A brief shout-out to Vickers

Warning: Prometheus spoilers; although that’s a fairly silly thing to say. Some movies really hurt from spoilers but many are the opposite: the more you read about them before seeing them, the better, and Prometheus is the latter.

Prometheus is, as everyone is already bored of hearing, a deeply flawed film, mostly because of a deeply flawed script. It is poorly structured, poorly communicated and poorly voiced, full of character inconsistencies and plot weaknesses, and generally messy. However, it is a film directed by Ridley Scott, who has a great eye for detail and a great talent for mise-en-scene, and can use those things to craft character very effectively without a word of dialogue. Combine that with some first-class actors and there are a bunch of lovely moments in the film, and almost all of them belong to Charlize Theron’s performance of Meredith Vickers.

If you’ve seen Arrested Development, you know just how incredible Charlize can be, and she doesn’t disappoint. And one of the things that Alien gave us, besides anything else, was an incredible female heroine for SF fans to enjoy. We didn’t really get that in Liz Shaw – although she is a tough survivor, she is flat, childish and bordering on annoying. Looking from a purely “who deserves to be on a t-shirt” perspective, Vickers is worth considering. Yes, she has very few scenes, but given how poorly more dialogue served Ms Rapace, that may be a good thing. And again, because it’s Ridley and because its Charlize, we get a lot out of those scenes. Vickers was my favourite character, and had an incredibly interesting story to tell.

In a very real sense, Shaw is the wrong central character, and the film seems to know that. Apart from David, nobody really gives a damn about Shaw, and she only ends up in the final scenes because nobody can think of a reason she shouldn’t tag along. Meanwhile the central story of the film is actually about a messed up family. A dad who refuses to die, a son who cannot die, and the final leg of the tripod, a girl who gets screwed by both of them.

Yes, Vickers is daubed in cliche and patriarchal ones at that. She’s the forgotten “son”, disinherited for the anointed one, a trope as old as Isaac and Ishmael. She’s also an Ice Queen Bitch with Daddy Issues, who tries to minimise her sexuality in order to be Tough In A Man’s World. But somehow, I find the character and the performance to be more than just the sum of all this. Being a disinherited heir explains all the Daddy Issues and the Ice Queen. Of course she’s trying to be a man, and a robot: those are the two qualities her father looks for in a child. And her nature is used to make a point, to move the story forward.

We start by not liking her – the push-ups are impressive but she has no time for the soft, artistic David we have come to enjoy in the opening scenes. Then she tells the scientists they work for her, and makes David her houseboy. But the latter scene is a triumph because Vickers sits uncomfortably in her surroundings. The girl who did her push-up routine before saying hello orders her vodka straight, unadorned, yet she is surrounded by style and comfort. That is our first big hint that Peter Wayland is alive and well. Her sense of separation from the crew, emphasized by living in an escape pod, is not because, like Gorman, she thinks herself above them, but because the pod is home to her father. Indeed, her whole existence on the ship – the idea that she’s in command, “her” quarters, “her” command, “her” stand-offishness, these are all just proxies for her father. And while David smiles beatifically at the privilege of doing His Master’s Bidding, Vickers bristles and seethes at being his puppet, his shell. And that contrast is key to the family story.

Vickers’ seething is clear when Captain Janek calls her a robot. She chooses emotion instead, because although she craves her father’s love she is fighting against becoming his slave. She gets the same choice again when her father is brought back to life. David, adoringly, bathes his father’s feet, in a deeply intimate fashion. Vickers bends, and in my favourite scene, tries one last time to join that intimacy, to do what David is doing. She reaches out to kiss her father’s hand, and he retracts it and curls it into a harsh fist. Then the script throws that scene away by her shouting out their relationship ham-fistedly, but it’s a hell of a scene. She’s tried everything she can to be as robotic as he wants her to be, to gain her father’s love – but in the end, the robot gets the love, and her sense of humanity, her sense of her true self, of reaching out to her father through emotion, not obedience, is rebuffed.

And she flinches like he struck her with the fist. It’s a scene with so much meaning and no words, and very powerful. It almost justifies the whole film. It almost justifies the stupid scene with the hammereel (as I’m told its called), where previously, someone reached out in kindness and was punished for it with pain. It’s a motif we saw with said scientist at the very start too – reaching out to the geologist and suffering for it.

I don’t know what it means that Vickers is killed. The film is a bit too incoherent – does she fail to choose nobility with Janek and is thus condemned for it? That seems unfair given Shaw is also praised for her survival instinct later. Is there any reason at all she would not be ejected with her own safety pod? I’m sure somebody can think of some but I couldn’t find one in the film at the time. In the end, the story seems to treat Vickers like her father does – cutting her out of the picture so father and son can take centre stage. Which seems very unsatisfactory. She is, for my money, the most interesting person on the ship. She’s not blatantly likeable like Janek, she’s genre-savvy and intelligent enough to set fire to her own men, but she manages to do it without seeming entirely cold and heartless, and she has a fantastic character arc which reveals her humanity under her hard, angry shell – a humanity that gives a greater understanding to her father’s madness, and her brother’s sickness.

