First Scare: Dracula (1979)

The one that was color-graded with extreme prejudice

With this being the fourth Dracula adaptation I watch for this series, I start to wonder: is it humanly possible to tell a Dracula story where women actually make choices of their own? Even in this unabashedly horny version, directed by John Badham, Lucy's vehement wish to spent eternity with the Count can be attributed to magical coercion. It's as if there were no such thing as freely desiring your predator; with Dracula there must always be a pinch of deception thrown in the mix, a hidden hand pushing the will that believes itself free. Where human seduction depends on mutual offering and suggesting, vampiric seduction is all about control. The trick is to hide that control under a charming façade, to convince you that your surrender was your own idea. The vampire is one of those predator species that prefer a docile prey. Like an anglerfish, but hot.

The trope of the vampire as a sexual threat has been present since the very earliest vampire fiction: both Polidori's The Vampyre and Le Fanu's Carmilla revolve around serial seducers of unsuspecting maidens. It became a perennial trait in fiction even until the early years of the 21st century to handle the topic of desire with a certain deliberate ambiguity where vampires were involved. Those stories look very different now through the lens of our contemporary notion of consent: for us, upholders of bodily autonomy and personal agency, any degree of coercion is unacceptable, no matter how sugarcoated. And it's a sign of the progress we've made that the authors of classic vampire tales would have found our perspective odd, maybe too reductive. So if you're going to dive into the literary tradition of sexy vampires, you need to keep in mind two conflicting stances: that of today, according to which anything less than free consent is inarguably assault; and that of the authors, whose understanding of seduction was most likely less egalitarian.

Badham casts a handsome Dracula, removing part of the character's mystique. While it makes the movie's romantic storyline more digestible to the audience, I find that it alters the character too much. Dracula is supposed to be a master manipulator; a key component of his scare factor is that, even if he presented himself in public like the stinking, rotten corpse he actually is, his victims would still be incapable of resisting his embrace. Dracula pulls the strings of human desire in the service of his own desire, which is what makes Nosferatu so effective. If Dracula is good-looking, it doesn't strike us as horrifying that someone would desire him—even if he's using his mind control powers. With the air of effortless charm that Frank Langella gives to this character, it's entirely believable that someone would want to be possessed by him—even if he's not using his mind control powers.

Here your mileage may vary. For a segment of the audience, the fact that he's already attractive before he starts controlling you will make him feel more dangerous. In my case, I'm fascinated by the idea of an inhuman monstrosity that can nonetheless reach into your most intimate feelings and twist them against you. And here we need to invoke cultural attitudes around lookism. By making Dracula handsome, this movie joins the long tradition of folk tales that question the idea of a link between external and internal beauty. Think of the Greek siren, or the medieval succubus, or the Japanese jorōgumo: extremely beautiful, equally evil.

For this version of Dracula, the reshuffling of characters goes like this: Jonathan is engaged to Lucy, who is the daughter of Dr. Seward. There's no Arthur, no brides of Dracula, no earlier visit by Renfield, and no ruse from Dracula: he readily admits that he's visiting England as a consumer. Of more consequence is the rewrite that turns Mina into Dr. Van Helsing's daughter. This time, he isn't an established vampire hunter; he learns about vampires along with the audience. This change allows for a scenario I like to see: Dracula infiltrating human society. Langella plays the Count as a worldly hedonist who enraptures people with his vast talent for conversation. Instead of keeping to the formalities of high society, like Lugosi's Count, Langella's is almost scandalous in how openly he seeks and enjoys female attention.

Thick volumes could be written on the Freudian symbolism of the vampire as a dual object of the erotic impulse and the death impulse, on the alarmingly easy way our basic desires can be warped toward our own destruction. Badham's Dracula aims to present a believable scenario of such distorted passions. Much like desire itself, your response to this piece of art will be uniquely yours. Maybe you'll fall under the spell. Maybe you'll remain unmoved. Taste is a mystery, like life and death.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Scare: Dracula (1974)

The one with the excess of close-ups and the perpetually constipated grimace

Ideally, Jack Palance should have been a great choice for the role of Count Dracula. His suitability for the role was so widely acknowledged that Marvel Comics used his likeness for the series Tomb of Dracula years before Dan Curtis cast him in the role. This was the same Dan Curtis who created the TV series Dark Shadows. Add Richard I Am Legend Matheson writing the script, and this movie had the right pedigree to be spectacular. Unfortunately, someone must have given Palance the wrong acting instructions, because from the start to the end of the movie, he only knows how to make one face: that of the unlucky vampire who forgot to add some fiber to his all-blood diet, and is now in urgent need of a laxative.

It's not like Palance is wasted on the role. When he speaks, you believe that he's the right actor. He says his lines in an unnervingly calm, low voice, in the tone of an immortal who has seen everything and can no longer be surprised. His acting choices resemble those of Bela Lugosi in his manner of staring, standing, and carrying himself. However, where Lugosi could own a scene by raising an eyebrow, Palance invariably contorts every muscle on his face, as if the director were pressuring him to choose which emotion to show.

The director himself is no help on this matter, with his strange habit of resorting to a zoom-in to mark every emotional beat. He does make effective use of low angles and the occasional Dutch angle to underline a character's interaction with the realm of the occult, but his overreliance on close-ups becomes a form of self-sabotage against the serious tone he's clearly going for. Matheson's script keeps a tight rein on the pacing of events, an essential skill to have when the audience already knows the plot by heart, and the directing style falls short of what this script deserves.

This time, the reshuffling of characters is less drastic than in previous adaptations, but there's one key detail to pay attention to: the addition of the subplot about the Count's long-dead wife whose likeness he randomly encounters in the present. Coppola would use the same subplot in his 1992 version. This is another way of solving the eternal question about the Count's reason for moving to England: in this case, it's because he's a hopeless romantic. From his dialogues (and bizarrely melodramatic flashbacks) it can be inferred that he'd be happy to remain in his castle if it weren't for the armies that have continuously come to pillage his land and/or murder his wife. If you will just let him keep his wife, he won't have to come to kill you. This version of the Count is no less a seducer than previous ones, but here the story emphasizes his sexual needs instead of Lucy's or Mina's. In fact, the female characters in this version perform the function of hypnotizable MacGuffins rather than people. They're there for the Count to pursue and for Arthur and Van Helsing to chivalrously defend.

