The Screengrab : 2001

Screengrab Review: "Moon"

Phil Nugent — Thu, 28 May 2009 17:00:00 GMT

Duncan Jones's Moon stars Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell, the sole human being employed at a mining station at the title location by a corporation called Lunar Industries. Sam is weeks away from completing a three-year stint that will end with the arrival of his replacement and his return to Earth. He's settled into a hermit's existence, kibbutzing with "Gerty", an all-purpose computer gofer with the voice of Kevin Spacey, letting his hair and beard grow out for weeks at a time, then getting a shave and a haircut to check in with his family and company masters back on Earth via telescreen conferences. Then...something happens. It would be unfair to give too many plot details away, since Moon, with its limited cast and scenic options, needs all the surprises it can hold in reserve. But the movie does turn on the idea that, in the future, technological advances will make work in space routine, grubby, even tedious, and that the corporations on whose behalf this work is performed may regard their intergalactic labor force less as Buck Rogers heroes than as insects whose air supply can easily be cut off if they present any inconveniences. In interviews, Jones has gone out of his way to pay tribute to the movies that plowed this line of speculation in the past, including 2001 but also such later sci-fi films as Silent Running, Alien, and Outland. Back in Kubrick's day, the idea that anything about life in outer space could ever become so routinized that it might become boring was a fresh joke, and even then, there were scenes in 2001 that maybe went beyond the call of duty in showing just how boring things in space could get. (There's a reason that it's not easy to recall, just of the top of your head, what's the second best movie starring either Keir Dullea or Gary Lockwood.) It takes a special kind of genius to depict tedium without seeming tedious, and in fact, tedium is something that Moon has plenty of.

Moon does have the look and feel of a labor of love. Jones shot it in 33 days, on a tight schedule, at England's Shepperton Studios, and he and his team, which includes the production designer Tony Noble, the art director Hideki Arichi, and the cinematographer Gary Shaw, did a hell of a job, especially on the interiors of the base where Rockwell and his robot sidekick make their home. (Outside, the miniatures used for the rovers that tootle across the lunar surface look very much like toys. This aspect of the film is not without its charms, compared the glossy hollowness of so much CGI animation, but it doesn't do much for the movie's attempt to sustain the illusion of where we are.) The look of the movie is hermetic and businesslike; it looks lived-in and smells of stale air. Jones is obviously taken with the idea of what it would be like to spend years of yourself trying to keep yourself amused in this dead, lonely environment without choking to death on the packaged food and fluorescent light. The only problem is that he's perfectly achieved an environment that would be convincingly horrible to live in, and failed to supply much in the way of the distraction from this nightmare that some more characters and knottier plot threads could have provided. As soon as you've had some time to admire the effort that went into creating this world, you're as eager to get the hell away from it as Sam.

Moon is Sam Rockwell's one-man show; he's really the only person in it. It might have been fun to see a flashy actor like the Kevin Spacey of old in this role; he could have really broken a sweat to keep you watching. (Spacey's voice performance as Gerty basically comes down to the inside joke of hearing Spacey, the most untrustworthy actor imaginable, spending the whole movie sounding solicitous. Compared to such precursors as 2001's HAL 9000 and Alien's Mother, Gerty is probably the nicest all-powerful electronic intelligence in the genre's history, but it's hard to put your trust in it, just because it sounds like Verbal Kint.) Rockwell is an amusing, likable actor, but here he doesn't supply enough presence of invention to hold you on his own. A talented comedian, Rockwell was well cast in the Star Trek spoof Galaxy Quest, in which he played an actor who, thrust into an actual sci-fi adventure, rebelled--pettishly, with his voice set at full whine--against his identity as the guy who's added to the regular group of characters so there'll be someone to kill off. When things go badly for Sam Bell, Rockwell turns in limply upon himself, and for long stretches doesn't even have anyone to whine at. And Hunt and his screenwriter, Nathan Parker, are too vague on the details of how the company's three-year plans work; you get the feeling that nobody is ever supposed to make it back to Earth at all, which makes it odd that there is in fact a functional escape pod handy. Moon has details you can drink in and a faint, dreamy emotional ache (amplified by the score by Clint Mansell), but the stuff that the details and atmosphere should be there to serve--the people and the story-- never come into focus. It feels more like the work of a hobbyist than an artist. As a moviemaker, Jones builds a great ship in a bottle.

