Matt Smith is leaving Doctor Who, someone new is coming into the role, everyone is speculating (with various degrees of tongue in cheek) about the likelihood of the role being filled by a woman or a black man or by Sophie Okenedo.
I don’t think it’s going to happen, folks. It’ll be a 30-ish white guy you’ve never heard of before.
Okay, it might be a black man. Paterson Joseph is widely acknowledged to have been Steven Moffat’s second pick for the role, and he had a lock on the part right until Matt Smith gave an incredible audition. I’d be surprised though, simply because of the weight of demographics. There are *so many more* white working actors out there, because there are more opportunities, institutional racism, blah blah you know how it works. If you dip a hand into the pool and pull out a wriggly actor, odds are good it’s a white guy. I’ll bet on those odds.
But the new DW won’t be a woman. They might even have auditioned women, but they won’t cast anyone who isn’t a chap. I think this is because the creators, either explicitly or intuitively, sense that a female Doctor will violate something about the show.
…and I think they’re right. Doctor Who is, among many other things, a show *about* men, and their relationship with women. Specifically, its about a certain kind of man, generous-spirited life-advantaged empathetic highly confident antiestablishment, like a genteel Edwardian adventurer with a rogueish streak, or indeed a TV creator, or most of the key decisionmakers in the creative sphere. The female companion is the means by which the show critiques this figurative man. In a sense, for better or worse, Doctor Who is about presenting a redemptive alternative masculinity.
So: there is nothing in the fiction of the show preventing a female Doctor (indeed, the show has explicitly allowed for it, very recently), but coded into Who is a gender-based dynamic that would be upended totally by casting a woman in the lead. For this reason, I don’t think they will.
Yet.
There are meant to be 13 Doctors (according to one story from the 70s, never mind all the other stories that say different) – that number has seeped into public consciousness and can’t really be ignored. The show will have to confront this limit in order to move past it. Then, I think, it will have an opportunity for conceptual collapse and reimagining; and so I predict a woman Doctor will appear on the scene, but she’ll be the Fourteenth Doctor, at the earliest.
—
Let me be absolutely clear: I would be SUPER HAPPY if the creators decided to violate this thematic tenet of the show. It is NOT essential to Who. It wouldn’t be the first major violation of the series’ thematic structure (refer: the Doctor is an asexual being). I would be stoked to be wrong. I would watch the shit out of Olivia Colman as the twelfth Doctor, to take the name being chucked around at present. But it ain’t gonna happen, and this idea of a violation is why.
(Yes, I’m being deliberately provocative by calling it a “violation”. I’m a blogger and I sin as a blogger sins.)
The whispers I’ve heard say the next Doctor was cast months ago, in January. I guess we’ll know soon enough.
(Oh, and while talking Doctor Who, Stephanie left an interesting comment responding to the “Steven Moffat’s issues with women” critique in the Friday linky.)
Over the last while I’ve been working through a stack of unread books by friends of mine. They are good. You should consider using your human money to add them to your stack of unread books.
The Guilty One
Not a crime book, despite being shelved in a lot of Crime sections, but it has the focus and drive of a screenplay – this sure ain’t a ponderous tale. There’s a lawyer defending a child accused of murder, while he himself is reminded of his own rough childhood and his relationship with the woman who fostered and then adopted him. The beauty of this book is that second relationship. Sometimes the imagery doesn’t quite land and you might see some twists coming but there are plenty of vivid characters here and Minnie is the most fascinating.
You’ll find this one at your local bookstore, in the UK/Aus/NZ at least. Little Brown have been pushing it hard, it was a Richard & Judy pick, etc. The author, Lisa Ballantyne, was a workmate & drinking buddy & occasional writing companion in my Scotland days, and I couldn’t imagine a nicer person to have a big publishing success story.
