Microreview [film]: Fantastic Planet

A Visually Unique Sci-Fi Allegory

On a planet inhabited by a giant, blue, humanoid race known as Draags, they have a rodent problem. And the rodents are us.

Sometimes, a kind-hearted Draag child will claim a human — known as Oms — as a pet, like we would hamster. Not like a dog, a companion, but like a tiny, living toy whose novelty can't really last that long. But by and large, Oms are treated as a nuisance and are regularly purged from the fields outside the city to keep the population of wild Oms down. The main Draag that Fantastic Planet follows is a child named Tiwa, and her pet Om is Terr. As Draags age, they begin their instruction, which is telepathic in nature, and all Draag knowledge is conveyed using a special headset. Terr ages much more rapidly than Tiwa, and eventually finds a way to steal her headset, escape, and bring knowledge to a group of wild Oms living outside of town in desperate need of something that will allow them to survive the coming purges.

So you wouldn't say that Fantastic Planet is particularly light fare, despite the large-eyed, actually-kind-of-cute character design of the Draags that adorns much of the promotional material for this 1973 animated film. In fact, the opening of the film is quite emotional, as we watch Draag children flick a human mother back and forth in play, until she finally stops moving. Like human children might thoughtlessly do to a bug. It's hard to know exactly what to write about this movie, because even forty-five years after its release, it remains essentially a totally unique experience. I had seen moments of it, and as a big fan of animation, I came to it specifically to see the animation. The story could have been nonsense, or just a psychedelic mish-mash of imagery, and it really wouldn't have mattered to me. Visually, this looked like it would be a stunning work, and it definitely delivered.

But the depth and effectiveness of the narrative surprised me, and in fact continued to surprise me as the film unfolded. I was drawn to the stunning visuals, and would kind of get lost in them, but then find myself getting yanked back into the story afresh, and thinking, "Wow, this really is good!"

Over the years, there have been debates about the allegorical meaning of the film — whether we are to understand it as a plea for better relations among peoples, or perhaps a message about the importance of animal rights and welfare. I'm not sure it matters very much. What I took away from Fantastic Planet was an invitation to greater awareness, of both the self and of others, and to the importance of compassion. If we can obtain it, we may exercise that compassion on behalf of others, or on behalf of animals, or on behalf of the planet, I suppose, but the important thing is that we do exercise it.

I think such a universal message helps this film to stand somewhat outside of time. While the music is waaaaay 1970s, and the years-long French-Czech co-production took place against the backdrop of Soviet tanks rolling into Prague, the film's message is timeless and the animation singular (visually not dissimilar to Terry Gilliam's Monty Python work, but deployed in a completely different manner), so I don't think you have to be a big animation nerd like me to find something touching and thought-provoking in this one-of-a-kind sci-fi film.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for the engrossing animation; +1 for telling a compelling story for adults at a time when that's not really how animation was thought of

Penalties: -1 for feeling a little slight at only 71 minutes

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10, well worth your time and attention. (About microreview scores)

Posted by Vance K — co-editor and cult film reviewer at nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012, sometime animator.

Fright vs. Fright: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Fright vs. Fright is a series of comparisons between classic horror films and the lesser-known works that inspired them, or subsequent remakes that stand on their own merits.

The Film: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

The Plot: Dr. Miles Bennell stumbles into a police station raving about not being insane, and needing people to listen to him. A psychiatrist arrives and agrees to hear Bennell's story. It goes like this: Miles returned from a medical conference to news that many of his patients had called and made appointments in a panic while he'd been gone, and then a day or so later, all called to cancel. When a friend says that she thinks her uncle isn't really her uncle, Miles is concerned for her. But then when a little boy comes in with his grandmother saying that his mother isn't really his mother, Miles begins to worry more generally. Stuff gets really weird when Miles gets called to his friend Jack Belicec's house because Jack's wife seems to have found a...body. It's a strange body. Sized and shaped like Jack, but without distinct facial features or fingerprints. Miles remembers his would-be girlfriend Becky saying she thought her dad was behaving strangely, and he darts to Becky's. In the dark basement, he believes he sees a doppelganger body of Becky in a locker down there, but afterward can't be sure. When he and Becky return to the Belicec place, though, the four of them discover giant alien pods in the greenhouse, each pod growing a copy of each of them. They've uncovered an alien plot to replace humans with unfeeling clones, and now they have to try to get away...and stay awake.

