Feb 25
Inspired by the work of Dutch designer Pieke Bergmans, filmmaker David Parker set out to make a film about the ways we waste energy, but somewhere along the way it grew into Light, a haunting, poetic meditation not just on human wastefulness, but on the eerie, even spectral textures of the urban landscape.
There’s a short interview with Parker at The Atlantic.
Dec 21
I’ve not seen Oceans, the most recent documentary from Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, the creators of Travelling Birds, but after seeing the two videos below I think I need to. The first is of sleeping whales, and is just luminously beautiful, while the second is of one of the strangest creatures I’ve ever seen, the Blanket Octopus (while we’re on the subject of octopi, you might also want to check out Sy Montgomery’s fabulous piece about octopi in Orion).
And in case it’s driving you crazy, that very sexy voice you can hear is Pierce Brosnan’s.
Thanks to io9 for the heads-up.
Oct 11
As I’m sure many of you did, I spent yesterday evening watching the season finale of Breaking Bad. As season finales go it was one of the great ones, not least because it managed the often difficult trick of concluding a long and suspenseful narrative arc without either seeming too neat and convenient or fumbling the ball at the last moment. But it also contains one of the most gruesome – and the most exhilarating – scenes I’ve seen on television in a long while.
What follows is going to be at least technically spoiler-free, since I’m not going to describe the scene, but if you’d like to go into the episode completely free of information you should look away. But basically it’s a moment of sudden and surprising violence involving one of the central characters.
The scene was interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One was how brilliantly orchestrated it was. Despite all the scheming and mind games part of the strength of this season of Breaking Bad has been the growing sense of chaos surrounding Walt, and the manner in which his actions have disrupted the operations not just of his family but Gus and the cartels in increasingly dangerous and unpredictable ways. Certainly it’s been difficult not to be aware of the steady escalation of the risk to Gus and his operations as the DEA (or at least Hank) gradually became aware of the possibility that Gus might not be quite what he seems to be. Yet as the final episode revealed, the season has also been incredibly tightly plotted, not just in the narrow sense of Walt having a plan, but in the larger, narrative sense of tracing out arcs and story lines that converge in a manner that’s both inevitable and surprising (to borrow Cocteau’s formulation).
But what also struck me was the sheer delight of the moment I’m talking about. When it came I quite literally jumped in the air and cried out, not once but twice. And despite the absolute horror of what had happened my reaction wasn’t disgust, it was exultation.
It’s a reaction you only normally get in dramatic forms like film, television and theatre (although there’s a scene in Deborah Moggach’s novel, Tulip Fever, which tends to generate the same response). There are several such moments in The Sopranos (Tony picking the tooth out of the cuff of his pants while talking to AJ’s psychiatrist, Paulie’s mother’s friend catching Paulie in her house, Ralphie’s head falling out of his toupee), but there’s also the lawnmower scene in Mad Men and any number of such scenes on film (oddly the one that come to mind immediately is the moment the shark grabs Samuel L. Jackson in Renny Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea, but there’s also the much-imitated scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark in which Indy shoots the swordsman by the plane).
What’s fascinating about all of them is that they’re moments in which the violence or grostesquerie comes as a surprise, and is often designed to elicit something like humour. Yet the sort of surprise they depend upon is often one that goes beyond the surprise that comes with the revelation of something unexpected: instead it’s the sort of surprise that subverts our expectations about the conventions of the genre. We don’t expect that shark to grab Samuel L. Jackson in Deep Blue Sea because he’s in the middle of giving the big “we’ll fight them on the beaches” speech every action movie needs (and the fact Jackson is a big star and a major character). Likewise the lawnmower scene in Mad Men doesn’t just involve the eruption of violence in a show that’s largely about the workplace, it involves the maiming of a character we’ve been led to believe will be significant. And while the scenes in The Sopranos are less overtly subversive, they exist within the framework of a show which often used violence to remind us of the randomness and chaos of the world as a whole.
But they’re also fascinating because they’re not just about doing unexpected or unpredictable things. Just maiming people at random simply doesn’t work as storytelling, however subversive it might seem. Whether it’s the scene from last night’s Breaking Bad or the shark chomping on Samuel L. Jackson, such scenes tend to jolt our expectations and assumptions within the narrative as well, by revealing the plot is not quite (or not at all) what we’d been assuming.