It's funny how the space left open by removing Jonathan Harker from the action in London raises Arthur Holmwood to an almost protagonistic position, yet the script keeps him restricted to serving as an appendix of Dr. Van Helsing. They do everything together, go everywhere together, investigate each clue together—you could remove Arthur from this movie and the only change you'd notice would be that Van Helsing would have to recite his infodumps to himself. Even Mina is almost an afterthought: her close friendship with Lucy is more told than shown, and what little autonomy she has in the plot is gone once she's fed Dracula's blood.

Changing Count Dracula from a predator to a heartbroken widower isn't enough to arouse sympathy for this character. There are still good reasons why the common folk who live near his castle shudder at his name. And on a more pragmatic level, the rough, hyperangular features of Jack Palance's face are a bad fit for a romantic lead. But the movie wants to present the Count as a suffering, tragic man who has endured loneliness for too long and just hopes for a second chance at happiness. Again, this is the same angle Coppola would try some years later, but Coppola succeeds at it because his Dracula is legible to us, because his flashback actually does the job of explaining the part of the story we need to understand instead of giving us mere hints as in this movie.

Dracula's manner of death in this version is overacted as all hell. Once the curtains are ripped open to let the sunlight in, the Count staggers and pauses multiple times to make sure you see him pose in pain from all sides. Then he helpfully gets himself in position for Van Helsing to impale him, a process that takes way more camera cuts than it needs. Overall, this movie is not without enjoyable moments, if your idea of enjoyment allows for frequent, abrupt shifts in PoV and a plot structured like a game of cat and mouse.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Scare: Dracula (1958)

The one sadly afflicted with pink eye

A few years ago, I did the experiment of watching all three film versions of Carrie on one day. It taught me a lot about the minutiae of adaptational choices: what effect it has if a certain dialogue scene is moved to a different moment in the story, what actions need to be condensed if a location is removed, how far an emotional setup needs to be from its eventual payoff. (My verdict is that 2013 has the best Margaret, 1976 has the best Carrie, and 2002 has the best prom massacre.) Watching various adaptations of Dracula is turning out to be a similar learning experience, with Terence Fisher's 1958 film a fascinating example of how drastically you can strip down a story while keeping its core intact.

If I was surprised by how much the 1931 film shuffled around the novel's characters, this version goes even further: Renfield and the sanatorium are entirely removed, as is Dracula's journey by ship, while Dr. Seward is reduced to a very minor role. Arthur is now Lucy's brother instead of suitor, and he's married to Mina. The bulk of the action is moved from England to Germany so that trips to and from Transylvania are less impractical. The most consequential change is that Jonathan Harker doesn't visit Castle Dracula as an innocent clerk bringing paperwork, but as a sort of secret agent already tasked with killing the vampire. This means that it's not the Count who lures Jonathan to his land, but Jonathan who takes the initiative to seek the Count. It also means that the Count's evil nature is known all along, so he doesn't get to mingle with human society.

Removing the Count's pretense of being a normal human massively reduces the contact he can have with the rest of the cast, which forces the director to make the most of his very few on-screen appearances. The tradeoff works: this is one of those monster movies where we get to see the monster very rarely, but each time we do, it lands with full impact.

The changes to the whole Jonathan/Mina/Lucy axis help provide a practical solution to the biggest loose thread in the novel: why did Count Dracula want to leave Transylvania in the first place? In this interpretation, Jonathan sneaks into the castle crypt in the first act and kills the Count's bride, who may or may not be desperate to be rid of the vampiric curse. This event gives the Count a clear motivation: you take my bride, I take yours. And that's why he goes after Lucy, who in this version is Jonathan's fiancée.

Jonathan doesn't make it past the first act alive (for which I was thankful, what with actor John Van Eyssen being rather mediocre in the role), so the film promptly shifts to introducing Dr. Van Helsing, who ends up being the true protagonist. As Van Helsing, Peter Cushing does a stellar job. He's helped by the script, which cleverly remolds the novel's crusader/pest exterminator into a detective-esque figure. He's apparently been on Dracula's trail for a while, and he frames his mission in terms of protecting the world from what could become a plague of vampirism.

However, precisely because the story has been stripped down to the basics, this whole talk of a threat to the world sounds incongruous. The action is confined to about half a dozen sets, beyond which the rest of society might as well not exist. Van Helsing does visit a customs officer and an undertaker in the course of his investigation, but those spaces just play their part and are quickly done with. If not for the dialogues, we wouldn't even know that Arthur and Mina are living in Germany instead of England. And the Count doesn't help sell his menace factor either; he's more interested in replacing his dead bride than in going on a biting rampage. The main conflict in this film is a strictly private affair, but the dialogues insist that Dracula sits at the head of a "reign of terror" that must be defeated yet is nowhere to be seen.

So instead of the usual dynamic in a Dracula story of the foreign Other quietly invading the civilized metropolis, here we have the civilized heroes going out into the land of the foreign Other to stamp down the threat it represents. Not a very subtle sentiment for a film produced while the Cold War was getting started (it doesn't escape the viewer that the undertaker's shop where the Count first goes to hide has the last name Marx, of all things).

This version of the vampire doesn't bother with theatrics. No beastly transformation, no fog cloud, no magical stares. His power is raw, brutal hunger (and his female victims welcome his assault with equal hunger). When he finally meets Van Helsing, he doesn't try to control his mind, as in the 1931 movie; here he goes straight for the jugular, and is only thwarted because he lets himself grow overconfident.

For a limited special effects budget, Dracula's death in this movie is impressive. Instead of erupting in flames when exposed to the sun, he simply crumbles down into a pile of ashes. It's very simple, very repulsive, and very effective. Unfortunately, the Technicolor process left many scenes more illuminated than they're implied to be, which makes it look like Dracula is walking outdoors under more sunlight than he should, so the dramatic shock of having the sun hit his face at the end is somewhat less effective. Still, this is a enjoyable watch. It's like going to the doctor's office for a needle jab: just the briefest glimpse of blood, and it's over before you feel any pain.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Scare: Dracula (1931)

The one with the intense stares

Tod Browning's Dracula is derived from a 1924 stage adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel, and it shows. It keeps several of the hallmarks of a traditional theater script: lengthy infodumps via dialogue; time jumps that relegate some plot developments (especially the violent ones) to the implicit space between scenes; extended, continuous use of the same set for several consecutive conversations; and a marked preference for telling over showing. I understand that Western theater has a long tradition of keeping the violence offstage; what I cannot understand is how, when you translate the stage play into a movie, you produce what eventually becomes the most memorable, most revered, most iconic interpretation of The vampire without showing me one single instance of biting.

