by the mutant pilots of the Guild. The use of wormholes and folding of space is now part of mainstream astronomical physics discussions with people such as Stephen Hawking talking about them. Herbert as any good science fiction writer has extrapolated ideas that began coming out with Albert Einstein and interestingly developed them in a direction which science has subsequently explored.
Thus we have a rich setting that even now differs from a lot of science fiction we see. I feel David Lynch captures that context and certainly makes it visually stunning. The scene of Shaddam IV in audience with a Guild pilot who arrives in a very steampunk holding tank surrounded by engineered attendants sums this up. A lot of the sets have a steampunk/dieselpunk feel to them suggesting that high technology can become baroque as time passes a trend that is alive now even stronger than in the 1980s.
The Harkonnen are shown as exploitative and evil. They are also polluters and this puts them out of step with the Fremen and to some lesser extent the Atreides who are more in step with their environment. The bloated, infected Baron Harkonnen whilst being in the model of bad guys of the past takes it to a new clinical level in the movie. His subjects are fitted with plugs in their hearts which can be removed at a whim instantly killing the victim; which the baron does to one servant early on for the fun of it. Harkonnen manipulates Dr. Wellington Yueh into betraying the Atreides by torturing his wife. Capturing the Atreides mentat, Thufir Hawat, Harkonnen enslaves him by introducing a slow-acting poison into his body. Lynch does wonderfully in showing us quickly the setting of these people and their behaviour. The same applies throughout with the Atreides and the Fremen, we can quickly engage with groups rivalling for the control of resources. This is not dismembered, this is trying to communicate something new to us efficiently. Even those who had read the novels need to be able to engage with how the movie presents such things.
Lynch is served by some good actors, notably Freddie Jones as Hawat and Dean Stockwell as Yueh, both, along with Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides were long-term collaborators with Lynch. Other notable players are Kenneth Macmillan as Baron Harkonnen. Sting as his nephew Feyd Rautha, Patrick Stewart as Atreides officer Gurney Halleck and not bad is Max von Sydow as environmental scientist Dr. Kynes. Sean Young is good as Chani but gets too little screen time. The romance between Chani and Paul is the one element people regret being edited out, but I suppose that it would have been seen to slow the action element of the movie which takes off once Paul is rescued by the Fremen. The weakest acting comes from Jose Ferrer as the emperor, perhaps because he is underwritten and from both MacLachlan and Jürgen Prochnow as Paul's father Duke Leto Atreides. Francesca Annis as his concubine and Paul's mother, Jessica about passes. I think part of the problem is that the as the 'good guys' the Atreides appear weak in the shadow of the horrific Harkonnen, but that is a flaw of the original material as much as of the screenplay.
Given the technological limitations of 1984 Lynch is able to give us bloated mutants folding space and 'worms' as large as office blocks and as long as a street rising up from the sands of Arakkis. There are hundreds of troops battling and in the climax of the movie we feel the epic conflict of the style of 'Lawrence of Arabia'. This contrasts with the claustrophobia of the earlier phases of the movie in the corridors of various palaces and even underground among the Fremen. In a movie the length of 'Dune'; in one hours longer no-one could encompass everything from the novel, but Lynch succeeds in both giving us the main elements of the novel and showing us a large dose of its intriguing style. I am sure a lot of people have been encouraged to read the novel off the back of seeing the movie. The trouble for Herbert's legacy was that he was too successful too soon. Winning the Hugo and Nebula awards right off meant no-one was going to restrain him and we ended up with a bloated series that means the gems of ideas and portrayals of people, places and actions are lost in all the bulk. Tighter, more edited novels would have continued the impact of the first much more effectively. Hence I feel that Lynch's 'Dune', rather than being a dismembered 'torso' of a movie is in fact a distilled essence that brings out the talent of Herbert's imagination effectively.