It’s this part of the process that’s particularly tricky. The director of In Bruges, Martin McDonagh, is also a playwright, and the author of a series of remarkable (and remarkably violent) plays which depend at least in part upon eruptions of violence that are at once shocking and hilarious. Of these the second in his Leenane Trilogy, A Skull in Connemara, is particularly interesting. The plot centres on a gravedigger charged with clearing out an overcrowded graveyard, and involves a subplot about his murdered wife, although as becomes clear later on, none of this is really the point. Instead the point is the bones – and more particularly the skulls – the gravedigger keeps accumulating, and the question of what is to be done with them, a question that’s answered very graphically towards the end of the play when, in an explosion of violence, the gravedigger begins to smash the skulls to pieces with a mallet.
It’s an extraordinary scene, and an incredibly liberating and exhilarating one. The sheer anarchy and release of it is hard to describe. But part of what makes it so exhilarating is precisely that sense of release, of knowing, at some intuitive level, that whatever you may have assumed this moment was the point all along.
The scene in last night’s Breaking Bad shares this quality, because it’s also the moment you realise things have not been what you’d assumed. Yet by releasing the tension that’s built up over so many episodes in such an unexpected way, it transforms something that should be horrible into something that’s exciting and even grotesquely funny. Anthropologists talk about liminal moments, points in time when the assumptions that govern our interactions are suspended, and we enter a state of possibility, and change, and I suspect that beneath the gruesomeness there’s an element of that at play in these moments too, a sense in which the ordinary rules are suspended, and we glimpse something of the possibility of change and transformation that is embedded in the heart of all narrative. And, paradoxically, where our extremely sophisticated awareness of the cultural conventions of genre and narrative (because without that awareness the subversion couldn’t work) also makes it possible for us to encounter the most uncritical feelings of wonder and release that narrative depends upon.
(Diehard Breaking Bad fans might like to check out the first part of AV Club’s four part interview with the show’s show runner, Vince Gilligan)
Apologies for the late notice, but if you’re a NSW Writers’ Centre member, you’re in Sydney and you’re at a loose end tonight, you could do a lot worse than heading out to the NSW Writer’s Centre for tonight’s Writing Genre: is it all about the rules? which features Margo Lanagan, P.M. Newton and myself kicking the genre can around. The event is members only (though I’m not going to claim to know how rigorously that rule is enforced) and bookings can be made by emailing the Centre.
Jul 29
The new Richmond Fontaine album, The High Country (which interestingly seems to be a single narrative, thus further closing the gap between Willy Vlautin’s songs and his fiction) is due out in September, but in the meantime, live versions of two of the tracks have popped up, together with the news Willy’s first novel, The Motel Life, has just been turned into a motion picture directed by the Polsky Brothers and starring Stephen Dorff, Dakota Fanning and Kris Kristofferson.
Thanks to Jane Palfreyman for the heads-up.
Jul 5
I’m in the throes of finally finishing my edits (more on that soon), but in the meantime, here are two amazing pieces of time lapse photography. The first comes via NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day, and is by amateur astronomer and photographer Alex Cherney, who compiled twelve months of footage of the movement of stars and clouds across the southern coast of Australia into one very beautiful, and very haunting video. I have a personal affection for this video because I’ve actually been using one of Cherney’s images as the background on my computer for the last six months, but in a way what’s most striking is the way the video serves as a reminder of how different southern skies and landscapes are to those in the Northern Hemisphere. Be sure to embiggen for the full effect.
The second comes via io9, and features images of water in slow motion (set to music by electronica act, Team Ghost). It’s a thing of strange, almost alien beauty.
I’ll be back online properly next week. Catch you all then.
Because I’m deep in the land of edits it’s likely to be another slow week around here, but in the meantime you might want to take a minute or two to watch this amazing time-lapse video created by New York photographer Josh Owens: it really is a thing of beauty.
If you like what you see you can check out more of Josh’s videos on Vimeo, follow him on Twitter or visit his website. Thanks to The New Yorker for the original link. You might also want to take a moment to watch Tor Even Mathisen’s similarly breathtaking timelapse video of the Aurora Borealis.