The Fly Papers Book 1: The Flytrap Snaps
A great, fun read for young’uns (I dunno, age 8-10 maybe? Who knows from age appropriateness) – kid adventure about a boy who befriends a sentient mutant venus flytrap and gets caught up in sinister goings-on. Great characters (particularly every single female character) and an even greater setting – a kind of kids-imagination version of what a filmmaking town would be like. This was nominated for children’s book of the year and I can see why. Johanna is based in the Wairarapa, and is an excellent lady.
(Also I want to mention that physically this is a beautiful book: well-designed, well-made. Johanna’s partner Walter was responsible for that, I think.)
Paranoia: Reality Optional
The dystopic satirical world of Paranoia has long been under-recognised as one of the greatest of all “story worlds” (to use the currently trendy transmedia jargon). It is a future society in thrall to a paranoid computer, while labyrinthine conspiracies and equally labyrinthine bureaucracy reduce everyday life into a series of catch-22 dilemmas. Created for a role-playing game in the early 80s, it has enjoyed ridiculously few forays into other media – three spin-off novels in the 80s, a 6-part comic series in the 90s, and now finally in the 10s there’s another run at using this world outside of gaming.
This particular story is a typically Paranoia combination of madcap hijinks and satirical brutality. It follows one member of Alpha Complex, Jerome-G, as he tries to make sense of the insane world in which he lives. There’s plenty of great laughs and action along the way. Oddly enough, the one section that didn’t quite work for me was where Jerome-G finds himself joining a troubleshooter team for a mission – which is the fundamental mode of Paranoia the game version. Great games and the great stories have different needs and rhythms, and here’s a good instance of that. The diversion doesn’t last long, anyway, and it’s still entertaining watching a typical Paranoia screwjob go even more out of control than usual.
Reality Optional was written by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, who is one of the nicest people ever to exist. This is his first novel, and given he’s about to become a dad to twins any day now it might be the last for a while…
Mansfield With Monsters
Local publisher Steam Press released this great collection of reworked Katherine Mansfield stories last year, and to everyone’s surprise it won over the literary establishment as well as the genre folk. The Cowens have a wicked, understated sense of humour in how they choose to subvert each of the chosen Mansfield stories, and in many cases these literature-hacks reveal new aspects of Mansfield’s work. Some of them are big and almost goofy, others are sly and mean, others still portentous and sinister. I dipped in and out of this between other reading, and it was consistently rewarding. I loved it.
This collection was the work of husband-and-wife cool noodles Debbie & Matt Cowens. They have been making cool stuff of various kinds since before I knew ’em, and that’s a long time ago now. It’s awesome that one of their cool things is getting this kind of attention.
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These are all good things to read. I recommend them all. Of course I am biased in every case, but hey, I could’ve just said nothing at all!
Seen on Peter Jackson’s pet Embassy screen, with all mod cons: high frame rate, 3D, super surround sound speakers, etc.
It was groovy. Slower than it needed to be, but not so much as I’d feared. After the first half hour, it felt to me *very* similar in pacing to the LotR films. I’d give it 3.5 or 4 stars, against the 4.5 or 5 I’d throw down for the Lord of the Rings flicks.
It felt less like a coherent whole than any of the Rings films – the digressions (basically anything with no dwarves or hobbitses) really felt like digressions. This didn’t bother me in the least, though.
The big setpiece action sequence, dwarves vs goblins through mad tunnels and across wooden bridges, was too cartoony to feel of a piece with the more grittily choreographed LotR films – as if Legolas riding the shield was the default tone and not an unusual moment – but it was a fun romp and fully enjoyable to watch. (It also directly echoed, and far exceeded, the similar chase sequence in Tintin which was that film’s only memorable sequence.)
I liked it. What ya gonna do.
The HFR was *cool*. I really, really liked it. I can see why people don’t, of course, it’s definitely a different way of reading the screen, but it totally worked for me (and the 3D didn’t make my eyes tired, too, so I think it helped with that). I certainly don’t think it’s right for every film, there’s an effect of the “distance” of the traditional lower frame rate, but I can see myself looking forward to more films using HFR. I reckon Prometheus would’ve been more fun for me in HFR, for example.
