Five Space Exploration Flicks

10… 9… 8… 7… 6… 5… 4… 3… 2… ONE!

Blast Off!

Richard Linklater directs Milo Coy, Jack Black and Glen Powell in this animated youth comedy where the 1969 moon landing is remembered by a fantasist Texan child.

Maybe every generation should have one of these – a nostalgic deep drill into every aspect of their childhood. The music, games, shows, food, social changes and big events. At times it can just feel like an awesome list of cool stuff remembered and recited… and I’m completely down with that. I’ve been adding tracks from the extensive soundtrack to my streaming library for a week now. Fantasy and obsession with the space program give way to a great day out at a theme park. So we are kind of in space, seeing an alternative day dreamed view to one of mankind’s biggest achievements, and also on the couch, half asleep, wondering if Time Tunnel will be on tomorrow. It just clicks, I laughed a lot at this. Linklater most successful rotoscoped project and in my head an unofficial prequel to Dazed & Confused. These Texan kids are exactly the right age to grow up into that tribe.

9

Perfect Double Bill: Waking Life (2001)

Robert Zemeckis directs Jodie Foster, Matthew McConaughey and James Woods in this sci-fi drama where Dr. Ellie Arroway, after years of searching, finds conclusive radio proof of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Maybe it is because he has spent the entire 21st century trying to tame the uncanny valley with middling success that we overlook the tremendous run of ambitious blockbuster after blockbuster that Robert Zemeckis crafted over 17 years at the pinnacle of his career. Romancing The Stone, The Back To The Future Trilogy, Roger Rabbit, Death Becomes Her, Forrest Gump, Contact, What Lies Beneath, Castaway. Not a dud or arthouse vanity project among them, all with cutting edge spectacle and something deeper to say about the late 20th century American experience. Contact gets a little lost in the shuffle even though it is the most intelligent and philosophical. Maybe you prefer 2001 / Close Encounters / Arrival. Contact is very much my go to in the sub-genre. Expansive, challenging, yet completely comfortable as Saturday night multiplex fodder. The chase for the truth and the big answers compels. Thrum. Thrum. Thrum. The message from another galaxy bellows at us with oblique possibilities. The whole endeavour is anchored by Foster in her most perfectly tailored role. It fits her talents and star persona like a glove. She is a pioneer, a romantic, the most intelligent person in the room, the most vulnerable to the prejudices of the patriarchy. No movie like it has a central character so captivating, attractive or zealous. 2 and half hours fly by. For a film that constantly interrogates weighty issues, Contact is never dull or lost in talk. A wonder.

10

Perfect Double Bill: Arrival (2016)

Ridley Scott directs Michael Fassbender, Noomi Rapace and Charlize Theron in the sci-fi adventure prequel where astronauts travel deep into space to potentially meet their maker and unleash their destructor.

Spoilers are going to abound here!

I want to explore my thoughts and don’t have the patience to tip toe around areas I want to write with clarity about.

Surely everyone who knows me well, knows I am an avid Prometheus defendant. I’ll bore you at dinner parties about how unfairly maligned I think it is, if I ever attended dinner parties, but I can’t as I’ll be at home… watching Prometheus again. When I first caught it at the Southbank mega IMAX on the weekend of release, the group of comedians I left with were picking it apart, amplifying their disappointment while I silently trundled off amazed and sated. And 10 years of many, many late night DVD watches down the line my love of this visually opulent, philosophically robust and rousingly adventurous epic has diminished very little.

The IMDB ratings speak for themselves. You’ll struggle to find a nerd messageboard or movie clickbait site that does not present the propaganda that Prometheus is the worst film ever made… yet half a million movie fans have anonymously rated it a solid 7 out of 10 over the last half decade… the vocal haters are clearly an unrepresentative minority with too much influence. Most people silently like, love or respect Prometheus. The incongruously better reviewed Covenant plummeted below a 7 on IMDB and that’s when the faithful first weekenders were the only ones rating it so far. I predicted it will level out at a below average 6.5 within a year. Lo and behold it now sits at 6.4.

Prometheus is hard sci-fi, crafted with an artisan’s zeal and unbeholden to its source material in a way that only the product of a key creative behind the 1979 original classic could be. Rather than being a big budget exercise in xenomorph fan-fiction, Prometheus terraforms a new exciting world within the same universe. It has no interest in canon and continuity- it is not looking for for both ends of the bridge to meet perfectly in the middle à la Rogue One and A New Hope or The Thing and The Thing. It has its own Lovecraftian / Chariots of the Gods / The Stone Tapes influenced agenda to follow.

Before I go into brief detail about all that I adore about it I’m happy to address a couple of the key nits people like to pick at it.

One: the scientists do not behave very scientifically.

