Movie Zone & TV Zone
I recently went to see Michael Winterbottom's new movie The Killer Inside Me, which has been the subject of much controversy because of its graphic scenes of violence towards women. It's based on the noir novel by Jim Thompson; and many have attacked it as being misogynistic and excessively violent. Others have defended it on artistic grounds, while conceding its violence makes it 'troubling'. And there are some who have defended the film, on the grounds that it shows the brutal reality of domestic violence. Which means it's a healthy corrective to all those Hollywood movies which routinely glorify violence.
I admire Winterbottom as a film-maker - his Twenty Four Hour Party People is a masterpiece - and I love noir in general, and the books of Jim Thompson in particular. To be honest though I found the film a bit of a yawn; BECAUSE IT WASN'T NEARLY VIOLENT ENOUGH.
I am in fact staggered at some of the reviewers who felt it was the most shocking thing they'd ever seen in the cinema. There's a scene where Casey Affleck bashes up Jennifer Alba; and there's a second assault scene; and that's about it really. Compared to what you get in many thrillers and action movies and horror flicks, it's very mild stuff.
What IS weird however about both 'beating up women' scenes is that the women don't fight back - which makes the violence feel oddly detached, and not-credible; and hence makes it hard to care about the story and its characters.
I think there's real merit in the argument that Winterbottom has created cliched female characters who don't respond in the way that real people would. There's a hint that Alba's character in a masochist; but if so, that should be dramatised. She should BEG to be beaten, which would truly shock us; and I would strongly argue that there's nothing inherently misogynistic about showing masochism in a woman. Because masochists DO exist. I was once the fly on a wall in a Metropolitan Police investigation into a group of masochists who did the most appalling things - one chap hammered a nail through his own penis - and no one can deny it's a real psychological phenomenon. (What would be unacceptable, however, is to hint at the lie that ALL women like to be hurt - that gets you into the immoral/indefensible territory).
I think the real issue for me here is that Winterbottom is a cerebral arthouse director who hasn't mastered the basic concept that violence in cinema is there to be ENJOYED. We love to be scared, appalled, terrified; we enjoy getting inside the head of evil serial killers; we relish being pursued by a psycho who has killed all our friends. That's how violence works in genre cinema, and even in 'serious' cinema. The violence in Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall gives energy and adrenalin to this brilliant study of the last days of Hitler. The violence in The Godfather - not your common or garden gangster flick but a true masterpiece about organised crime - is deliciously awful. Luca Brasi having a knife in the hand before being garrotted! James Caan being plugged full of holes!
The horrible cop getting his head shot apart by Michael Corleone!
These acts of violence function as essential elements of the overall pleasure that cinema offers. And it's not just Hollywood movies which allow us to "enjoy' violence. One of my favourite films of last year was the verite arthouse movie A Prophet by Jacques Audiard, an unflinching study of life in a French prison. Except it's not really a 'study' or an 'analysis'; it's a movie, and a gripping one, with savourable sequences of ghastly violence that keep you glued to the seat. In particular, the murder committed in the first third of the film is one of the most compellingly enjoyable pieces of cinema I've ever seen; it doesn't 'glorify' violence, but boy, it's fun to watch.
What I'm saying is; let's stop pretending. Of course violence, when it's in fiction rather than in life, is fun. It's part of the imaginative experience; imagination is our way of living other lives, and since we can do so without incurring actual injury, the more violent the better. It's cathartic, it's exhilarating, it can be beautiful; but the key point is; IF YOU'RE A SANE AND MORAL PERSON, WATCHING VIOLENT MOVIES DOESN'T MAKE YOU VIOLENT. Reality, fiction; fiction, reality: two different things.
And, as a writer of action SF, I have to concede that violence is my business. I write violence, I read violent books by other authors; I spend large parts of my day wondering whether a character should die by having his head blown up, or whether it would be more fun to have him eat a live snake and be consumed from the inside out.
Adam Roberts, in his masterly and very funny novel Yellow Blue Tibia, explains how the science fiction writer approaches the art of violence, as a group of Russian SF authors (including the first person narrator) plot a story of alien invasion:
'Let's have the aliens blow up some portion of the Ukraine, ' [said Frenkel], 'That would be the best option.
How could we plan such monstrosity so very casually? This is not an easy question to answer, although in the light of what came later it is, of course, an important one....Writers, you see, daily inflict the most dreadful suffering upon the characters they create, and science fiction writers are worse than any other sort in that respect. A realist writer might break his character's leg, or kill his fiancee; but a science fiction writer will immolate whole planets, and whilst doing so he will be more concerned with the placement of commas than with the screams of the dying. He will do this every working day through his life. How can this not produce calluses on the those tenderest portions of the mind that ordinary human beings use to focus their empathy?
Adam is bang on here; science fiction writers, and their close allies, fantasy writers, are truly evil creatures. We are the people who cannot bear to write crime novels about serial killers because the body count is so darned low. We celebrate the intellectual and extrapolative essence of our genre whilst shamelessly wallowing in atrocity and horrific acts of barbarity, evisceration, beheading, and worse.
Here's a sample of some of the stuff I've been reading recently:
Four men in combat armor had dropped from an upper level using personal lift packs. The polymerized chameleon armor labored to keep up with the shifting background but only succeeded in turning each man into a brilliant kaleidoscope of reflections. One moved inside the sweep arch of my mini-gun to neutralize me while the other three went for Johnny.
He came in with a pulse-blade, ghettho style. I let it chew at my armor, knowing it would get through to forearm flesh but using it to buy the second I needed. I got it. I killed the man with the rigid end of my gauntlet and swept the mini-gun fire into the other three worrying Johnny.
(from Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons)
There were heads and arms and legs and halves of bodies writhing and squirming and cursing under foot, and headless bodies dashing about the room colliding with friend and foe indiscriminately. If ever there was a shambles it was there in the great council chamber of the seven jeds of Morbus.
(from Synthetic Men of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs)
I launched myself into the one I'd decided was Lyosha, tossing my cigarette into his face with my left hand as I pulled my gun with my right. He cursed in Russian, all consonants and fucking phlegm, waving his hands in front of his face and dancing back. As I crashed into him I brought my gun up and fired twice into his belly, falling down on top of him and rolling off to the side.
(from The Eternal Prison by Jeff Somers)
Hell, I read this stuff all the time, and what I write is often WORSE in terms of gruesome barbarity. (Red Claw got a great review from a site called Emotionally Fourteen, which then graded it 10 out of 10 for Number of Eviscerations- and I'm actually proud of this.) So does that mean I have calluses on the tenderest parts of my mind, the bits that are used to focus empathy, as Adam so beautifully if cruelly phrases it?
Well perhaps so. But on balance I feel that constantly wallowing in imaginative violence has made me not one whit more aggressive, or capable of violence. I remain as timid, fearful, and cowardly as I have always been. I would happily slay a Barsoomian plant man with my long sword; but I am not in the habit of mugging elderly ladies, or randomly shooting people in pubs.
This is why I get very wary when kind-minded commentators praise a film like The Killer Within Me because it shows the 'reality' of violence. It does nothing of the sort! It's just a movie. Real violence is what happens in the real world, and I abhor it; and I don't need films to tell me it's undesirable. (That doesn't mean fictional stories should be immoral; the art of writing violent fiction is being able to shock the audience with gory stuff without losing track of the real moral values we, the authors, believe in.)
But why, I am forced to ask, does violence in fiction appeal so strongly, to me and to so many of you? Why do we not daydream about peaceful characters, who broker peace and leave a trail of concord and amity behind them? Why do we prefer the Man with No Name, or Conan, who are more inclined to leave a trail of corpses behind them?
I guess the answer is obvious; we're never more alive than when we are in fear of dying. And to experience that intensity of life while reading a book, or watching a film, and without any ACTUAL possibility of dying, is vicarious ecstasy.
So I will continue to read books and watch films that glorify and revel in violence; I will splash in blood and gore as my protagonist hews a path through his or her enemies with a broadsword, or a plasma gun; and I'll continue to treat senseless murder as a staple element of my daily entertainment.
And let's not forget, violence can be wonderfully beautiful - WHEN IT'S NOT REAL. Tarantino shows this in his magnificent Kill Bill, a glorification of violence in all its forms and traditions. So I'll end with some images from that, one of my favourite violent movies ever.
I was looking for a movie to watch last night, and I saw this write-up of Repo Men in my paper, the Guardian:
'The nasty but futuristic business of retrieving artificial organs from broke people is given a nasty but futuristic treatment in this silly, violent sci-fi'.
Well, that didn't sound very good, and I was all set to go and watch Centurion. But the times didn't work so it was Repo Men after all; and naturally I feared the worst.
But what a joy, and a relevation, it proved to be! This is the funniest, most brilliantly satiricial science fiction movie since Robo Cop. It's a dystopian vision with its tongue in its cheek; the acting is immaculate, the dialogue zings; the twists keep twisting.
This is cinema for grown-ups who can appreciate wit allied with violence; and the Guardian reviewer is clearly utterly tone-deaf. Because this is a film which changes tone and genre constantly but subtly, in a way that allows the viewer to think about morality and social justice and STILL enjoy vicious kick-ass action.
The script is by Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner, from the novel by Eric Garcia; the director is the stylish Miguel Sapochnik, who has a background as an art director
There's absolutely nothing I can say about this film that won't spoil the experience of watching it; so I'll just conclude by saying this is the best science fiction movie I've seen since...um... Inglourious Basterds.
I've just been reading a fabulous post at Juno Books, which gives an excellent account of the urban fantasy, paranormal romance and sword & sorcery genres. And it also attempts a definition of that wonderful word 'kickassitude,' which Juno editor Paula Guran considers to be a defining ingredient of urban fantasy.
But what is kickassitude? Can only women have it? And who first coined this ridiculous but truly wonderful and adorably grammatically incorrect term?