A Goddard/Whedon clever-clever horror movie that takes the stereotypical slasher film structure and dismantles it. I fought hard to avoid being spoiled for this film but it turns out I needn’t have bothered, because it pretty much unfolds completely predictably from the juxtaposition set up in the first two scenes. The joy of it isn’t surprise though, it’s in execution, particularly in the gags. This is funny stuff. I did guffaws.
What it doesn’t do, is say anything clever about the horror genre, and I think it was trying to. There’s a subtextual thing in there that, I think, really doesn’t get what horror films are for, or conversely, what audiences want from horror films. So while I really enjoyed the film, I also want to argue with it. I suspect that the bits that threw me out of the experience – without exception, these were times it pulled a turn from grim nastiness to funny, which is trademark Whedonesque – failed for me because they were founded on this misapprehension.
Conversely, what it *does* do is celebrate scary movies. And it celebrates beautifully. It gets how scares work and how gags work and how tension unites the two. It plays out, on a scene level, beautiful beautiful moments that I will always remember. They didn’t all add up for me, but I definitely got my money’s worth. Would very happily watch again.
Documentary about a family who found their lost son after four years, only it turned out it wasn’t their son at all, it was an imposter. Told from the point of view of the imposter.
This is a heck of a story, and it’s easy to see why people have been eagerly talking about it. The main figures are fascinating (the core family, the increasingly odd imposter), and the supporting characters are memorable (including an FBI agent who is, er, not the best advertisement for that agency, and a Private Investigator who is a born star).
The twists and turns don’t seem quite so gasp-worthy to me though, and probably to anyone else who studied psychology. “How could the family possibly accept this chap was their son?” Well, “very easily”, says psyc. Because if there’s one thing psychologists know that they can’t seem to get into the public domain, it’s that we are way more cognitively fallible than society tells us. You Are Not So Smart.
Like most documentaries I see these days, it is too long – it would probably make for a great BBC 60-minute no-ads TV documentary, but at 90 minutes it really felt like it took ages to get going. Anyone who goes to see documentaries on film (or rents them on DVD) will know this phenomenon though, and it’s pretty forgiveable really.
So, I didn’t gasp and I thought it was long. That sounds pretty negative. Actually I really enjoyed this film, I’m just unwilling to talk about why because it’ll spoil the surprises – and the filmmaker really makes the most of those surprises. Definitely worth your time.
Very pleased to own two brand-new Monster books by some excellent friends!
The storytelling game Monsters of the Week by Mike Sands is a lovely, elegant way to sit down with your friends and tell some tales of Buffy-style monster-fighting. It’s a great game, and a lovely book, deserving of the widest possible audience! Find out more, and how to order, here!
Also: Mansfield With Monsters, by the lovely Debbie & Matt Cowens! Unlocking the secret early drafts of NZ’s greatest writer Katherine Mansfield, it will give you a new way to look at those classics… And yep it’s one of those literary mashup thingamies, but as a short story collection it won’t wear out its welcome, and of course Debbie and Matt are very clever people indeed. Marvellous! Spot it in bookstores around the region, and find out more, and how to order, here!
If this was from the 2010s they would all be vampires
This house has been unwell for ages. Wee Beastie’s been sick 6 weeks, and Cal & I have been coughing too. It’s nothing major but it wears you down. It’s exactly the kind of state where it seems like I good idea to pull out the old Dawson’s Creek DVDs. We just watched the 13 episodes of season one.
