I haven’t had a chance to review any SF films
in a while here on Spacefreighters Lounge. I’ve been saving all those opinions
for my podcast, My
Moviehouse My Rules, now housed on SoundCloud.
But there are a few interesting new titles to stream right now that SF fans
might want to check out.
Let’s start with a film that’s generating quite
a lot of buzz on Netflix, DON’T LOOK UP, starring just about everybody in
Hollywood, but most notably, Leonardo di Caprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl
Streep, Timothee Chalomet, Cate Blanchett, Tyler Perry, Mark Rylance, Jonah
Hill, and Ron Perlman. Written and directed by Adam McKay, who wrote THE BIG
SHORT and produced the Academy Award-winning VICE, this is a dark comedy about
the end of the world, that demise coming in the form of a giant comet headed
straight for Earth.
Two scientists, nerdy-but-attractive Dr.
Randall Mindy (di Caprio in tweed and glasses) and impulsive-but-beautiful grad
student Kate Dibiasky (Lawrence looking much as she always does), discover the
comet and try to get someone, anyone, to listen to their message of
looming disaster. To no avail. The politicians (including the President (Streep)
and her idiot son/Chief of Staff (Hill) are too concerned about politics; the
media (Perry and Blanchett) are too concerned about “keeping things light” on
their talk show. An “Elon Musk”-type tech genius (Mark Rylance) delays
destroying the comet in vain hopes of exploiting its precious rare-earth
elements. All of this is played for laughs, but the premise cuts a little too
close to the bone to be laugh-out-loud funny.
McKay’s sentiments are obviously skewed toward
the liberal side here, which may lead some more conservative viewers to avoid
the film. But DON’T LOOK UP is more pro-science than against any
particular political faction, sympathizing with all the scientists currently
crying in the wilderness about climate change.
I wasn’t expecting much from the film, given
the poor reception it got from critics (who called it too preachy). Instead, I
found DON’T LOOK UP unexpectedly touching, thanks to the filmmaker’s repeated use
of a single technique to bring his point home. From the moment the news of the
comet becomes known, he shows everyday people absorbing the information via
their phones, TV screens and tablets, at first with mild interest, then with
increasing alarm. McKay checks in with folks at home at key moments throughout
the film, not just Americans or Europeans, either, but people gathered around
TV sets in huts in Africa, in slums in India, on islands in the Pacific. As the
comet comes nearer, some people are in active denial (thus the title of the
film), some are glued to their screens. But finally the object of doom is impossible
to ignore—the thing is like a searchlight in the sky.
As humanity’s end grows near, we are treated to
images of all that would be lost if the powers that be do nothing and the comet
hits: wildlife in forests and savannas, birds on the wing and fish in the
ocean, babies and puppies and rushing streams. Just flashes, but enough to
remind us what a treasure this Earth is, unlike anything else in this solar
system; unlike anything else we know within reach in this galaxy. It becomes
clear that McKay isn’t talking about the fictional, unlikely, planet-ending
disaster of a comet striking us. He’s talking about global warming, something
that is happening right now, the response to which is equally inadequate, too
little and too late, hampered by politics and denial.
Timothee Chalamet’s character, the relapsed Christian
evangelical skater-boy Yule, provides a tiny, flickering spark of hope near the
end of the film when he offers up a prayer around the family dinner table as
doom approaches. Far from being a saccharine moment, in Chalamet’s hands, it
becomes another touching scene when you least expect it. And, yes, I’ll admit
to a taste for good corn when the film calls for it.
Of course, SPOILER ALERT! there is a problem
with this film if you like happy endings. There genuinely isn’t one here,
unless you count what happens to the despicable President Orlean. But those are
the times we live in. Contrast that with the optimism of 90s disaster films
like ARMAGEDDON (Bruce Willis, Billy Bob Thornton, Ben Affleck) and DEEP IMPACT
(Morgan Freeman, Elijah Wood, Robert Duvall). Yes, we lost lots of people and
coastlines in those films, and heroes sacrificed their lives to save the world,
but the world was saved in the end. And, perhaps more important, the citizens
in those films trusted both science and their leaders. Just as we all
did in those days.