Screengrab Review: "Terminator Salvation"

Nick Schager — Thu, 21 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Terminator Salvation goes Dark Knight-gloomy to reignite James Cameron’s technophobic sci-fi series, jumping forward to post-Judgment Day 2018 to pick up with rebel “prophet” John Conner (Christian Bale) and the human resistance as they wage war against malevolent sentient Skynet and its army of killer robots. The world is now ash-gray and reverberates with cacophonous explosions and squealing metal, a grim, gritty Road Warrior desert dystopia populated only by Terminators and vagabond humans who huddle around barrel fires listening to the radio broadcasts of Connor, a humorless hero embodied by Bale with such monotonous intensity that one fears the greatest threat to his well-being is a self-produced aneurism. Bale’s vehemence suitably meshes with the apocalyptic landscape in which director McG has situated him. Yet working from a script by John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris that places a far greater premium on land, sea and air skirmishes than on meaningful drama, the actor proves no more compelling than the machines against which his protagonist struggles. If only this were a 2001-style commentary on mankind’s devolution. Terminator Salvation, alas, strives for bleak gravity with misguided fervor, dispatching the very traces of warm, generous humanity that, in Cameron’s first two chapters, served as counterbalancing reminders of the necessity for staving off forthcoming mecha-Armageddon.

Given the dreariness of his tale's military resistance, however, McG makes the exact opposite case, positing a human race barely worth saving. At odds with his resistance leadership – namely Michael Ironside, here drained of nails-tough charisma – Conner is determined to use a special transmission signal to shut down Skynet’s HQ, as well as find Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), the teenager who will someday travel back in time to impregnate his mother and become his father. Conner ceases to exist if Reese dies, a scenario familiar to anyone with passing knowledge of the series. And here, it’s frequently intercut with the saga of Marcus Wright (bland battering ram Sam Worthington), whom we first see on death row in 2003 donating his organs to Helena Bonham Carter’s bald, dying Cyberdyne scientist, and later find emerging from the 2018 primordial muck reborn as…what? One guess is all it takes to deduce the surprise lying in wait. The predictability of this revelation, though, isn’t the bummer it might have been thanks to the more pressing disinterest elicited by the overall story, which is comprised of underlined-meaningful dialogue (“Everybody deserves a second chance”), peripheral hotties with beautiful hair (Moon Bloodgood as the badass female, a preggers Bryce Dallas Howard as the maternal one), and action that’s orchestrated with harsh vigor but – one thrilling semi-truck chase notwithstanding – only mild imagination.

McG nods to his predecessors in ways both strained (managing to shoehorn in, with some difficulty, “I’ll be back”) and amusing (a snippet from Guns N’ Roses’ “You Could Be Mine”), but even less than Jonathan Mostow’s Terminator 3, his franchise entry barely bothers adding something new to the mix, adhering to a strict run-and-gun template at the expense of innovation. That might be pardonable if the film proffered even an ounce of humor, which has always been a secondary but vital series component, whether it was Edward Furlong ordering Ahnold’s emotionless surrogate father figure not to kill in T2, or Kristanna Loken’s red-leather-dominatrix get-up in T3. Terminator Salvation, however, mistakes soberness for seriousness, its gloomy character drama coming off as merely action-figure poses, and its deafening combat, drained of any larger narrative import, registering mainly as impressive CG demo reel material. Where feeling is needed, McG offers only cold steel, such that when Wright finally rebels against his makers with a corny bit of slow-motion window-breaking, and Schwarzenegger shortly thereafter makes a cameo – via face-grafting computer-generated trickery – the sought-after emotional payoff never materializes. In its place, there’s only crashing, crushing indifference.