I’ve always maintained that season one was good TV, to the bemusement of my nearest and dearest. After this rewatch, I stand by that call. It’s great! But that ain’t the rep the show has. When Dawson is talked about – well, the dialogue is a thing. A lot of people mock Dawson for the way the characters talk. But it’s meant to be like that! Sure they don’t talk anything like real teenagers, but neither do teenagers on any other TV show ever. (You might allow exceptions for Freaks & Geeks and the little-remembered Canadian gem Straight Up.) The thing is, Dawson’s teens used a style that called attention to itself in a way other TV dialogue didn’t: wordy, reflexive, informed by therapy and philosophy and experiences beyond the ken of teenagers. The characters all made teenage choices, but they talked about those choices like obsessive overly-analytical and highly verbose adults. You can dislike the style, sure, but don’t think it ain’t deliberate.
This stylistic choice is, in fact, the key to Dawson’s Creek. (And you didn’t even know it was locked! Just put up with me, shh.) It ‘s all about something I’m gonna call the supertext (no doubt there is an actual name for this but this is my blog post and it is about Dawson of all things so I make the rules). By supertext, what I mean is the stuff that’s going on at the high-end, structural level. Like: “This scene is where Jen tries to make friends with Joey and Joey resists,” that’s supertext.
On a normal show, the scene would be like, Jen: “Hey Joey! You’re wearing great clothes! Lets read some coffee table books about the Mayans!” Joey: “Um” *sideeyes*. That’s text. And the subtext would be: Jen: “I wanna be friends with Joey because I want to prove to myself that I can have normal relationships and maybe that I’m not a horrible person” and Joey: “I am totally intimidated by this hot chick from NYC who knows how to smile with both sides of her mouth”.
Well in Dawson season one, what they do is grab the supertext and drag it down into the text. So the above example ends up with the text being, Jen: “Hey Joey! Nice clothes! You know when someone new comes to town they usually try to make friends with someone else who seems sane!” Joey: “Ummm, but sometimes people just resist the idea of being friends with each other because of personal reasons” *sideeyes* Jen: “Well I intend to keep trying to be friends with you anyway!”
This is the whole structure of the show. The text deliberately draws attention to the supertext, it gets talked about by the characters who squeeze it dry of meaning. The subtext, meanwhile, gets left alone and remains active to inform and create drama. But – and here’s the magic trick – the supertext is just the subtext in universal form. The characters talk about their inner motivations and problems, but they do it at a remove by talking about story structures, expectations, universal narrative rules that just happen to be relevant to their situation. The show gets to have its cake and eat it too, deconstructing itself without breaking its fiction into pieces. It’s a nice trick, albeit far too clever-clever to sustain for more than a short time (and indeed this gets scaled massively down in subsequent seasons).
So this is the technique, and its used to explore a simple story: a love triangle comprising the innocent guy, the new girl with a history, and the oldest best friend who secretly loves him. (Yeah, the virgin/whore thing is there, but the show is partly an interrogation of that idea so it ain’t so bad.) And what it’s really about is uncertainty – how feelings are not easily discerned, attraction is vexatious, and love doesn’t come bundled up as a single coherent thing. That uncertainty angle is good stuff, but to tell the story you have to accept one dramatic conceit: that there can be a love triangle in existence with none other than Dawson Leery at its apex. And that, not the dialogue, is the real challenge for the viewer.
Because, look at that Dawson s1 core cast in order of choiceness: Joshua Jackson: full-on charm offensive, effortless charisma. Michelle Williams: a genuine star now. Back then, her developing chops were only sometimes on show. Her character was sometimes annoying but she was good value. Katie Holmes: limited range, and unable to hold the camera like the show wants her to, but when she’s within her zone she’s fantastic, off-kilter and unashamed and so, so angry. James van der Beek: ok this one is problematic. He’s not terrible exactly, but the supertext-text shenanigans force this character to be a certain kind of hopelessly self-obsessed. Making the role fun to watch would be a challenge for any actor and he just. Can’t. Get. There. He’s obviously in trouble in the final episodes when everyone around him is miserable and all he can do is squeak “It’ll be okay” while he furrows his brow at them.
