Tag: SF

Aniara

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

An elevator to the stratosphere winches passengers up from Earth to the docked spaceship Aniara. The interplanetary passenger liner is effectively a gigantic shuttle taking people to Mars to begin a new life. As the journey can be mentally traumatic, Aniara has an on board facility called Mima, a room / interface into which users plug themselves to relive old memories. Both interface and its human client group are looked after by a facilitator called the Mimaroben (Emelie Jonsson). The clients lie down with their heads resting on something that looks like a neck brace and experience, say, a forest in Spring with a fresh brook running through it, “the Earth as it used to be”.

Early in the journey to Mars, Aniara hits space’s equivalent of an air pocket: the ship tilts and, for a short time, everything on board is total chaos. Then things return to normal. Only, they don’t.

Eventually, the captain announces over the ship’s large screen video, public address system that Aniara swerved to avoid a fatal collision with an asteroid. The passengers and crew are very lucky to be still alive. The manoeuvre also involved jettisoning all the ship’s fuel. Now Aniara is drifting having been knocked off course – not a problem since once it approaches a nearby planet or other celestial body, the crew can use the planet’s gravitational field to slingshot themselves back on course. However as the Mimaroben’s world-weary, astronomer room mate (Anneli Martini) points out to her, the ship isn’t going anywhere near any such planets or bodies. So they’re just drifting through space with little likelihood of either reaching Mars or being rescued.

What follows, unusually and refreshingly for an sci-fi film ostensibly about space travel, is a study of a self-enclosed society in crisis as it moves from a consumerist passenger liner model to something much more prescriptive and co-operative. Food production shifts to algae-based crops which may provide a less pleasant diet but nevertheless ensures all the ship’s the population are adequately and healthily fed.

As more and more people want to use Mima as a form of temporary respite from the ship’s seemingly hopeless predicament, the facility eventually reaches a point where it can no longer cope with the client numbers and breaks under the strain. Accused of shutting down the now inoperable system, the Mimaroben is moved to more menial tasks.

Despite her initiating the occasional unsatisfactory sexual encounter with a male pickup, the Mimaroben’s main romantic interest is to be found in a pilot named Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro) with whom she eventually moves in and forms a household. This works for the two of them, at least for a while, but elsewhere on the ship the social tension becomes more and more strained. Fundamentalist quasi-religious cults arise, their dubious practices involving gathering for mass orgiastic rituals, partly for the purposes of procreation. Meanwhile, the marginalised Mimaroben may have a long term solution to all the unrest: she harbours a dream of building a VR display of sorts outside the ship to show images to the population in order to help them cope with their situation.

It’s never discussed exactly what has befallen planet Earth, but images of conflagration jostle with Mima’s ‘past’ imagery of healthy woodlands and fresh running water suggesting global warming has taken its toll. Crew notwithstanding, the implication is that everyone on the ship possesses sufficient financial resources to buy their way out. When disaster occurs, their bubble of self-preservation is burst and they enter into a sort of social free-fall where anything goes. Perhaps the piece overreaches itself a little with its religious orgies which play out as compelling spectacle even as you half wonder exactly what they’re doing in the narrative. Otherwise, though, it’s impressive as a piece of sci-fi, refreshingly intelligent as a portrait of a society in crisis. Overall, it’s wholly fascinating.

Aniara is out in the UK on Friday, August 30th. On VoD in March. Watch the film trailer below:

Memory: The Origins Of Alien

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

When Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979) first came out, no one knew about its most notorious scene. These days it’s been so referenced in films, television and popular culture that everyone, it seems, does so. If you’ve never actually Alien, treat yourself to watching it before seeing Memory: The Origins Of Alien. Or, indeed, before reading this review.

You’d be forgiven, as this new documentary starts, for thinking you’d wandered into a different film. Spiders on sun-drenched stone surfaces. Footage of Greek temples. But then, visuals clearly inspired by Alien show three Furies waking up on the floor of a spaceship interior and advancing towards camera. The voice-over invokes the myth of Clytemnestra and the Furies, although they are referenced rather than well explained so you’d be advised to click through the above links or google and look up references to them before seeing the film.

Greek temple/Furies bookend notwithstanding, this generally excellent documentary about Alien isn’t quite as integrated a whole as 78/52, director Philippe’s prior, terrific documentary about Alfred Hitchcock, the making of Psycho (1960) and the shooting of the infamous shower scene. However at a pitch level Memory: The Origins Of Alien at least follows a similar model: an examination of a film with a key shocking scene which resonated heavily through popular culture both at the time of its initial release and ever since. In the case of Alien, that would be the so-called chest-burster scene in which John Hurt, seemingly recovering from having an alien entity known after the film came out as a face-hugger clamped to his face with a tube inserted into his mouth, which creature has disappeared, being interrupted when eating a meal with crew mates by his suddenly becoming very ill before an alien entity fatally bursts out of his chest.