It goes without saying that Bela Lugosi carries this movie on his shoulders. Despite the excessive wordiness of the script, the obviously fake bat puppets, the lack of a music soundtrack, and the scattered, ill-advised attempts at humor, it only takes one look at the titular vampire's intense gaze to fall under his spell. When he's not engaged in the social pantomime of small talk, in a strenuous but futile effort to pass as a hot-blooded, cheerful human, his presence fills the screen with an unblinking, commanding aura of evil. Wikipedia tells me that almost a dozen actors were considered for the role, but now that I've seen the movie, the possibility of giving the Count any other face strikes me as inconceivable.

Fancy clothes and impeccable haircut aside, this version of the vampire is still very close to Nosferatu, an almost irrational monster guided by the hunting instinct, without the sentimental appeal that later reinventions would add to the archetype to create a more relatable figure, desperate to find love but cursed to see people only as food. When his character is free from the need to pretend to be a normal human, Lugosi puts on the face of a predator, giving his victims not the natural recognition of a fellow person but the hungry stare of a beast preparing to jump. He delivers a terrific performance, which anticipates later occurrences of the single-minded, uncaring killer that can be found in Alien or The Terminator.

The liberties taken with the source material are a double-edged sword. For one part, the early scenes about a real estate lawyer visiting the Count's castle are given to Renfield instead of Jonathan Harker, a change that strengthens the causal cohesion between the first and second acts. Also, Dr. Seward, who is in charge of the hospital where Renfield ends up locked in, is rewritten to be Mina's father instead of Lucy's suitor, which gives the Count a convenient reason to get close to Mina. The downside is that the role of Jonathan Harker is greatly diminished, Mina is reduced to sexy lamp status, and Lucy's death and subsequent undeath lose the weight they should have in the plot. There isn't even a scene to purify Lucy's corpse; she's simply forgotten halfway through the movie.

From our position in this century, accustomed to hundreds of variations on the vampire mythos, it would seem easy to forgive such misfires; there's always another version out there with its own aesthetic, its own vision, its own reinterpretation of the story. But in 1931, Dracula was yet to enter the public domain. The choices made by Universal Pictures did more than express artistic freedom: they set canon. There's an entire period in the history of horror during which Universal's Dracula was the only authorized Count on screen. Just like the present generation only knows Ian McKellen's version of Gandalf, and will forever think of Gandalf in that image, there was a generation whose idea of the Count was shaped by Bela Lugosi's acting style. It's the kind of first-mover advantage that forces every subsequent moviemaker to make their art as a response to it.

The irony is that Nosferatu came first, however illegally, which makes Universal's Dracula, for all its intentions of defining the character on its own terms, a response. Whereas Orlok is a cadaveric nightmare heralded by pestilence, Lugosi's Count comes across as a dusty relic of the Ancien Régime, a ruler over the human heart who repays obedience with madness. Both are corrupted, bloodthirsty abominations, but Lugosi's version knows the tricks of a stage magician, most notably the dramatic effect of a well-timed fog machine. Moreover, Nosferatu is silent, while Dracula lets Lugosi make full use of his heavy Hungarian accent to leverage the audience's learned Orientalism. Orlok feels like the fearsome Other because he's a walking corpse; Lugosi's Count feels like the fearsome Other because he's a foreigner with weird tastes.

My notion of the vampire was shaped by the film adaptation of Interview with the Vampire and Coppola's reinvention of Bram Stoker's material (plus smatterings of The Munsters Today, Forever Knight, Count Duckula, Drak Pack, and Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School). Somehow I never came into relevant contact with Dark Shadows, Salem's Lot, Hellsing, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Castlevania, True Blood, or The Vampire Diaries. I did meet Blade, Underground, Vampire: The Masquerade, and Twilight, although at an age too late for them to influence my personal mythology. (Namely: if you ask me to think of vampires, the thing about sunlight that hurts them is not the UV light, they are not at war with werewolves, they have no connection with Biblical characters, and they Do. Not. Sparkle.) I don't view vampires as tragic figures or forbidden seducers; I view them as the perfect symbol for the parasitic nature of aristocracy.

Alas, I am a child of my time. This version of Dracula didn't particularly frighten me. Some of the scenes where the Count uses his mind control powers straddle the very thin line between the sublime and the ridiculous, and the uneven editing kills all sense of dramatic momentum in the last third. Worst of all, in consonance with the theatrical conventions of its time, but absurdly for a big classic of horror, we're not allowed to see the Count die. I feel sorry for the masterful lead actor who was dragged into this less than expertly made movie.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Contact: Nosferatu

The classic that codified vampires on screen for all eras

Previously in the First Contact project…

We've discussed how German Expressionism used extremes of shape and shadow to convey emotional content. Well, what better medium to tell a story about hungry things that lurk in the night? The 1922 film Nosferatu, an illegal adaptation of the novel Dracula (the ensuing copyright lawsuit forced the studio to declare bankruptcy), keeps its most iconic images confined to one short, climactic scene. But what a scene! Making the most of the technological possibilities of the time, the ending of Nosferatu uses one of the most effective tools of horror: suggesting instead of showing. It's just a silhouette moving up the stairs, just a silhouette extending toward a door, just a silhouette grasping a heart… and this little trick suffices to represent the supernatural profanation that has taken place. It's a master class in using a minimum of visual cues and letting the actual horror play out in the viewer's mind.

Nosferatu has both the strengths and the defects of a freestyle adaptation. It omits a handful of superfluous characters from the novel and streamlines the plot down to its basic components. The details that it adds (the references to occultism, the plague outbreak, the town's hunt for a scapegoat, the new method for defeating the vampire) are a natural fit for the heightened sentimentalism of this movie's tradition. However, the character of the young real estate agent who brings the purchase papers to the count's castle is made less interesting in this version. In the first part of the novel, the growing sense of dread comes from reading this character's gradual suspicions about the count's private habits. Nosferatu portrays him as blissfully oblivious to what's going on under his nose. Once the count settles into his new property, the novel switches to detective mode as our protagonists track down his movements and begin strategizing a way to kill him. In Nosferatu, the answer is conveniently found in a literal Monster Manual that the young man already owned, and the count jumps straight to the final confrontation as soon as he moves in. In striving to lose no time, the movie loses much of the novel's suspense.

