2002 Saturn SF – MINORITY REPORT

I rewatched this in a double feature with AI, Spielberg’s previous science fiction outing.  Both films disappointed me in the theater, and I’d avoided both ever since.  Despite these links, they’re actually very different films – almost mirror opposites.

Loosely based on a Philip K. Dick story, Minority Report follows the pre-crime unit, led by Tom Cruise (Cruise is not the kind of actor who disappears into a role, so his character’s name isn’t worth the time).  In 2054, a team of three pre-cognitives have visions of future murders which can be recorded and replayed by the police, who then have to figure out the crime’s location and rush to stop it.  This procedure has led to the end of homicides in the D.C. pilot program, but it is not without controversy, since it leads to people being convicted of crimes they don’t commit. When a Department of Justice representative (Colin Farrell) shows up to investigate, Cruise discovers some inconsistencies in a few of the precogs' visions.  Then, when he is himself accused of a future murder; he has to go on the run, and in the process of investigating the murder he is destined to commit, he puts himself into the position of fulfilling the prophesy.

It’s a very exciting film with fantastic effects.  There’s all sorts of fun near-future tech from Apple-influenced/influencing touch interfaces (RIP Steve Jobs) to vertical highways to jetpacks to eye-scanning spider robots.  The chase scenes are fast-paced and well-filmed.  And, there are some interesting questions about destiny and justice in play as well. A fun, fast-paced film with believable future tech and interesting speculative questions? I told you it was the anti-AI.

So, why did I have a problem with this film?  A lot of my issues concern the film’s conclusion, so I can’t really get into them without spoilers, but I will say that I wanted this film to be about the ethics of precrime and/or the question of causality.  However, a twist late in the film takes it in a different direction, and it becomes a more conventional mystery/thriller.  There are a few efforts made to return to the central themes, but they’re buried, I think, by efforts to give the film a simpler conclusion.

In the theater, this bothered me a lot.  It really ruined the whole film for me.  This time, perhaps because I knew it was coming, I wasn’t bothered nearly as much.  I was able to enjoy the ride, and have fun with one of the richest and most compelling future visuals since Blade Runner.

Grade: B+

2001 Saturn SF – AI: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

I have been looking forward to rewatching this film since I added the Saturns to my reviews – not because I enjoyed it so much the first time…in fact, I hated it.  I just really wanted to make sure that I hated it.

This film has as good a science fiction pedigree as you can get.  It began as a project by Stanley Kubrick, and Steven Spielberg decided to complete it himself after Kubrick’s death; it’s based on a short story by British sf legend Brian Aldiss called “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long;” and, it concerns the very Asimovian question of whether a robot artificial intelligence can love, and, more importantly in this case, would he be loved back?

In a catastrophic future caused by global warming, there are strict population controls.  Some people choose to fill the gap left by not having children with robotic “mecha” children.  David (Haley Joel Osment) is a prototype with the aforementioned lovin’ upgrade.  He is placed with a couple whose real son is on deep freeze, and they come to like him.  They allow David to imprint on them, but when their real son comes back, David is a fourth wheel (cars in this future have three wheels, get it?), and the mother leaves him in the woods with his robotic teddy bear.  Inspired by his mother’s dramatic readings of Pinocchio, David goes off to find the Blue Fairy and become a real boy.  He meets sex-bot Gigolo Joe (Jude Law), who joins him on his quest.

The visuals are pretty fantastic, and there’s a few human-face-on-robotic-chassis effects that were pretty cutting edge ten years ago.  That’s really the nicest thing I can say about the film.  Yep, I still didn’t like it.

I have several problems with it.  Haley Joel Osment’s performance is impressive, but in a creepy way.  Watching him in this film is just plain unsettling, as you suspect he may actually be a robot (the Child-Actortron 3000).  An even bigger problem is the pacing.  Kubrick hadn’t gotten past the story stage, so this is mostly Spielberg, but he tried hard to do a Kubrick impression. That’s where the film starts to fail, I think.  He begins with a much more deliberate pace and imbues every scene with a weighty sense of suspense or dread.  These are old Kubrickian tricks, but I think only Kubrick can pull them off.    

The movie suffocates under this weightiness, it’s slow, depressing, and dull, and it doesn’t have nearly as much to say as it seems to think it does.  What is the message?  What do we learn?  People are mean to robots?  Spielberg is good at sentimentality?  People will wear glow sticks in the future?  The future will look like Las Vegas meets a State Fair?  I don’t know. The movie actually feels very New Wavey, which makes sense with the Brian Aldiss roots, but it’s the worst of New Wave misanthropy and pretension.

After meandering for two hours, the film does take a crazy left turn in the last half hour, that’s…well, at least it’s interesting.  There are a lot of contrivances to get the film to an awkward sense of closure that only barely mitigates the slow-burn creepiness that bogs down most of its running time.

Grade: C-

1997 Saturn – MEN IN BLACK

The Saturn is far from the most prestigious award that I’m covering, but I wanted to include it for the sake of variety in my movie reviews. It has also awarded some very strong films that outshined their more prestigious Hugo competitors in the long-run (Soylent Green over Sleeper, Terminator over 2010, 12 Monkeys over Babylon 5). So, the Saturn has recognized its fair share of strong sf movies. This is not one of them.