It doesn't necessarily mean 'violent', ie kicking ass in the literal sense. But no one can deny that the little girl at the top of this blogpost has kickassitude in eponymous abundance.
But I would argue that one of the original kick ass dudes is this guy:
Philip Marlowe, the wise-cracking LA private eye created by Raymond Chandler, has attitude to spare. He's rude to cops; he makes fun of beautiful women; he's so smart, he's dumb. And I'd argue that Mike Carey's exorcist detective Felix Castor is totally in this Chandler wisecracking authority-defying tradition.
But kickassitude is also exemplified by this lady:
Yes, the classic femme fatale. Cool, deadly, scornful of authority. The femme fatale is sometimes attacked as being a misogynist creation, spawned by male writers who were afraid of female emancipation and who therefore regarded women as monsters to be feared. But hey, lighten up; femme fatales are female bad guys. They're fun roles; and these are empowered women. And they're funny too. Here are a couple more oldie but goldie kickass gals:
Barbara Stanwyck, Double Indemnity
Rosalind Russell, His Girl Friday
In modern urban fantasy, you can spot the attitude from the cover; moody, brooding, cool, either dressed in jeans
or in sexy leather.
Or dangerously armed:
And go on, really spoil yourself, here's the Urban Fantasy Book Parade featuring a gallery of empowered ladies, together with a plethora of butts, backs, tattoos and moons.
One of my favourite kick ass characters is played by Charlize Theron in the mildly under-rated Aeon Flux (directed by Karyn Kusama, who went on to the direct the Diablo Cody-scripted horror Jennifer's Body.) Our heroine Aeon looks amazing, and utterly cool, with hair that never moves, no matter how many knock down fights she gets into. And most important, when she is violent, she is gracefully violent, and does an excellent multiple back flip that looks exhausting. This is violence choroegraphed like dance floor moves; and boy, it's great.
The essence of kickassitude is what it's not; these women do not crave approval, they do not flatter and plead, and they are not defined by their relationship to men. Men beg for their attention, not vice versa. (Just as it is in my own personal life!) So I would mark out Claudia Black in Farscape as a cool kick ass lady; she's a violent psychopath who's slowly discovering a conscience.
Kara Thrace has kickassitude in abundance of course. But Elle in Heroes merely pretends to have it; she curls her lip rather well, but she does not command our fear. It need hardly be said that Buffy kicks ass - but I'll say it anyway - and one could certainly put up a case for Eve Myles in Torchwood as an exemplar of kickassitude:
These are Independent Women; capable women; scary women; and sassy women. And if you look on the urban fantasy and SFF bookshelves, you'll find them in abundance.
In modern Hollywood however - with a few exceptions - kickassitude is in short supply. There are still SO many movies where the women are token women, eyecandy and sidekicks, rather than being fully fledged heroines or co-protagonists. Even Io (Gemma Arterton) in Clash of the Titans, for all her godly wisdom, doesn't DO much; and she has no damned kickassitude.
So in my view, Hollywood hasn't cottoned on yet to what its audience wants from its female protagonists; butts, tattooes, backs, a vivid personality, and...attitude.
If you could have a superpower, which superpower would it be?
Oh please! Don't pretend you've never thought about this. It's the first daydream of every card-carrying SFF fan. The entire genre depends on wish-fulfillments fantasies...we all grow up dreaming of being a superhero of some kind or another.
(Or, if comics aren't your thing, then you may have dreamed of being a warrior, or a beautiful kick-ass princess, or a daring space captain, or a vampire, or a werewolf....tick box as appropriate...)
I always wanted to be this guy (NOT THE WEEDY SWOT, THE BIG MACHO ONE!):
In retrospect, this is embarrassing. It would have been cooler to want to be Spider-Man. He might have icky-sticky webbing - hello, sexual metaphor alert! - but at least he doesn't become hugely engorged and large and green, i.e. (using the celebrated Palmer metaphor translation device) Angry Hulk = monstrous erection the colour of a frog.
When I was older, and knew better, I wanted to be this guy:
Wolverine of course has a variety of powers; strength, feral rage, a healing factor, and an adamantium skeleton. But his main superpower is that he is cool. He is Indiana Jones with added attitude; he is the ultimate bad-ass. He even smokes cigars (cigars make me cough, and I hate the smell they leave on your clothes - but this is a daydream, right?)
I have never, however, daydreamed of having this guy's superpower:
Stretchy limbs, a stick up his arse, and grey hair blooming at his temples? What's the fun of that?
Even Johnny Storm's power was dorky; Flame on! It's somehow so juvenile. I'd much rather be the Beast - especially when he had the coloured fur.
But most of all, I wanted the full package; the super-power, and the inner torment. The Hulk is not a happy superhero; he's tortured, hated, mocked by society. Peter Parker is insecure. Wolverine has a dark back story (revealed over a billion comic stories, and rather oddly synopsised in the movie X Men Origins: Wolverine.) The key common factor - for the adolescent me, daydreaming of being a superhero - was the notion of being a loner, an outsider, 'not understood, 'special'.
The essence of being a teenager dreaming of having a superpower, in other words, is to feel just like you do when you DON'T have a superpower.
In one of my favourite ever SF novels, however, Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human, the characters have a rather different superpower. Six characters who separately are confused and unhappy creatures are able to join together to form a new kind of entity - a homo gestalt. Lone - the Idiot as he's known in the early chapters - is the first person who is able to make the gestalt 'blesh'; but it brings him little happiness. Bonnie and Beanie are two twins who can teleport but cannot speak; Baby, another member of the gestalt, is a mongoloid baby with the mind of a computer.
It's a masterly book, in my view; one of the greatest SF novels ever. But it's not the stuff of which daydreams are made. Here's the first paragraph:
The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear. His clothes were old and many-windowed. Here peeped a shinbone, sharp as a cold chisel, and there in the torn coat were ribs like the fingers of a fist. He was tall and flat. His eyes were calm and his face was dead.
Men turned away from him, women would not look, children stopped and watched him. It did not seem to matter to the idiot. He expected nothing from any of them.
Lone has a superpower - telepathy - but more than that, he is a vital piece in a new kind of human species, a gestalt entity that is larger than the sum of its (human) parts. But who would want to be this sad lonely freak! It's a dystopian vision; the superpower as curse, not blessing.
The recent Brit TV show Misfits also, darkly but hilariously, created a gang of superheroes who are cursed not blessed. Simon has the power of invisibility; but since he's such an annoying dork he was pretty much invisible anyway. Sexy, charismatic Alisha is cursed with the power to make men desire her when she touches them; which means she's constantly subject to attempted rapes, and can only make love to her boyfriend though mutual, non-touching, masturbation. And Kelly, the chav (for US readers - chavs are way lower down the social scale than trailer trash), is telepathic; which means she spends all her time hearing people think, 'God what a slag SHE is.'
Wolverine is cursed too of course - but I would LIKE to be cursed the way he is. I'd love to be haunted, lonely, an outcast from society, but still able to kick-ass and lord it over my enemies.
The Sturgeon vision, however - and the Misfits vision too - makes us experience what it would be like to have special powers that don't make you feel special. You' d be better off being ordinary, than having THESE crap powers.
It's the difference, of course, between wish-fulfillment genre stories and darker, more satirical explorations of the same subject matter. But it makes me aware of how very hard it would be to be 'more than human'. Because it's our human frailties - our insecurity, our vanity, our ego, our petty jealousy of others - that makes us want to be superpowered in the first place. If we really did evolve, to become better, wiser, more profound people - then Marvel Comics would go out of business, and superheroes would go out of vogue.
This for me is one of the problems with Series 3 of Heroes, which I am watching at the moment (long after everyone else of course - Always The Last One To Catch On to a Cultural Phenomenon truly is my superpower.) Because - without giving away actual plot details - I would say that one of the story conceits in this series is the idea that ANYONE can have a superpower. And in surprise twist after surprise twist, characters change powers, lose powers, and acquire powers when it was their role to be the character WITHOUT a power. All of this undermines the series' original genius, its ability to create superheroes with original character traits. In the early eps, for instance, Peter Petrelli, for instance, was gifted with the power of being able to see in 3 D despite having an annoying lock of hair dangling in front of one eye; and his brother Nathan was gifted with the power of looking like he had his elegantly cut suits sprayed on every morning.
But once characters lose their traits, and change their powers - it's hard to root any more. Because 'rooting' is at the very heart of this 'which superpower would you like to have?' game. You define yourself by the character with whom you most empathise. It works for Marvel Comics characters; it works equally well with Buffy characters. Are you Buffy, Willow, Cordelia, Angel, or Xander? (I'm Giles - the annoying swotty one who never hits anyone. I'd like to be Xander, but in my heart I know I'm not good looking enough!) But of course, in my dreams, I'm Buffy. (This is fantasy, changing sex is allowed...)
So let me answer my own opening question.
If I could be a Misfits character I'd be - well I wouldn't be any of them actually. AARGH. Nightmare. I guess Curtis is the coolest, but his ability to turn back time would make life SO complicated. It's hard enough to keep track of just the ONE life...
If I could have the powers of any character in the series Heroes, it would have to be Hiro.
Not because he looks like me (I'm much closer to Peter Petrelli Parkman) but because stopping time is so cool. Life rushes past so fast - wouldn't it be great just to freeze it, and take a proper look! (Time-travelling is less appealing to me, since, as with Curtis's powers, it results in stories so complex they make my head hurt.) But Clare Bennet's powers are also great - because they're so limited! She has a healing gift, she can't die, but has no superstrength and so has to use a gun or a taser against bad guys. And the sheer FRUSTRATION of that puts me in that character's head, and makes me feel her inner torment. (The characters who can replicate other people's powers, however, are TOO powerful. There's nothing 'feel-special' about that power; they're all armour, no chink.)