The Good, The Bad, The Indifferent: Invasion of the Body Snatchers is about as good as 1950s horror/sci-fi gets. There's not a lot of "guilty pleasure" here — this is lean, taut storytelling that is maybe not as visceral today as it would have been in 1956, but is no less thought-provoking. That this movie can be claimed as both a tacit endorsement of McCarthy-ite Red Scare paranoia and a rejection of that very same ideology speaks to how engaging it is. The filmmakers all went to their graves insisting that there was no political motivation or didactic intent behind the film, but there's no denying that it is a product of its zeitgeist. Can we be saved from the threat of secret Communist infiltration? Or, can we be saved from the reactionary forces in control that insist on homogeneity? This is in many ways the best of genre storytelling — a metaphorical treatment of existential forces that a society is wrestling with.

Fun bit of connective tissue: Carolyn Jones (later Morticia Addams), was in last week's installment, House of Wax, and also plays Teddy Belicec in this movie.

Remade As: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

How It Stacks Up: I'm not sure which of these two version is "better," so suffice to say that when it comes to the daunting task of remaking classic movies, this is about as good as they come. There are some elements that are a little dated — like the super-fake nosebleed on the pod-body of Jack Belicec (this time played by Jeff Goldblum) — but on the whole the practical effects hold up, and Philip Kaufman's film does a great job of painting on a broader canvas than the original film. Set in San Francisco, instead of a small town, the stakes begin much higher, and the barriers to stopping the alien pod-people from spreading are much more daunting. The ick-factor is ratcheted up in this version, and one additional characteristic added to the pod people in particular really heightens the creepiness. It's the shrieks. The shrieks of the pod people. It's unsettling and kind of chilling, and such a great reminder of how the well-chosen little things can be used to much better effect in horror than gore-for-gore's sake.

Worth a Watch? Absolutely. I think it's hard to go wrong with either of these two versions. There are more versions out there, but these two I can recommend without reservation.

Posted by Vance K — cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012. Perennial watcher of dozens of horror movies each October. Not a pod person. As far as you know.

The Roger Corman Interview

Roger Corman has been, arguably, the single most important voice in the history of independent cinema. It was an absolute honor to be able to sit down with him in his office to discuss his new film, Death Race 2050, and specifics from a career that spans seven decades.


For the uninitiated, Roger Corman began writing, directing, and producing in the mid-1950s. He launched the careers of actors like Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda, and revived or reinvigorated the careers of Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, and others. As a producer, he gave directors like Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Joe Dante, and James Cameron their starts in filmmaking. He worked extensively with writers such as Twilight Zone alumni Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, who were also seminal sci-fi and horror writers in their own right. His distribution company won foreign language Oscars for the films of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini.

But at the end of the day, this is a guy who just made a lot of great movies. From the 1950s beatnik satire A Bucket of Blood to the 1960s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, to the 1970s punk hallmark Rock n Roll High School and beyond, Roger Corman may have spent a career working with low- and medium-budget films, but he managed to create lasting art, documents of the times, and just goddamn fun movies, and he continues to do so.

If you haven't, check out Death Race 2050, streaming on Netflix and on DVD and VOD or watch the original, Death Race 2000, on DVD or streaming on FilmStruck. And enjoy the interview. I sure as hell did.

Posted by Vance K — co-editor and cult film reviewer for nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012, musician and songwriter, and Emmy Award-winning producer.

Westworld at Mid-Season

Too mysterious for its own good?

HBO's new series Westworld hit the mid-season mark this week, and it feels like there's enough there to finally talk about in terms other than wild internet fan theories.

If you haven't been watching, that's cool. I wanted to weigh in without spoilers, on what the show's actually doing (and maybe not doing), and if it's worth checking out. I remember seeing the original 1973 movie for the first time about five years ago, and I wasn't floored, but it was cool and it occurred to me that if I'd seen it when I was 12 or 13, it maybe would've been my favorite movie. It was a pretty straightforward wish-fulfillment sci-fi adventure. And hell, Westerns and robots? Man, sign me up.