Separated at Birth: "Wall-E" and "Silent Running"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

The new Pixar film Wall-E might be considered the real blockbuster of the summer movie season so far, if only because most of the other obvious lollapaloozas--Iron Man, Sex and the City, that Harrison Ford thing--opened a month or so before summer officially started a little more than a week ago. A very funny, beautifully designed, unexpectedly affecting (I cried, okay? The walking trash compactor with the googly eyes fell in love and I cried. And I'd do it again.) animated fable, Wall-E deserves all the riches it will earn for its makers, which will probably only pile up faster and faster as people look for something to take the kids to see even as the remaining summer sure-shots, such as the new Batman and Hellboy films, turn weirder and darker. Because the movie carries a pretty explicit satirical message indicting the human race--or Americans, not that there's that much difference--of having selfishly abandoned their stewardship of their own ruined planet, it will also set off a publicity-getting barrage attacks by conservative commentators denouncing it as tree-hugging propaganda, which I'm sure will do it at least as much harm as those attacks on Mr. Incredible and his family for being elitists.

In the meantime, some canny repertory theater programmers would be well advised to cash in on the movie's success by pulling Silent Running out of mothballs, toot sweet. Although Wall-E pays comic homage to 2001 and includes an in-joke for Alien fans by employing Sigourney Weaver as the Mothering voice of a spaceship's computer, its strongest debt, both visually and spiritually, is to the 1972 hippie sci-fi film that marked the directing debut of Douglas Trumball, still best known for his work as a special effects wizard on such films as 2001, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Blade Runner. Both Wall-E and Silent Running posit a time when mankind has completely squandered the natural resources of its home planet, though Silent Running never gives you a look at what Earth itself has come to. Set entirely in space, it stars Bruce Dern as Freeman Lowell, a crew member aboard the Valley Forge, a vessel that has been tending the last surviving gardens in an orbiting greenhouse dome. After Dick Cheney ascends to the presidency, orders come in to blow up the domes and return to Earth. Lowell is the only person who seems troubled by this, and in the end he takes command of the ship and sets off into deep space so that he can tend his garden without being hassled by the man. He has to kill his three fellow human crew members (Ron Rifkin, Cliff Potts, and Jess Vint) in order to pull it off, a detail that the movie doesn't linger on but that gives it a tough edge that makes it genuinely provocative and perhaps saves it from squishiness. Like Edward Abbey's cult novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, it can be taken as an implicit endorsement of eco-terrorism. (It should be noted that Trumball devised an out for himself with the movie's soundtrack, which raises the possibility that Dern's character has been driven insane from having to listen to Joan Baez trilling in his ears.)

Of course, there's always been a glass ceiling on the number of people in the audience who were prepared to root for Bruce Dern even when he's on his best behavior. The real heroes of Silent Running are Lowell's helpers, the drones--pint-sized, waddling robots that he whimsically renames Huey, Dewey, and Louie. The drones seem to grow their own eccentric personalities after Lowell has liberated them from their lives of anonymous drudgery and programmed them to concentrate on tending the garden, and when one of them "dies", it seems to matter much more than the deaths of Lowell's mostly cretinous human companions. To realize his concept for the drones, Trumball actually went low-tech: the robots are suits (weighing some twenty pounds each) that were inhabited by double-amputees. The character of Wall-E, in turn, is unmistakably a drone as re-imagined by Chuck Jones and liberated from live-action gravity. (Although Pixar is still technically an arm of Disney--maybe the only arm that works with any reliability--Wall-E and the accompanying short film Presto, about a stage magician with a hungry rabbit, makes it more clear than ever that if the company's contract is with Uncle Walt, its artists' hearts and souls belong to classic Warner Brothers' Termite Terrace.)

Silent Running isn't the solid knockout entertainment that Wall-E is. Originally produced for Universal's doomed early-seventies "youth division", it is a searching and sometimes fumbling film, but one whose weaknesses are redeemed both by its sweetness and the incongruously razor-blade-chewing presence of its leading man. It is in some ways a movie made for the sake of a central image, and that image--the leafy green forest in the glass dome floating silently in space, carefully preserved and safe where no man can see it, or despoil it--can still give you shivers. (Unfortunately, so can Joan Baez.) It's an oddball personal movie, but Wall-E isn't the first mainstream picture to take inspiration from it: the drones had a strong effect on the look and behavior of Star Wars's R2-D2. In turn, Pixar hired Ben Burtt, the sound designer best known as the "voice" of R2-D2, to provide the same for Wall-E. Whatever else they don't have in common, these movies could all be said to share a core language--a language of clicks and beeps.