May 12
Just a reminder that if you’re in Sydney over the weekend you might want to head over to Shearer’s Bookshop in Leichhardt for When Genres Attack, a pre-Sydney Writers’ Festival event exploring a series of hot-button issues to do with genre, literary status, women’s writing and the state of literary culture generally. It’s an event I’m really excited to be part of, not just because they’re a series of questions dear to my heart, but because I’ll be sharing the stage with the irrepressible Sophie Hamley and two of the smartest writers I know, P.M. Newton (author of one of my favourite books of last year, The Old School) and Kirsten Tranter (whose debut novel, The Legacy, I’m in the middle of as we speak and am enjoying very much). If you’d like a taster of the evening Kirsten’s written a fascinating piece about the way setting up oppositions between genre fiction and “literature” impoverishes our understanding of both for the Shearer’s Bookshop Blog.
The event kicks off at 7:30 tomorrow night. Tickets are $7.00 and are available from Shearer’s Bookshop on (02) 9572 7766. It’d be great to see you there.
Apologies again for my somewhat sporadic posting: I’ve been in a bit of a work-hole for the last little bit. I think – I hope – I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but in the meantime I thought I’d link to a couple of reviews I’ve had in the papers recently (there have actually been a number more but exactly what gets posted online seems to be a bit arbitrary these days).
The first is my review of Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists, which was published in The Australian a few weeks back. I may have some more things to say about Rachman’s book in the not-too-distant future, but for now the review will have to do.
The second is also from The Australian, and is of John Ajvide Lindqvist’s follow-up to the truly unsettling Let The Right One In, Handling the Undead, a book which despite its subject matter (zombies in Sweden) and Lindqvist’s bizarrely unmodulated prose, is both oddly beautiful and more than a little upsetting.
(If you feel like hunting out the print versions I’ve also had pieces on Martin Amis’ The Pregnant Widow, Richard Powers’ entirely wonderful “enhancement” Generosity (one of the most exciting books I’ve read in ages), and Jim Crace’s All That Follows).
I’d also like to suggest three (or four, to be precise) things from elsewhere which are very definitely worth reading (assuming you haven’t already). The first is Anthony Lane’s breezy and entirely entertaining tour of the history of 3D (in the context of which I’d refer you to my post on Avatar a few weeks back). If you’re not completely over Avatar by now Daniel Mendelsohn’s piece on the film is also worth a look (though I have to confess I think anything by Mendelsohn is worth reading).
Also worth a look is Jason Epstein’s piece in The New York Review of Books on the future of publishing: I suspect I feel less wedded to the past than he does but it’s a pretty good summary of the situation at present.
And last (but very definitely not least) Jonah Lehrer’s fascinating piece from The New York Times Magazine about the controversial but tantalising studies suggesting depression may confer evolutionary advantage, a piece which is distinguished not just by being the only place I’ve ever seen the word “heterogeneity” used in a newspaper article, but by meshing suggestively with the desire of a wide range of writers (including myself) to try and understand depression in terms beyond the simplistically pathological.
Enjoy – I’ll be back online later this week.
Break text
Jan 28
I was reminded this morning (during a Twitter exchange about the iPad) of Philip Kaufman’s fantastic 1978 version of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, a film which must rank as one of my all-time faves.
Kaufman’s wasn’t the first film based on Jack Finney’s 1955 novel, The Body Snatchers
While Kaufman would quickly go on to make his name as a director with films such as The Right Stuff and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, at the time of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers’ release he was mostly known for his low budget 1972 Jesse James film, The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid. Yet he nonetheless attracted a remarkable cast, headed up by Donald Sutherland and Brooke Adams as Matthew Bennell and Elizabeth Driscoll, Leonard Nimoy as self-help guru Dr David Kibner, and a then relatively unknown Jeff Goldblum as Jack Bellicec.
For those unfamiliar with the story, it’s devastatingly simple. Alien pods drift to earth, bringing plants which grow into copies of human beings, latching onto people as they sleep and absorbing their memories and appearance but none of their humanity. Gradually, but inexorably, they begin to infiltrate the population, replacing them, until the last vestiges of human individuality are wiped away.
A lot of the film’s pleasure lies in its understatedness. Set in a wintry San Francisco, amidst the already alien-looking buds of cropped plane trees and shot in a muted palette of browns and greys, it takes the anonymity of urban life and uses it to unsettling effect. As the characters go about their lives people push past them in the streets, their relentless movement and anonymity becoming increasingly disturbing; occasionally the steady, and increasingly deliberate movement of the passers-by is disturbed by a figure breaking and running, but for a long time the city might be any city, anywhere.