And if I had to be a character in More than Human, I would be Lone. Even though he's a character who has no character; but I feel for his loneliness. I empathise with that. It's not wish-fulfillment - it's connection. I connect with Lone, the superhero who never defeats a supervillain, and lives and dies in sadness. (Damn, that sounds awful - honestly I don't spend ALL my time in front of a computer - I really do have a BIT of a life...)
But all in all, I would rather be the Hulk. Because the Hulk's power is an inability to control rage within acceptable boundaries; and that's exactly what I would love to do when I'm stuck on a country lane and the other car won't back up an inch or so to the nearest passing place, and I have to reverse back half a mile. Or when I get stuck on hold calling the telephone company, and they play that annoying music. Or when...
You get the idea. There are moments when Hulk Rage would be nice.
Palmer....Kill!
Well, maybe not; maybe gentle snarky irony will always be my one and only superpower.
Inspired by Archie Tait's sublime choice of SFF Song of the Week - with its anime theme - I've decided to make it Anime Week on Debatable Spaces. Yes, I'm like that, wild and impetuous.
So today, and every now and then when we feel like it, are some fabulous images of anime heroes with intros from arch guest blogger on this site Stuart Angell McGregor - who, when he's allowed out into the real world, also write screenplays, makes films, and reviews comics and graphic novels. (Adding all those things up - he's clearly NEVER allowed out of the house.)
Stuart Angell McGregor writes:
ANIME HEROES (Part 1)
SHOTARO KANEDA (AKIRA, 1988)
I had a green jumper when I was a kid.
Not just any green jumper mind. Oh no, the front of this one was emblazoned with the loveable and furry face of my childhood hero, Dogtanian, the brave star of the Spanish/Japanese animated mish-mash ‘Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds’.
I ate in that jumper.
Slept in it.
Cuddled it lovingly as I ran around the playground, all carefree and childishly stupid, fingers grabbing at the frayed cuffs.
I was happy.
And then I saw ‘Akira’.
You see, in 1981, the American actor Cam Clarke voiced the spunky little anthropomorphised rascal I loved so much, and it wasn’t until 1994 – as I pushed my VHS copy of ‘Akira’, bought proudly with many weeks worth of pocket money, into my Aunt’s fat player – that I would come to discover how far Clarke had moved up in the world.
Toward the end of the 80s he found fame as Leonardo – the most ‘vanilla’ of the ninja turtles, despite those awesome swords – but here I was now, watching open-mouthed and wide-eyed as Clarke romped through the neon-soaked mess of Neo Tokyo, popping pills and kicking faces, as the voice of Shotaro Kaneda, leader of the teen biker gang ‘The Capsules’.
Kaneda, and Clarke, expertly exude two of the best kinds of rebellion – 1) a total lack of respect for any kind of authority (watch as Kaneda bad mouths school teachers, police officers, and baldy, serious-looking army generals alike), and 2) the ability to drive big shiny bikes very very quickly towards other gobby teens.
Kaneda can be a wonderfully vacuous character at times. He looks cool, driven by aesthetics, wearing a great jacket and riding the best bike in the world (EVER!), but also displays amazing moments of charming stupidity.
However, as the landmark ‘Akira’ marches on, shifting focus from these ongoing violent biker conflicts, to the post – WW3 Japan’s abuse and betrayal of its army of young psychics, the sheer joy of Kaneda’s delinquency becomes tempered somewhat. His youthful alienation gives way to a sense of both place and purpose as he falls in with proud underground rebels, and the fate of the world comes to literally rest in his hands.
But then, that’s the problem with all teen rebels.
Ultimately, some day, they have to grow up.
Some day, they have to become us.
Most writers live very boring lives.
*sighs jealously*
In my very first posting on this site, I claimed to have had a colourful life as a spy, explorer, murderer, and film producer. Students of Palmer irony will recognise this was largely a pack of lies; I've never done any of these exciting things!
Except, um, being a film producer. Because, unlikely as it sounds, I actually am one.
This is, let's face, a cool kind of a job, and I've written about it before on this site. I've blogged about going to Cannes; and I wrote about my trip to the American Film Market, in LA, and conceded that being a film producer is indeed a curious hobby for a science fiction novelist.
The truth is - producing a feature film is HARD. And no matter how much effort you put in, there's no guarantee of success. That's why being a movie producer is not a job for a sane person.
Hence - I qualify!
At the moment though, rather to my surprise in fact, I find the process of getting a movie made is happening all around me. Co-producers. A director. A casting director. Cinematographers reading the script. Funding sources identified. Casting discussions. It's exciting as all hell and, let's face it, it's glamorous too. It's much cooler than my real life as a nerdy (nay, one of the MOST nerdy!) SF novelist.
Here's a glimpse of the location for my movie, which is called Inferno:
This is an image of the steel works at Port Talbot - the visual inspiration for Ridley Scott's opening sequence of Blade Runner (he was driving past on the M4 and saw THIS.) And this is the mythic landscape for my film about murder, sex, love and gritty working class life in a Welsh seaport.
This is the kind of movie I've always wanted to make - it's inspired by Double Indemnity and Body Heat and Chinatown and that whole noir tradition; and a passion for genre movies like those is why I became a screenwriter. But the film business is a extraordinary industry: mad, criminal, incompetent, unfair, glorious, inspiring, and I LOVE IT. And because it's such a mad business, the only way to achieve your vision as a movie writer is to GET OUT THERE AND MAKE THINGS HAPPEN.
As a novelist - especially if you work for the wonderful Orbit Books (*creep* *creep* but I do mean it) (and hey guys - how about a hike on that last advance?) it's much easier. The guys who run SFF publishing care; they are passionate; they take risks; they support creativity.
In movies, however, it's all about being a distributor, stealing all the money off creatives, and spending it on lap dancers, champagne and coke. NO GUYS! GIVE US THE MONEY, SO WE CAN MAKE REAL MOVIES! (And, er, if there's any left over, I wouldn't mind a glass of champagne?)
I used the 'V' word - Vision - just now, and that sounds a wee bit pretentious I know. But you really have to HAVE to have one, or indeed several, if you're going to be a creative artist. Obviously you have to listen, collaborate, accept that other people have valid points, take notes, etc etc etc. But once you've done that: you must STICK TO YOUR VISION.
My vision of Inferno is a lot to do with landscape, and a lot to do with myth. I mentioned the Ridley Scott story above - this is one of my pitches for the movie when talking to potential financiers. And when I first read that story, in Empire magazine, I realised - this is my back yard - my home town - and Ridley himself believes it's a mythic landscape. So why don't I do something with that?
Another part of my vision for the film is a rebellion against the dominant social realist verite-filmmaking tradition of the British film industry - the kind of lowkey, truthful movies that Ken Loach makes, and Andrea Arnold makes. I love many of these movies; but I don't want to make them. I'd prefer to create films that are visually rich, intense, utterly enjoyable, and which offer a rollercoaster experience with soul and passion. Movies like The Last Seduction, Body Heat, Grosse Pointe Blank, Sherlock Holmes (the recent one) and Kill Bill excite me far more than Brit flicks like, for instance, An Education. (Which is a lovely little film - but not for me THRILLING.)
My love/hate relationship with the British film industry goes back a bunch of years. One of my first jobs was a script reader for major companies like Columbia UK and Granada Films, when I met wonderful producers like David Puttnam and Lynda Myles and Margaret Matheson and Scott Meek. I script edited a movie called The Bull Dance by the legendary Robin Hardy (who made The Wicker Man); though sadly the company who made it became kaput. And Granada Films, one of my major employers at that time, also went out of business. Goldcrest - slightly before my time - was the great UK film company, and they too went bust (though, technically, they didn't declare actual bankruptcy.)
You get the idea; it's a volatile and unpredictable industry; just about as safe as building houses on volcanic rock, in the shadow of an active volcano. And so, as I say, you have to go out make your own chances. And that's what I'm doing now.
And all this helps to explain why I'm a gamekeeper turned poacher; a writer turned producer. I have 3 movie projects in all; and one of them - Inferno, my Welsh film noir - is now at that key stage where small platoons of people are behaving as if it will definitely happen.
Because that's the only way movies get made; a critical mass of belief and passion has to be there, key personnel have to be attached, vital creative decisions have to be made; and then the money magically falls into place. (Okay, it may be a BIT harder than that - but fortunately I have two seasoned co-producers on board with 20+ film credits between them, and they do actually understand the details of film finance, and have the contacts to access it.)
And what I'll be doing on this site, in irregular blogs like this one, is writing about the process of producing a movie. How it works; why it often goes wrong; and why no stars EVER sleep with the screenwriter. The ups, the downs, the more downs, the sudden unexpected ups again.
This is a story which doesn't necessarily have a happy ending - we may fail to raise the finance, the movie may never get made. Well, guess what; that doesn't scare me. I can handle eventual defeat; NOT TRYING is the one thing that's utterly alien to my nature.
Or, alternatively, the movie WILL get made; in which case the readers of this blog will have been on the inside track of the genesis of a moderately major new British feature film WHICH YOU WILL LOVE. (Trust me on this!)
The next step is preparing a budget (in hand), and finding a cinematographer. So watch this space....
Actually I prefer Trinity...brrr! But let's not go there.
Neo is the coolest of the cool. He is Christ (aka the One), he is kick-ass, he wears shades, he has superpowers, and he is here to rescue us from the horrible terrible place that is The Matrix.
I love The Matrix; Matrix 2 (Reloaded) not so much, Matrix 3 (Revolutions), let's not go there. But the first Matrix film came as an absolute shock; who could have thought cinema could be so kinetic, so visually wonderful, so like a comic book?
There's a lot of great writing in the script by the Andy and Larry (or Lana, if you believe the rumours) Wachowki. Not great dialogue (why don't they get Joss Whedon to write dialogue for ALL science fiction movies?) but really clever ideas. The movie borrows ideas from Buddhism, Joseph W. Campebell's book on myth, Alice in Wonderland, and gnosticism. And it weaves that into a narrative that makes computer geeks look cool.
