The strengths of women, the weaknesses of men: why Aeon Flux is a good SF film

What is it about science-fiction based shows and films that choose to explore their chosen ideas through mature, emotionally-complex characters, which brings out the vitriol and bile from mainstream critics and self-appointed ‘protectors of the flame’ fanboys and girls?  The two TV shows I’ve enjoyed the most this past US TV season have been Fringe and Dollhouse, both of which have been thankfully renewed.  Now, four years after its release, and four months after re-watching the original animation series in its entirety, I’ve finally seen the live-action feature version of Aeon Flux, and in all three cases, I am astonished with the hatred visited upon all three on their debuts.  I know time allows for some products to become appreciated and find their audience, but that initial hatred astonishes me.

What’s with that?

I understand the appeal of something like the original Aeon Flux animations, how unique they seemed at the time, how appealing to young males a near-naked amoral S&M babe assassin engaged in SF action was, as well as the quirky humour, and non sequitur plotting.  As an adult, however, the juvenile nature of the shows is self-evident, and diminishes their entertainment value.  Thus, I take the complaints about the live-action version from both fanboys and the original creator with several large pinches of salt – after all, how credible is it to make a big-budget feature in which the heroine dies several times?  What genuine originality would that provide to a paying audience other than the most superficial of novelties?  That it became a staple of South Park is all the evidence needed as to the juvenility of such an idea.  However, the third and final series of the animation, the one with the least amount of original creator involvement, is by far and away the most conventional and lacklustre, so any attempt to paint a story on a larger canvas that can still be called Aeon Flux still needs reference to the original, and shockingly, that’s exactly what the film does for its first half.

I counted numerous visual and story references to the original animation throughout the first half of the film, including:  transferring a secret message pill by open-mouthed kiss; dominatrix inspiration to Aeon’s clothing; the notion of one humanity divided into Breens and Monicans; the preponderance of biotechnology; Japanese and European influences on production and costume design; lethal acrobatic action that often makes Aeon seem part insect or animal; the fellow Monican assassin with feet for hands; the lethal obstacle course to access the dictator’s home; the sexual relationship with benevolent dictator Trevor Goodchild despite orders to assassinate him; the latter’s factionalist government, and his scientific quest for something not explained, but very important to him; and finally, the secret lab beneath his apartment that can only be accessed by dimensionally shifting (which leads to a brilliant fight worthy of the Wachowskis).  Frankly, as a fan of the animations, that’s MORE than enough to satisfy me that this adaptation honours its roots.

Now, to the meat of the criticisms about the other elements of the film, starting with the issue of dress.  Is it really so vital to have your lead actress practically nude in an outfit that would break or reveal far too much during every stunt move?  Is it not obvious that the credibility gap all science-fiction films face with an audience only worsens when the lead is a lethal assassin with apparently no sense of cold anywhere on her body?  The Fifth Element‘s Leeloo is the closest to such an outfit, and yes, Milla Jovovich also learnt to fight for that film and did so admirably – but she spends most of the film not fighting, and certainly not leaping around acrobatically and stealthily as an assassin would – which Charlize Theron does as Aeon.  Also, covering up does not automatically equate to less sexy – that’s the thinking of a juvenile male.  The heightened sensuality created by the costume designers, the actresses and the director are palpable, and definitely lift the film well above its rating.   I’ll return to those specific creative personnel later; let’s address the issue of providing a solid story foundation that actual follows some sense of dramatic purpose.  What is so wrong about trying to create a coherent world with a history that provides motivation for the characters whose actions are creating the drama?  The film never resorts to deus ex machinae beyond the traditional tensions of pulp adventure and filmic action, instead following people motivated by their pasts to make decisions in the present that dictate the future.  This is realistic, people – things generally happen for a reason, even if you don’t know what that reaon is – people do things because of who they are and how they’re shaped.  Otherwise it’s just the creators forcing the square characters through the round plot holes as they go along.  I buy that the people we see in the film are the way they are because of what has happened to the world – I love that their culture is built out of their history, even as much of that history is unknown to the majority.  Yes, the oddball complexity of Trevor Goodchild has, to some degree, been split between the brothers Trevor and Orin, and yet without that element, there is no emotional connection to the political machinations Goodchild’s underlings are engaged in as he pursues his scientific agenda.  It may dilute the original cartoon character, but it enables so much more, it’s a price well worth paying.