The least enjoyable part of Nosferatu is the underwhelming way it ends. The method for defeating the vampire is too passive, and the special effects used for the vampire's death by sunlight are disappointingly simple, especially when seen just moments after the expert play of shadows that precedes it. Romanticism is all about feels and vibes, so a damsel's self-sacrifice is par for the course, and the script gets bonus points for the brief dialogue at the beginning where dead flowers foreshadow the loss of something beautiful, but, as I said above, the final scene is where you find the bits that you'll remember.

Apart from the titular villain, the quality of the acting is nothing remarkable. The suffering damsel knows clearly what her role is: to look vulnerable and helpless. She spends the movie visibly sighing with the oh so tragic demeanor that in any other movie would presage a death by tuberculosis. The friends she stays with for most of the runtime are basically skippable, and the madman who waits in jail for the count's arrival comes off more as comic relief (and possible anti-Semitic caricature) than as a supposed secondary antagonist. The young man who visits the count at his castle is consistently clueless, even cavalier about dining with an undead abomination, and after he returns home, he ceases to have any impact on the story. Only the sailors who unwittingly transport their killer do an interesting job in terms of acting, and they're promptly dispatched offscreen.

What Nosferatu lacks in scriptwriting it makes up for in visual memorability. Orlok, Nosferatu's substitute for Dracula, has a fantastic design. Cadaveric yet imposing, frail yet ravenous, this is a monster perfectly made for silent cinema. It's impossible to avert the eye from his unnatural presence, enhanced by a judicious dose of the stop-motion technique in some scenes. The performance is deceptively simple: his facial expressions don't hint at any reasoning intelligence behind the appropriately dead gaze he wears at all times. It's as if the rats that travel with him, spreading his curse of pestilence, had eaten his eyelids and left a hollow, desiccated set of eyes to haunt mortals with. That said, it's regrettable that Orlok's look also happens to match several anti-Semitic clichés. The Germany that birthed Nosferatu had a long and painful road ahead before reckoning with its theretofore unexamined prejudices.

To a viewer of this century, Nosferatu isn't exactly scary, much less after the many ways its memetic potential has been reused and remixed. Vampires have been everything: sublime, detestable, pitiful, sexy, cartoonish, fearsome, pathetic, elegant, repulsive, otherworldly, relatable, beastly, aristocratic, demonic, sparkly, allegorical, ostracized, dominant, solitary, clannish, contagious, playable, killable, dateable. To watch Nosferatu after seeing the plethora of movie vampires that followed grants a humbling perspective on what infinite malleability can result from a modest first showing. By virtue of its own, small addition to vampire lore (killing them with sunlight), it taught writers that more variations were acceptable: garlic, crosses, holy water, silver bullets, dead blood, a lucky roll of Turn Undead. Carmilla, The Vampyre and Dracula brought vampires from the obscurity of folklore into world literature. But it was Nosferatu that positioned them as staples of pop culture. If for nothing else, we must thank it for that.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Contact: The Adventures of Prince Achmed

The earliest surviving animated feature length film—a fairy tale from a lost world

A friend of a friend once said that one of the many terrible things the Nazis did was destroy the film industry that prospered in Germany under the Weimar Republic. That is, admittedly, by no means the worst thing that the Nazis did, but it was not good. You had some path-breaking filmmaking, pushing the boundaries of a totally new art form, replaced by endless rows of goose-stepping brownshirts, noisome propaganda films, Leni Riefenstahl using whatever artistic ability she had to defend a mass murderer, and Hitler yelling. History has shown us time and again that state-managed media is never profound, or deep, or interesting; it’s only ever a pablum to make you deny the evidence of your eyes and ears. The arts are inevitably a casualty of tyranny.

Here, I’ll be discussing another standout film from the Weimar Republic: The Adventures of Prince Achmed, directed and written by Lotte Reiniger and distributed by Comenius-Film GbmH in 1926. This is a milestone in cinematic history, as it is the earliest surviving fully-animated feature film (there are two from Argentina that are unfortunately lost—although all sorts of old films have been found in warehouses in countries people wouldn’t expect, so here’s hoping they find it). It is also remarkable that said first animated feature film was one directed by a woman; ‘Lotte’ is a German diminutive of ‘Charlotte.’

The plot of this film, as the title may suggest, is adapted from a number of stories from Arabian Nights. The whole film is a lush romp through a lavishly detailed Arabia, a portrayal that is no doubt Orientalist in a number of its tropes but is nevertheless dazzling to look at. It has a few different tales cobbled together, so you have Prince Achmed featuring, but Aladdin also joins in the proceedings. I liked, perhaps most of all, the beginning with the flying horse that operates something like a jetpack that Achmed doesn’t really figure out how to operate until he is already lost.

It is, in some ways, very much of its time. The portrayal of Arabia is clearly something out of an Orientalist fantasy, but as I said, it’s gorgeous. The primary antagonist is an evil sorcerer, stated to be from Africa (although I’m not familiar with the Arab source, so that may be older than this film), who has a miserly look and a big nose. It’s the sort of thing that I suspect to be a primeval antisemitism (see the images on this essay by a Rabbi about modern manifestations of antisemitism), not even consciously expressed, but rather so deep in Western cultural memory we associate it with evil while not being aware of its origin. There’s also something that is both groundbreaking and somewhat uncomfortable in presentation; there is a kiss between two men who apparently love each other—but it is between an evil emperor of China and a trusted servant, which has both uncomfortable power dynamics and the old trope that same-sex attraction is the province of a depraved upper class (see how the Communist world for so long called homosexuality ‘bourgeois degeneracy’). Reiniger herself was outspokenly in favor of gay rights, so she meant well so far as I can tell, but she employed tropes, as in other places in the film, that did not age well.

What really stands out is the animation. It was done with something akin to shadow puppets, in addition to a wide variety of other materials, to create a wide variety of environments; her team used sand, soap, cardboard, and tissue paper. The end result feels both very old and very modern, like a minimalist animation made on a computer and put online with a simple but sweet message. The effect is one that feels natural, logical within its context, a world where palaces can fly and so can horses (although for the latter you need some training). When Reiniger made the film, she said she wanted to make something that wasn’t possible in live action, a sentiment that has aged surprisingly well. You could certainly make a live-action film like this nowadays, but all the magic would be CGI (which is itself a form of animation, perhaps proving her right in a way she could never anticipate).