People mistakenly think that movies are vast and can encompass a novel. This is generally not the case. You can make a movie of a short story or a slim novel. A classic Agatha Christie novel of 60-70,000 words provides more than enough for a full-length movie, of 90 minutes to 2 hours' duration. The first novel in the 'Dune' series, i.e. 'Dune' (1965) written by Frank Herbert (1920-86) is 412 pages long, at my estimate probably 100,000 words, which could easily supply a 3 hour long movie even if the content was not as complex as it is in 'Dune'. A detective story such as Christie's often use stereotypes and tropes, and in the movies even casting particular actors in certain roles, in order to speed up the audience's engagement with what we are being introduced to. Look at 'The Lord of the Rings' cycle. The books are not as long as the Dune books and certainly not the Harry Potter books (usually 700-800 pages long) but because of the setting and parallel stories this provided enough material for 9 hours' worth of movie (2001-3). Making the eight Harry Potter movies (2001-12) based on seven such lengthy novels has needed the suppression of sub-plots and removal of certain characters and even then you are left with lengthy movies. Since the mid-1960s the length of novels has grown and now whereas 200 pages would be the norm now 400-800 pages is typical; naturally this will impinge on any visual media production based on them.
The average novel these days needs a mini-series to give it a worthwhile airing and this is ultimately what has happened to 'Dune' with 'Frank Herbert's Dune' in 2000 running at 4-5 hours in total depending on the version you watch. The second and third novels in the series ('Dune Messiah' (1969) and 'Children of Dune' (1976)) formed the basis of a 2003 mini-series 'Frank Herbert's Children of Dune' which was another 4 hours in duration. So, you might say, 'alright contemporary novels are too large to make the basis of a movie so David Lynch should not have bothered with his 1984 effort'. This is where today's posting comes in. My view and I certainly am not alone in this, is that the 1984 movie was worthwhile simply because it was tight.
The key problem with the Dune series is that certain elements are greater than the sum of its parts. Herbert is best as an author in his short work not in the bloated novels that came from the success of the first Dune book. After 'Children of Dune' there was 'God Emperor of Dune' (1981), 'Heretics of Dune' (1984) and 'Chapterhouse: Dune' (1985). I read all these books in a single year in the 1990s and soon lost the will to continue; I only completed them because I had bought them and in the hope that they would recapture the original excitement, the failed to do so. They are overloaded with stodgy text and the ideas run out. By the end even though people say the final book is a 'cliffhanger' you basically do not care what happens next, all the life has been sucked out of the concepts. Of course, financially it was in Herbert's interests to keep writing because these books were bestsellers, but I believe that they would be more appreciated if there had only ever been the first book. There are some sparky passages but everything quickly becomes laboured which is not surprising when you have covered thousands of pages even if they straddle centuries. Thus, a movie of just over 2 hours to almost 3 hours, depending on which cut you watch, keeps the flabbiness down and concentrates on the elements which drew readers to Herbert's work in the first place. Interestingly Herbert seems to have known this himself. Wikipedia gives an interesting quote from Herbert when interviewed by Kevin J. Anderson, saying 'They've got it. It begins as Dune does. And I hear my dialogue all the way through. There are some interpretations and liberties, but you're gonna come out knowing you've seen Dune.' Herbert was more supportive of the movie than many of his fans.
The trouble is that the Dune series like The Lord of the Rings and to a lesser extent, the Harry Potter stories, has almost become the property of the fanatical fans who love nothing than to pore over the minutiae so as to eke out the buzz they first got from engaging with the stories. It is unsurprising that there was 'The Dune Encyclopedia' (1984) which was like an encyclopedia of a real universe and in some ways with its short (and not so short entries) is more readable than the novels. In addition, Herbert's son, Brian and Kevin J. Anderson have produced prequels 'Dune: House Atreides' (1999), 'Dune: House Harkonnen' (2000) and 'Dune: House Corrino' (2001) set a short time before 'Dune'; 'Dune: The Butlerian Jihad' (2002), 'Dune: The Machine Crusade' (2003), and 'Dune: The Battle of Corrin' (2004) set 10,000 years before 'Dune' and then two books which drawing on Frank Herbert's notes apparently complete the first cycle: 'Hunters of Dune' (2006) and 'Sandworms of Dune' (2007). Then there are the so-called 'interquels', books set between events shown in the original five books: 'Paul of Dune' (2008), 'The Winds of Dune' (2009) with two others promised. The pair have also written four short stories set in the Dune universe. A phrase involving a dead horse and flogging comes to mind. However, it is clear that there is such a loyal fanbase that these things can continue to be produced. Saying that I cannot comment on the quality not having read any of the Herbert & Anderson books and I accept they may be good in their own right. However, this focus on all the tiny details and exploring these as far as is humanly possible is why the 1984 movie is then seen as being dismembered or not being sufficiently authentic.