This brings me to the single most important element of the film, and one it shares with FRINGE and Dollhouse and which I believe to be at the heart of much of the fanboy and critical carping about these properties.  In all of these projects, there are no macho alpha males as lead characters, only as secondary or even tertiary ones, and more often than not villainous or opposed to the female leads in some manner.  Key relationships for the lead women are with other women; emotional and intellectual responses are not simple and swift, they are complex and often considered; wider contexts are weighed in the balance.  Most of all, human emotion and the memories they help create are seen as lasting elements of what makes us human – no celebration of callousness or coldness, although these exist in abundance in all of these fictions, but instead, the idea that some things go so deep in the psyche that even apparent erasure or re-engineering of the mind can only bury them, not delete them.  In short, all of them partake of the human response to the over-technologised world, they assert what were once seen as distinctly feminine values over more masculine ones traditional in these sorts of fictions.

The majority of the creative personnel on Aeon Flux were women; only the writers were male, but they came from a comedy background, not an action or SF one, and they re-wrote constantly to accommodate ideas from the director, producer, star and the locations they found.  They bring a sense of the organic to the film that goes beyond the lush production design and costuming into how people hold themselves, communicate, and fight.  The amoral aloofness and humorous violence is replaced by a sense of organic flow, of trained, motivated combat for clear-cut reasons; of nature and humanity shaping even the weapons and clothing.  Much was made of apparently poor editing of the fights at the time; five years on, in a post-Paul Greengrass vocabulary of cinema, these look like the incredibly well-crafted action sequences they are, with clear geography and visual cues for the audience, tightly but not overly edited.  The Monican leaders are women; all the key decisions are made by women; all the key fights happen between seriously badass women.  Race is not a factor – this is a future that has been forced by circumstance to become colour-blind, but no comment is made; as with all good SF, the facts are show to you, not told to you.  In fact, as with Dark City, I could have quite happily have watched the film without the opening narration – enough clues are given in the earliest dialogue scenes in the film, and that would probably be my one complaint against the film.

All of which leads me to wonder, particularly in light of the constant online crowing about the return of Sylvester Stallone to the action arena, just how much of the complaining has to do with male critics and fanboys feeling disconnected from three of the most interesting representations of empowered women in an SF context deliberately contrasted with unempowered women in the same.  All three of these fictions remind me of Jodie Foster’s discussion of the placing of the Hero’s Journey in a female context for The Silence of the Lambs, as mentioned on the commentary for said title on the Criterion DVD edition.  As a man, I love seeing empowered women in fiction, and always have done – blame 2000AD, 80s anime, James Cameron, Kathryn Bigelow, Cynthia Rothrock, Michelle Yeoh, HK films, and written SF & Fantasy as well as a strong mother for that – but to see fictions play with the very notion of what is and is not physical and emotional strength or weakness, to provide shifting contexts that demand different responses rather than a static one- or two-dimensional character always responding in the same manner, well, that entertains and thrills me like few other things in life, and I am glad that Aeon Flux decided to be so much more than just another Hollywood summer blockbuster wannabe.

New Mind Games With Old DNA: Trust Abrams & Whedon

How TV has watched is changing as I type this.  How people treat the role of manufactured entertainment in their lives is also shifting around, although perhaps not as much for those who weren’t geeks to begin with.  There’s less and less worth actually experiencing as a viewer, given the rationale for the spending of advertising money on the bits between the ads, if what you expect from those bits is entertainment that functions somewhat above the lowest common denominator, and which is aware that it is doing so.  Sometimes, however, what’s on screen looks like the same old rope for advertising money.  I contend that some shows are actually less old rope, and more a case of creators worrying away at those ideas of most interest to them, a case of refinement rather than recycling.

Those who continue to subscribe to the half-a-century old auteur theory seek single-minded meaning in what are, ultimately, collaborative pieces created with commerce as much in mind as art.  Practical realities often feed the more idiosyncratic elements of these pieces than creative will, although without doubt the former can inspire the latter, something that keeps some of us hooked on lower-budget and exploitation fare.  Television budgets soared with available advertising, but are now coming down, something that those of us old enough to remember a time when TV was the financially poorer but creatively richer cousin of cinema can but hope will lead to more interesting things to look at between the remaining adverts.