Oh and the order of choiceness above? Unfortunately for the show, that is the exact reverse order of screen time given to these respective folks. Joshua Jackson gets crap all to do all season. Michelle Williams is part of the big love triangle so she’s around a bunch, but almost everything she does turns around Dawson, sucking the air out of her performance. Katie Holmes gets a bit more to happen for her, and the Beek, poor devil, has to anchor every episode and every big emotional turn. That’s the nature of the problem, isn’t it? It was a show with a lot of assets in precisely the wrong places.
But that doesn’t stop it from being good. Hell no.
Perhaps informative: while writing this I’ve been half-watching the first eps of s2, and man, it plummets downhill. The narrative/structural tricks that made season one work just make season two collapse in on itself. Dawson is no longer a stylized doofus constructed as a way to explore relationship anxiety; he just ends up being a gigantic tool. And the creators are too good not to know this (e.g. the producer, super-talented Mike White, whose very next gig was Freaks & Geeks). Witness: second episode, Dawson is alone for first time in new girlfriend Joey’s room, and he promptly reads her diary. No but wait, that’s not the bad part. The bad part is he proceeds to get very upset because Joey says in her diary that she didn’t like the cheap monster movie he made, and is petty and mean to her until she works out that’s why he’s being petty and mean, and then he aggressively tries to make her feel bad about it. I mean, it’s just inexcusably oafish and horrid behaviour and it’s the very first thing Dawson does this season. They know. But it doesn’t save the show that they know it.
(There’s a reason why Television Without Pity exists, after all. The gigantic home of TV snark – its importance much reduced in the age of YouTube and NetFlix – originated as a place for people to bond over just how awful Dawson Leery is. And he is, he really really is, just that awful. There is a measurable amount of joy to be had from shouting “shut up Dawson!” at the TV.)
So, I liked this show when it aired. Season one was great times. And no, it wasn’t the hot babe factor, I never gave a second thought to any of the women of Dawson’s Creek. (For contrast: Buffy.) But I definitely responded to something going on in that show. The tone and rhythm of it, the overthinking and the staring into the water and the unsettling nature of uncertainty, that felt true to me. It reminded me of my teen years that had recently ended, and it reminded me of my early 20s that were still ongoing. Watching it now, I still get that off it, like a contact high of being young and unresolved. That’s why I will defend Dawson season one against all comers. Sure, it’s nostalgia and my personal memories kicking in, but I feel it ain’t just that. There was something real at the core of it: in its bizarre way, it expressed something irreducibly true about being young and incomplete. And not only that, but by the end of the season it built up to an answer: you can’t get out of uncertainty by thinking (no-one on Dawson ever solves anything by thinking); no, you get out of uncertainty by finding new stuff to do, and doing it.
So, Dawson. Bite me haters, it’s the business.
—
Oh yeah, here’s another thing everyone’s forgotten about this show, including me: season one is full of sex talk. That’s another thing that disappeared in seasons 2+. In s1, sex infuses everything. There is content in these episodes that genuinely surprised me for how upfront it is.
Dawson Drinking Game: every time Dawson says “I just want to know where I stand”, drink. That’s all you need. FATAL.
OH HEY ALSO DON’T FORGET THAT IN S2 KATIE HOLMES’S CHARACTER JOEY TOTALLY HAS A RELATIONSHIP WITH A GUY WHO HASN’T COME TO TERMS WITH THE FACT HE IS GAY *NUDGE NUDGE WHAT A COINCIDENCE NUDGE NUDGE*
More? Okay. Here’s what I put on Facebook and Twitter:
Prometheus: I really liked it! Except for whenever any character said or did anything. Or when the film explained anything at all, Or when it linked to or referenced any other movie. Apart from that it was great!
(The visual experience was wonderful, and that is best experienced in the cinema. I sort of do recommend it, in a bizarre way. It’s a deeply incoherent film. And it is trying to do something, which is more than 95% of big films ever do. I dunno man. It’s a weird, weird movie.)
