Interzone #244 Jan - Feb 2013 (26 page)

* *

Based on a Kafka novel, Michael Haneke’s
The Castle
(aka:
Das Schloss
, 1997) – out on DVD, 12 November – is a tale of alienation and a lonely stranger’s struggles against mysterious officialdom.

‘K’ (Ulrich Mühe) is a land surveyor, called to work for a Count at a seemingly inaccessible castle. The local villagers are an unfriendly lot, refusing K lodgings at the church or inn. It is winter, and the landscape is just as inhospitable as the people. K’s two new ‘assistants’ arrive but prove to be imbeciles, lacking the surveying equipment he expected them to bring. K lacks a permit necessary to enter the castle, and none of the peasants can, or will, help or advise him. However, neurotic barmaid Frieda (the late Susanne Lothar, Mühe’s wife) is wholly sympathetic and provides K with shelter and sex, becoming his fiancée. K attempts to meet his employers, any representatives from the castle, or even their unreliable messenger, but his communications, like his confrontations, are blocked, so his progress is thwarted. The ordinary absurdism here is usually bleak, but occasionally farcical, and the distinctions between solemnity and satire are arbitrary.

Filmed in German with English subtitles, the period setting adds even greater unfamiliarity to the impenetrable illogical moodiness of an otherworldly quality that accumulates around K, from a patina of grime to a crushing weight on his mind. The misunderstandings and doubts multiply like rabbits pulled from a magic hat, and it is hard to find anything that is kept in the dark, let alone truth. K faces an unfathomable bureaucracy sustained by idle intermediaries via the uncertainty of twilight whispers. Offended authority figures are as unforgiving as a napalm fire. A howling night wind increases outside, as if in dark symmetry with the internal confusions of K. Subjective betrayals and escalating weirdness leads to a haunted surrealism like a conjunction of Ingmar Bergman and Monty Python.

Disc extra: the biographical featurette,
24 Realities per Second
(56 minutes, in French with English subtitles), about Haneke’s life/works, is illuminating but it has a studied ‘informality’ that’s somewhat demanding and occasionally trying.

* *

Previously available as a complete hi-def boxset,
The
Lord Of The Rings
‘extended editions’ are re-released singly on Blu-ray (3 December), and these movies are, quite rightly, still acclaimed as the ultimate high fantasy trilogy. I must confess that I have not read the books but, to me, this grandiose screen version feels like a legend about disarmament, a triumph of genuine wisdom over madness, and details valiant efforts to avert the possibility of catastrophic warfare by simply getting rid of the doomsday weapon. The One Ring can only be disposed of in the fires of Mordor, and we can see the notion of meltdown destruction to put an end to evil (here, the ring is like a WMD exemplar) reflected in varied genre works: perhaps most tellingly in the annihilation of a cyborg/ultimate stealth weapon in
Terminator 2: Judgement Da
y (1991), thus saving the future for humanity.

Never mind the studied ‘bromance’ between Frodo and Sam, that “treacherous little toad” Smeagol/Gollum is, by implication in the prologue of
Return of the King
, very probably a gay monster. Yet he is largely consistent in his paradoxically schizoid obsession throughout this epic storyline, troubled by others suspicions, (self-) doubts, and almost as much betrayal as loyalty. It was a shame that the likeable feminist idea to update the character of Arwen into a warrior princess was abandoned in favour of remaining faithful to the source, while the trial of battling alongside the men is taken by shield-maiden Eowyn. A decade or so later, the decisions about changes, or lack of them, to established lore may seem even more like significant weaknesses, especially when other alterations made to Tolkien’s narrative (see ‘purist edition’ fan cuts and scholarly views on a ‘travesty of adaptation’) during the scripting developments and final editing now look arbitrary or inconsequential.

Despite the glorification of warfare (referencing the crusades; as ‘halflings’ can be read as children) where, somewhat perversely, even the long dead are called upon to fight as ghosts, these are still action movies of repeatedly astonishing spectacle as the level of threat expands from shire (village), to fortress (city), to realm (the world). There are many grotesque fantasy horrors in Middle-earth, but I still find that Shelob the giant spider is the most nightmare inducing creature of them all.

With over two hours of excellent footage added to the 558 minutes total of this trilogy’s theatrical versions, the scope and the depth of this saga expands into various unexplored corners of its milieu and is all the better for its shadings/nuances of main characters, and humorous asides which thankfully included the best Tolkien joke I’ve heard (the punch line is “Four”). My favourite bit of newfound trivia is noticing John Noble, very good as Denethor whose suicidal despair in Gondor and trouble with two sons foreshadows-in-retrospect the actor’s recent TV work playing Walter Bishop in
Fringe
. As for the protracted string of false endings, I still think Peter Jackson’s opus should have shown the newly crowned king, elf royalty, and people, all bowing to the heroic hobbits, then faded to black. That would have been a saner closure. I wonder, will Peter Jackson’s prequel trilogy (which I think should be titled ‘Bilbo Begins’ and ‘The Dark Hobbit’, etc) actually be any good?