Pulling against this ordinariness Kaufman injects one horrible detail, which is the scream the replicants use to identify ordinary, unaffected humans, and which makes the film’s final, terrible denouement so chilling. I had hoped to provide a video of one of the characters screaming, but sadly the only one I could find is cut from close to the film’s end, and so I was reluctant to use it for fear of spoiling what is, surely, one of the great cinematic moments.
But there are other, wonderful details as well, not least the omnipresent garbage trucks, little emblems of ordinariness which take on a quite different meaning as the film progresses, and it becomes clear they are being used to dispose of the bodies of the replicated, or the bizarre use of bagpipes playing ‘Amazing Grace’.
Like John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids, which I’ve written about on this site before, part of what makes Invasion of the Bodysnatchers so chilling is the inexorability of it all. There is no plan, no strategy, there is just arrival and assimilation. Like the Borg in Star Trek, the pods seem to have no purpose but to absorb humanity, to make us like them.
But I suspect the real horror of the story in all its incarnations lies in the way it plays upon deepseated anxieties about absorption and loss of individuality. It’s not just that there’s something horrible and uncanny (in the full, Freudian sense of the word) about these emotionless copies, it’s that our anxieties about the erasure of individuality are so deep that any vehicle which triggers them can be redeployed over and over again in different contexts, bouncing off whatever fears are circulating in the culture. In the 1950s it was Communism (or its dark passenger, McCarthyism), the 1970s blank-faced hippies and Moonies, in the 2000s it was the notion of surveillance, of revealing oneself (a theme taken up to similar, but much more powerful effect in Richard Powers’ brilliant 2007 novel about brain damage and individuality in post-9/11 America, The Echo Maker): as a man advises the increasingly terrified and desperate Nicole Kidman on a train in The Invasion, “Don’t show any emotion, just look ahead. They can’t tell who you are if you don’t show any emotion”.
Break text
Jan 18
Neytiri (Zoe Saldana) and Sully (Sam Worthington)
Given the sheer volume of discussion of Avatar online, and the fact that it’s now a month since the film was released, I’ve been a little reluctant to chip in with my two cents worth. But while the time for anything like a straight review is long past, I feel like there are some things worth saying about it that don’t seem to have been said to date.
Because what I want to say is reasonably extended, I’ve decided to break it up into two (or just possibly three) posts. The first – this one – is about the 3D technology of the film; later in the week I want to say a few things about the film’s broader message, and perhaps about what it is that seems to work (and not work) in it.
To begin with, I think it’s worth observing just how overwhelming the response to the film has been. I can’t think of another film in recent years which has generated anything like as much commentary as Avatar, or (perhaps more interestingly) which has managed to chew up so much bandwidth across so many channels. You’d expect a genre film, especially a genre film as expensive and technically striking as Avatar to be generating a lot of commentary on sites which cater to fanboys, but it’s a lot less usual for a genre film (or indeed any film) to be generating continuing commentary on the opinion pages of the major international broadsheets.
At least part of this can be attributed to the film’s politics, which have enraged right-wing commentators around the world (or at least inspired the sorts of absurd posturing that passes for outrage in right-wing circles). I’m not going to rehash their arguments here, which mostly turn on the mawkishness of the film’s ecological and political subtexts, but I would observe that there’s something telling about the sheer ferocity of the Right’s hostility to messages which are, at one level, so unexceptional (after all, as Elvis Costello almost asked, what’s so threatening about peace, love and understanding?).
But I’m not sure the somewhat confected political debate about the film’s politics really explains its transformation into a full-blown cultural phenomenon. Certainly it’s difficult to imagine the armies of people who’ve trooped off to see the film having a Road to Damascus moment as they head home to their houses filled with the sort of consumer technologies that made the film possible and deciding to give it all away for a simpler life (nor, I suspect, would the many corporations with a stake in its success be impressed if they thought its anti-consumerist message was actually hitting home).
Instead the film’s impact seems to be a result of the technologies that make it so striking, in particular Cameron’s extremely sophisticated fusion of 3D and digital special effects.