There's one flaw in the story - the good guys are all trying to destroy the Matrix. But I LOVE the Matrix. Who wants to live with the boring rebels in their boring hideaway, when you could be on the inside of a whizz-bang computer game where people can have superpowers?
The screenplay can be read here; and now here's some pretty pics of brooding Keanu in what may be his best ever role, following by the wondrous trailer.
Stuart McGregor kindly sent me the link for these wonderful images - artworks inspired by Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.
Let me get one thing straight, before I commence my rant for today: Avatar is one of the best things to happen to the science fictional world in years. It's raised the credibility of the genre in the movie theatres - after all those Harry Potters and Hobbits in Pursuit of Rings movies and other fantasy epics of recent years. It's got the world excited about aliens and space exploration. And it's at the vanguard of a whole new generation of incredibly exciting and visually extraordinary blockbusters. To cap it all, James Cameron is a director I admire enormously.
But he is, as I say, a traitor to his own species.
And he's also made a film that in my view - despite breaking all box office records, and although it's pretty damned good - isn't THAT good, or that special. It's fun, it's certainly beautiful, the ending is exciting. But I don't really 'get' what's so revolutionary about the 3D effects. Compared to Up, it's no big deal; that movie set the bar for CGI 3D movie spectacle and Avatar comes nowhere near it.
Nor do I think the film is as visually extraordinary as everyone claims. The scenery and action scenes are marvellous, but it all lacks imagination. How come the aliens are blue, but the trees are made of bark and the leaves are GREEN? It could all be, well, much more alien.
There's nothing in this film to compare with Predator, perhaps the most visually spectacular SF film ever made. Director John McTiernan and cinematographer Donald McAlpine created a movie that is both a nail-biting kick-ass actioner, and a piece of modern art - by which I mean that every time we switch to Predator-POV the screen becomes filled with colours as vivid as a Kandinsky.
But Predator plays a cleverer game. It isn't just about the scenery, it's built around mythic concepts - chiefly, Arnie as the mud-coated (think woad-coated Celt) warrior going mano a mano with an alien. The explosion scenes in that movie, too, are astonishing - visions of a Dantesque Hell on Earth.
Avatar, by contrast, has blue gazelle-like creatures running through what looks like the Amazon rainforest. Sweet - but not astonishing.
But that's just my opinion - which in view of the box office triumph of the film, shouldn't be taken too seriously (and, indeed, won't be). There's no doubt that SOMETHING extraordinary is happening with this film to make it such a phenomenon. And the media coverage in the press has been awesome.
Online, too, Avatar has been covered extensively, and I've been taking a peek at some of the comments to be found out in cyberspace. There have been rave reviews, like this one in the Hollywood Reporter. Fantasy SF Blog revealed that Cameron's volcanic temper eclipses that of our our British Prime Minister Gordon Brown (once you've clicked the link, scroll down to 'James Cameron, Benevolent Tyrant'.) John Scalzi got pretty much what he was expecting, and (unlike me!) felt no moral outrage at the 'noble savage' strand. Ann Wilkes' Cherokee blood boiled at the way the natives were treated, and she loved the story. Revolution SF drew attention to the alarming phenomenon of Avatar fans who feel like committing suicide because they can't live on the planet of the Na'vi. SF Gospel made some very smart points about the movie's provable theology, and asks - would it be okay to kill the Na'vi if they DIDN'T have a provable God?
And the definitive review came from Richard Morgan. (He said it was 'Very pretty.')
But my final take on Cameron's masterwork is, as I say: TRAITOR!
I'm referring of course to the second part of the film when (SPOILER ALERT! BUT I THINK THIS HAS ALL BEEN GIVEN AWAY IN TRAILERS) our hero dons the body of a blue-skinned alien and goes to war against the humans.
Think about it. Our main character is human! We are human. And yet we're being asked to root against our own species, in favour of the aliens?
It's not as if this is a minor spat between alien and human. It's a brutal war. Dozens and dozens of human beings die horribly, and we are invited to cheer. Almost as many aliens die in the carnage, and we are clearly meant to be sad as each of them perishes.
This defies all the rules of rooting. You root for you own team, not the opposition. As a Welshman, even of the non-sporting variety, I am obliged to root for Wales every time there's Wales v. England rugby match. If I cheered on the English, I would be surgically de-Taffed.
The disloyalty to humankind comes, of course, cloaked in liberal good intentions. The Na'vi are, you see, noble savages; they are metaphorical of the Native Americans and the Australian aboriginals and all the other Stone Age tribes who have been wretchedly treated by invaders from Europe. And the movie manages to function simultaneously as a) a shoot-'em-up kickass action movie and b) as an ecological hymn to the glories of the nature, and the crapness of being an evil corporation that wants to destroy the rainforest and doesn't care how many natives die in the process.
Well, I'm all in favour of hating those who pillage the natural world; and I certainly don't condone the way the Native Americans or the aboriginals were treated. So at one level, I'm certainly on Cameron's side.
But on other hand - per-lease! Couldn't the morality be a little more subtle? The guy from the corporation virtually slavers with evil, his treatment of the Na'vi is both incompetent and buffoonish, and there's a complete absence of moral ambiguity. Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington) and Dr Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver) and a couple of others are good; all the Na'vi are good; but all the soldiers and the horrible white capitalists who run the mining corporation are all utterly and irredeemably evil.
This kind of black & white morality is forgiveable, of course, in an action movie where you don't look for rich characterisation and moral subtlety. But in a movie that proclaims itself to be a moral force for good - well, maybe the script could have had just a LITTLE more work done on it.
But that's not my gripe. My gripe is - what's so bad about humans? I mean - I'm human, my friends are human: all the people I like and admire, alive and dead, are human. Humans are - well, what can I say? We're not SO very bad.
But in science fiction, we get a bad press, as the ignoble history of colonialism gets writ into stories set among the stars. And Avatar is for me part of this syndrome - of neglecting the virtues and glories of humankind.
And the chief virtue and glory of humankind is - we're not all jocks. We're not all heavily bicepped, macho monsters who are so obsessed with gadgets and weapons of war that we lose sight of the finer things in life - like Nature, and art, and being nice to each other. In fact, none of the people I know are like that. All MY friends are weedy, cowardly, bookish, kind, and, well, nice.
But in Cameron's parallel universe, all humans are either soldiers or cruel capitalists (admittedly Signourney Weaver is a scientist and there are a couple of other scientists helping Jake Sully fight his good war - but these characters don't really have much character.)
Contrast this with the weedy science graduate geek played by Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day, cursed with a wisecracking dad, and always banging on about scientific things. A broad caricature yes - but there's hope for humanity if there are a few of THESE entertainingly anal-retentive guys about.
Avatar would, in my view, been a richer and better film if there'd been more diversity among the characters, and less idealisation of the Na'vi. They are supposed to be like the Native Americans - but they aren't, not really. The Native Americans were a Stone Age tribe with a flair for war, especially of the sneaky variety; as I recall from my past reading, ambush was considered by many tribes to be a worthy way of attacking an opponent. And, once confronted by an invasion of white-skins, the Native Americans proved themselves to be adaptable and savage; they learned to ride horses, they learned to shoot guns, they even copied the invaders' trick of scalping their enemy.
All of which makes the Native Americans REAL, and flawed, and complex, as opposed to the holier-than-thou Na'vi, who can't kill another creature without an act of gaian communion.
Cameron over-eggs it all in other words; the Na'vi are so perfect that I hate them. They don't even LOOK like real aliens; they have the wide-eyed blank-faced look of characters in a manga comic. For all the much vaunted brilliance of the CGI, I never forgot for a moment that I was watching blue simulations. Indeed, in some ways I felt these aliens felt less 'real' than the animatronic aliens in Farscape.
Of course, I freely concede that in my own novels I don't shirk from making the humans the bad guys - it makes for a better story that way. But I think we shouldn't forget to celebrate the best of humanity - the geekiness, the wit, the camaraderie, the cleverness, and the heart-bursting loyal love of which humans are capable.
Admittedly, Jake DOES fall in love, with the girl alien Neytiri, who IS quite pretty in an eerie 'she looks like a blue Bambi, is he really going to do it with a deer?' kind of a way. But he's a pretty dull character in other respects; we root for him because he's the hero, not because he's all that interesting.
A sequel to Avatar is being planned, I gather; I'd love to think that it involves a spaceship full of Jewish comedians who are airlifted down to teach the Na'vi the skills they clearly lack; self deprecation, grumbling, and the cruel taunting of the afflictions of others. Not to mention, cake!
For my part, living on the planet of the Na'vi would be like living in the English countryside: beautiful, spiritually uplifting, and BORING. I'd rather live in New York and eat bagels and pastrami with the aforesaid Jewish comedians, and indulge in daily rituals of sarcasm and ironic hyperbole.
That's what it is to be human.
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Why I Love Misfits by Danny Stack
** MINOR SPOILERS **
Five teenagers get struck by lightning and develop strange super powers, blah, blah, blah. On paper, Misfits, E4’s new supernatural series, shouldn’t work. We’ve seen this idea before. Or at least, it certainly feels like it. Anybody within a five feet radius of the spec script pile will tell you it’s groaning from the weight of similar sci-fi ideas. All of a sudden, thanks to Heroes (the American smash hit series) superheroes were thrust into vogue. The geeks hadn’t just inherited the Earth, they’d taken over the TV.
In the UK, the success of Dr Who, Torchwood and Merlin (BBC) and Primeval on ITV meant that hey, the audience must really want to see these kind of shows, right? ITV tried again with Demons, which didn’t exactly work out, but at least ITV2’s sitcom No Heroics was a playful send-up of the genre. Still, enough superheroes. Time to move on, yes? And so, when it came to E4’s Misfits, the heart didn’t exactly jump with excitement. ‘Heroes meets Skins’, apparently. Hmm, an easy pitch, sure, but it would be so easy for Misfits to misfire. Luckily, within minutes of the first episode, you just knew that the show was going to get everything right. An instant classic was born.