However, some creators put together and lead teams of creative collaborators in the specific endeavour of further mining territory first mapped out by themselves or others.  These talents are often treated as auteurs within television, and may well be, despite the teamwork – the buck has to stop somewhere after all.  The real question is: are they producing work worth watching, or are they indeed just selling old rope?

When The X-Files was launched on the then-fledgling US Fox Network , it was aired back-to-back with Jeffrey Boam & Carlton Cuse’s quirky western adventure series The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., a show famed for giving the legendary Bruce Campbell his first TV lead.  The “smart money” was on that show to succeed, and the second one was dismissed as a show not worth watching, as an attempt to bring back the unsuccessful Kolchak: The Night Stalker.  Rolling Stone Magazine in particular dismissed the Files as old rope, a few years before it would carry the stars & creator naked on the cover.  I only gave it a shot because Starlog Magazine did a series of interviews to tie in with the US summer re-runs, in which starDavid Duchovny, known to geeks then for already playing an oddball FBI agent in Twin Peaks, as well as a strange sort of investigator in cable soft-porn anthology series The Red Show Diaries, recommended episodes for fans to get to know the show.  With it airing on Sky here in Europe, I got someone to tape it for me, and I lost my heart immediately to the first episode I saw.  Back then, before nerds became the financial demographic known as geeks, this good-looking guy in the Fed suits revealed impeccable geek credentials time and again, thanks to the real nerds behind the scenes, the writers.  Fox Mulder is the first character I can remember seeing on TV that I was able to relate to as an adult, rather than aspire to.  The show retains its special place in my heart, despite where it went in the end.

Buffy would prove to be the same – it arrived with minimal fanfare given the movie it was spun off from, with only serious film nerds knowing who Joss Whedon was, knowing he was one of us too.  I remember watching it on BBC2 on Wednesday afternoons, amazed someone was getting away with what was effectively action-horror exploitation with an HK twist on TV, complete with hot young women.  Again, a first season that took recognisable things I was already into, blended them expertly, and then threw them up against the screen in the hopes it would survive – the things that endear a TV show to me. Boy, did it ever.

Finally, I have to mention ALIAS, if only because it seems to be either forgotten or unfairly maligned now that J.J. Abrams gets to play with bigger properties on the big screen.  Here in the UK, that show was aired on Monday nights on Sky, and at the time, television was in the doldrums for me.  There just wasn’t much on that I was hugely interested in.  Again, friends taped it for me, and again, first episode in, I was hooked.  I followed 24 all the way through from the beginning on BBC2 around the same time, and I felt the two of them were thrilling for old reasons, not new – 24’s 60s-style split-screen work, never as creative since as it was then under film director Stephen Hopkins, and ALIAS’ glossy update of 60s spy-fi, making a star out of Jennifer Garner, both brought back the cliff-hanger ending, something that those who grew up on classic Dr.Who will tremble and shiver in delight at the memory of.  I still think 24 season 1 is the best airport thriller never written, getting everything right about that format in the US TV one-hour drama format – never been as impressed since, although series 3 was good.  ALIAS, however, I was in for the long haul, until we hit series 4, and it seemed like the re-set button was hit one too many times.  Once more, as with the X-Files, the failure to mesh the creative elements with the practical production ones led to disappointment with this viewer, although there were still pleasures to be had.

Returning then to the now-ended 2008-9 US TV season, I am struck by the fact that the shows I have most enjoyed watching this year were, once again, the ones dismissed upon their debuts no more than old rope.  Again, they come from the minds of Whedon and Abrams, arguably the definitive industry geeks.  FRINGE, like Supernatual before it, is so much more than just an X-Files knock-off, a smart refinement of ideas played with occasionally in that series, but then mixed in with other TV DNA, including ALIAS, while Dollhouse is without a doubt Whedon’s most mature, complex and interesting show.  Both have terrific acting, smart, post-Battlestar Galactica plotting and bone-crunching, post-Bourne Trilogy action.  F/X work occasionally isn’t at the level of cinematic work, but almost routinely exceeds typical TV fare.  Dollhouse in particular has some weaker episodes at the beginning, relying too much on the apparent weekly mission format just like Buffy’s first season, but my interest was held, mostly due to a first-class acting ensemble consisting of top-class character actors like Olivia Williams, Reed Diamond, Fran Kranz and Harry Lennix; intense TV vets like BSG’s Tahmoh Penikett, Angel’s Amy Acker and lead Eliza Dushku; and unusually versatile newcomers Dichen Lachman, Enver Gjokaj and Miracle Laurie.  The series addresses concepts seen before in film (Nikita, Total Recall, The Manchurian Candidate), anime and manga (Elfen Lied, Gunslinger Girl), and SF literature (Joe Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered, Karel Capek’s R.U.R., common tropes of cyberpunk), but with a high degree of consideration for the emotional and moral ramifications of all involved.  This is the forte of Whedon and his writing team, reuniting Mutant Enemy alumni Jane Espenson, Tim Minear, Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain with relative newcomers Tracy Bellomo, Maurissa Tancharoen, Andrew Chambliss and Jed Whedon.  They set up a world and populated it with people I find fascinating, even the ones I don’t like, and took them on journeys that revealed more of themselves not just to us, but to themselves and each other.  I am looking forward to going on more with them, and look forward to where they all go next season.