Men in Black is a big-budget science fiction action comedy special effects extravaganza. There’s also some sort of story and characters in there, but they’re mostly overwhelmed by a combination of slime jokes and cg goo aliens. The film, adapted from an obscure Marvel comic book whose existence I cannot verify, taps into the alien conspiracy craze that the super-popular X-Files had rekindled at this point while adding lots of elements from the aesthetics of Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton (Spielberg executive produced, though director Barry Sonnenfeld seems more indebted to Burton on this one). The men in black are mysterious well-dressed government agents who cover up alien encounters. Tommy Lee Jones plays an uber-professional man in black, basically by reprising his role from The Fugitive. Will Smith plays the headstrong new recruit in a set up that is only slightly incredibly generic. Rip Torn is the bossy boss. Linda Fiorentino is underused as the love interest. Tony Shaloub and others play weird aliens, just barely passing as humans. I think I’m listing the cast because there’s so little plot to recount. Aliens threaten to blow up the world, and the Jones/Smith team must stop them. The film undercuts itself by repeatedly reiterating that the plot may seem exciting, but this is really just a normal, boring day at the office for the men in black.

If you haven’t noticed by now, I’m not a fan of this movie. It’s quite popular among lots of sf fans, but it rubbed me the wrong way the first time I saw it, and it rubbed me the wrong way again this time. Jones could pull this roll off in his sleep (and, he may actually be sleeping through most of the movie – what are those sunglass hiding?), and Will Smith is his usual, sickeningly charismatic self. They’re the best things about this mostly stupid film. There’s a fair amount of childish gross-out humor, which is generally not my favorite, and the rest of the jokes depend on the idea that anyone at all unusual must be an alien.* “New Yorkers sure are weirdos, they must be aliens!” Har…har? I don’t want to seem oversensitive; a smarter script could probably make these things work. This is not a smart script.

So, yeah, not funny. Not even a good riff on the alien conspiracy idea. The best thing I can say about this film is that it’s very short and quite inoffensive…and yet, I am offended by its inoffensiveness. Sorry, I think I have an irrational hatred for this film. The fact that it won in a good year for sf-on-film over the likes of Gattaca, Contact, and The Fifth Element just makes me even more annoyed.

The sequel, by the way, makes this movie look like The Godfather II.

Grade: C-

*By the logic of the film, shouldn’t Rip Torn be an alien rather than a man in black?

1994 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, 1993 Saturn – JURASSIC PARK

Michael Crichton had an unhealthy obsession with amusement parks that tried to kill their patrons. Between his Jurassic Park franchise and his Westworld franchise, I can only assume that he had a very bad experience at Disneyland at some point in his life.

The titular park is filled with dinosaurs cloned from DNA discovered in prehistoric mosquitos fossilized in amber. It’s not all that far-fetched, other than the problem that we have no mosquito fossils from nearly that long ago. We do have a fair amount of mammoth DNA though, and scientists have speculated about developing clones and using elephants as surrogates. The film "Late Pleistocene Park" probably wouldn’t have grossed 900 bijillion dollars like this one though. The filmmakers also cheated by making their velociraptors twice as large as they really were, but paleontologists fixed that problem by discovering the larger utahraptors around the time of the film’s release.

Anyway, the plot: billionaire John Hammond brings in a group of scientists, a lawyer, and his grandchildren to examine the dinosaur-filled park that he’s building, but everything goes wrong and the dinosaurs run wild. It’s a fun romp, but the big attraction at the time was the dinosaurs themselves, which look a sight better than the first on-screen live action dinosaurs in 1925’s The Lost World. Between T2 and this film, we’re clearly in the midst of a cgi revolution, and I certainly remember feeling that at the time. Jurassic Park is far more ambitious as it attempts to use computer effects to create realistic living, moving creatures rather than silvery goo. As a result, the effects have not aged nearly as well. The running T-Rex and raptors still look pretty good, but the static shots that first reveal the prehistoric animals – which I remembered as awe-inspiring – look a bit like what you’d see in a cable documentary these days.

Nevertheless, I still enjoyed re-watching the film quite a bit. Overall, it’s aged better than I’d expected. I think there are two secrets to this success. The first in Spielberg’s direction – he’s at the peak of his abilities (Schindler’s List was released in the same year, believe it or not), and his talents for suspense and action show through. I also like Spielberg’s signature “smoky light beam” effect a lot more than J. J. Abrams' unhealthy lens-flare addiction. The performances also keep the film interesting – Spielberg has a talent for eliciting not-annoying performances from child actors and Sam Neill and Laura Dern are solid as the heroic paleontologists. Meanwhile, Sir Richard Attenborough and Jeff Goldblum chew through the scenery as an eccentric billionaire and rockstar chaos mathematician, respectively. Even Samuel L. Jackson, in a minor role, keeps things lively. Everyone involved from the director to the actors to the effects people walk the line between serious suspense and pulp romp, and they’ve created a memorable classic in the process.