First, why it works. The show is created and written by Howard Overman (a TV regular: Merlin, Spooks, Hustle, amongst others). You can’t over-emphasise the importance of the writing for a show like this to succeed. Right from the very start of Misfits, you can tell it’s got a style and assurance all of its own. You think: ‘yeah, Heroes meets Skins… but better’.
The characters are a bunch of teenage ASBOs, enslaved to community service. There’s gobby Nathan, chav Kelly, sexy Alisha, athletic Curtis and meek Simon.
Episode 1 pep talk
When they get hit by lightning, they discover they’ve got supernatural traits but their powers are far from cool or useful. Sexy Alisha gets a disturbing power where anyone who touches her skin is consumed with violent lust for her. Or as meek Simon puts it when Alisha touches his neck: “I want to rip off your clothes and piss on your tits”. This dialogue edge continues in its unashamed and bold fashion, making you do a double take of ‘did they just say that?!’ on a regular basis. The gobby Nathan won’t stop talking but thankfully what he has to say is always cheeky and witty. “I’m pretty sure this breaches the terms of my ASBO” he says when burying their community officer. Fun, fun, fun.
Oh, did I say they had to kill their community officer? Self-defence, obviously, because he had turned into some kind of crazed zombie who was going to kill them all. You begin to realize that the ‘Heroes meets Skins’ pitch is totally off. This has no American overtones whatsoever. This is ‘Dead Set meets Skins in a bastard world of Heroes’.
Meek Simon
Kelly holding Nathan's, um, wank sock.
Why it works, the second. The direction. It seems if you want a show to have a distinctive look and feel, then you got to hire directors called Tom. In this instance, Tom Harper and Tom Green. They give Misfits a delicious cinematic vibe with their careful composition and grading. ‘Let’s give it a cinematic look’ is a phrase often heard in the early rounds of TV development, only for the execs to change their minds in the edit suite as they panic whether the audience will hear the dialogue when the action stays in a wide shot. Thankfully, we get no such interference here as Misfits establishes a visual style that just reeks of class and cool. These are two hip directors to watch out for. Tom Harper has the film Scouting Book for Boys in the bag and we haven’t seen the last of Tom Green, that’s for sure.
Why it works, the third. The actors. Robert Sheehan (Nathan), Lauren Socha (Kelly), Antonia Thomas (Alisha), Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (Curtis), Iwan Rheon (Simon). They may be misfits, but they’re perfect. Then you have the brilliant Alex Reid out to find the truth about her missing boyfriend (the dead community officer) and guest star Amy Beth-Hayes who nearly steals the show in episode two. The main cast is where it’s at though. They’re characters we care about, and want to spend time with. Most importantly, we want to know what happens next.
Curtis and Alisha
Why it works, numero four. The setting. A community centre on the banks of a murky river. Possibly London, who knows, it could be anywhere, but what’s particularly genius about the choice of setting is that it keeps the action contained. This means that the production budget doesn’t spiral out of control, especially as it has to cough up some wonga for special effects. It’s also testament to the two Toms (directors) that they keep everything visually interesting. You never get bored of looking at what would be a very drab location in real life.
The drama and fun of the action zips by at a thoroughly enjoyable pace, and there’s effective character development for all concerned. The only Misfit misgiving is that the main arc of the series ends a bit sooner than you might expect, leaving the final episode to introduce something new and not altogether satisfying. Still, the final pay-off reveals Nathan’s super power and leaves things nicely open-ended to ensure that series two can pick up where they left off.
‘Nuff said. Stop reading. Get thee to your nearest DVD outlet and purchase Misfits immediately. Enjoy.
Ripley was the trail-blazer; but Kara Thrace (call sign 'Starbuck') is, for many of us, the quintessential female SF action hero. She's a hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, maverick daughter-of-a-bitch who hates authority and always breaks the rules - but is, just, the best. The bravest, the boldest, the best at piloting, the most-tattooed - what's not to love?
By the last season of Battlestar Galactica, the show which made Kara famous, the plot twists were so complex and so numerous that any actor who dared to ask 'Er, what's my motivation in this scene?' would receive a 400 page email in response. Kara's character suffered more than any other from this plot-monster syndrome - her character arc was abandoned in favour of a narrative twist so immense it actually squelched all the drama. But before then..Kara's on-off relationship with Lee Adama, her daughter-father relationship with Admiral Adama, and her open contempt for Colonel Tigh (who she punches in, I think, the pilot episode), all these are compelling and bewildering - in the way that real people ARE bewildering. Kara is brave - but she's also a mixed up kid.
So frak all detractors; Kara Thrace (played by actor Katee Sackhoff) is my SFF Hero of today.
I woke up mulling about the John Scalzi column I read yesterday about why Quentin Tarantino's movie Inglourious Basterds is NOT a science fiction movie as some (e.g. me) claim it is.
As always, Scalzi is judicious in his diatribe, so though he does a comprehensive job of demolishing the 'Basterds is SF' argument, he also acknowledges that if fans want to claim it as SF, they should feel free to do so. As he puts it, 'Hey, if you mess with the timeline, the geeks are going to come out of the woodwork and start chanting, "One of us! One of us!" I wouldn't suggest that scifi fans shouldn't feel as if Basterds fits into their genre. Take it! Love it! And, if it wins the Best Picture feel free to claim it as yours.'
I've written a rebuttal to Scalzi's comments in my Comment to his blog; but I'm still left feeling there are big issues here to be thrashed out. It takes us into the murky waters of genre theory. And it involves asking some major questions: What is genre? What is SF? What is the difference between SF and fantasy? Millions of words have been expended on answers to these questions and yet, no one seems to agree.
And at some level, that fact kind of annoys me. Healthy disagreement is, well, healthy; but this level of disagreement reeks of mental chaos. And as someone who loves science, and the rigour and logic of scientific methodology, it irks me; because if scientists were this 'open-minded' about every topic under the sun, there would be no science. (To put it another way: if arts graduates had invented the space rocket, it would look exceedingly pretty, but it wouldn't fly.)
So let me go through Scalzi's points one by one; and then I'm going to put my head on the chopping block and offer my own attempted answers to all those big questions.
Scalzi argues that Basterds isn't SF because:
'1) It wasn't marketed as SF.'
'2) The science fictional aspects of the story are not necessarily essential to it.'
'3) It's kinda more like fantasy than SF anyway.'
'4) If Inglourious Basterds is science fiction, so are most historical movies.'
For those new to this debate, who haven't seen the movie, the point to bear in mind is: Tarantino's film is set in World War II, and tells a fictional but plausible story about a team of US guerrillas (the 'Basterds') operating in Hitler's Germany; but certain events that take place in the movie most emphatically DID NOT happen in real life. In other words, it's an alternate history drama; and alt-history is a recognised sub-genre of science fiction.
Okay.
Scalzi's point 1) is a good one. It's generally acknowledged that 'genre' is something that is in part created by marketing. The crime genre wouldn't be as vividly defined as it is if the publishers didn't market their tales of criminal activity under the banner of Crime Fiction. There are Crime bookshelves in bookshops; specialist Crime awards, etc etc. And it's a fact that a Margaret Attwood novel with 'science fictional' elements will be treated as a literary novel; but a Philip Palmer or a John Scalzi with SF elements will be sold, marketed, and branded as 'SF'.
But that's not good enough. Genre is more than a marketing tool; it's a vivid, real thing, a slippery but true concept that adds value to the fiction we read, and the movies we see. Genre is like language; you can't 'explain' it, but you can learn to understand it.
To back up that opinion, I will call upon my second favourite Professor (after the ineffable Professor Nicole Peeler - hi Nicole!) namely Professor Rick Altman, of the University of Iowa, whose book Film/Genre is a definitive and brilliant analysis of what genre is, and how it works, and how it changes depending on the way it is perceived.
In Altman's film theory jargon, 'Genres are most commonly taken to come into being when a body of texts shares a sufficient number of semantic and syntactic elements. This production-driven definition needs to be matched with a reception-driven definition recognizing that genres do not exist until they become necessary to a lateral communication process, that is until they serve a constellated community.'
Ouch. That was ugly! Sorry to inflict the jargon on you - but bear in mind, this is a specialist academic book and these guys feel the need to talk that way. Elsewhere in the book, however, Altman is more readable; and the reason I think THIS GUY KNOWS WHAT HE IS TALKING ABOUT is because he actually does research. He uses a literary version of the scientific method; he studies a great deal of data, he finds the patterns that are hidden there, and thus draws his conclusions from evidence, not out of his own arse.
And much of the data Altman assesses is to do with actual movies produced by actual movie studios. He's sifted through the files of most of the major studios to find out how THEY define genres. And the conclusions are startling. The genre of 'musical' for instance, didn't actually exist in the early days of movies. Instead, it was used as an adjective, modifying nouns like comedy, romance, or melodrama. Here's an abbreviated version of a list of movies of the 20s and 30s and the genre descriptions that were attached to them in their publicity material:
Weary River - epic
The Broadway Melody - all talking, all singing, all dancing dramatic sensation.
The Vagabond Lover - romantic musical comedy
Devil May Care - romance punctured with subtle comedy.
The Tender Foot - a Merry Western Comedy full of Laughs and Ginger.
The Love Parade - light opera.
The Rogue's Song - operetta.
Roadhouse Nights - melodrama and button-busting comedy
College Love - 100% talking, singing, college picture.
There are two points here; The first is that we wouldn't now necessarily define the genres of those films according to the way they were marketed THEN. So Scalzi's Point 1) falls off a cliff.