An unavoidable trope of sci-fi in general that. If there is no giddy hubris, then no breakthrough fantastical or horrific to set the narrative in motion. Scientists need to be unprofessional dicks otherwise we don’t have a film, you utter goons. You can see this shocking but essential lack of health and safety in previous entries of the series (Kane looks entranced into that squirming egg, Ripley constantly and consciously goes back into hunting, nesting and feeding grounds) as well as with fictional scientists in the works of Cronenberg, Wells, Frankenstein, Greek Myth et al. May I even suggest real life research pioneers who died doing unwise things with their experiments like Marie Curie or Michael Faraday?

In the genre entertainment movie, the humans go from masters of their domain to toddlers in danger within one foolish open door, one rashly crossed threshold. Look at those beautiful but awkward top heavy bubble helmets. They clumsily bang their heads off each other frequently and look like they’ll topple over at any moment, newborns struggling with their first movements in this brave world. Scott has made them visually ungainly and lacking control.

This matches the Engineers’ awkward exosuits, their own failures we witness in the ghostly holographic CCTV replay, something has gone horribly wrong. The message is “You play God or you meet your creator, you risk becoming of inferior and terminally vulnerable.” The only species not to destroy themselves by meddling with their own origins are the xenomorphs themselves. They have no philosophy. They just feed and breed and retaliate. Answering the big questions is the opposite of a survival instinct.

Two: Why not just move sideways out of the path of that crashing spaceship rather than try to outrun it?

Well, Shaw actually does exactly that, while Vickers doesn’t. And maybe there is a point in that. Vickers has lived her life calculating and avoiding risk far, far in advance. So she hasn’t exactly attuned her immediate survival instincts. She lives on a lifepod, which is now jettisoned up ahead, these are pointedly her first (doomed) steps on a hostile planet she has avoided venturing out on. Maybe she is scared shitless to do anything but run. Human, that. And if you watch the sequence again, the path of the impacting craft is quite erratic. I’m not sure a simple sidestep to the left(, Simon!) would cut it. Shaw does roll over… only to see the big “croissant” topple in her direction anyway and almost crush her again.

I think this boils down to people not wanting a big action set piece. Why you no want no action set piece, people? What are you? Mike Leigh fans?

As for other “flaws” you want to bring up… fuck off. You don’t deserve cinema.

Now for all that meaty strength. The restrained body horror; sustained in the brilliant self abortion sequence (one of the most thrilling proactive moments of the franchise entire, sold perfectly to us by the committed Rapace) to the cheeky momentary look of disgust on the reanimated head (shades of Ash) before it explodes.

Costumes designers, set dressers, model builders and score composers take a massive bow – Prometheus looks and sounds like the most expensive film ever made. Glistening and foreboding, inventive yet practical. Then there’s the intelligent mythology that introduces as many questions as it does answer old mysteries- the bedrock of opening the series out for future entries. We take in issues of creation, parenthood, faith and evolution – you don’t get that in Star Wars.

A brilliant cast – Fassbender is chilling, Rapace charming and hardworking, Theron icy and petulant (watch her face when Weyland refers to his robot as the closest thing he has to a son -Oof!), Guy Pearce as a decrepit cameo, Idris Elba as the manly ship’s captain, familar faces Benedict Wong, Kate Dickie, Rafe Spall and Sean Harris beefing out the credits.

Cor! You’d give both nuts to watch another film with this bunch, no matter how unlikeable or strangely motivated the characters. And I thought we were all adults here… who says we have to like all our characters? How do you pricks watch Goodfellas or Raging Bull? Genuine question. How?

So early versions of the chestbuster, the facehugger and the alien itself appear in the form of a foetal squid, a mega squid and the “deacon” respectively. But the creatures this film is truly about is the Engineers. Everything else is fan service offal. And the Engineers are fascinating. We meet one in the opening sequence, sacrificing his body as a dispersal system for the black goo virus / DNA accelerant? Are they boosting or controlling the evolution of a planet? Seeding themselves into the far outreaches of the universe like long game colonists? Testing a weapon?

Either way, the suggestion seems to be we are the end product of this sacrifice. And once we have become advanced enough to discover and understand their primitive starmaps and navigate space they will want to know. Seemingly to destroy us at this military outpost they have baited for us as the destination. Not that they are perfect, those holographic images from the past and their strewn bodies suggest something has gone tits up, the familiar image of the alien on a mural above their black goo store suggest the xenomorph already exists and is a portent for death in their culture too.

One of most provocative moments is when the android David and the dying Weyland wake the preserved Engineer from hypersleep. He observes them at first but then viciously attacks. What has angered him? Their mere presence? Then why the hesitation? Its realisation that David is a human construct and the humans have been playing Engineer? David speaking their language? Mastering it? Or bungling it? Offence? Or dying Weyland showing all his frailty and vulnerability in front of Engineers pale, muscular, smooth perfection? Is he proof the experiment on Earth has failed or has grown wildly out of control?