Still here? Ooookay. Let’s go.
BALD RIPLEY Twenty years ago, round about now, I bought the June 1992 edition of Cinefantastique. It was the first solid information I would get on the sequel to my absolute favourite film, Aliens. I’d seen an early trailer on Entertainment Tonight but apart from that, I knew nothing.
The coverage was a revelation. Cinefantastique was not a puff-piece magazine, and it did not pull its punches.[1] As it recounted the bizarre story of the production of Alien3, I was forced to accept some uncomfortable truths. Principally, this: the loyal soldier and the brave girl saved by Ripley’s heroism? They die in the opening credits of the new film. Get over it.
Cut to: sitting in the movie theatre with my buddies. The lights go down. The film begins. And those opening credits that heartlessly destroy the loved characters from a previous film? I love those credits. I still think it stacks up as one of the best opening sequences I’ve ever seen. All around me, though, the reception is not as positive. Right there and then, everyone else finding out that the guy and the little girl are dead. The movie doesn’t care. It just kept going at them. No wonder they start to hate it.
The hatred didn’t last. About a decade later, it started to pick up some respectability, and while it’s still little-loved, it’s also rarely hated any more. But it took a long time for that first rush of thwarted expectations to even out. I often wonder if that magazine was the only thing that spared me from the same initial response. Expectations matter. More than that: expectations are part of the film experience.
Expectations have been a big part of Prometheus, too. Is it an Alien prequel or is it not? What will Ridley Scott have to say this time? What is that big human-looking face? Does the trailer really give away 98% of the film?
So what were we expecting?
LES COUSINS DANGEREUX Let’s get this right out of the way, then: Prometheus is not an Alien film. And that’s fine.
“Star Beast” was into development when the word “Alien” was noticed just sitting there in the script, waiting. It’s a great name, both an adjective and a noun, and it completely captures the theme of the film, that… waitasecond, I’ve already written about this. Let me quote myself.
[In the 1979 film] there was a whole biologicial technology in evidence that was truly alien, whose provenance and purpose was left unexamined. Thematically, this was the ground on which the B-movie monster stalked. The idea of alien-ness – the beauty and terror of the deeply different – was portrayed in a dense ecology of incomprehensible detail, all clearly part of some unreadable plan. A monster rose up and killed the film’s lonely humans, but the message was not that alien life is inimical to human life; the message was that alien life is not measurable against human life. These are different orders of nature, existing at right angles to each other. And, by extension, the message was that humans are not the masters of all they survey. Even these star-spanning future humans command only a small and humble domain. It’s a message of warning against hubris. We humans are just one limited mode of seeing in a universe which makes no room for us. Or, shorter: we do not matter.
Ridley Scott has done something completely different here. In fact, what he’s done here is the direct opposite of what he did in Alien. In Prometheus, it is announced in the opening scenes that humanity does matter. We are being invited to visit these mysterious aliens, who have shepherded us throughout our history, and who maybe created us.
There are no aliens in Prometheus. There are only cousins.
Ridley here portrays an intergalactic order in which human existence is comprehensible, and part of a grand plan. We have a place in the plan, we just don’t know exactly what it is. This idea is thematically incompatible with Alien.
This makes it somewhat distracting that the film-makers, over and over again, draw links between the two. Places, scenes, moments, from the 1979 film are repeated in the 2012 film. These quotes are all shallow and surface material. The new film is tone-deaf to the content and mission of the old. It reimagines these surface elements to address entirely different, incompatible, concerns.
Prometheus isn’t an Alien movie. It’s an Alien remix.[2]
THE CHERRY ORCHARD Among the many memorable characters created by Monty Python, my favourites have always been the Gumbys. The Gumbys are shouting, staggering, inept, thuggish, helpless morons. Perpetually bewildered, they break everything around them while bellowing obvious, tragic expressions of their discomfort and failure.