Point 2) is that genre is clearly evolutionary. The very words we use to describe genre can change over time; and as far as movies are concerned, new genres are born all the time. Altman is particularly brilliant about analysing this; he points out that Hollywood studios love to copy their own hits, and the hits of others. So one successful movie about gladiators (a 'history drama') will spawn a dozen more movies about gladiators (creating the 'gladiator movie genre'.) In the same way, the film Rififi is a brilliant movie about a gang of low lives staging a heist; and it's now a template for the entire 'heist movie genre'.
In the UK film industry, this 'genre born out of coypcatting' tendency is most clearly examplifed by the movie The Full Monty. It was a hugely successful movie; so for years UK producers have tried to produce other movies that are 'like' The Full Monty - ie ensemble comedies with quirky loveable British characters and rude moments based on an unlikely but true story. Now I know that doesn't sound like a genre - but it is! My friend Geoff Deane wrote one of the most successful of the Full Monty copycat movies - Kinky Boots, an ensemble comedy with quirky loveable British characters and rude moments based on an unlikely but true story. (The inspiration for the movie was a documentary about a guy up North who owned a shoe factory and started making fetish footwear.) I'm not decrying the movie by saying it's a copycat picture, nor I am in any way undervaluing the fabulous job Geoff did on the script. But that was always the deal - Geoff was told from the start that the producers wanted a 'Full Monty type hit' and they got one.
Thus are genres born...
That's a long rebuttal to Scalzi's point 1). But my underlying intent here is to suggest that you can't define genre by what it says on the poster. Any serious film scholar has to have a beady eye for what the genre really is, according to the actual material in the movie.
Point 2) is, I'm sorry, a dubious argument. The ending of the film is great, and it depends TOTALLY on this alt-history twist. Take that away, and the story collapses, and becomes a less good movie. So yes, it IS essential to the movie. A similar argument applies to Ken MacLeod's splendid The Execution Channel, much of which takes place in a world that is very like our contemporary world, but which has a dazzling SF twist in the closing chapters. If Ken had written a different ending, his publishers might have queried whether this was 'really' SF; but he didn't! He knew all along the coup de roman he was going to pull off, and he pulled it off.
Point 3) is a tricky one. Does alt-history have to have a scientific explanation to be SF? Does The Man in the High Castle have such an explanation? Does The Yiddish Policeman's Union have such an explanation? Okay in Star Trek stories there were often tales that take place in alternate histories that depend on the Enterprise passing through a black hole, or some such. But alternate history stories to my mind work best if they're just presented 'as if'.
So does that make them fantasy, or SF? Strictly speaking, the answer should probably be neither: Alternate History could and maybe should be treated as a separate genre. But because it's a subgenre that evolved out of SF, it kind of fits there. And of course 'science fiction' is a term that by no means covers the full range of possibilities of the genre it describes. It drives me mad when people say: '1984 can't be an SF novel because it has no science' (though in fact it does.) For SF is about more than just science! It's about speculation, and extrapolation - hence the attempt by some writers to rename the entire genre as 'speculative fiction'.
But this gets to be angels dancing on pins stuff. Alternate History IS Science Fiction, in my view, because that's the genre that spawned it. It can also be fantasy (as in Naomi Novik's fantasy series about the dragon Temeraire that fights in seabattles in Napoleonic times.)
Scalzi's Point 4) is that lots of historical movies get the history wrong; so can't they be classed as SF too? The answer; no they can't. That's just, sorry, dumb-ass sophistry. All drama relies on fictionalising, even the historical stuff! And when in doubt, print the legend; that's the golden principle of storytelling. John - it's just not the same thing!
This leaves one final question; does this actually matter? I mean, really? I don't think it matters hugely to Scalzi, to be honest. He's just having fun, sounding off, teasing geeks like me. Scalzi is a guy I admire hugely; he's a fine writer, and a master polemicist, who does one of these columns every week and is a master of arguing the contrary point just to get everyone talking. So why, let's be blunt about this, am I getting so genuinely hot under the collar?
The answer is: for me it DOES matter. It matters because Inglourious Basterds is a fine film, and a valuable film. Yet though it's had commercial success and Oscar nominations, it was pissed upon by all the critics I read, who mocked its excessive violence (which is in fact essential to its genre!) and Tarantino's woeful ignorance of history.
But Tarantino knows his history! And he's deliberately falsifying it, as part of his artistic strategy of 'genre-mashing', and playing games with the audience. So though I'd argue it's technically correct to class this as an 'SF movie', it's equally correct to call it a war movie, and an action movie, and a B-movie hommage. It's all those things, all at the same time. That's the game Tarantino plays; he makes movies for a sophisticated audience who know genre, and love genre, and enjoy the rollercoaster ride experience of totally changing genre a reel before the end.
Genre is a label but it's not a straitjacket; it's a creative tool, that offers a direct route to the audience's imagination via their own insights and knowledge and expectations of 'this kind' of film. Ultimately, many of Tarantino's films (excluding Jackie Brown which plays a different game) constitute a genre of their own - the postmodern, genre-hopping, genre-mashing 'Tarantino movie' genre.
And smarter critics, steeped in the traditions and tropes of speculative fiction/science fiction/fantasy fiction, would have spotted all that, and not written such dumb reviews.
Inglourious Basterds is in my view, a fine and startling piece of work. Like Hitchock's Psycho - which also changes genres in mid-movie - it shocks by doing the truly unexpected just when you least expect anything so unexpected to occur....
Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised to find Miss Buffy Summers on my list of SFF Heroes. The heroine of Joss Whedon's seven series epic TV show has everything you'd expect in a hero - a smart mouth, a maverick attitude, a proficiency for kicking ass, and a total disrespect for authority. But she's also a generous friend, emotionally vulnerable, and keeps falling love with unsuitable guys (check the teeth first, girl!) She's also cute and dinky which, admittedly, can't be said of more traditional heroes - like Conan. (See below.) But that all adds to her appeal; huge physical strength in a small girl body.
In the course of seven series, Buffy Summers grows up, as does Sarah Michelle Gellar; it's an amazing journey to watch, and experience.
And to get you in the mood, let's start with the theme tune for the show, played by rock band Nerf Herder.
Today's SFF Hero feature is dedicated to Lilith Saintcrow, who was blogjay on this site yesterday and chose the wonderful Banned in Argo by Leslie Fish. (See below, or click SFF Song of the Week to the left or click here. Come on, come on, I can't make it any easier - find it!)
When writing the intro for her song choice, Lilith sent me an email telling me of her love for the soundtrack of Conan the Barbarian by the genius composer Basil Poledouris And this reminded me how much I love Arnie's movie of the classic Robert E. Howard tales. Never has Schwarzenegger been so muscly, so almost naked, and so utterly right for the role. (Well, except for his Terrminator role.) It's a smart, exciting, morally challenging movie, directed by John Milius who co-wrote it with Oliver Stone; and it defines Conan as the quintessential fantasy hero.
If you want to hear a bit of the soundtrack and see the trailer, click on the arrow below. Some still images follow.
I've never liked Superman. I enjoyed the Richard Donner movies, I've read some of the comics, but as a character he's never worked for me - because he's too powerful, hence a bit smug. Kryptonite is cleary the writers' desperate attempt to give him some vulnerability, but it doesn't wash. Superman is a lantern-jawed jock, and I kind of like it when he loses.
In Smallville, however, the young Clark Kent is a shy, insecure, sometimes awkward kid - and he really is vulnerable. He's coming to terms with his powers. He still lets his dad (initially) and his mom boss him around. He's crippled by his love for the beautiful Lana, but always get tongue tied. Clark Kent I like; Clark (as played by Tom Welling) is a hero I can identify with.
Sigourney Weaver as Ripley in Alien and its sequels was the pioneer female action hero. She has no superpowers, but she's tough and ruthless, she can run like hell, she loves big guns, and boy, she's determined.
It was wonderful to see Weaver return to SF in Avatar - she's the best actor in it by far.
Once upon a time, women in SF and Fantasy stories screamed fearfully and waited for the guy with the biceps to save the day. No more; thanks to Ripley.
Wolverine is the greatest ever Marvel super-hero; and Hugh Jackman is the coolest actor in the X-Men. Tragically, however, the character has never been written for properly in the X-Men movies (in my view). And the stand-alone X-Men Origins: Wolverine is enlivened by the wonderful Liev Schreiber as Sabertooth, and is wonderfully shot by director Gavin Hood and his cinemetographer Donald McAlpine; but is still, in my view, a disappointment.
No matter; Wolverine is still the best there is at what he does. Here are some pics:
I love movies, and I wish I'd seen them all. Or rather, all the good ones.
In pursuit of this ambition, I've been catching up on some classic movies, some of which I've seen before many times, some of which are new to me.
Today's blog is about the daddy of all SF films, the Robert Wise version of THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL (1951).
Stephen King writes about this in his wonderful book DANSE MACABRE. He compares it with the later movie EARTH VS THE FLYING SAUCERS, an all action and terrifying tale of aliens invading Earth. Like much movie SF, he argued, EVTFS is really a horror movie; THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL by contrast, 'is one of a select handful - the real science fiction movies.' It's not, in other words, a futuristic version of a tale about the boogeyman. It's not like ALIEN, with its vagina dentata alien conjuring up primal fears that we didn't know we had. It's not about The Fear of Strangers, or of Otherness. It's a cool, careful, masterly dissection of what shits humans are, and how and why aliens are right to fear us.
This makes TDTEST sound rather cool and academic; but in fact, it's an amazingly taut film. I was delighted, in fact, to find that - despite a small special effects budget, and the incredibly over-precise diction of all the characters, that it's not a dated or 'old-fashioned' kind of classic SF movie that is better left dust-covered in the archives. Admittedly, the space suit worn by Klaatu the alien looks as if it was retained by some skinflint in order to be re-used by Cybermen in the sandpit in the early Dr Who eps. And the interior of the ship is sadly inadequate compared to the Tardis. But this film is, I discover, a masterpiece of suspense.