In itself this is hardly a remarkable observation, but stay with me for a moment. 3D isn’t new, but after the success of Avatar I think we can assume it’s here to stay. There have already been announcements that films ranging from the new Bond film to 2012′s Star Trek 2 and the now-Sam Raimi-less Spiderman 4 will be shot in 3D, and while the technology will presumably take a while to trickle down into smaller, less spectacle-driven productions, I think there’s little doubt it will.
To my mind the interesting question isn’t whether 3D will gradually displace older, 2D technologies, but what that will mean for the way we see and experience film (or indeed whether it is fair to continue to describe the future of visual storytelling as “film”). As anyone who’s seen it knows, what’s really exciting about Avatar isn’t the story (though to tell the truth, I found it completely absorbing, all my caveats about the woodenness of its storytelling notwithstanding) or even the effects (which are, quite simply, extraordinary) but the sense of immersion. As many before me have observed, the film largely declines to employ the sort of cheesy things-shooting-out-of-the-screen-at-you gimmicks 3D films have usually confined themselves to, and instead concentrates on creating a world you enter as if it were real.
Interestingly, I think the sheer novelty of the experience rather overwhelms the fact that as a simulation of real space the film is actually rather crude. There’s depth, but objects and figures often seem more like planes moving in space than actual three-dimensional things (rather like a $300 million Captain Pugwash cartoon, I suppose). That’s not to say it isn’t amazing, and – as the film’s publicity reminds us – unlike anything we’ve seen before, but it is to be reminded that for all its wonder to an audience in 2010, within a decade Avatar is likely to look as crude as the original Star Wars does now. Likewise I suspect it’s fair to assume that 3D film and television are probably only transitional technologies, and that the future lies in holographic projection or some similar technology.
But crude or not, I think there’s little doubt Avatar is the embodiment of Cameron’s recognition that cultural forms are, in a very deep sense, artefacts of the technology that create them. Novels take the form they do because of the codex book, movies the cinema (and increasingly, television) screen, video games the computer screen. So moving from 2D to 3D isn’t just about adding depth to films, it’s about creating something new, something unlike anything we’ve had before.
In a minor way this is visible in the textures of the film itself. Despite the immersiveness of the 3D Avatar often seems curiously flat texturally. Given the riot of colour that is Pandorum, it would be impossible to describe it as washed-out, but more than once I found myself nostalgic for the vivid density of colour digital images and digital film have made us familiar with. There are a few moments that have it – most memorably the early scenes in space, which draw upon NASA’s photographs of the ISS and shuttle missions – but for the most part Pandorum (and by extension the film itself) doesn’t look dense or vivid enough to be “real”.
Arrival at Pandorum
But this density of colour is itself new, a consequence of the shift to digital imaging, and the increasingly blurry line between reality and representations of reality, a line films like Avatar are making even blurrier. What looked “real” to an audience familiar with Technicolor looks strange to us, just as the more liquid surfaces of analog photography seem increasingly other-worldly to a culture more accustomed to digital reproduction.
This is doubly true of Avatar’s use of 3D, which breaks the fourth wall in a truly revolutionary manner. Instead of watching the film, the audience are in the film. I’ve not read everything that’s been written about the film, but it seems odd to me that people haven’t made more of the fact that Cameron quite deliberately situates a second, imaginary immersive technology at the centre of the film, as if to suggest the film is, in some small way, a very crude version of what Sully and the others experience “dreamwalking” in the avatars themselves.
Sully (Sam Worthington) and his avatar
But the avatar technology also – and importantly to my mind – invokes the computer game. I don’t mean by this that the film is intended to celebrate gaming or leverage a computer game (though it’s certainly not too cynical to suggest there’s nothing accidental about the very obvious continuity between the textures of the film and the textures of Avatar: The Game). Instead I think Cameron invokes gaming because he understands – whether consciously or not – the synergies between the immersiveness of 3D moviemaking and the computer game.
In a very crude sense, computer games and film have been converging for some time. In the gaming world it’s long since ceased to be surprising for a game to be “cinematic”, and, conversely, I think it’s fair to say the largely digital textures of a lot of action and science fiction films often seem to resemble those of the more sophisticated games.