On the Monty Python album that a friend dubbed on to tape for me in early high school, the Gumbys appear in an amazing sketch: an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. It’s two minutes, give it a listen if you never have:
Friends, this is a fair representation of the human action in Prometheus. Prometheus would in fact be a more coherent and satisfying experience if every line of dialogue was overdubbed with Gumbys saying “Sorry,” “I’ve broken it,” and “My brain hurts”.
I really feel like this can’t be emphasised enough. The dialogue and behaviour of every single character defies understanding. It is hard to think of any action by any character that even faintly resembles real human behaviour. This is not an exaggeration. Every line, every action. Every character. Every single scene. All of them. For an entire film. Beginning to end. ALL OF IT.
(Well, I can think of two exceptions, both involving Idris Elba’s space captain: (1) when he puts up a christmas tree, and (2) when he asks another character if they are a robot. That’s it. Maaaaaybe when Noomi Rapace’s space archaeologist puts herself on a medical chair, too. Maaaybe.)
Hey, that Cinefantastique issue was the first I ever heard of James Blish’s idiot plot: “a plot which is kept in motion solely by virtue of the fact that everybody involved is an idiot”. I thought it a bit harsh as a description of Alien3, but it is a perfect description of what’s going on in Prometheus. Everyone is an idiot. The things they do aren’t just stupid, they are nonsensical in a way that almost loops around into coherence again, like a Lewis Carroll poem, where all the inexplicable ridiculousness becomes mutually reinforcing and disguises the fact that none of it makes any sense at all.
I can’t think of another film that is so completely front-to-end inane. Nothing but wall-to-wall Mr Gumby, start to finish. My brain hurts! I dropped it! Run away Mr Gumby!
What were we expecting? The characters in Aliendon’t make great decisions but they sure aren’t idiots. But this isn’t an Alien movie! Okay then. Consider, um, Blade Runner. Or Lawrence of Arabia. Or pretty much any other film ever made.
TOMB OF HORRORS
Prometheus doesn’t have a plot, it has a location.
In the early years of Dungeons & Dragons, you’d buy adventure modules to play with your friends. These were always pretty much the same: a detailed description of a dungeon or other dangerous environment, filled with traps, treasure, and monsters, and usually with some underlying logic that could be uncovered through careful investigation. Every group that sat down to play would have a different story unfold as they entered and explored this dungeon. Character was important, sure, but the organising principle of the experience was the dungeon map, and the key that explained it. Everything in the game arose out of the location.
Prometheus takes this same approach to its story. There is no story except characters exploring, and reacting to, the environment. It may be the closest we’re ever going to get to a filmic representation of the Tomb of Horrors experience.
As a result, the film pays a lot of attention to its sense of place. It carefully and clearly establishes its external geography, showing how everything fits together in the physical space. It then purposely upends this in the twisting interior, echoing the way in which the characters get swiftly disoriented in the labyrinth. And then, perversely, it underlines the lack of clarity about the internal physical space by repeatedly showing a very detailed map of the interior.
Prometheus succeeds magnificently as an exploration of space. The visuals in the film are stunning. The environment is realised in a completely credible, deeply fascinating, fully atmospheric way. It is lit and shot and computer-enhanced with great skill. This is a visual effects triumph [3], and a sign of Ridley Scott’s mastery of this aspect of filmmaking.
Did we expect anything less?
HORSESHOES OF THE GODS Reading that magazine helped me set my expectations right for Alien 3. Prometheus presents a similar challenge. If you go in expecting Alien The Prequelling, you will be disappointed. To his credit, Ridley Scott did a good job of trying to shift expectations. What I was expecting (hoping for, really) was a film that would make me think.
This is what we want film-makers to do, isn’t it? To stretch themselves, to try and make a big statement, to do something that will give us some meat. To his further credit, Ridley Scott has done this here, he’s gone in boots and all and tried to do something huge.