The plot, briefly, and without I hope too many spoilers: An alien spaceship lands on Earth
and a humaniform alien called Klaatu (Michael Rennie) emerges, accompanied by a huge robot, Gort. Klaatu comes in peace, but is treated with hostility by the authorities. And his attempt to summon a meeting of the leaders of the world is snubbed. So he escapes and - after befriending a young boy and her mother - explains to a kindly Professor with hair issues that the Earth is in deadly peril.
That's all I can say - if you haven't already, see the film! - but the genius of this movie is how much is achieved by the simple act of Defining the Peril. We know the Earth will be in dire danger unless certain things occur; and knowing that is enough. It's the opposite of 2012, where we have to SEE houses fall down, cars fall into the sea, planes fall from the sky, people dying horribly, in such graphic detail that it becomes, pretty quickly, a bit ordinary. (What! Only a hundred people just died! - what a yawn!)
Here the jeopardy is defined; the clock is set ticking; and it's terrifying. I was literally on the edge of my seat in the climactic sequence. Okay, the robot is not that scary - it has zappy eyes like Cyclops, but that's all it does - but we know what it might do. And because its potential power is so awesome, its very presence terrifies.
All this artfulness is of course - at one crude level - a result of budgetary constraints. Even in 1951 audiences liked action, not chat; spectacle, not thoughtful speculation. But with limited resources, director Robert Wise and writer Edmund H. North (working from a story by Harry Bates) dug deep into their bag of storytelling tricks and made us fear a man who does nothing malicous, at all, in the course of the entire film. But though he's courteous, and pleasant, Klaatu is an utterly cold and decisive character. If he has to kill, he will kill, and he will kill vast numbers of those who deserve to die.
Gulp.
For Klaatu is a rational being; and his rationality is the source of his scariness. You can't reason with him; because he's right. And you can't defy him; because, as the setpiece sequence of the movie proves, his power, casually executed, utterly dwarfs that of the humble Earthlings.
The music is another key element of this movie. Composer Bernard Herrman - who also wrote the scores for many of Hitchcock's great suspense thrillers including PSYCHO, as well as providing the music for THE TWLIGHT ZONE and some of the 1960s LOST IN SPACE - creates a chilling, haunting soundscape of singing voices and jagged orchestral crescendos. It's a style that's often imitated, but I have to say I don't think I've ever seen/heard a movie with such a brilliantly tense score. The opening sequence, when the spaceship lands and the tanks take their position, is utterly nervejangling, like having someone run a cold knife blade down your spine to test how thick the skin is.
At other times, the film IS dated. There's a lot of talky stuff, the girl (played by Patricia Neal) is very much the typical 'pretty, good Mom' character you always see in 50s movies. The army briefing scenes have a static, expository quality. And, even in 1951, what Mom would let a total stranger wander off with her kid...?
But for much of the time, Wise and North show remarkable adroitness in the way in which they use newscasters and telephone operators and soldiers in jeeps to convey a rich, busy universe of action, without spending too much money.
I saw this movie on a lovely collector's edition DVD which I bought last year at Eastercon, in that wonderful little stall on the far right. As always, I bought a bunch of old movies thinking, 'I must watch these some day.' Fortunately, that day, for this movie, was yesterday.
Did you know? (I know you did):
The band Klaatu, named after the alien in this movie, wrote the song 'Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft'.
The 2008 remake (a stinker, allegedly) stars Keanu Reeves, who actually IS an alien!
Here's the latest guest blog in our Movie Zone feature...from the talented and irrepressible screenwriter and blogger Adrian Reynolds. Adrian's thoughts on life and movies and other stuff can be found on his beautifully named youdothatvoodoo blogsite.
Take it away Adrian:
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DOES WHATEVER A FRANCHISE CAN: SAM RAIMI'S SPIDER-MAN by Adrian Reynolds
Timely Comics, established in the 1940s, produced titles about crime, romance, monsters, and cowboys as well as superheroes, whose role was to take on the Nazis in wartime pulps. It was under the guidance of Stan Lee two decades later that the publisher -- by now known as Marvel -- created a new generation of winning superhero titles: Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk and Spider-Man. They were a clear departure from DC's heroes Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, who were archetypes seemingly divorced from regular human experience. By contrast, the characters Stan Lee concocted in collaboration with artists Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko were easy for their teenage readers to identify with. The Hulk was effectively a teenage boy struggling to control a body undergoing transformation. The Fantastic Four were a family as dysfunctional as your own. And as for Spider-Man...
Spider-Man artwork by Steve Ditko
Peter Parker is a high school kid consumed by unspoken love for Mary Jane Watson, a science nerd living with his Aunt May and Uncle Ben. Then he is bitten by a radioactive spider and rather than acquire leukaemia gains arachnid powers for himself, gifted with impossible acrobatic skills, heightened strength, able to scale vertical walls and sense danger. Adding to that nifty repertoire, Peter's invention of webfluid allows him to zip round the city suspended from ropes of web. But...he still can't talk to Mary Jane, and adding superheroics to his repertoire just means he has less time for college work, and that his life gets more complicated.
OK, the characterisation might be as two dimensional as the pages Spider-Man's stories appeared on, but that's one more dimension than DC's leading icon, Superman, had back then.
All of this, more or less, is present in Sam Raimi's trio of Spider-Man films. The first presents the story of Peter's transition from human to superior human to superhero. The distinction is important: he gains his powers first, but it's following the death of Uncle Ben that he becomes a superhero, whose values inform his actions. The bit about Ben telling Peter that "with great power comes great responsibility" is frequently quoted, but just as important is what Ben says before that: "these are the years a man changes into the man he's going to become the rest of his life -- just be careful who you change into."
Those two quotes anchor the trilogy, with every aspect of Peter Parker's progress relating to those themes of maturity and honour. The films chronicle a teenager growing into young adulthood, dealing with the responsibilities of work and the complexities of being a family member, and the distinction between the dream of love and its day to day reality. Which serious business is thankfully leavened by a healthy dose of wisecracking, acrobatics, and fights with grotesque supervillains. Phew.
Something that distinguishes Peter Parker from the likes of Batman is that he has read superhero comics. When Peter gets his powers, he tries out catchphrases such as 'Shazam' and others associated with classic comics heroes in the hope that it will reactivate his webbing -- produced organically from his body in the films...adding to the squicky adolescence of this singular hero, Peter oozes sticky fluids -- which takes a while to get under control.
Reading comics is one thing, emulating their protagonists is quite another. Bringing together superheroics with teenage tribulations was a stroke of genius on Stan Lee's part. Buzzing on his new powers, and realising he can use them to win money to buy a car to impress Mary Jane, Peter takes part in a wrestling tournament -- and wins. His jubilation is short-lived: the fight organiser weasels his way out of giving Peter the full prize money, and the consequences of that form a straight line to the murder of Uncle Ben.
So, Spider-Man is haunted by his past actions, giving him the requisite dose of angst that adolescents thrive on. And at the same time, he -- literally -- masks that guilt and adopts a joke-a-minute persona with the bad guys he takes on, seen to its fullest effect in the second film, when Peter is relishing his powers. That mix of jauntiness and emo despair will be familiar to anyone who has been a teenager, or has one in their house.
Any hero is defined by the calibre of their villain, and Spider-Man has a rogues gallery of bad guys on his tail. In the first film it's Norman Osborn, a zillionaire scientist entrepreneur whose son Harry goes to high school with Peter. Norman sees Peter's intellect as outranking his son's, and the two get on fine initially. But in designing a weapons system for the military, Norman Osborn is driven mad and becomes the Green Goblin, who after being thwarted by Spider-Man appoints himself as Peter's nemesis.
As a rationale it works well enough, but there's another motivation underlying the Green Goblin: merchandising. Conveniently, Green Goblin's armoured outfit looks just like a kids' toy, complete with accessories. Ideal for rolling out as actual toys to children worldwide, accompanying Happy Meals, essential in a franchise like Spider-Man. Ho hum.
Green Goblin gets killed in the first film, and Harry takes on his father's mental mantle in the third, sworn to take down Spidey, who he mistakenly believes murdered him. That kind of continuity is exactly what superhero comics are made of, somehow straddling soap opera and Greek drama at the same time. Which is good: it gives the films a feeling of connectedness, and there are all kinds of easter eggs dotted in the trilogy for readers of the comics.
One of the biggest assets of the trilogy is its lead actor, Tobey Maguire.
It's an inspired piece of casting: Tobey is credibly nerdish as Peter Parker, and has a physicality that suits Spider-Man, very much in line with the way that Steve Ditko drew him -- he's got a wiry build, not a muscle man's.
Maguire convinces as a harried young man trying to do the best he can, with a touch of puppy dog in his genetic make-up, quizzical at the curve balls life throws him. And if he doesn't always perform to his best as Spider-Man, that's because in a lot of the longshots when he's swooping through the city you're actually looking at a digital simulation that sometimes has a rubbery feel. Other actors also turn in strong performances. Kirsten Dunst is delectable as Mary Jane, and has her own character arc across the trilogy, experiencing the ups and downs of the acting profession, falling for Spidey and discovering that he and Peter are one and the same. She has such a transparently good heart that it's credible when, under her watchful eye, a bank employee puts back cash that bursts out everywhere during a robbery. Of the supporting characters, the best is newspaper publisher J. Jonah Jameson, brilliantly brought to life by actor 
J.K. Simmons, a foghorn-voiced penny-chiselling petty tyrant who hires Peter Parker to take photos of Spider-Man, only to use them in a campaign against Parker's alter ego. Which is typical of Peter's luck, and gives rise to some great scenes in the offices of the Daily Bugle. The third film sees a rival compete with Peter to bring images of Spidey to Jonah's attention -- Eddie Brock, whose emnity towards Parker has tragic consequences.