The plot is simple, and it feels like a fairy tale. Those who want labyrinth dramas twisting every which way will be disappointed, but given the source material, it could only be like this. And that isn’t even a bad thing; viewing the film in the twenty-first century, the plot and the animation complement one another. It looks like a children’s book, with odd plot contrivances here and there, and simple motivations, but Reininger and crew made it feel primordial, like something in our collective subconscious that when brought to the surface makes us feel warm and whole and secure as she tells a story about princes and princesses with a cartoonish visual style and a myriad of colors. Should you watch it, imagine you’re a small child again, and a parent is reading you a bedtime story. That’s the tone.

The Adventures of Prince Achmed is a film very much of its time, but even so, values can and do resonate. It’s another work whose fingerprints can be seen all over, should you pay attention. It’s a film that, to modern audiences, has the paradoxical effect of simultaneously immersing you and completely breaking your immersion, forcing you to see its place in the world in a sort of artistically-inclined Brechtian distancing effect. It is short, only about an hour long, and magical in a way that adults often forget. It makes you wish that the Weimar age of German cinema could have had more decades to develop and flourish, to create more beautiful things like this. For all its faults and all its moorings in the past, it is a beautiful work of art, and I recommend it to anyone who may be interested.

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

First Contact: Flash Gordon

What do you mean, "Flash" is his given name?

Turn on the popcorn maker and turn off your brain: random nobody Flash Gordon (yes, that's really his name) is here to fulfill your male power fantasy. Enter a world of nonstop intrigue and adventure, populated by the cheapest monsters in the galaxy—either regular pet shop animals filmed really close to make them look gigantic or extras wearing bargain basement rubber suits. Experience a land of heroic fantasy where men are men and women are plot devices. Watch this all-American hero effortlessly defeat every Orientalist caricature in the book. Get lulled into mindless resignation by the tried-and-true screenwriting trick of being captured, running away, being captured, running away, being captured, rinse and repeat for thirteen frakking episodes. Fun for everyone!

While sitting through the first Flash Gordon serial, originally shown in theaters in 1936, I not only thought very seriously about my life choices; I also felt like I finally understood something key about Star Wars. I was mildly aware that Flash Gordon had been one of the main inspirations for Star Wars, but now I see how strongly the poison of nostalgitis was present in Star Wars since the beginning. Defeat the evil emperor, rescue the princess, avoid the emperor's laughably useless soldiers, have incongruous sword duels in a world of laser guns—it's all there. Pressing the specific buttons in your brain to make you relive your childhood was always part of the Star Wars DNA.

And oh boy was that childhood easy to impress. Maybe I'm too used to fiction that has something to say, a worldview, a stance, a point. I'm not sure what I wanted from Flash Gordon, but in retrospect, I should have been less surprised by its anxious coddling of the male ego. God forbid a female character has goals of her own! No, every speaking role played by a woman must be instantly obsessed with the protagonist, and for his sake she won't hesitate to scheme, manipulate, switch sides, plead for his life and faint. Gosh, so much fainting. Because, you see, our random nobody is actually very hot, and very strong, and very righteous. I knew that the male gaze directed at female characters was reductive, but the male gaze's treatment of men is an Ouroboros of self-fellatio.

Wikipedia tells me that a big part of the success of the Flash Gordon comic strips, starting in 1934, was the quality of the illustrations. That may be so, but Flash Gordon on screen, at least in this earliest version, looks cheap as dirt. My favorite editing trick was the scene where Flash strangled a tiger to death without actually showing us the tiger. (What athletic training does Flash have, you ask? He plays polo. I'm serious.)

I've called Star Wars the empty calories of science fiction; in this analogy, Flash Gordon would be a watermelon bubblegum: barely any flavor at all, more air than substance. Perhaps I would have been captivated by Flash Gordon in the same tender years when I was into Jules Verne. To build your own rocket and jump to space sounded more doable when "scientist" was the only title you needed and you didn't have to wait for a government budget. But Verne understood gravitas. It meant something to shoot yourself to the moon on a homemade capsule. In Flash Gordon the thrill of adrenaline is the whole point, and it's not even all that thrilling.

I'm left wondering how on Earth this became a beloved classic. In Flash Gordon I feel echoes of the most annoying bits of Tarzan and Conan, and in turn, echoes of Flash Gordon resonate in the most annoying bits of James Bond and Indiana Jones. It's yet another link in the long chain of daring hypermasculine men who solve all their problems by punching them, of token female characters who are only there to be lusted after, of exotic cultures that are only there to provide set decoration or loot (and it doesn't escape me how much the latter two items on this list resemble each other).

When bitter curmudgeons lament that science fiction has turned too woke, something like Flash Gordon is their standard for comparison. And I would be tempted to scoop out my own eyes if that were the only form of science fiction available. Our generation is so incredibly lucky.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Contact: The Rocky Horror Picture Show

It's finally happened: the answer to my antici… pation

How many times a day do you think about the Roman Empire the queer subtext of Frankenstein? It's sad that so many people seem to spend their whole lives without once doing it. And it's so easy, almost banal, to notice the wealth of potential queer readings of the story of a cisgender man who usurps the female role of giving life; a man who has no problem with building another man, but recoils in terror when asked to build a woman; a man to whom, when he's promised a visitation on his wedding night, it doesn't occur that his wife is involved in the picture. Dr. Frankenstein's unnatural creation, a child who is already an adult, a creature begotten outside the boundaries of heterosexual intercourse, shatters by the fact of simply existing the taken-for-granted necessity of marriage, parenthood, inheritance, and the elaborate pantomime of Regency courtship. Popes have had an accurate instinct in choosing IVF as their nemesis: once artificiality is invited to the dance of procreation, the artificiality of our family models is instantly exposed.

Which is why something like The Rocky Horror Picture Show was sooner or later destined to exist. I like to imagine what would have been said during the pitch meeting:

"Sir, I have a new script for you."

"All right, let's hear it."

"It's about two young lovebirds who get lost in the road on a stormy night and knock at the door of an ominous-looking castle."

"I like where this is going."