FRINGE, on the other hand, I simply cannot WAIT for next season!  In typical Bad Robot fashion, the cliffhanger left everything unresolved and no sense of where the show will go next except possibly into territory that The X-Files never dared – a war between opposing sides played out over the course of the show.  From a classic Abrams/Orci/Kurtzman set-up – ordinary FBI agent finds herself entangled in a large-scale bio-terrorism conspiracy based in fringe science that becomes more complex the further she investigates – the show has evolved its own mythology, as did ALIAS and LOST before it, again populated by interesting characters being led down the darkened alleyways of their own lives and the pasts of others.  While I hope the show sustains itself in the manner of LOST rather than ALIAS, it definitely excites and entertains the way ALIAS did, with an equally intriguing new female lead in Aussie Anna Torv, great East Coast location work, an unusual family dynamic in Joshua Jackson and John Noble’s Bishops, several steals from Ken Russell’s Altered States including former Molly Dodd Blair Brown, and some of the best horror moments on TV since the X-Files’ heyday, Supernatural not withstanding.  All in all, the show grew rapidly into my top-of-the week must-watch item, and the enforced breaks in December and March only reinforced that status.  I will be buying the extras-packed blu-ray for certain, and watching the season 2 opener as soon as I possibly can; Dollhouse second on both counts.

If I had not given either of these shows a chance beyond their initial pilots, then I would have really missed out this season on those things I enjoy the most in the one-hour drama format.  Old rope is often just that – but sometimes, one is being sold a deeper exploration of known themes, just as in auteur theory.  We need to remember how to give shows a chance – if they deliver everything in the pilot, then there’s not many placces to go after that.  Television drama used to require a certain amount of commitment from its audience, and while the US heyday of the serial-drama-as-novel has passed with the ending of The Wire, Battlestar Galactica and the coming end of LOST, the lessons learnt from those shows have filtered through to the more traditional format, allowing for the best pleasures of both styles to be had.  Enjoy it while this sort of TV drama can still afford to be made.

I’m Getting Old (3): The Revival of a Musical Style I’m OK With

I am perfectly happy to enjoy something that is not enjoyed by more than a few other people here and there.  I loved seeing Peter Jackson and his team win Oscars, but in the end, it matters not to me whether something I love is a massive hit or not.  If anything, living in the age of the geek as lucrative and reliable demographic has soured my enthusiasm and understanding of a particular breed of fellow geeks, that of the emotionally needy fanboy.  Not to say I’m not, but I was always after emotional approval from other human beings for my words and deeds, not my tastes in media.  The thrill of hanging out with people who share some of those tastes has always been good, but I’ve never expected either to have friends who share each and every interest, nor have I craved the approval of the mainstream.  In fact, I cannot remember ever wanting to be part of it, ever.  Niche is, has been, and hopefully will continue to be, more interesting than the majority of that which needs a wide demographic and large returns to be created in the first place.