HBO's new series is anything but straightforward — and that goes for both on- and off-screen aspects. I saw the first trailer for the show right after the 2016 Television Critics Association press tour, when HBO's president of programming was confronted with a series of questions about the pervasiveness of violence against women in its shows. Coupled with Emilia Clarke's repeated calls earlier this year to "Free the Penis" and get some more equitable nudity on Game of Thrones, this show is arriving at a moment where it's under the microscope right from the jump in a way previous HBO shows maybe haven't been. And the first Westworld trailer did nothing to assuage the violence-against-women accusations leveled in those TCA panels. Quite the opposite.


But what about the show? Well, that's where I'm a little bit at a loss how to talk about it. The long and short of the story is that there are a couple of guys visiting the futuristic resort of Westworld, where you can live out your fantasies (violent and sexual, mostly) with AIs that are indistinguishable from real people. The operators of the park start to notice something is wrong with a few of the units, and the signs point to a couple of them "waking up." Meanwhile, the guests in the park don't know any of this is going down, and one guest in particular, The Man in Black (Ed Harris, not Johnny Cash) has a secret mission he's on that no one else knows about. The pilot episode does the "alternate reality" bit to perfection, and I found myself caught up in the giddy feeling of "this would be so cool, to actually walk off a train in the Old West!" I'd like to think I wouldn't be as big an asshole as the guests on the show, but it seemed cool. But the storytelling is so oblique, so insistent that "there are lots of mysteries going on," that to be honest I didn't have much of a connection to anyone in that pilot episode, and if they hadn't, toward the end, gotten into the notion of these robots waking up, I don't think I would've stuck around for episode two.

But I did stick around. And this is where the internet comes into the story again. Because of that obliqueness in the storytelling, because there were clearly lots of different breadcrumb trails being laid out in different directions, but none of them explored in depth (yet), and because the internet abhors a wild-theories vacuum, we got a lot of real elaborate fan theories right from the start. My favorites are that the show is actually taking place in two distinct time periods, but I think subsequent episodes have ruled that out, for the most part. The issue for me is that I can't separate the experience of watching the show from its footprint in fandom. I keep looking for clues to an eventual, massive reversal, but it could very well be that the show is just weaving mysteries and moving linearly. It's kind of pissing me off, to tell you the truth, now that we're halfway through season one and I still basically know that the robots are waking up, but not anything else.

So there's that. And then in Episode 5 they did Free the Penis, but not as much as they freed the boobs again. Probably half the episode takes place during an orgy in a bordello, and I found myself right back to wondering if the purpose is just titillation, or... What are we doing here, guys? Are we really driving at insights into humanity and what consciousness means, or is that just a flimsy framework for showing gold-painted boobies?

But without equivocation, I can say that the performances are fantastic. Evan Rachel Wood and Thandie Newton both play strong, interesting characters, and their performances are truly kick-ass, especially considering how much of them they have to give while naked. Anthony Hopkins, Jeffrey Wright, and Ed Harris are all amazing. Even if I'm not sure that the ride is going somewhere I'm going to feel totally satisfied getting to, I'm happy to spend an hour a week watching these amazing performers.

Posted by Vance K - cult film reviewer and co-editor of nerds of a feather, flock together since 2012, musicians, and Emmy-winning producer.

Microreview [video game]: Headlander by Double Fine Productions

Getting into your head

The weirdest thing about Headlander is that you can't jump. Can you imagine completing a Castlevania without jumping? Bionic Commando didn't let you jump, but it had the bionic arm. There is no bionic arm in Headlander. There are short range teleporters, but otherwise your legs are simply for moving left and right. Except, at any point in time, you can pop your head off of whatever robot body you're currently inhabiting and fly around. I guess that's pretty weird too, now that I think of it.

In Headlander, you are a disembodied head. You have a little thrust rocket and not much else at the start. You progress in the game by attaching yourself to headless robot bodies with varying abilities. There's an experience point system, and you can upgrade your head's abilities. By the end of the game, you'll have more abilities than you'll know what to do with. The story kind of gets a little lost, but the gist of it is that you might be the last surviving human after everyone has uploaded their brains to robot bodies, but an AI named Methuselah has taken control of them and you have to stop him.


Headlander does this all within a beautifully realized 70's sci-fi style. Funk. Rooms with shag carpeting all over. An early area known as "the Pleasure Port", which is full of sexual overtones without ever doing anything get in trouble with a ratings board. Every enemy shoots lasers, and they bounce around the room. Trippy colors everywhere. Every non-combat robot body can dance. I didn't grow up in the 70's but it all seems very spot-on. It's a fun to explore world with a lot of what we expect out of a Metroidvania.