Critics of games and gaming usually point to the crudeness of the interactions, or the lack of interiority in games as a sign of their inferiority to older forms such as fiction and film. But that seems to me to miss the point. Games aren’t about interiority, they’re about agency, and often, the creativity of the player. They are an experience, a means of entering another world.
Of course this is precisely what Sully does in the film when he steps into his avatar’s body (and again when he leaves the control of the mission and becomes one of the Na’vi), and what, in a cruder sense, the film allows the viewer to do. And while the agency enjoyed by a player is absent, the sense of immersion moves the experience beyond that of passive consumption, suggesting something more like possibility, or even escape. Indeed the film very deliberately suggests this longing for freedom, and for escape through its early concentration on Sully and his ruined body, and the sense he only becomes fully alive, and fully real in the moment he steps into the avatar.
Which brings us back, I think, to the question of what 3D will do to film, and perhaps more profoundly, film’s storytelling. All forms of fictional narrative – novels, films, television series, even fairy tales and folk stories – create worlds. But the shift to 3D makes this process central, emphasising the viewer’s immersion in the world of the film, just as computer games emphasise the player’s immersion in the world of the game. It also, in the longer term, suggests new forms of interactivity, and, I suspect, narrative possibilities (at the very least POV pornography is unlikely to ever be quite the same). And, more deeply, it hastens our transition into a world where the virtual and the real are essentially indistinguishable, and where our sense of what is real is hopelessly enmeshed in the technologies we use to reproduce it. As filmmakers like Cocteau understood long ago, 2D film has always, at some deep level, been about a kind of dreaming, a way of projecting our fantasies onto the screen (it’s not accidental we watch movies in the dark, or that film is essentially insubstantial, a play of light upon a screen); with 3D those dreams cease to be insubstantial, and begin to populate the world around us.
Break text
Aug 30
In his novel, The Day of the Triffids and its vision of a world struck blind and menaced by carnivorous plants, John Wyndham created one of the most enduring nightmares of the Atomic Age. Nearly 60 years later, his vision might equally serve not just as a warning of the perils of genetic engineering, but as a powerful reminder of the very different ways British and American writers imagine the end of the world.
Aug 27
If you’re not already feeling exhausted by the promotional campaign for Where the Wild Things Are, this week’s New Yorker has an interview with the freewheeling Dave Eggers, who has a lot of very interesting things to say about The Wild Things
Meanwhile the extended trailer featuring interviews with Sendak and Jonze which was released a few weeks ago seems to have reappeared on Youtube (at the time of my last post it seemed to have been removed for copyright reasons). Hopefully it won’t vanish again, because it’s really rather wonderful to hear Sendak speak about his creation.
And if you’re a bit bemused by the notion of a novel based on a film adapted from a children’s book, perhaps I could point you to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a book which was not, in fact, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but Fred Saberhagen’s novelization of Francis Ford Coppola’s movie. Hollywood meet Irony. Irony, this is Hollywood.
Break text
Break text
Aug 15
Concept art by Nathan Schroeder for Bryan Singer's 2001 Battlestar Galactica remake
After a week of rumours, Universal have announced that Bryan Singer is to produce and direct a cinematic adaptation of Battlestar Galactica.
It’s not the first time Singer (director of The Usual Suspects, the first two X-Men movies and most recently Valkyrie) has been attached to a remake of Glenn A. Larson’s 1970s television cheesetacular. In 2000 Singer developed a mini-series based on the original series for Fox, but despite being scheduled to go into production in November 2001, the project came unravelled in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. In the aftermath of the collapse of Singer’s remake Ronald D. Moore and David Eick were commissioned to reimagine the franchise yet again, leading initially to the 2003 mini-series, starring Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell, and subsequently the recently concluded television series.
For those struggling to understand where a remake would fit in the Battlestar Galactica universe created by Moore and Eick, which ended (satisfactorily or not) with the remnants of the Human and Cylon civilizations finding Earth, they need struggle no longer, because it is clear Singer’s version, which is being produced in collaboration with Larson himself, will not be a continuation of Moore and Eick’s show, but a wholly new interpretation of the material.