The relationship between Peter and Mary Jane is at the heart of the films. That and the bond between Peter and Aunt May provides an emotional core to the story that grounds it in recognisable human feelings, important when there'd otherwise be a danger of getting lost in larger than life action. One of the keynotes is a special moment between Spidey, hanging upside down, and Mary Jane, who pulls up the bottom half of his mask to give the hero an iconic kiss.
Comparing that kiss to one from her beau in the second film proves to Mary Jane that she really isn't committed to the relationship -- but she doesn't get to kiss Peter and discover the whizzbang she feels when they lock lips as that's when the bad guy turns up, a perennial problem of dating superheroes. And the kiss is a touchstone once again when Spidey demonstrates the same move with a rival in front of a crowd celebrating what he's done for New York -- the city might be impressed, all Mary Jane sees is Peter cheapening 'their' kiss. Impressive, on director Sam Raimi's part, that something so apparently simple can be called back through the trilogy to demonstrate different facets of Peter and Mary Jane's romance over time.
Raimi is an interesting director, who started out with the horror classic Evil Dead, but is also a pal of the Coen Brothers, co-writing their The Hudsucker Proxy and being a sounding board for them as they are for him. He's more steeped in pop culture than the Coens, with a love for comics and tv and genre films that clearly comes out in his own work: the first Evil Dead film (which Joel Coen worked on) was very much a cheap horror, its sequel had comic elements to give it broader appeal, and he's followed that pattern since: shocks leavened by humour, as seen to good effect in Drag Me To Hell. Maybe it's Raimi's relish for pulp fiction that makes him so adept at handling villains. None are better than the second film's bad guy, Doctor Octopus, played magnificently by Alfred Molina. He starts out as anything but plain old Otto Octavius, a scientist dedicated to harnessing fusion technology to create cheap power for the world. But as soon as he declares that he holds "the power of the sun in the palm of my hand" you know that hubris is going to bite him on the ass. And it does. An experiment -- funded by Norman Osborn's son, and Peter's friend, Harry -- goes wrong. Result: the four robotic limbs that Otto uses for his experiments are fused to him, and lose the ability to be overridden by his conscious mind. The snakish extensions are an amazing creation, and bring out a darker side of Otto, fuelled by the death of his wife in the experiment that went wrong. He's a tragic figure, and one who with Spider's guidance comes to redeem himself when it counts, humanity winning out over baser instincts, saying with dignity "I will not die a monster" as he seeks to right what he has done.
The third film is perhaps weakened by having three villains. Sandman is a stunning creation, run of the mill baddie Flint Marko escaping from the cops and leaping into a pile of sand that's being used for an experiment (those scientists insist on messing with forces they can't comprehend). He gets zapped, and becomes a creature of sand, the effects for this transformation first class, and used to convey pathos as well. Less successful is the alien symbiote that turns Spider-Man's costume black and boosts his powers, before moving onto another host in the form of photographer rival Eddie Brock. 
When the symbiote is with Spidey it's a brilliant opportunity to showcase more of Tobey Maguire's range, as a darkly seductive side to Peter comes to the surface, seen to fantastic effect in a scene set in a jazz bar where Mary Jane is singing. Peter saunters in, accompanies her on piano ('does whatever a spider can' evidently includes keyboard wizardry), and launches into a dance routine in which he humiliates Mary Jane by flirting with a love rival in front of her. The cad. But when Eddie Brock bonds with the symbiote, it's not so interesting.
Except, that is, for the matter of his defeat. The crittur turns out to be vulnerable to certain sound frequencies, which Spider-Man discovers by accident when he wallops the Brock symbiote with a hollow metal pole. Realising it's effective, Spidey gets a bunch of similar poles and puts Eddie within a circle of them -- the first time to my knowledge that an enemy has been defeated by tuned percussion since my uncle Len played the Mike Oldfield album Tubular Bells to drown out the carol singers at his door.
The final villain of the trio is Green Goblin. Kind of. Norman Osborn died in the first film, and son Harry replaces him in the third. But only after he has amnesia and forgets that he hates Peter, reigniting their former friendship for a while. It's a cute device, and of course it doesn't last -- Harry realises what the score is, and sets out to avenge his dad...or is that extend the franchise given the merchandising undertones of all this? In the end, Harry has a change of heart and pairs up with Spidey to take on Sandman and the symbiote-boosted Eddie Brock. If it all seems rather fraught and melodramatic, it works because these costumed weirdos stay true to their characters. Harry Osborn reverts to being Peter's good pal. Otto Octavius reasserts control over his serpentine limbs and dies a hero. Sandman is forgiven by Peter for his involvement in Ben's death and gets to live on, free to love the daughter he misses so much. It's only the symbiote that dies, and good riddance: it's icky. Besides, its function is to bring out the worst in people.
The Spider-Man trilogy is a fine addition to the superhero movie canon, one of its more honorable entries given the amount of garbage out there (I'm looking at you Catwoman, you Daredevil, and -- sad to say -- Fantastic Four, whose comics can be fine stuff). It's a kinetic funfair ride with Spidey swooping between buildings, having cool fights in alleys, and on and in subway trains zooming through the metropolis, zinging out one-liners as he does. What could be more fun? Add an ongoing romance with a great looking girlfriend that takes us from teenage crush to real relationship with credible problems, and you've got a series that suits both genders, and every age. Perfect family viewing, and worth going back to for some of the subtleties Raimi and his writers bring to the films that give the films a lingering fizz you might not be expecting.
Copyright Adrian Reynolds, January 2010
THE MOVIES:
Spider-Man (2002): Screenplay by David Koepp. Directed by Sam Raimi.
Spider-Man 2 (2004): Screen story by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar & Michael Chabon, screenplay by Alvin Sergeant.
Spider-Man 3 (2007): Screenplay & screen story by Sam Raimi and Ivan Raimi; screenplay by Alvin Sergeant. Directed by Sam Raimi.
I've finally seen Avatar, and it's as amazing and spectacular as everyone says. The 3D experience is exhilarating, the plot is tight and smart, and the concept is brilliant. It's one thing to write a story from an alien's point of view; but Cameron has gone one step further, by allowing a human being to become an alien. (I know that also happens in District 9 - but in Avatar you really start to see and feel the world from this new, extraordinary perspective.)
I do have a couple of gripes about the movie though. And I accept that my criticisms probably say more about me than they do about James Cameron.
But really, who would actually want to live on that ghastly planet full of simpering size zero models? They're all so skinny! Where are the tubby aliens!
I also have a problem with the sheer unremitting niceness of the aliens. Admittedly, Neytiri the cute alien love interest, does get to snarl and be cross from time to time, and those indeed are her sexiest scenes. But the deal is: humans, especially American soldier humans, and American mean-minded bureaucrat humans, are a Bad Thing (except for our small team of liberal-leaning American nice guys, including one Hispanic woman.) And the aliens, by contrast, are a Good Thing. For they are 'primitive', at one with nature, in touch with their feelings, and receptive to the gaia of the planet in the way that rich materialistic Westerners (like me and, quite possibly, you) simply aren't.
Well okay, it's a movie, and that's the story, and I'm not going to knock it. But there's something about this vision of the sacred primitive that has always got my goat. Because in reality, lots of ancient and primitive cultures have been violent and warmongering. Some civilisations, like the Maya, died out because of greed and war. The Incas and the Aztecs were also brutal violent cultures; and their Spanish invaders were no better, morally speaking, but also not that much worse.
And that's humans for you. We are a violent, predatory, competitive species, and there's never been a time in history or pre-history when that hasn't been the case. And no wonder: we are products of an evolutionary system that privileges survival over all else. Nature is red and tooth and claw - damn, I wish I'd said that! - and the only way to stay alive is to kill better, flee better, or hide better than all the rival species.
If primates had remained in the trees, and jackals had become sentient - would the world really be a better place? Would capitalism be more humane and fair, if snarling hyenas in suits ran the banks and the financial institutions? Would the streets be safer if wolves were in charge of the Neighbourhood Watch scheme? Or wouldn't they just - being wolvish by nature - steal and kill and mug unsuspecting elderly wolves?
Lions are the kings of the jungle; but they are lazy, arrogant and savage beasts. Would sentient lions do a better job of this planet? Or wouldn't they just sleep for eighteen hours a day then nuke all the other lions for two or three hours before going to bed again?
Evolution is a cruel schoolteacher; and for that reason, my guess it that most aliens we encounter - all of whom will have been subject to evolutionary forces - will be just as violent and selfish and brutal as we, as a species, are.
Of course I like to believe that humanity is capable of better things. Humans can be wise, poetic, liberal, gracious, and kind. (I'm not saying I am any of those things though.) But generally, I would say - looking around a post-Iraq War world, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Copenhagen summit, at a time when greedy bankers who almost destroyed our financial system are being rewarded by massive bonuses and new highly paid jobs - I'd say we are a species that has a long way to go before we can call ourselves a civilisation.
In Avatar, the balance of nature is vividly dramatised as a bond between all living things. In evolution, I would more cynically argue, the balance of nature is that if there are too many herbivores, the predators will catch them more easily and then there will be fewer live herbivores. And if the predators get too skilful, they'll kill too many prey; and then they'll die of starvation.
Evolution is a battlefield littered with corpses; it's really NOT that nice.
That doesn't mean I'm defending the humans in Avatar. Nor am I denying the beauty of Nature, and the extraordinariness of the way so many diverse creatures sustain life in a complex web of inter-relationships. But 'one-ness' with Nature only gets you so far; it takes hard work, and moral courage, to pursue and enact the ideals of justice, peace, cooperation, democracy and fairness.
So we, as a species, have a long way to go; but I'm betting that most other species in the universe will have the same problems, and the same flaws, as we do. For that reason, I'd prefer a less rose-tinted view of alien life. Let them have flaws; let them make mistakes. Let them be the slaves of their own evolution - whether they are predators, prey, parasites, or symbiotes.
And let's also hope that they, and we, learn to work together and with others, to build a culture that isn't based around the desperate desire to thwart and humiliate others, in order to be 'top dog'.