In this context I want to stick up for the movie. I think Lynch with his eye for the visually striking was ideal as director for this movie. He kept it pacy and though it is rather front loaded in terms of setting the context of the struggles between House Harkonnen (backed by the galactic emperor) and House Atreides which has spawned a messiah, this pays off and to have adhered to the book too closely would have meant rather repetitive battle scenes at the end. Herbert conjures up a wealth of characters with a range of motivations. While some of them are typical they do catch our attention and Lynch communicates this with who he selects to play them and thus I believe derives the true essence of 'Dune' rather than the blow-by-blow reproduction that many fans seemed to expect but would have been tedious.
Herbert engaged readers by conjuring up a universe which differed from what they expected from a science fiction story and remember he did this in 1965 before the appearance of the more experimental science fiction of the late 1960s and early 1970s in my mind focused in particular on Michael Moorcock. Herbert was an antidote to the hard science Asimovian science fiction. He showed a universe with many parallels to our own. The houses remind us of Renaissance Italy city-states with a different family ruling a planet, though with a Russian-Polish-German styling (well captured by Lynch) even their council is called the Landsraad (very similar to the German Landsrat).
The bulk of Herbert's influences, however, come from the Middle East. Remember this was a time in which the word 'jihad' was unknown to most of Europe and the USA and no-one had heard of units like Fedaykin (from Feda'yin) certainly far fewer among the US population than post-colonial Britain which had until recently ruled over Iraq, Jordan and Palestine. Arrakis is a desert planet and the obsession over the narcotic melange, 'spice', can easily be seen as an analogy to oil in the Middle East; the spice even helps space travel in the way oil processed allowed road, rail, sea and air travel on Earth in the post-war period. The emperor of the galaxy is the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV. Padishah is the Farsi (i.e. Iranian) word for 'great king' ; it was also applied to the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Now Saddam Hussein is well-remembered we can see a name not too far from his in this emperor of Herbert's books. Iran was the focus of tensions between the Russians and the British and then in the Cold War between the Soviets and the Americans; control of oil was the issue. It is easy for an American author writing at the height of the Cold War to have the Harkonnens as some stand-ins for the USSR and the Atreides as more Anglo-American in approach.
Of course, being a decent author, Herbert does not make a simple analogy and everyone can see other parallels from the region, notably between the rise of Paul Atreides to be leader of the Fremen people of Arakkis and the career of the British officer T.E. Lawrence ('Lawrence of Arabia') who led the Arabs in the overthrow of their Ottoman rulers during the First World War. David Lean's movie 'Lawrence of Arabia' was released in 1962, just three years before 'Dune' was published. Yet again, though, Herbert mixes in other elements and though the Fremen might be considered to be parallel to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) formed in 1964; one can also see parallels to the Jewish terrorist groups trying to expel the British from Palestine in order to establish the state of Israel in 1948; especially in terms of the female fighters, notably Chani (it is an Jewish contraction of the name Channah [who in the Old Testament is the mother of Samuel and wife of Elkanahr] which was a traditional one among Jewish women; the women called Chani these days, especially in the USA seem predominantly to have been named that due to the Dune series) who ultimately becomes Paul Atreides's wife. There is a feminist critique of the Dune series in that the women appear mainly as 'witches' shown predominantly as members of the Bene Gesserit clairvoyant order and other female roles such as the emperor's daughter and other noblewomen are characteristic of medieval/early modern roles, e.g. either as abbesses or as consorts to produce heirs. Even Chani ends up in such a role though she is an active freedom fighter too. Saying that Herbert was writing in the mid-1960s before the feminist movement had taken off and his women are certainly a step on from the more brainless beauties of some of the science fiction around at the time.