Given all this, it would come as no surprise to most that my favourite musicians either influenced or have been part of the critically-maligned, short-lived early 90s UK musical style referred to as “shoegazing”.  I own the complete discographies of The Church and The House of Love on a mix of original and re-mastered CDs, with some period vinyl dotted around.  I would qualify R.E.M.’s early, best period – summarised in The I.R.S. Years compilation – as arguably an influence, as well as Eno/Lanois-produced U2 of the same period.  Jangly guitars and Byrdsian harmonies from the UK and US would also figure in the mix – listening to the likes of The Smiths and Echo and the Bunnymen from the UK, Guadalcanal Diary and drivin’ ‘n’ cryin’ from the U.S., while everyone else at university was grooving to the hip and the high from the Madchester scene – Happy Mondays, Stone Roses, The Charlatans, Inspiral Carpets – I continued on in my terminally unhip, resolutely unfashionable way, falling in love with a group of bands who would then arrive, burn bright and then burn out, as Brit-pop took indie into the mainstream:  My Bloody Valentine, Lush, Slowdive, Ride, Curve.  The entire period has been compiled, with the usual high skill exhibited for two decades, by U.S. label Rhino, on the first two discs of The Brit Box, a lavish 4-disc set covering UK indie music of the 80s and 90s, and well worth your time to anyone who loves this period and type of music.  A couple of major ommissions aside – no Slowdive?! – this is the best time I’ve had with an album until I found Otis Taylor’s certified trance blues.  Although for an alternative view, it is definitely worth reading former Melody Maker writer Simon Reynolds’ review of the set here – he provides interesting context that begs a few questions as to why a South African Indian like myself loves this music.

I only mention all of this because, listening to 6 Music, I came across a Swedish band reviving these sounds, and doing it in the kind of lovely fashion I find addictively listenable.  They’re called Sad Day For Puppets, and they’re currently on tour around Europe.  The current UK single is Marble Gods/Big Waves, and listening to their other tracks on MySpace is liking taking a trip back in time – DJing on University Radio Falmer, getting to grips with the beginnings of adult life, and making a right hash of it too.  Weird, the things one can get nostalgic for.  Anyway, enjoy the tunes – I’m off to get the debut album and early singles, collecting a new band the way I used to.

I’m Getting Old (2): When Sleep and Love Mean More Than Movies

The continued ageing process has been occupying me for the majority of this weekend.  Between my fatigue at a busy, stressful work week and my diabetes not behaving it as it should, yesterday vanished between extensive bouts of sleep, three separate shopping trips, and my girlfriend being the wonderful, loving human that she is.  This might not seem like such a big deal, but it was only a short few years ago not one person who could claim friendship with me would find this anything but utterly preposterous.

If I had such a thing as a free Saturday, not travelling around the country to see friends or working at a convention or somesuch, I would normally spend it mainlining movies or TV, be it on DVD or PC.  Watching a whole TV or film DVD box set never seemed a herculean challenge, nor something unusual.  Caffeine and fast food fuelled hours of watching, something that has gone on since I was old enough to use my parents’ video rental card.  It was a perfectly normal part of who I was.  Most of all, it allowed me to amass the knowledge that has since come to fuel my professional skill-set, a mixed blessing, but still a blessing in my eyes.

Life is so different now.  Diabetes Type 2, a loving girlfriend and a life together with her under one roof, have made me re-assess what my priorities are in life.  I may love science fiction in all its forms, but in the end, we live here and now under the same sky, all affected the same way by the passing of time.  There are things I’ve wanted to see, things I’ve wanted to do that I always thought there would be time to do.  Being diagnosed with a hereditary fatal disease puts everything in perspective, if you avoid denial, and I’ve come to realise that, in the end, however high I revere the art of storytelling, whatever the narrative, however important I think it is to living to be able to tell each other stories in all their permutations, communicating with each other, from past ages, to future ages, there are, by default, more important things in life.

This one’s for you, Kim.

“And in the end

The love you take

Is equal to the love

You make”

The End – The Beatles, 1969

I’m Getting Old (1): why I’m betting on the sequel over the reboot this summer

Post-US Superbowl TV Ads, the geek community are communing online today about these densely-packed super-trailers, 30 seconds to a minute of tightly-cut, TV-friendly glimpses of this summer’s American blockbusters.  Me? I keep disconnecting further year after year with this particular info-dump – the date in the marketing calendar that it is, as fabricated an occasion as Valentine’s Day.  However, everyone knows the latter can indeed be fun if one has something to celebrate, and so it is with the Superbowl ads – there’s always something that hits my button, gets my juices flowing, sends me “on the jazz”, in the words of The A-Team.  And so it is this year.