Where it loses some shine is that there's a real lack of enemy variety. It's mostly humanoid robots that stand still and shoot bouncing lasers at you. After you learn how to aim for their heads as a reflex, they don't offer much challenge. You also get the ability to pop the heads off of enemy robots while disembodied early on, which is a quick way to disarm them if you're not actively being shot at by other robots. There are a couple more enemy types that show up late in the game, and some with defense against having their heads immediately removed, but they're rare. It's also a fairly short game, but that's less of a complaint and more of a welcome sight that the game won't overstay its welcome.

However, beginning to end, Headlander is good, weird fun. There's a moment halfway through that I won't even begin to spoil that literally made me laugh out loud and it reminded me that these moments are what Double Fine does best, even if the gameplay has a few kinks. Headlander's a pick-me-up for a boring weekend.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 that moment, +1 having a colorful fun world

Penalties: -1 not enough variety of enemies, -1 navigating the Power Dome area is a pain

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 (well worth your time and attention)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Double Fine Productions. Headlander [Adult Swim Games, 2016] 

Microreview [book/movie combo]: The Man Who Fell to Earth

How to adapt a sci-fi novel? Add rock stars. And sex. So much sex.

Book

Walter Tevis' brief 1963 novel is a heartbreaking examination of self-doubt. In it, an alien calling himself Thomas Jerome Newton lands his spaceship in a remote field in Kentucky with a mission and a sheaf of papers containing specifications for scientific breakthroughs unheard of on this planet. The scientific ideas he turns into patents, which he turns into an extremely profitable company called World Enterprises, which he uses to fund his mission. Pretty smart.

Seemingly the one person out there in the general public who catches on that all this technology coming out of this new company may be alien in nature is a heavy-drinking, burnt-out college chemistry professor named Nathan Bryce. Even the lawyer Farnsworth who helped Newton set up World Enterprises and runs the day-to-day operations doesn't have the same inklings Bryce develops regarding the reclusive Newton. So Bryce seeks Newton out and manages to talk his way into a job at World Enterprises. This new success leads Bryce to put the bottle down, and re-commit himself to chemistry.

But Newton finds himself in very different mental, emotional, and spiritual circumstances. After an unfortunate run-in with Earth's gravity leaves him convalescing, Newton befriends his de facto nursemaid, Betty Jo, who happens to be a Scotch-addled souse. His home planet of Anthea (the native name for either Mars or Venus) is a wasteland after global wars reduced the population to only a few hundred survivors, and it is Newton's responsibility to develop a space-going ferry to bring them to Earth. The stress upon him is tremendous, as is his profound loneliness, so the introduction of wine and Scotch whiskey come as a welcome diversion and sedative, but his increasing dependence on them threaten the success of his mission.

Walter Tevis himself was descending into alcoholism as he wrote the book. Although, as he discussed in interviews years later, he seems to have not realized it at the time. It's stunning, then, how the writerly part of his brain fundamentally understood and could successfully transpose onto the narrative ideas and experiences Tevis' conscious mind was keeping at arms' length. As much as this book is about alcoholism — and it is — it seems more fundamentally about failure. In the book, alcohol is the medicine that failures self-prescribe to forget their disappointment at having not become what they felt they might have if...whatever happened to them hadn't. 

Despite a relatively slight page count, this is an engrossing book unafraid of very big questions. Beyond failure, beyond alcohol, friendship and loneliness, it also seems resigned to the fact that we'll one day blow ourselves up and wipe ourselves out. There's some thematic overlap with Nevil Shute's On the Beach, and I found myself having a similar reaction to The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Film

Nicolas Roeg's 1976 film adaptation of The Man Who Fell to Earth has a troubled history, with the film's American distributor chopping some 20+ minutes out of the movie for its initial release because he apparently didn't understand it. But Criterion has released the full version in a characteristically wonderful edition with a bunch of wonderful special features.

The Man Who Fell to Earth is one of the most interesting book-to-film adaptations I've come across because it is actually quite a faithful adaptation, but very quiet about it. Roeg doesn't spend a lot of time explaining what's going on, but communicates the story with true visual mastery. It is a true testament to how much the oft-quoted mantra "show, don't tell" can really accomplish. It's also easy to see, however, how someone might find themselves utterly baffled by what's going on in this movie. 