"Turns out the castle is the home of a mad scientist."

"Promising so far. Go on."

"In fact, he's a barely disguised—or rather, barely dressed, exquisitely disguised homage to Dr. Frankenstein."

"Oh, my! What do the youngsters do?"

"They just kind of stand there while the mad scientist sings about transvestism."

"Wait, what does that have to do with the story of Dr. Frankenstein?"

"Well, the man he's building in the lab is a breathing, talking sex doll."

"Remind me, who's the target audience for this?"

"Plot twist: the previous model he built escapes his cage."

"Oh, my!"

"Don't worry. He just sings a song and is promptly hacked to death with a pickaxe."

"That escalated quickly."

"Later that night, the mad scientist sneaks around the castle to seduce his sweet, innocent guests. Each separately, then both."

"That sounds complicated."

"It's actually super easy. Barely an inconvenience."

"Did you test this with viewers?"

"Trust me, they'll adore it for decades."

When I came up with the idea of the First Contact project, I wondered at what moments in my life I could have encountered the movies I was putting in the schedule. Metropolis, for example, is one of the conceivable choices of an informal film club run every year by a friend in college, a chemistry major who was obsessed with classic cinema. But when would I have ever had the chance to discover The Rocky Horror Picture Show? Not on Colombian television, that's for sure; I remember the angry parent letters complaining that Ranma ½ was confusing the kids. In late night cinema? No way. My parents enforced a totalitarian curfew. In Catholic school? Unlikely. This movie would have given some of my ordained teachers a heart attack—but not without first giving them a boner.

I made very few queer friends at my hometown, a dangerously homophobic place it took me the first half of my twenties to successfully flee. But even after I learned of the existence of this movie, I wouldn't have been caught dead speaking of it. My brain was still on full alert, watching for the slightest slip of word or body language that could mark me as a target. To most people who knew me, I remained closeted until a month before my wedding. Anything I could have wanted to know from the extensive heritage of queer culture was right there, just one torrent file away, but I still needed to give myself permission to walk under the rain and knock that door.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is probably the kind of shock treatment I could have used back then, a perfumed, silky glove slapping me in the face, an abrasive bite leaving marks of lipstick and stubble. I lived through times when the thing my oversanitized education needed was something like this story about a couple of proper, well-behaved, straight Christian youth going through a night of wild erotic liberation, first shown on theaters at the same time that Puritan America was being loudly invited to partake in a societal metamorphosis of ways of loving and ways of being, an invitation that continues to be rudely refused for no good reason.

Time to void my queer membership card: I have very little patience for musicals. Just not my thing. The first musical film I ever enjoyed was Happy Feet, because the queer subtext landed close to home for me. But I sense a certain something in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, in its playfully trashy aesthetic, its matter-of-fact subversion of nuptial rites, its unafraid, unashamed disdain for standards of decency. It is the kind of art that fulfills the noble task of comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

First Contact: Metropolis

A dazzling window through which a century of science fiction can be glimpsed

Economic inequality is bad. It's unfair, cruel, bad, unfair, cruel, bad, unfair, cruel—there aren't many ways to say this basic fact. This is why it's so difficult to make a science fiction allegory of inequality with anything interesting to say beyond: bad, unfair, cruel. I've become very skeptical of this century's dystopias because, almost every time, the setting turns out to be yet another allegory of inequality that's going to parrot what I already know. As a topic for storytelling, greed doesn't lend itself to much complexity or depth; it's just a bad thing, and it ought to end, and that's pretty much all there is to say on the matter. Call it The Hunger Games or Altered Carbon or Elysium or the Black Mirror episodes "Fifteen Million Merits" and "Nosedive," they tend to replay the same arguments and impassioned pleas and end up sounding like they harbor the alarming suspicion that we need convincing that the sky is blue. Time after time, we're treated to the same fables of decadent leisure for the few and soul-draining toil for the rest like it's some world-shattering discovery. You have to look for the topmost of top-caliber stories, like the Doctor Who episodes "Oxygen" and "Boom," to find fresh creative angles on the age-old problem of human greed.

Despite the difficulty of saying anything new about inequality, science fiction has tried its hand at saying it many times, mainly because our genre is an heir of the Industrial Revolution, which made it a natural vehicle of expression for the dystopian living conditions of factory workers since the earliest science fiction. So it's no surprise that class conflict is the core conflict in Viennese director Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis. Set in a city divided between luxury and drudgery, it tells the story of a workers' rebellion sparked by an undercover robot with dubious loyalties. Even if you don't follow science fiction, anyone interested in cinema is aware of Metropolis as one of the absolute biggest classics of all time.

My first impression is that this film's revered status is more due to its unparalleled visual inventiveness than to any insight gleanable from its script. The moral stance of Metropolis lands like a blow to the face, with all the shallow preachiness of the average Black Mirror and a textbook case of Madonna-whore complex that I'm sure made Freud yawn. Of course, I say this from the position of a 21st-century viewer who has had his fill of science fiction about rich, overemotional manchildren with mommy issues. By which I mean Ferengi. Surely these themes must have felt audacious and thought-provoking back then. But is it really possible that 1920s Weimar moviegoers didn't know that factory workers had harsh lives, and needed two hours of delirious psychosexual melodrama to open their eyes to the evils of class stratification? The question may sound silly in our hyperliterate 2020s, but let's not forget that there are still pockets of regressive ideology where it's asserted with a straight face that slaves didn't have it so bad. Even such a prominent literary figure (and prominent Fabian socialist) as H. G. Wells called Metropolis implausibly pessimistic in its depiction of the suffering of workers, although it must be noted that his analysis of the movie was so literal that he mistook its striking art design for a genuine attempt at predicting coming trends in industrial engineering.

To be fair to Mr. Wells, there are details in his essay that hint at the possibility that the version of Metropolis he watched must have been Channing Pollock's studio-mandated, intentionally mistranslated recut. But even so, to make such misjudged remarks about the look of the film, Wells must have been unfamiliar with the conventions of German Expressionism, the artistic tradition most in line with the key moviemaking principle that the function of images on a screen is not to be, but to represent.

German Expressionism works so well for the silent black-and-white format that I'm surprised it wasn't independently developed in other countries. When you can't record sound or color, the only tools you have for communicating a character's emotions are lighting and gesture. And when your only tools are lighting and gesture, overdramatic chiaroscuro is your friend.