The problem is that the ideas Scott is pursuing are, not to put too fine a point on it, stupid. Go read Cavalorn’s LJ post [4] on the symbolism (major spoilers!) – I believe he’s identified what Ridley Scott was consciously putting into play for this film. And it’s just not pretty reading. Scott has left a lot of ambiguity around the answers to many of his questions, mistaking provocation for depth. The questions are provocative, sure, but there’s nowhere for any of them to go. They don’t mean anything. If the answer was given, you wouldn’t feel any different. It’s dead content, questions designed just to be questions. [5]
So don’t expect the love to grow for Prometheus, like it did for Alien 3. This is a movie that will shrink on reflection, and away from the immersive environment of a darkened movie theatre. Those expectations are going to be corrosive, because it’s a movie that can’t live up to them. The more it is considered, the faster it will disintegrate. (And not in a lifegiving way.)
It’s a failure. A huge, engrossing, foolish, stunning, disastrous waste of talent and skill that pushes you away faster than it can pull you in, that alienates you faster than it can speak to you. It’s a folly and all of its many flaws come down to the writing, on every level: the concept, the structure, the execution, the dialogue. The writing, of course; the simplest thing. A man with a pen and paper. The hardest thing, too.
Watch it, or don’t.
[1] Though I’ve long lost the actual copy, I remember so many of the details from that incredible set of articles. I believe that this was the origin of the phrase “development hell” as a way to refer to moviemaking by the hard road. Also memorable: interview with Lance Henriksen where he said “this David Fincher kid they pulled in to salvage this movie, he’s a talent. This film does not show what he can do. watch for him.” Henriksen called that one right.
[2] Yes, Ridley Scott would disagree, but why should we listen to him?
[3] Bias alert: I’m mates with a few people who worked on these visual effects, including the guy in charge of all the bits Weta worked on. So I am predisposed to kindness. I don’t think this is just bias, though – most reviewers seem to agree on this bit, while disagreeing on almost everything else.
[4] And how nice to see Adrian Bott’s essay being circulated all over the place. I was introduced to him in passing in 2005, but never said a word to him beyond hello. Mutual friends indicate he’s a very nice chap though.
[5] *cough cough* Damon Lindelof *cough* Lost *cough*
Songs From The Inside
Four celebrated Kiwi musicians embark on a project to bring music to prisoners.
Everything embedded in Māori protocol. (Right down to how the closing credits are done.)
Half-hour episodes. Ten or so?
Cal & I were lucky enough to get a few hours to ourselves, and decided to check out a film. Our options gave us a pretty stark choice, and we opted for The Muppets over Lars von Trier’s (supposedly fantastic but probably a wee bit depressing) Melancholia.
This was a good call.
It’s a great film. Sure, not perfect. The pacing felt a little bit *too* rushed at the start, like you were waiting for it to catch up with itself. But all the bits were fantastic. It was classic Muppets action. Lew Zealand got one of the best lines in the film, and you know something’s going right (or terribly terribly wrong) when that happens. Heck, the film trusted its felt talent enough to hand over the screen to its chicken cast, who of course (unlike the other Muppets) cannot speak, only cluck. Everything stopped for a big chicken-only musical number which was performed in its entirety. And it worked.
And I even teared up a bit as the Muppets recreated their classic TV opening.
I only had one complaint about this film, one moment where it kicked me out of the zone. The Muppets are performing probably their most famous song, and it cuts to the audience in the theatre, who are all smiling and swaying along with the music. And I thought, NO! That’s not right. They should be SINGING ALONG!
Anyway. This card-carrying member of the Victoria University Muppet Club loved it.
Bonus: Yesterday I listened to this Q&A podcast with the writers of The Muppets – revelatory and laugh-out-loud funny. Obviously, filled with spoilers, but if you’ve seen the film I highly recommend it.
Also: Chris Cooper’s song in the film is a SHOWSTOPPER.