One thing that is going on, without a doubt, is gettin'-it-on. The source material is almost entirely asexual. Newton is essentially sexless, Bryce is too old to be interested in sex, and Betty Jo is presented as dumpy and matronly. Boy, not the movie, though. David Bowie has rock star magnetism to burn, Betty Jo becomes the lithe and oft-naked Mary-Lou, who introduces Newton to a helluva lot more than just alcohol, and the aged Bryce is reimagined by Rip Torn as a student-shagging professor who only seeks out World Enterprises after it becomes clear his exploits will likely cost him his spot at the university.

But like Tevis' Cuban Missle Crisis-adjacent book, Roeg's film is one for its time. The sexual revolution had happened and TV had proliferated, so Roeg's version of T.J. Newton simply has more options at hand when it comes to losing himself. 

In the end, both versions stand alone as engrossing works taken on their own terms. 

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for the way each telling uniquely captures its time; +1 for the character of T.J. Newton, and the ways in which his trial of pretending to be something he isn't remains moving in both tellings 

Penalties: -1 for the total lack of outside scrutiny World Enterprises receives until very late in the proceedings

Nerd/Cult Film Coefficient: 8/10. Well worth your time and attentions.

Greatest Sci-Fi Movie of All Time Tournament (Round of 16)

VOTING ON THIS ROUND IS NOW CLOSED. TO VOTE IN THE NEXT ROUND, CLICK HERE.

Folks, I have to admit I'm surprised.

A bunch of my picks bit the dust in the Round of 32, and we had one MAJOR upset: the 8-seeded Brazil knocked off 1-seed Frankenstein. Frankenstein, people! But where you really twisted the knife is in the Gort Region, where Donnie Darko knocked off The Day the Earth Stood Still...and not the Keanu Reeves one. That I could understand, but...man. Here's where I make some crack about young whippersnappers and getting off my lawn.

Here's where we stand:

Click for a larger view.

My guess is the only 1-seed that makes it to the Round of 8 is Empire Strikes Back. And if Brazil is the little engine that could, then we may have to say goodbye to Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick, both. But that's for you to decide.

On to the voting!

Gort Region

HAL Region

Robbie Region

R2 Region

Polls will remain open until next Thursday night (Pacific), and the next round will open for voting on Friday.

Posted by Vance K — who knows where a life-sized Gort can be found if needed, and co-editor of Nerds of a Feather since 2012.

Greatest Sci-Fi Movie of All Time Tournament (Round of 32)

VOTING ON THIS ROUND IS NOW CONCLUDED. VOTE ON THE ROUND OF 16 HERE.

Last year it was sci-fi TV shows, and thousands of people weighed in, crowning — a little surprisingly to me — Firefly the winner of the Best Sci-Fi TV Show of All Time Tournament. This year to coincide with the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament that has offices all around the country flouting local gambling laws, we present our second annual tournament: The Greatest Sci-Fi Movie of All Time.

Behold!

Click the bracket for an expanded view you can also print out.

Here's how the films were selected and seeded. First, I took the top 100 films from the IMDb "Highest Rated Sci-Fi Feature Films" List, and eliminated any films with fewer than 50,000 user votes. In what is essentially a popularity contest, films that few people have seen would skew the results and be easy marks for upsets. Then, to correct for the pronounced "recency bias" IMDb user ratings famously show, I made the following adjustments:

• I revised the user rating of any films released in the last 2 years downward by ten percent
• Any films released in the ten-year period before that, I revised downward by five percent
• For films released between 1960 and 1975, I revised their rating upward by five percent, and
• For any films released before 1960, I revised their user rating upward by ten percent

This is no doubt not a perfect system, and neither are the IMDb rankings themselves perfect (how Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan isn't on that list, I can't imagine). But I think it's a good system that gave us a solid distribution of films from every decade (except the 1940s?) since the silent era of film. But enough about math! To the voting!

Gort Region

HAL Region

Robbie Region

R2 Region

Results and the next round of voting will be posted each Friday until we crown a winner. Happy voting!

Posted by Vance K — Co-editor and resident cult film reviewer of Nerds of a Feather since 2012