Except it’s not the one I was expecting it to be.  I’ve been a Star Trek fan as long as I can remember.  I haven’t watched an episode in years, yet can discuss things I saw from twenty years ago with some accuracy.  I saw all the movies right up to Insurrection, all the TV iterations up to Enterprise season 1, and then gave up on the lot, the whole thing.  Just stopped, got busy with other things, moved on.  And in so doing, became a fan of J.J.Abrams‘ TV creations – Alias was such a rush those first two years, like nothing on TV except the concurrent arrival of 24, while Lost has an absolute textbook-perfect pilot, and did something new for US TV.  I was impressed when he was tapped to replace Joe Carnahan directing M:I:III, and loved what finally ended up on the big screen.  So why am I less and less enthused by the trailers for the ST reboot coming our way this summer?

Abrams and his writing pals Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman have given Paramount something they’ve wanted every ten years or so, which is a vehicle for a younger, cheaper cast to carry the brand forward.  They’ve invested in proven talent at every level, and have even kept the links to the existing mythos to try not to alienate the massive fanbase, while finally making the franchise relevant to the larger number of non-fans.  It looks shiny, fast-moving and action-packed.  And it looks uncomfortably like a school play, full of children playing known adult figures.  I like it at a superficial level, but nothing about it works the way, say, a new James Bond works, or Shaft.  Not yet.

On the other hand, a film I had absolutely no desire to see, no emotional connection to from childhood, yet ended up thoroughly enjoying, for the shallowest of reasons, was Michael Bay & Steven Spielberg’s Transformers.  The trailer to the sequel, the first actual footage released so far, was everything that was good about the first film, in spades.  The heroes are in jeopardy, the earth too, familiar faces are back, and things blow up and get smashed REAL good.  Some things in life make perfect couples – fish and chips, cheese and pickle, John Woo and cinematic violence, and in this case, Michael Bay and GIANT FREAKIN’ ROBOTS SMASHING THINGS.  More of that is just what the doctor ordered.

So yeah, I’m betting on the sequel over the reboot for most fun for my money this summer on the big screen.  I might lose – heck, I’ll be happy if I do lose.  Either way, though, Paramount win.

Proper Science Fiction: back on cineastes’ agendas PART 2

Friday’s Variety carried a story about the director of the recent The Day The Earth Stood Still remake signing on to direct a single-film adaptation of Dan Simmons‘ Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion.  A great step in the right direction, given what the last few posts in this blog have been about.

However, of equal interest in the same article is the news that the scriptwriter has already delivered an adapatation of David Brin’s Startide Rising for Paramount.  Those who know Brin will know that this is one of his Uplift novels, which suggests Paramount are looking, as they always are, for a workable franchise.

So – David Brin, Dan Simmons and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War coming from Ridley Scott – one of my all-time favourite novels from one of my all-time favourite directors.  Things are looking up already – to the stars.

Proper Science Fiction: back on cineastes’ agendas

 

Poster for upcoming feature 1

 

Given what I said in the last post about science fiction in cinema having become other genres wearing a few SF trappings, here’s an example of what looks like written SF given a proper cinematic treatment: an English-friendly website for the upcoming Hungarian adaptation of the great Stanislaw Lem’s novel 1.   For those who aren’t already aware, Lem wrote Solaris, filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh.

 

And if you have no idea whether Hungarian cinema is any good, then you need to watch Kontroll NOW. Seriously.

Windows on the World: Why Documentaries Are The New Science Fiction

 

Award-winning documentary which inspired this post

When I was a kid, I wasn’t just a science fiction nerd of the 70s – Doctor Who,  Gerry Anderson shows, Blake’s Seven, Star Wars, etc.  I was a space cadet, a budding technophile in the making.  I wanted to jet-ski to work down the Thames, with a TV phone watch and all that.  I watched Tomorrow’s World (UK science & technology current affairs programme) with near-religious fervour – THIS was what tomorrow WOULD be like.  I read, and watched, and read, and watched.  That blend of TV primed me for classic literary SF – the late, great Arthur C. Clarke’s Islands In The Sky collection launched me off into years of thoughtful amazement.  Asimov, Niven, a quick detour via Doc Smith and back to names taken more seriously than his.  Even Patrick Moore’s Scott Saunders series, what would now be termed “young adult” books, were devoured, more than thrice.  I can still quote the odd line from all of these folk – my favourite from the Moore series was Saunders ‘M’-style boss’ method of congratulations;  ”Congratulations.  You can have a cigar or a coconut, whichever you prefer.”  Strange what sticks in the mind.