By weaving together unfamiliar references to the 20th century Middle East with elements from 19th century and Renaissance Europe, Herbert was able to create a real flavour for his science fiction, which is clear engaged people in the way that J.R.R. Tolkien did through using Nordic legends to create his Middle Earth. Herbert intentionally stepped away from the 'hard' science fiction and whilst there are laser guns and spaceships there are elements that emphasise the non-technical. Following the Butlerian Jihad ten centuries before what is shown in 'Dune' technology is held in suspicion (after a machine ordered the termination of a foetus, topic which clearly chimes with many in the USA) and so other methods are used. Notable are the mentats, i.e. human computers whose minds are accelerated by an addictive narcotic. Of course, before the 1940s the word 'computer' in our world did not refer to a machine but to a person who did calculations. The Atreides develop sonic rather than laser weapons, powered by trigger words. Herbert refers to Zen Buddhism (and even creates a philosophy Zensunni combining Zen with Sunni strain of Islam) and the shout (kihai) a person doing Karate makes when they strike can easily be seen as being a parallel of this. In individual combat people have personal force shields that bounce off laser fire or fast moving bullets, only a slowly moving blade or boring bullet can penetrate, so allowing individual combat back into a science fiction setting (and one can see parallels in the light sabre combat of the Star Wars series). This is a useful device because it allows old fashioned heroics back into science fiction stories. For space travel, space is 'folded' by the mutant pilots of the Guild. The use of wormholes and folding of space is now part of mainstream astronomical physics discussions with people such as Stephen Hawking talking about them. Herbert as any good science fiction writer has extrapolated ideas that began coming out with Albert Einstein and interestingly developed them in a direction which science has subsequently explored.
Thus we have a rich setting that even now differs from a lot of science fiction we see. I feel David Lynch captures that context and certainly makes it visually stunning. The scene of Shaddam IV in audience with a Guild pilot who arrives in a very steampunk holding tank surrounded by engineered attendants sums this up. A lot of the sets have a steampunk/dieselpunk feel to them suggesting that high technology can become baroque as time passes a trend that is alive now even stronger than in the 1980s.
The Harkonnen are shown as exploitative and evil. They are also polluters and this puts them out of step with the Fremen and to some lesser extent the Atreides who are more in step with their environment. The bloated, infected Baron Harkonnen whilst being in the model of bad guys of the past takes it to a new clinical level in the movie. His subjects are fitted with plugs in their hearts which can be removed at a whim instantly killing the victim; which the baron does to one servant early on for the fun of it. Harkonnen manipulates Dr. Wellington Yueh into betraying the Atreides by torturing his wife. Capturing the Atreides mentat, Thufir Hawat, Harkonnen enslaves him by introducing a slow-acting poison into his body. Lynch does wonderfully in showing us quickly the setting of these people and their behaviour. The same applies throughout with the Atreides and the Fremen, we can quickly engage with groups rivalling for the control of resources. This is not dismembered, this is trying to communicate something new to us efficiently. Even those who had read the novels need to be able to engage with how the movie presents such things.
Lynch is served by some good actors, notably Freddie Jones as Hawat and Dean Stockwell as Yueh, both, along with Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides were long-term collaborators with Lynch. Other notable players are Kenneth Macmillan as Baron Harkonnen. Sting as his nephew Feyd Rautha, Patrick Stewart as Atreides officer Gurney Halleck and not bad is Max von Sydow as environmental scientist Dr. Kynes. Sean Young is good as Chani but gets too little screen time. The romance between Chani and Paul is the one element people regret being edited out, but I suppose that it would have been seen to slow the action element of the movie which takes off once Paul is rescued by the Fremen. The weakest acting comes from Jose Ferrer as the emperor, perhaps because he is underwritten and from both MacLachlan and Jürgen Prochnow as Paul's father Duke Leto Atreides. Francesca Annis as his concubine and Paul's mother, Jessica about passes. I think part of the problem is that the as the 'good guys' the Atreides appear weak in the shadow of the horrific Harkonnen, but that is a flaw of the original material as much as of the screenplay.
Given the technological limitations of 1984 Lynch is able to give us bloated mutants folding space and 'worms' as large as office blocks and as long as a street rising up from the sands of Arakkis. There are hundreds of troops battling and in the climax of the movie we feel the epic conflict of the style of 'Lawrence of Arabia'. This contrasts with the claustrophobia of the earlier phases of the movie in the corridors of various palaces and even underground among the Fremen. In a movie the length of 'Dune'; in one hours longer no-one could encompass everything from the novel, but Lynch succeeds in both giving us the main elements of the novel and showing us a large dose of its intriguing style. I am sure a lot of people have been encouraged to read the novel off the back of seeing the movie. The trouble for Herbert's legacy was that he was too successful too soon. Winning the Hugo and Nebula awards right off meant no-one was going to restrain him and we ended up with a bloated series that means the gems of ideas and portrayals of people, places and actions are lost in all the bulk. Tighter, more edited novels would have continued the impact of the first much more effectively. Hence I feel that Lynch's 'Dune', rather than being a dismembered 'torso' of a movie is in fact a distilled essence that brings out the talent of Herbert's imagination effectively.
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