* *

Having made a disaster of his last effort, the deplorable
Airborne
(
Black Static
#29), writer-director Dominic Burns (alias Alexander Williams) turns his Tourette’s brand of amateurishness to vapid sci-fi tale of alien invasion
U.F.O
.
(DVD/Blu-ray, 24 December). With stars Jean-Claude Van Damme, Julian Glover and Sean Pertwee in support roles, this looks like someone watched
Skyline
and
Battle: Los Angeles
and thought they could make a trashy British version on a Derby estate with a credit card budget. Honestly, this tawdry mess makes other low-budget modestly effective flicks, such as microcosmic London comedy chillers
Attack the Block
and
Storage 24
, seem like
CE3K
scaled, grandly spectacular classics.

A showcase for boring stereotypes,
U.F.O.
sinks to levels of shameless ineptitude that are usually reserved for crap home videos. It evinces all the dramatic tension and simplified suspense of a coin toss, and it is a brow-furrowing migraine of annoyance waiting to happen. Even when trying to emulate the sweary irreverence of Tarantino, Burns just proves how terribly unimaginative his uninspired approach to subgenre is, and this feeble nonsense sinks, inevitably, beneath the overwrought but vacuous self-indulgence of its unintentionally comic action scenes. If you find a copy of this DVD, I would suggest that you run away. Save yourself. Warn your friends. Like a signal from outer space that heralds a doomsday of boredom,
U.F.O.
spells out dismal prospects for any future homegrown movies of this ilk.

* *

Alcatraz
was set in present day San Francisco, where a lady cop was chasing baddies from the past. Simon Barry’s
Continuum
(Season One, DVD, 28 January) is about a female detective from the future in today’s Vancouver, where she tracks down some villains from her own time. After playing a spy for TV show
Alias
and the heroine of
G.I. Joe
, Rachel Nichols must have been a casting shoo-in as Kiera Cameron for this series. Bottled-lightning set-ups of
Terminator
,
TimeCop
and
Trancers
are flipped on political/gender lines, and juggled into fairly coherent sci-fi cop drama. Frequent action scenes rattle along with plenty of energy, although
Continuum
does lapse into sentimentality – complete with melancholy song tracks – for many episodic epilogues.

Among the terrorists, Lexa Doig (
Andromeda
,
Jason X
) as Sonya Valentine is the only one of the Liber8 gang who really looks like she’s from the future. Cameron’s aided by young genius Alec (Erik Knudsen), an inventor/hacker who eagerly adopts his official sidekick role. Except for flashbacks to the future, SF elements are reduced when Cameron stops wearing her glitchy catsuit of invisibility. But it is amusing to see fresh visualisations of com-tech concepts, recycled from early-1970s TV movie
Probe
and its follow-up series
Search
, updated with HUD for the heroine’s augmented sensorial arrays that are generated by her cyber-cop implants.

The story arc veers sideways, from standard
24
antics (kidnappings, robbery, terrorism) to Occupy style protests, and routine character subplots led by an idealistic but crazy professor, involving anti-government radicals and gizmo MacGuffins. There is VR shoot-em-up game play that’s dangerous to certain users, and the hostage crisis at Alec’s family’s farmstead brings several conspiracy elements to a violent, ultimately tragic conclusion, just as the superhero imagery is reasserted when the heroine gets her damaged biotech ‘protector’ suit working properly again.

“What happens in the future stays in the future.” Seeing how the revolutionary movement starts – 65 years earlier – changes the heroine’s views about her own time’s rewritten history. But, even as one loose timeline thread is tied off, quirky references to Gilliam’s
12 Monkeys
become particularly relevant to some ‘dystopian destiny now’ themes of economic collapse and the social upheaval in its aftermath, championed by a bitterly aged fanatic who corrupts easily confused and suicidal kids into martyrdom.

Although never as thrillingly intense as the similarly constructed
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
, this is a very enjoyable sci-fi action series that deploys its nanotech in layers of sophisticated info-media that enables cyborg agent Cameron to function as an ideal super-cop model. Nichols makes the most of humorous scenes (such as having to mask her character’s virtual telepathy), and is quite appealing as a quick-study detective whose futuristic investigative techniques are readily interpreted by present day police officers as uniquely advanced insight.

* * * * *

Copyright © 2013 Tony Lee

* * * * *

Tony
also reviews many DVDs and Blu-rays for our sister magazine
Black Static
–  14 in the new issue #32, out now in print, with easy to enter competitions to win great films.

In
Black Static
you’ll also find
Peter Tennant’s
Case Notes, several pages of in-depth book reviews, supplemented by the occasional author/ editor interview.

Black Static
is also the home of regular comment columns by
Stephen Volk
and
Christopher Fowler.
Not to mention a lot of world class fiction…

A convenient subscription to both print magazines is highly recommended! Please visit our website (ttapress.com) for all the options available. The Endnotes include links to Black Static as an Ebook.

Black Static
is available in E book editions. You should find live links in the Endnotes.

* * * * *

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