Don’t worry though, Spielberg proved in Jurassic Park II: The Lost World that he’s fully capable of making horrible films as well!

Grade: B+

1990 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation – INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE

I haven’t taken a formal poll or anything, but I’m pretty sure this is the most controversial entry in the Indiana Jones trilogy. As mentioned before, Raiders is almost universally beloved. While I’ve met people who adore The Temple of Doom and consider it their favorite, I think the vast majority of fans and critics agree that the film is thinly plotted and rushed and/or too screaming-Kate-Capshaw-heavy and/or ethnically insensitive. The third film, on the gripping hand, seems to have dedicated fans and detractors.

I’m firmly in the fan category. I can understand the critique that the film goes too far down the road of self-parody, but I think, due to the character’s pulpy roots, the self-parody has already begun early in Raiders, and The Last Crusade nicely continues the tradition without getting too silly. I mean, it’s not like Harrison Ford survives a plane crash with an inflatable raft or a nuclear explosion in a refrigerator. No one swings through trees on a vine while yodeling like Tarzan in this one.

The film begins with a young Indiana Jones (River Phoenix), and we get to see an early adventure and his neglectful, Holy Grail-obsessed father. Then, we flit back to the 1930s, where Harrison Ford’s Indiana learns that his father has gone missing while on the trail of the Grail. Indiana must journey to Italy to follow the same clues, then rescue his father from the Nazis while discovering even more clues. Most of the film is actually a chase full of humor and action. In the end, the Joneses must compete with the Nazis through an excellent set of booby traps in an old Crusader fort (which looks suspiciously like a famous Jordanian archaeological site).

The main reason this film is so great comes down to two words: Sean Connery. Connery plays the older Henry Jones with his usual charm and derring-do, but he also adds a less common academic awkwardness. It probably wouldn’t be much of a stretch for most actors, but Connery had been cool personified for so much of his career that it really is a noticeable shift. I think this is his greatest performance, and that’s saying quite a bit.

This is the third and final Indiana Jones film (don’t let anyone tell you different), and the series ends on a high note.

Grade: A

1982 Saturn - E.T.

E.T. is probably the most terrifying horror film ever made. The first time I saw it, I had to be carried from the theatre, screaming from fright. I may also have peed myself. Of course, I was barely three years old, but I still worried that to watch the entire film might be to stumble down the path to a sort of Lovecraftian madness.

Surprisingly, it turns out that this Steven Spielberg film is fairly sweet and not actually that scary. In a coming-of-age tale for the Reagan era, three siblings dealing with their parents’ divorce find an abandoned alien. The middle child, Eliot, forms an empathic bond with this “E.T.,” who quickly learns some English, shows off various psychic powers by making bicycles fly, and plays dress up. Eventually, the government butts in and messes everything up (things actually do get a little scary at that point). From a speculative fiction standpoint…well, we never learn much about E.T.’s species (their DNA has six base pairs! They like mushrooms!), but that’s not really what the film is about.

Spielberg’s visual style is very evident; he does a great job of evoking both quotidian suburban America and a real sense of wonder. The E.T. puppet is pretty fantastic, though the movie has been remastered with a digital alien in parts, and the original is hard to come by (they also replaced guns with walkie talkies for some reason; I guess because people like me found the film so terrifying). Six-year-old Drew Barrymore gives the performance of her career, despite being drunk and stoned through the whole production. Having said all this…I think Saturn made a huge mistake with this award. Two other films that came out in 1982 are obviously superior science fiction classics….

I’ve seen critics complain that Spielberg is a “manipulative” filmmaker, but I’m pretty sure that a filmmaker’s job is to evoke emotions. I think they’re just mad that a commercial director made them cry. Then again, speaking of "commercial" the use of Reese's Pieces is the pinnacle of early product placement.

Grade: B+

1982 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, 1981 Saturn Fantasy - RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK

Welcome to the age of Spielberg and Lucas. They made two very different but very successful science fiction movies in 1977 – Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. These two films basically catapulted science fiction into a dominant film genre for the ‘80s and beyond. Both of them continued to make sf films that racked up Hugos and Saturns and influenced most of the science fiction films that we see today. In 1981, they got together and made Raiders of the Lost Ark, an homage to the pulp adventure serials they grew up on.

I don’t really know what to say about this film, except that it really is fantastic. I’m hard-pressed to come up with critiques. Um…the pacing isn’t perfect in the second half…but it’s still pretty solid. There are a lot of stereotypes deployed in the portrayal of non-Western peoples – the movie has its fair share of savage Indians and “worthy Orientals,” but I’m inclined to give Lucas and Spielberg a pass because they’re just replicating the imperialist tropes of adventure serials and the H. Rider Haggard-type novels from which they descended.

I guess I should summarize the plot. Indiana Jones is an adventure-loving, artifact smuggling archaeologist….oh, who am I kidding? Everyone knows the plot. If you somehow haven’t seen this film, and you have any sense of adventure, drop what you’re doing and go see it.

Grade: A