Alien differs from Psycho in that while Hitchcock’s film very much conforms to the idea of film director as auteur – there are other collaboators however (despite a specious argument that surfaces from time to time that Saul Bass not Hitch shot the shower scene) the whole thing was Hitch’s vision – Alien is somewhat problematic in that regard, being the product of at least three separate minds: US writer Dan O’Bannon, Swiss artist H.R.Giger and British director Ridley Scott. One can certainly play auteurist games with Alien and talk about it in terms of Scott’s wider body of directorial work, but no serious attempt at understanding the film can fail to examine the contributions of the other two contributors.

Indeed, watching this documentary, if anyone can lay claim to being auteur of Alien, it would be O’Bannon who wrote it and spent $1 000 of his own rather than the production’s money to hire Giger to make sketches and designs on paper before Scott became anywhere near involved. For a while, it was set to be directed by Walter Hill, a director who writes most of his films, but he wasn’t especially enamoured of the project and eventually left to make Southern Comfort (Walter Hill, 1981). Hill’s name remains on all the Alien films as producer. A good half of the current documentary is devoted to O’Bannon, with a little interview material augmented by considerably more interview footage of his knowledgeable wife Diane. There’s a short if informative section on Giger and then, finally, the last half hour or so covers Scott’s involvement and the actual shooting, including the chest-burster sequence.

That makes the whole very much a film of two halves – the O’Bannon half and the Scott half. The O’Bannon half is the better one, packed with fascinating insights which make you want to go back and watch the original film all over again. The brief Giger section is just as good, although there’s not all that much of it. In the Scott section, Scott comes over as the right person to direct the film, in tune with O’Bannon and Giger, but there’s a sense in which Alien is more O’Bannon’s baby than Scott’s. Scott brought Giger back onto the project after Giger had been dropped against O’Bannon’s wishes during the period when Walter Hill was the director.

A number of pundits wax rather too lyrical about Alien and there’s no mention of the embarrassing moment after the chest-bursting in which the little post chest-burst critter hilariously dashes off screen like the Road Runner from Warner Bros. Looney Tunes cartoons. The interviews in 78/52 threw all manner of light on various aspects of Psycho; those in Memory: The Origins Of Alien are a little less critical and a little more adulatory, which doesn’t do the piece any favours.

Yet, flawed as both Alien and this documentary may be, the former remains one of the great filmic SF texts while the latter proves a mostly worthwhile and compelling companion piece. If it doesn’t attempt to cover the series of films that followed – a little more on Scott and Prometheus, in particular, would have been good – it nevertheless throws considerable light onto how Alien got made (and how it very nearly didn’t) and most definitely merits just over an hour an a half of your time.

Memory: The Origins Of Alien is out in the UK on Friday, August 30th, and then on VoD the following Monday, September 2nd.. Watch the film trailer below:

Foreboding (Yocho)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This is not exactly a remake, not exactly a reboot, not exactly a sequel. Most definitely a companion piece, though, and arguably the more effective of the two movies. And apparently, an edit of the director’s five-part series for Japanese satellite station Wowow, although it feels like a (well over two hours long) standalone feature. Kiyoshi Kurosawa revisits Before We Vanish / Sanpo Suru Shinryakusha (2017) for another story about the aliens clad in human bodies who steal concepts from people’s minds by touching a finger to a forehead E.T. (Steven Spielberg, 1982) style prior to a full scale invasion of Earth.

Where previously the director took the material and threw a cornucopia of different elements at it, this time round his efforts feel much more thought through and the resultant film far more consistent overall – a creepy and unsettling sci-fi paranoia thriller grounded in compelling, character-driven human drama.

Kurosawa builds his reinvented narrative round shop floor worker Etsuko (Kaho) whose friend Miyuki is going mad because of the strange presence in her home. Is it a ghost? No, it’s her father but she no longer has any concept of father. Or mother. Or brother and sister. Or family. An alien has removed this concept from her brain.

Her hospital employee husband Tatsuo (Shota Sometani) is behaving oddly too – experiencing pain in his wrist. He has been turned into a guide – a human who tells his alien controller from which humans to steal concepts. His controller is the newly arrived Dr. Matsuka (Masahiro Higashide) about whom Etsuko immediately senses something odd when she meets him.

Tatsuo’s wrist pain comes from the process of turning him into a guide which involved Matsuka’s grasping him by the wrist. The pair have been going around stealing concepts from people’s minds with Tatsuo suggesting the people (picking those he doesn’t particularly like) and Matsuka doing the stealing. As it turns out, they weren’t responsible for what happened to Miyuki. That was another alien and guide.