In so many ways, Prometheus wasn’t what anyone was expecting. It’s not really an Alien prequel, on its own. It’s not really a film about the originators of life, but – like 2001 – about what the robot does on the way to meet the originators. And Shaw isn’t a new take on Ripley: she’s not a bad-ass SF heroine, she’s neither cool nor poignant, she’s not dramatically interesting.  All those titles go to the lady on the side of the stage: to Meredith Vickers. For the love of God, let’s remember that, and not the stupidity of her death.

I looked nothing like a rose

Since The Great Gatsby is my go-to answer for my favourite book, I suppose I should weigh in on my thoughts on the new trailer just released. But the short answer is that it told us very little; it proved all my predictions while only allaying a few of my fears.

Cards on the table – I am a great fan of Baz Luhrmann’s work – he manages to continually be bold, idiosyncratic and unconventional, in an industry that heavily punishes all three. I’ve always felt he was a good match for Gatsby, and Gatsby generally a good match for him. Luhrmann excels at creating textual worlds, dense in their hyperreality: he did it spectacularly with Verona Beach in Romeo and Juliet (where billboards offered up Prospero Cola) and with the illusory remembered Paris of Le Grande Epoque in Moulin Rouge; creating the impression of the Jazz Age just as Fitzgerald did is a task perhaps only he is worthy of tackling. Naturally, then, his Jazz Age New York is centre stage and the grand star of the credit’s opening, living large, in the same hyper-colours and clean lines as Peter Jackson’s in King Kong, but with more swing. Moulin Rouge also showed he knew how to film excess in a way that was both vulgar and enticing; naturally his version of Gatsby’s revelries are the most exciting we’ve seen portrayed, inviting the viewer for once to actually want to be there.

The typical criticisms have already appeared about using rap music, and should be ignored for being as infantile and racist as they always are. Modern music is no more out of place in a period film than it is to have Spartacus speaking English, and rap music has so many parallels to jazz it would be ridiculous not to use its language in a film like this. And Baz is not simply jumping for the obvious – most of the trailer is underscored with a fairly obscure U2 song, “Love is Blindness” which is lovely in its thick, despondent sense of menace, its portrayal of the destructive, toxic nature of affection, naturally undercutting the vivacity and playfulness of the images, hinting with the camera angles and pauses of the shadows beneath the style. Which we needed because, along with the dazzling Art Deco and gorgeous cityscapes, it was beginning to look like there would be no rotten veneer underneath at all. But Baz is building to it, and he seems to get there.

We can also be sure Luhrmann will handle the symbolism deftly – if we can have Prospero Cola and the green fairy of absinthe appearing literally, the Eyes of Dr Mecklenberg will be child’s play. I liked seeing Nick and Gatsby on the dock itself, bringing the metaphor onto centre stage. Again, Luhrmann goes beyond just the obvious.

I’ve been worrried about DiCaprio, but he looks to be strong in the role. His great curse as an actor – his inescapably boyish looks, that made him look so clownish as an old J. Edgar Hoover – are here an asset to highlighting the Peter Pan nature of the character. He also looks sufficiently small and humbled in the presence of Daisy. The weak parts come where (as in Edgar) he must play the villain, because he has so little menace. That may, however, end up being a virtue. It depends on how much romance Baz demands of the story.

Script-wise, we hew closer to the book than ever – if we can judge by the trailer, Jordan has the largest role ever in this version, Owl-Eyes and Klipspringer get a showing, Daisy seems constantly about to stumble over in confusion, which is an improvement on Mia Farrow’s stunned-mullet approach, Wolfsheim is pulled forward to provide the menace DiCaprio can’t – but in tone, the trailer still seems quite romantic. Romance is where Baz’s head lives, and even his dark endings are epic tragic ones, and as such tend to ride very close to farce. Many chuckled when DiCaprio wept in the dirt in Romeo and Juliet, and I never felt the tragedy of Sabine’s death in Moulin Rouge was really honest because the first half of the film had worked so hard to clothe her in cartoonish style. It is so easy to miss the point with Gatsby and turn it into a tale of good versus evil, of dreams dashed and love pure and untramelled even when it loses against the foul cheap dust of the world, and Lurhmann is easily seduced by such tragic tales. But in the end it is common humanity that ties the book together, that reveals the jazz age as a tawdry sham and exposes even the glittering Daisy as a monster, in the pettiest and most pathetic sense, that turns the end from a romantic tragedy into a slideshow holocaust of banality. Edgerton is talented and seems to know to play Tom down but we have images of him and Gatsby coming to blows, and the whole point is Tom doesn’t need to do that. He wins without firing a shot because he has money, and Gatsby doesn’t. I think Baz wants him to be a moustache twirler like all his other villains – Richard Roxburgh and Bill Hunter, for example. But Tom is far too much a vacuum to be a melodramatic beast, and any suggestion of it usually takes away Daisy’s culpability in all of it.