Unanswered questions are not flaws or plot holes. They are the barbs that hook the committed viewer back in, make a experience like Prometheus endlessly rewatchable. Like Scott’s own Blade Runner. And why should we understand the motivations of something so… alien?

I’m willing to accept Prometheus with its B-Movie plotting and fresher’s first year theorising and reasoning can be off putting to those who merely wanted another face value, gung-ho Aliens. But I think the imagination, assembled craft, naughty shocks, escalating intensity and ambition far outweigh any initial dissatisfaction. Viewed as a companion piece to Ridley Scott’s Alien on its own, it proves a delicious expansion. And Prometheus in its own right it is a pure, compelling, truly cinematic experience. Try it again, please?

I remember the Prometheus teaser being released on Christmas Day and having to hide up in my brother-in-law’s room for half an hour to watch it over and over and over on a smartphone. A prequel to one of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made… from the original director. I was sold – hook, line and sinker. Bouncing in my seat until the summer.

Still am!

10

Ridley Scott directs Matt Damon, Jeff Daniels and Kristen Wiig in this sci-fi adventure about a stranded astronaut who has to survive Mars with limited life support while NASA mounts an unplanned rescue mission.

I think we all know that the release of Project Hail Mary inspired this weekend’s list. Both based on Andy Weir’s novels.

“I’m gonna science this shit outta this.” Only a decade old and they genuinely don’t make them like this anymore. A classy ensemble wittily negotiating the impossible around a charismatic and bubbly turn from Matt Damon’s smart alec Robinson Crusoe. This is a problem solving movie. And a good format for how we should all live our lives. Prioritise one emergency at a time until the solutions cascade into each other. Very few modern blockbusters celebrate decency and intelligence like this. And because Ridders was the gun-for-hire, it looks the utter tits. Massive uninhabitable alien expanses, A-listers looking glamorous (unless in peril) and sheen-y shiny believable tech. It is constantly entertaining over 150 minutes and leaves you with a series of massive smiles on your big dumb stupid face.

10

Perfect Double Bill: Ad Astra (2019)

Philip Kaufman directs Ed Harris, Sam Shepard and Dennis Quaid in this epic drama following the test pilots and US Marines who broke the sound barrier and became the first astronauts for NASA.

Allegedly the astronauts didn’t like this representation of them. Mercury Seven original Wally Schirra said: “It was the best book on space, but the movie was distorted and warped… All the astronauts hated it. We called it Animal House in Space.” You can see why the flyboys who conquered the stratosphere didn’t gel with this representation of themselves. They’re cocky, laddish, constantly flirting with death wishes. Cowboys who could be replaced by chimps. Pioneers along for a ride they have little control over.

Only really Harris’ John Glenn shows an external humanity, emotional maturity. He treats his wife with a gentle adoration while the others hound dog and drag their ‘First Ladies Of Space’ about like required ornaments.

Kaufman ain’t interested in myth, he’s interested in myth making. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance at MACH 3. He knows it takes a special kind of macho jock to achieve the unachievable. He makes no bones in presenting these men as fallible, flawed and competitive. Because he has no need to turn these men into heroes. They already are, he’s trying to reset them back to being men. Rewind all the hype and propaganda, the Presidential phone calls and ticker tape parades. He explores some icons like Chuck Yeager (Shepard making a genuine, almost supernatural, impact as the man who should have been king of space) with an affectionate focus, others with a cursory shorthand.

The movie lacks narrative form, drifting from one character or location to the next with little finesse. It isn’t interested in a trad three act structure. It is a freewheelin’ procedural of a unique, never repeated adventure. Yet it never feels baggy at three plus hours. The Right Stuff feels like a feast. The filmmakers eschewed the use of visual effects done in the lab. It makes you feel like you are right there. Did Tony Scott and Joseph Kosinski use this as a starting point for their Top Gun movies? Fleshing out all the reality but retaining the need speed, the desire to put an audience in the cockpit as the impossible is tamed?

Bill Conti’s score adds to the aura that we are on the precipice of a new age of man. It absorbs Holst’s The Planets and Native American chant recycled from a previous Kaufman flick. Synthesiser heaven. John Barry was originally asked to compose the score but didn’t like Kaufman’s brief for how he wanted his movie to feel. “Sounding like you’re walking in the desert and you see a cactus, and you put your foot on it, but it just starts growing up through your foot.”

In its finest scenes, and this evening devourer is full of them, The Right Stuff makes you feel like you are witnessing the points in the 20th Century where humanity is being redefined and America lives up to it grand potential.

A once in a lifetime cinematic experience.

10

Perfect Double Bill: Apollo 11 (2019)

Notes: I have watched 2001 a half a dozen times on the big screen trying to unlock it. Bores me to tears. Cannot unlock it. 2010 is a better movie. But I love Kubrick?!

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