While watching Metropolis, I was in awe of how few dialogue cards were really needed to tell the story. With the exaggerated way the actors waved their arms and performed their facial reactions, following the plot was effortless. As regards Freder, the young male protagonist, this style of acting hurts the reading of his character. He comes off as too mercurial, too easily influenceable. Actor Gustav Fröhlich was 24 when he worked in Metropolis, and I kept having the impression that his role would have felt more natural if it had been given to a teenager.

On the other hand, Brigitte Helm proved here that she was ONE HELL of an actress. As typical for this era of cinema, she also resorted to big, expressive movements for playing the two characters she had in the movie, but the result never feels like too much. She was in perfect control of exactly how much she needed to twist her neck or contort her face to nail a scene. With the spell she casts on the viewer, she singlehandedly saves Metropolis from the absurdities of its script.

The main antagonists of Metropolis are a businessman and an inventor. Their suitability as villains in a fable of industrial dystopia is clear; their motivations are anything but. The inventor claims to want revenge against the businessman over a decades-old romantic rivalry, but the rebellion his robot incites among the workers is exactly what the businessman wants, to the point that one middle manager is explicitly ordered to let rioting workers destroy the most important machine that keeps the city functioning. The disaster that ensues only lands for the businessman when he's told that his son is in the factory. And yet, somehow, the boss and the workers end up spontaneously willing to listen to each other, in a painfully saccharine scene that lingers for too long.

It is a testament to the movie's artistry that it became a must in any film studies curriculum despite being known primarily in mistranslation. It's hard for a shamelessly sanitized script to detract from the power of these images—the miniature sets depicting the shining city of the future; the iconic accident scene where a wall of machinery is transmuted into a demonic face that devours people; the no less iconic dance scene where the robotic impostor in womanly guise demonstrates its ability to enchant men; the frantic choreography of workers attached to buttons and levers; the secret tunnels buried beneath the city; the imposing architecture that feels oppressive just by looking at it. Even when depicting actions that on paper sound banal and boring, there is no scene that doesn't have a superabundance of emotion. Watching these actors shake and jump all over the screen has an oddly mesmerizing effect that took me by surprise. It's a happy marriage of medium and style.

And then there's the bonus satisfaction of identifying the elements of Metropolis that begat prosperous descendants across the 20th century: the robot design that looks like a great-grandmother to C3PO; the inventor's laboratory that helped codify the aesthetic conventions of mad science; the urban geometry that haunts the night in Batman: The Animated Series; the impostor wearing a human skin like one of Skynet's creations. I felt like I was participating in a reverential pilgrimage to the birthplace of my idols.

Only in one regard will I agree with Mr. Wells's otherwise narrow-minded criticism of Metropolis:

The film’s air of having something grave and wonderful to say is transparent pretence.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

We Rank 'Em: Best Computer (PC) Games of the mid-1990s

First, a caveat: this list is not a survey of the most influential or most well-known games of the mid-1990s, despite the fact that the mid-90s was arguably when the computer game industry really took off; it represents, instead, my personal opinion based on good if eclectic times in my childhood, almost 20 years ago (writing that last phrase terrified me...), and also on the unique 'replay fun factor in 2013' (codenamed: RFF 2013) assessment, in which 6/10 or above means the game would probably still be fun to play in 2013. In other words, the games on this list are being judged on how well they've stood the test of time, both in my own memory, and also in the sense that, via Dosbox (or Steam), they can still be enjoyably played today.

So some of you may read the list and be astonished/apoplectic with rage that __(fill in name of favorite game here)__ isn't on it, or that __(insert name of hated game here)__ is; just remember that writing this list is like baring my childhood soul to all of you, revealing what I was actually spending time doing in the 1990s (let's just say that homework/sports weren't exactly eating up my time), and thus these games contributed to my own identity, since the 1990s were formative years for me.

One final note: I'm defining 'mid-1990s' to be the years 1993-1997, so excellent games like Half-Life, Thief, and Starcraft (all 1998) are excluded. Maybe down the road a bit we'll do another list of best games of the late 1990s...

One more final note: I simply could not get the list down to just six titles, so I cheated by keeping a tremendous number of 'honorable mentions', which is kind of doubly cheating since it means I did not, in fact, rank 'em.

Best Computer Games of the mid-90s

Hon. Mention: Doom (1993)

Doom literally terrified my childhood self. Whenever a demon or whatever jumped out at me from the gloom I would scream, have a heart attack, leap away (after carefully pausing the game) from the computer and collapse on the floor, gibbering in fear. So Doom gets full marks for atmosphere! But I'm not by nature much of a fan of either a) 1st-person shooters, or b) being reduced to a quivering, dangerously-close-to-wetting-my-pants scaredy cat, which is why I didn't actually play Doom that much, and also why it doesn't make the list proper. Plus, although the graphics and multiplayer functionality and whatnot were impressive for the time, there are plenty of very similar games out there now, which means Doom scores just a 1/10 on the RFF 2013.

Hon. Mention: Panzer General (1994)

The game that popularized the revolutionary hexagonal format, and also spawned countless pimply-faced World War II buffs (=nerds), I too enjoyed the (sometimes counterfactually!) historical challenges of invading/defending Poland, Norway, or even Great Britain or Washington D.C. (that last one felt a bit lacking in terms of historical probability, but it was a fun thought experiment). On the other hand: I don't know about you, but I played, and play, games to escape reality, not to relive it (things like World War II especially) in all its horrific detail. Moreover, because of the rather random combat engine, you can suddenly have some of your best troops decimated, and there are few things so frustrating, indeed heartbreaking, as seeing one's cherished guys get slaughtered. I enjoyed the campaign version waaaay more than the scenario, especially if the latter is against a wily human opponent. So although the game has stood the test of time relatively well—indeed, none of the sequels really surpassed the original—I can't really say it's too high on the 'fun' factor, so on the RFF 2013 scale, it's a 2/10.

Hon. Mention: Daggerfall (1996)

Ah, the Elder Scrolls! This second game in the series was (at least as far as I know) what popularized the nonlinear approach, and I embraced it with gusto. In fact, I never made the slightest effort to progress down the main plotline quests. Sure, some elements of the game, especially dungeon combat, were formulaic (but remember those zombies? Man, they were scary when they appeared around a corner, one arm raised, moaning in that weird way!), but for us would-be hunter-gatherer types, there's nothing better than getting cool new equipment and improving one's skills. The graphics weren't that great even back in 1996, and probably look laughable now, but at the time, replay value was incredibly high. Its RFF 2013 factor is just 3/10, however, because of the other later games in the series, especially the magisterial Skyrim—which has all of the good features of Daggerfall plus amazing graphics and overall stellar game play.