 

However, over the years, science fiction has entered more and more into popular culture, not just in the West.  Ideas once talked about in hushed tones amongst geeks are common currency; the actual technology once imagined has come to pass, though maybe not as predicted – my 3G phone, looking remarkably like a Star Trek communicator, can do video calls, and I use it instead of wearing a watch.  Wow – who knew!  Much of the best of SF has been borrowed, reworked, dismantled and rebuilt, until now shreds of it are everywhere, confetti after the wedding.  And yet, and yet…

I honestly believe the heart of the genre is missing.  Movies have reduced Science Fiction to SF to sciffy (pronounced skiffy), action or melodrama or comedy with SF trappings draped over them, like a soothsayer convincing others his furs grant him that animal’s powers.  Action, a genre of TV and cinema I love, is particularly guilty of that, inflicting over twenty years of low-rent clones of Aliens on us, the way anime has made Blade Runner familiar and friendly.    The core of SF is not the surface, but the IDEAS, the science explored through the fiction.  Beware any film or TV show claiming to be SF where the writers staff revel publicly in their ignorance of science – all they will be able to write is melodrama.

Which lengthy introduction brings me, finally, to documentaries.  Having written up a number of them for my weekly column, Mission: International,  over at www.geekplant.co.uk, I’ve been given real pause for thought about the recent resurgence of the genre, and the success even made-for-tv docs have been finding in the cinema.  Why?  Why are cinema-going audiences willing to go out and pay for a ticket to see a documentary in the cinema, even if it has a TV showing scheduled?  What is it about the recent crop that is so compelling? Is it purely a matter of the quality of production – reality shot and edited like fictional cinema?  Partly, as  so much cinema has taken on what used to be the visual traits of documentary (handheld cameras, overlapping dialogue, etc.), which has been too much for some audience members.  Is it taboo subject matter? Unlikely, given how much of that is exploited through reality TV.  No, there has to be something more, I’m sure.

Today, watching The English Surgeon, I realised exactly what it is.  The best documentaries offer us windows on the world, glimpses into places we may never have been nor will ever visit,  insights into people who are not us, who may be nothing like us despite being fellow humans, or who are incredibly like us.   They take ideas the directors have had, or have spotted while filming, and then explore those ideas through the craft of film applied to the recording of reality.  In short, they do what the best science fiction used to do – they find a way to explore ideas and technology and the world around us through a medium given to fiction, shaping reality into narrative, teasing out the threads nestled beneath daily life or specific occurrences.  In a world with satellites, video phones, portable computing power that easily outstrips that of the original Apollo programme and computers built inside computers, the most alien creature out there are ourselves, the most outlandish ideas and technologies still from our minds.

No wonder people are paying to see them – they’re seeing more of the world than the narrowband focus of modern TV allows.  Forget reality TV – reality itself is out there now, but bizarrely, it’s on film.

“Every day I get out of bed and drag myself to the next cup of coffee.”

 

It's All In The Caffeine

“You know, every day I get out of bed and drag myself to the next cup of coffee.  I take a sip and the caffeine kicks in.  I can focus my eyes again.  My brain starts to order the day.  I’m up, I’m alive.  I’m ready to rock.  But the time is coming when I wake up and decide that I’m not getting out of bed.  Not for coffee, or food or sex.  If it comes to me, fine.  If it won’t, fine.  No more expectations.  The longer I live, the less I know.  I should know more.  I should know the coffee’s killing me.  You’re suspicious of your suspicions?  I’m jealous, Kay; I’m so jealous.  You still have the heart to have doubts.  Me? I’m going to lock up a 14-year-old kid for what could be the rest of his natural life.  I got to do this.  This is my job.  This is the deal.  This is the law.  This is my day.  I have no doubts or suspicions about it.  Heart has nothing to do with it any more.  It’s all in the caffeine.”  Detective Frank Pembleton, Homicide: Life On The Street

 

Welcome to “It’s All In The Caffeine” a “pressure valve” blog for this UK-based media consultant.  This will be the place for all that stuff I need to write down that does not get an airing elsewhere, a mix of views, reviews, and who-knows-what-else.   You can find me at the Insider Discussion section of the Blu-ray.com forums, at Geek Planet, where I provide book reviews and a weekly column on international genre cinema, and sometimes still on various anime and DVD forums.