Superficially at least it’s difficult to imagine why Universal, and more particularly Singer, would want to make a Battlestar Galactica without Edward James Olmos’ Adama, or Mary McDonnell’s President Roslin, or Katee Sackhoff’s Starbuck, to say nothing of their extraordinary vision of Cylon society, particularly given that, with at least one television movie, The Plan, still to screen, and the prequel spinoff, Caprica, scheduled to begin on SyFy next year, Moore and Eick’s version isn’t even cold in its grave yet. With what is now widely regarded as one of the most audacious and powerful television shows ever made so fresh in the memory, why make a movie the very existence of which seems certain to alienate much of the show’s fan base? And what, given the sheer complexity and metaphorical power of Moore and Eick’s version, does Singer think he can bring that is fresh to the material?
Of course there’s nothing new about the cannibalistic nature of science fiction, and science fiction film and television in particular. Like horror and fantasy, science fiction has a long tradition of freely borrowing, adapting and just straight appropriating tropes, devices and ideas. Remakes abound, as do thinly-disguised copies. Indeed the original Battlestar Galactica owes its existence to the success of Star Wars, and was the subject of a lawsuit by George Lucas for copyright infringement, a lawsuit which is itself ironic given the fact that it is difficult to imagine a film more aware of cinematic history, and more laden with appropriations than Star Wars itself.
As I’ve observed before, Moore and Eick’s version makes powerful, and often amusing use of this same history. Intended as a reboot rather than a sequel of Larson’s original 1970s version of the show, it incorporates elements of the original version without ever quite accepting the original series as prehistory. The basic premise, of a catastrophic attack on the Twelve Colonies, and the desperate search of the survivors for the lost Thirteenth Colony, Earth, is retained, as are the names and identities of many of the original characters, but simultaneously the now-dated futuristic technology of the original show is utilized as the technology extant in the Cylon Wars 40 years earlier, transforming the original series into something like mythological prehistory.
In places this prehistory is given playful, or ironic effect, as in the Cylon helmet on display in the museum in the mini-series, the chainsmoking Dr Cottle, or the antiquated computers of the ageing Galactica. And in this sense it is only one of a number of echoes of other science fiction texts within the fabric of Moore and Eick’s version of the show, in particular the appropriation of the term “skinjob” from Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (itself, of course, an adaptation of Phillp K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep?) or the use of Minority Report’s dreaming precogs (again themselves inspired by a Dick story) as the model for Battlestar Galactica’s Delphic Cylon Hybrids.
But more importantly, Moore and Eick’s play with the original series allows their reimagined version to incorporate the original series into their version’s already somewhat overdetermined mythic structure, joining texts as disparate as Virgil’s Aenied, Exodus, Paradise Lost, The Book of Mormon, more potent, contemporary anxieties about terrorism and the War on Terror, and the Classical, zodiacal associations invoked by the names of the Colonies and the characters as part of the dense web of allusion within which the show operates.
But the cannibalistic nature of the genre – and indeed the show itself – aside, it’s still difficult not to feel there’s something peculiar in the notion of rebooting the show again, so soon. Why, one wants to ask, what can a reboot do that Moore and Eick’s version didn’t?
The problem is that this is exactly the wrong question to ask. Universal aren’t interested in finding something new in the material, any more than the creators of Transformers or GI Joe were interested in the ideas behind them (such as they were). What they want is a property that will allow them to unleash the machinery of the contemporary Hollywood spectacular, together with the associated merchandizing and marketing campaign. The precise nature of the property is relatively unimportant in the whole equation. What matters is that it provides a canvas upon which the digital wizardry of contemporary filmmaking can be unleashed.
Looked at this way a number of the more puzzling revivals of recent years seem a little less peculiar. Land of the Lost didn’t come into being because someone had a burning desire to tell the story of the Sleestak on the big screen. It came into being because the studios knew they had the technology and the promotional machinery to create a summer blockbuster, and Land of the Lost provided a convenient tentpole for them to deploy them. And, by using an extant property, they didn’t even have to go to the trouble of creating something new.
With this in mind it’s not difficult to imagine what Singer’s Battlestar Galactica will be like. Say goodbye to Moore and Eick’s handheld camera work and silent, spinning space battles; say hello to digital explosions and monster robots. Say goodbye as well to the complex political subtexts: no doubt there will be gestures in that direction but the nature of the beast (and indeed the somewhat lugubrious nature of Singer’s filmmaking) almost ensures they will be little more than gestures; what Universal will want is Transformers in space, and that, presumably, is what Singer will give them.
Break text
Theme: Linen by The Theme Foundry