It further transpires that Etsuko is somehow resistant to the alien concept stealing process, which means the government wants to work with her. Kaho is terrific as the woman trying to hold on to a husband being driven off the rails through a mixture of forces both within and beyond his control, conjured by a suitably agonised performance from Sometani. Higashide gives off just the right degree of unsettling otherworldliness to make you believe he’s an alien walking around in a human body.

It’s not just the playing of the actors that makes this work, though. Kurosawa invests the whole thing with an incredible sense of dread – what if I round the next hospital corridor and that alien is waiting there for me? – and stretches the tension about as near to breaking point as you can imagine. A late scene in an expansive interior is basically a woman with a gun looking for an adversary who we know to be holding an axe in readiness for attack.

Such a scenario must have been executed in countless thrillers with varying degrees of suspense or lack of it. You don’t always know what you’re going to get with Kurosawa, but when he’s good he’s very good indeed – and this is edge of the seat stuff. Hard to believe that his other version of the same story is so average, unfocused and generally all over the place by comparison.

Yocho (Foreboding) plays in the London East Asia Film Festival (LEAFF). Watch the film trailer (Japanese, no subtitles) below:

Before We Vanish (Sanpo Suru Shinryakusha)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This review is of a first viewing. It really doesn’t happen often, but I can imagine liking this more second time round. Before We Vanish is a very strange and unusual movie, from Japan.

Hands take a goldfish from a group in a white bathtub and transfer it into a metal pan. A sailor-suited schoolgirl carries the fish in a bag to another house. Inside the latter, on its floor, the fish struggles to breathe as it lies on the ground out of water. Spattered with blood, the girl (Yuri Tsunematsu) walks happily along the middle of a busy road. As she strolls without a care, a lorry swerving to avoid her crashes headlong into an oncoming car.

Elsewhere, something is wrong with Shinji Kase (Ryuhei Matsuda from The Raid 2, Gareth Evans, 2014). His behaviour alarms his wife Narumi (Masami Nagasawa from Our Little Sister, Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015, playing in LEAFF this Saturday 28/10). For instance, he suddenly vanishes from the house only to be found lying, quite happily, in the tall grass of a nearby field.

“No-one is saying anything,” says journalist Sakurai (Hiroki Hasegawa from Love And Peace, Sion Sono, 2015) who spends much of the time driving around in a van with a satellite dish on the roof. He’s convinced that a big story is about to break and intends to be the one doing it.

The girl hooks up with a boy (Mahiro Takasugi). Both are convinced they are aliens who have taken possession of human bodies. An invasion is coming and three of them have been sent ahead to lay the groundwork. Sakurai is definitely not an alien, but the other two let him tag along. The aliens are offering him an exclusive. Besides, in order to function they need a human to act as their ‘guide’.

Once resident within their human hosts, however, the aliens cannot comprehend many of the concepts that humans take for granted every day of their lives. Such as “individual”, “self”, “family” and “love”. But this issue is easily remedied. An alien finds a human with a clear idea of the concept of, say, “self”, touches them on the forehead with an extended finger (a bizarre nod to E.T., Steven Spielberg, 1982) and retrieves that concept from the victim’s head. The victim collapses immediately after the theft and is never quite the same again.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s meandering narrative mixes these conceits with more traditional sci-fi and action elements (but not that much of them, lest you might think of this as a generic SF picture – it is, but then again, it isn’t). There are battles with automatic weapons where the aliens get shot but hardly seem to notice. At least, until the resultant trauma proves too much for their host body.

One of the very first scenes has a woman pulled in through her own front door by an unseen adversary: towards the end, aircraft fly overhead delivering firebombs recalling similarly gratuitous flying aircraft at the close of the same director’s career-defining J-horror outing Pulse/Kairo (2001). Kurosawa tops this in Before We Vanish with a scene in which red lines drop from a cloud whirlpool above the sea then change course and fly towards the coast as burning fireballs.

The core of the piece is ultimately much less the plot, such as it is, than the characters: the aliens and their guides, the Kase family and the boy girl companions with the reporter tagging along. One minute it’s charming, the next it’s terrifying. One minute you’re watching a comedy, the next a moving romance and the next a sci-fi action movie. Which ought to render the whole thing an unwatchable disaster which can’t make up its mind as to what exactly it is. And yet somehow, in much the way that Pulse/Kairo threw every horror trope its director could envisage at the audience and yet produced something that cohered under a weird internal logic all of its own, the disparate elements of Before We Vanish hang together as a memorable whole. It’s both bonkers and beguiling in equal measure.

Before We Vanish plays in the London East Asia Film Festival. On Blu-ray and digital HD on Monday, February 11th.