In short, Baz is like Gatsby, he believes in love, in the orgiastic future, that even when facile, even when dangerous there is power in dreams; but I always felt the book was about hate, about the smallness of people, about the shallowness of even a brilliant, glorious dream – yet hopeful because of that, because beneath the artifice are a few simple human things worth caring about. Finding that in a film would be difficult for any director; and while Baz has got a great cast and a gorgeous eye, I feel his mountain of gold and glamour will make it hard to find a heart of anything, no matter how shadowed and shallow he makes it.

But the shirts – the shirts made me smile.

The TMNT shooting script

Like some Hollywood insider, I have stealthily acquired from my sources the shooting script for the new TMNT film.

In Predator We Trust

It’s time to rethink the Predator, people. Warrior-nobility aside, we’ve been casting them as the badguy. And I’m not sure that stands up. Walk with me:

Point the first: They are “drawn to battlegrounds”.

In the first and second films, the predators are drawn to the most dangerous places on earth – in the first film, the drug war in South America, in the second, the drug war in slightly-futuristic Los Angeles. The suggestion is it goes to those places because all the carnage and killing makes it likely they’ll encounter plenty of warriors to make good hunts. But that doesn’t hold up to hunting logic. If you want to get a good challenge from a grizzly bear, you don’t go to the grizzly bear arena where grizzlies are fighting each other to the death, because then your average target will be half-chewed and eaten before you get near him. If you want a challenge, you find a quiet lone grizzly at his full strength, and you kidnap his daughter. You know, like in Commando. You don’t wait for him to come to South America and waste ammo on some drug dealers first.

And this “ultimate hunter” thing runs into trouble with point 2 -

2) They “take trophies”.

Or do they? Yes, they skin their victims and take heads. But they don’t take them home with them. The pick up vessel in Aliens vs Predator doesn’t stop to collect all the skulls the last predator must have been storing somewhere. When Arnie arrives in Predator 1, the predator has skinned his victims, yes, but he’s tens of miles from that site and shows no intention of going back after he kills his victims. So he skins people, but where does he put the skins? In a pouch?

So here’s an alternative idea: he skins his prey to scare the hell out of everyone else in the area.

Now we’re starting to get a new idea of the creatures. They go to the worst warzones on earth. They identify and track down the worst killers in the area, defeat them effortlessly and then leave their mutilated bodies around – as a warning to others.

Now hold that thought as we go through some other points:

- they’re invisible, and move in mysterious ways

- but they can be sensed by voodoo priests (Predator 2) and Native American Shaman types (Predator), so they have some kind of spiritual presence

- they have dredlocks, perhaps indicating a strong sense of spirituality and connection to Rastafarianism.

- they have been visiting earth since before the last ice age (AvP)

You see where I am now.

The Predators are gods, or aliens masquerading as gods, and they are here to HELP US. When humans are swarmed by too much warfare, and look to be consuming ourselves, an invisible force descends, butchers all the best warriors and terrifies everyone else into ceasing fighting. They are trying to save humanity from our own destructive ways. They are HIPPIES. That’s also why they skin corpses, they are probably trying to recycle the carcasses into nice hats or wallets or seat covers or something.

I know what you’re going to say: if that’s true, then why did they bring the Aliens to the South Pole for training exercises? But that’s not the right question. The question is: why did they bury everything at the South Pole under a thousand tons of ice? See, I think they brought the aliens to earth to STUDY them (assuming they didn’t just find them here already – Prometheus may have something to say about where the “jockey” came from – there were giants in the old days, people), then one day they discovered humans. Being gentle creatures and not wanting to kill the alien queen, they froze her and buried her deep under the ice so she couldn’t harm humans until they could find a way to safely extract her. By the time they had done that, they realized that the alien was not only dangerous to humans, but so were the humans themselves. This amazing new species was on the verge of wiping itself out. The solution is to become invisible and watch from the sidelines, and interfere when it became necessary. Sometimes they could be subtle, other times, they needed a nuclear bomb (hence Sodom and Gomorrah).

Some accidents occurred along the way that caused us humans to worship them as gods. Some stories leaked through. This is why all ancient myths have something like the titanomachy, where the monsters/evil serpents are destroyed by the gods, but lurk around, waiting to insert evil into us again. Only the gods can save us – immortal, invisible, dredlocked spirit masters of beyond. Predators? No: PROTECTORS. And every time we run into them, we kill them with a tree of some sort. Or Danny Glover.

And the lord sayeth, this is my blood, shed for you, and Jesse Ventura said, if it bleeds, we can kill it….