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| Davis's troupe of players post-pandemic in Station Eleven. |
The world does survive the
apocalypse in a marvelously creative science fiction limited series streaming
now on HBO Max, Station Eleven. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether
you want to engage with a screen project that deals with the effects of a
global pandemic (in this case a type of flu) that kills off most of the world’s
population in just a few weeks. There are advantages in engaging in a fictional
account of such a pandemic and its impact; you can remove yourself from it to a
certain extent and see it objectively. And at least the pandemic in STATION
ELEVEN isn’t a lingering thing like our COVID struggle. The premise here is
that the flu blew through its host population quickly and was gone, leaving its
small reservoir of immune survivors to carry on and rebuild civilization as they
could.
In this series based on the
novel by Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel, we follow the intersecting stories
of a young girl, Kirsten (Matilda Lawler), who is onstage in a version of KING
LEAR when all hell breaks loose; the man who, by chance, becomes her guardian,
Jeevan (Himesh Patel); Kirsten 20 years later (Mackenzie Davis), now the
unofficial leader of a troupe of Shakespearean actors wandering the wasteland
of the Great Lakes region; and various other characters, all loosely connected
by a pre-pandemic science fiction graphic novel they are each intimately
familiar with titled STATION ELEVEN. The series jumps back and forth between
characters and timelines to fill in gaps in the plot, assembling a full picture
of what happened when and to whom, eventually giving us a complete
three-dimensional model of how everyone (and everything) is related. It really
is the most remarkable piece of storytelling, bolstered by some wonderful
acting, stark camera work and a jarring electronic score. The show does require
patience, however, and it may not be for everyone. If you like complex, though,
(and you’re fond of SF and Shakespeare), I recommend it.
In a similar introspective
vein comes a film advertised as science fiction, ENCOUNTER, starring Riz Ahmed, star of
2019’s Oscar-winning SOUND OF METAL, backed up by versatile Oscar-winning actor
Octavia Spencer. Amazon Prime chooses to describe this film by writer-director
Michael Pearce as a science fiction tale about a Marine veteran trying to
protect his two sons from the threat of an alien invasion. But SPOILER ALERT!
at the risk of putting you off the movie, I’m going to tell you ENCOUNTER is NOT about
that, except in the lead character’s mind. I guess the producers (and Amazon
Prime) thought that if viewers knew it was about a mentally ill veteran of the Afghanistan
war kidnapping his children and taking them across country under the delusion
that microscopic bugs were controlling people’s minds, it might not go over so
well.
So the setup puts us in the
Marine’s mind, and, at first, we go along with the alien invasion idea. We see
what appears to be something streaking into the atmosphere, what looks
like a tiny tardigrade invading the bloodstream of insects, a mosquito
injecting microscopic beasties into a human bloodstream, news reports of
widespread rioting and crime on the television. We meet our antihero Malik
(played with unstinting credibility by Ahmed—what a fine actor he is!) in a
hotel room that appears to be crawling with nasty bugs. He’s covering himself
with bug spray and “researching” the invasion. He’s also planning to grab up
his two sons, 10-year-old Jay and 8-year-old Bobby, (played with skills beyond
their years by Lucian-River Chauhan and Additya Geddada) from their mother’s
house because he’s convinced Mom has been infected by the alien bugs.
What follows is a tragi-comic
road trip from Oregon to Nevada’s Groom Lake, where Malik believes the last
uncorrupted base still holds out against the invasion. Meanwhile, the FBI is on
his trail, thinking he is a “family annihilator,” someone who will kill his
boys and himself when he finally snaps. Only his parole officer (Octavia
Spencer), a good-hearted type who gives everyone the benefit of the doubt,
believes he will put his sons before himself.
The power of the acting is
what lifts this admittedly strange and clunky vehicle out of the mud. Ahmed and
both boys take the mundane to the next level here, making ENCOUNTER worth
watching. And the end, far from being the disaster you might anticipate, is
touching and even uplifting. I started watching this because I like Ahmed and I
expected SF; I stayed with it because it had surprising depth. You might, too.
You can find these and more
of my new screen reviews with old-school attitude on SoundCloud, iTunes,
Stitcher, my Facebook Page app or
on my podcast website at mymoviehousemyrules.com.
You can comment there, too, and tell me what you think!
Cheers, Donna