Hon. Mention: Ultracorps (1997)

I really, really liked Ultracorps, a massively multiplayer web-based space conquest game, back in the day—I remember rushing home from school to take my daily turns, which sometimes took up to an hour, and having that be either the high point or the crushing low point of the day depending on how everything ticked out. But I was just an idiot kid in those days, so I wasn't that good at it and I wasted all my in-game money on cool but low cost performance units like CR ORGs, whereas savvier players bought uglier but tougher stuff and then robbed me of my precious empire. Strictly speaking Ultracorps is web-based, not really a computer game; otherwise it would be ranked on this list. It was resurrected recently and can actually be played today (I know because I played it again, about six years ago, and was still awestruck by grandmaster UC_Rommel), so potentially its RFF 2013 could be high, but when I remember how much of my free time was sacrificed on the altar of space domination, and how deeply I was affected when my empire crumbled before my eyes, I can't give it higher than a 5/10.

6. Civilization II (1996)

Some of you are probably wondering why such an excellent game has barely squeaked onto the list. The answer is two-fold: a) the amazing sequels, Civ 3 and especially Civ 4 (not so much Civ 5, in my opinion), and b) the end-game. True, at the time, in the mid-90s, Civ 2 was endlessly fun and a big improvement over Civilization (which itself was groundbreaking and great fun). But I didn't enjoy playing the game out to its grueling conclusion, as all too often (as that recent story about the guy who's been playing the same apocalyptic game off and on for 10 years can attest!) it can get tedious. And although its replay value was high in the 90s, since Civ 4 there's no need to return to a lesser installment like Civ 2, meaning its RFF 2013 is 4/10.

5. X-Com: UFO Defense (1994)

This game was fantastic—and kind of still is, despite its flaws. The graphics look terrible today, but who cares? What some game developers apparently don't know or recognize is that not all of us play games solely for the lush visual experience. X-Com is certainly compelling evidence of that. Strangely, none of the sequels were all that good, or in any case, they couldn't surpass the framework of the original. Recently X-Com was released for like a dollar on Steam, which means if you want to decide for yourself if my RFF 2013 rating of 6/10 is accurate, you can!

You just know your soldiers are going to get blown away as soon as they step off the ramp...

4. Warcraft II (1995)

"I'd rather be sailing!" says one of the human soldiers in Warcraft II, and for some reason, the over-the-top intonation of his jaunty comment sent me into fits of laughter, making the characters' voice-acting, strangely, the one feature of the game that I remember most clearly. This is the game that really sold me on Blizzard, and led me to embrace Starcraft later on; Diablo, which you'll note is not on this list despite being released in 1996, was fun and all, but Warcraft II was way more fun. Indeed, it takes the mid-90s cake for real-time strategy games. Would it be fun to play today? Undoubtedly, but since we now have Starcraft II in addition to Starcraft—both of which were even more fun than Warcraft II—there's really no need to play it, meaning it scores a 5/10 on the RFF 2013 scale.

3. Master of Magic (1994)

Let's get the bad stuff out of the way first: the graphics (whoa), the lack of an autosave (argh!) and the A.I./diplomacy (on Impossible, rival wizards pretty much declare war on you as soon as they can, without the slightest justification, and are completely unwilling to make peace).  But the good stuff vastly outweighs the bad! Send Torin the Chosen into combat with Sky Drakes and Great Wyrms and so forth to plunder the untold riches of the land, forging magical weapons and armor for him and other heroes to wield in their quest...train unstoppable Paladins in your High Men cities, or fierce Doom Drakes in your Draconian ones, and crush your enemies with the power of your conjurations! Does it get any better than that?  Despite the minuses, this game has astonishingly high replayablity even today (as I've rediscovered recently—how alarmingly quickly the time passes when one is playing Master of Magic! Beware lest you play right through the night...), meaning it earns an 8/10 on the RFF 2013 scale.

Ah, Diplomacy! Er...nice to meet you too?

2. Betrayal at Krondor (1993)

I get it now, but this one sure stumped me 20 years ago, before the Internet!

I was just a snot-nosed (and kind of snotty) kid when this game came out—on those 3.5" 'floppy' disks, remember those? And I remember being awed at the size of the game file, which required—count them—seven such disks! This game is much more linear than others on my list, and yet allows for quite a bit of nonlinear exploration of the world (which is what I really enjoyed doing).  Watching the characters improve their skills and getting them new and ever more impressive stuff is one of life's great joys, am I right? Plus, it was set in Midkemia, and as I mentioned in my recent rant about Feist, I liked Midkemia, as a child, almost as much as Middle-Earth (near sacrilege to say, I know). Anyway, this game was awesome when it came out, and is still great fun to play twenty years later, partly because no other games set in Midkemia were nearly as good. It earns a RFF 2013 of 9/10 despite now absurdly bad graphics and, worse yet, me knowing exactly how the game progresses and even remembering some of the solutions to the riddle-chests!

1. Master of Orion II (1996)

It's been 17 years, and still Master of Orion II remains the best space-based empire building game evarrrr! For me, the very early stages of exploration are the most fun of all. Will you find a lush planet ripe for settlement, or a craggy but mineral-rich barren rock, or even, joy of joys, a splinter colony? There are weaker aspects to the game, particularly the A.I./diplomacy situation (whose engine was inherited from Master of Magic, apparently, as the same company made both): for example, in a recent joyful revisiting of MOO 2 I formed an alliance with a neighboring empire, but refused when they demanded I declare war on a third empire. Just two turns later my 'ally' attacked me, in the worst display of wounded pride and pettiness the galaxy had ever seen! And worse yet, they're winning as of this moment :(

Yessss, a splinter colony!  Nooooo, a space hydra!

   But when it's good, Master of Orion 2 is sooo good! And because no other game, including MOO 3, has come even close to recapturing the magic of the original, it earns a perfect 10/10 on the RFF 2013. Just writing this review is making me want to play it again—and I'm going to do so literally as soon as I finish writing!