Reviews
Star Trek: Voyager: The Killing Game (1998)
Beautiful to look at; nonsensical plot
This episode of Star Trek: Voyager throws us straight in media res, disorienting and confusing us, but that's fairly common for a science-fiction program. We suspend our judgment until we find out what's going on, but it's explained only gradually, and then unsatisfyingly.
The Hirogen, an alien hunter species the USS Voyager has encountered recently, have taken over the Voyager. We don't see this battle, nor do we see flashbacks to it, nor is it even described. They then discovered the Voyager's holodeck technology, and the Hirogen leader realized its potential.
You see, the Hirogen are hunters. They usually hunt in small groups, just a few of them aboard a starship, locating some prey target, usually an intelligent being, and pursuing them until they're able to kill them and take trophies. Occasionally, such as this time, several Hirogen ships band together to take down something larger, such as the Voyager, apparently. But they haven't always lived like this. They used to have a civilization, until their self-imposed scattering throughout space isolated them into small groups. The leader thinks that if his people could use the Voyager's holodecks to satisfy their hunting instinct, allowing them to hunt simulated prey in scenarios taken from the vast computer databanks, they could live together in communities and have a civilization again. This kind of makes sense.
His second-in-command disagrees with this plan, because he likes the way things have been his entire life, but he's going along with his leader because he's the leader. This also makes sense.
What they did next doesn't make sense: they put neural implants into several members of the Voyager crew (our main cast members) that interact with the holodecks and make them think they're actually the characters whose roles they're playing. Where they got these neural implants is unclear - apparently from the Voyager, but how they knew the Voyager had these implants and what motivated the Hirogen to look for them are undescribed. Also undescribed is the reason behind using them at all. The Hirogen leader's plan doesn't require that there be any actual prey, or indeed any real participants other than the Hirogen themselves, and they wouldn't be using neural implants. This makes no sense.
The Hirogen expand the holodecks aboard the Voyager, essentially making the ship one large holodeck, and turn off the safety settings, so real people can in fact be injured and die during simulations. And they start experimenting with the neural-implanted crew, sticking them into one scenario after another taken from the databanks, for reasons that are never adequately explained.
The Hirogen dig through the historical archives in Voyager's computers and find some data about World War II, deciding for some reason that it would be a great scenario to play out. Our main cast members now all think they're in a French town that's been invaded by Nazis - some are resistance members, some are American soldiers trying to drive the Nazis out of the town. The Hirogen are in the scenario as Nazis, and there are of course many hologram Nazis, Allied soldiers, and civilians. But we can easily see the Hirogen as themselves, Tuvok as a Vulcan, Seven of Nine as a Borg, B'Ellana as a half-Klingon, etc. The holograms don't notice that they aren't human, and the neural-implanted real crew members don't notice that they don't fit into the scenario either. What's happening makes sense; why the Hirogen are doing it doesn't. It doesn't satisfy their hunter-prey instincts, and it doesn't move the leader's plan forward either.
The entire two-part episode, unusual in that both episodes were originally aired back-to-back, seems to have been made just because the producers wanted to do a bunch of cool stuff on screen. There isn't any high science-fiction concept here. They wanted to blow up a building and show Klingons fighting Nazis when the barriers between holodecks come down. Everything looks great, and the actors do a fine job with the mess of a script they were given. But the writers just never really had any idea why any of this was happening. They were just told to make it happen, so they did.
This is not to say that there aren't some fine moments. The comedic moments when Neelix, having realized that he isn't actually a Klingon, has to lead the Klingons to fight the Nazis by attempting to act Klingonlike, are quite funny, but all too brief. The Doctor is similarly amusing as he encourages Neelix - kind of. We have the privilege of hearing Jeri Ryan sing. And one of the holographic Nazi officers, a true believer in the Third Reich cause, gives a bone-chilling speech that highlights the true evil of Nazism while simultaneously encouraging the #2 Hirogen to mutiny against his leader.
In the end, there is little resolution to all of this. Of course the Voyager crew take their ship back, or there wouldn't be more episodes. Janeway had made a deal with the Hirogen leader: leave Voyager, and she'd give him the holodeck technology he needed to carry out his plan. But the leader was killed by his second-in-command, who in turn was killed by Janeway, so the rest of the Hirogen don't even know whether they want this holodeck gizmo. Will they use it, as their leader originally intended? We don't know; they take it and go away. They return in a later season to answer that question, but here in this episode we don't find out.
As I said, this episode contains some amazing scenes, great acting, strange scenarios, and so forth, but the writers are forgetting that the plot must come first, and it must make sense; you can't just string together a bunch of scenes and call it a story. They're also forgetting the cardinal rule that having Nazis on Star Trek always goes badly. We're also suspending our disbelief yet again that Starfleet hasn't chucked the entire idea of holodecks into a star by now, considering that in every single episode featuring the thing, the holodeck somehow goes horribly wrong.
It's clear that they had about one episode worth of material but stretched it out into two in order to justify the expense of all the sets and costumes they had to bring in for this one. In terms of the overall arc of the series, we were expecting there to be some sort of final confrontation with the Hirogen, who had been causing Voyager problems in recent episodes, but we didn't expect it to happen like this - defeating the Voyager and its crew in a battle we never get to see, then turning it into a giant spacegoing LARP. I was vastly unsatisfied by this episode, but not as badly so as with "Year of Hell," which made me stop watching Voyager when it was on the air.
Ring of Fire (2000)
A black and white morality play set in the Old Surreal West
In medieval Europe, theater companies put on "morality plays," in which a protagonist encountered personifications of various concepts, showing the protagonist's descent into temptation, his repentance, and finally his redemption. Some might be more familiar with John Bunyan's _The Pilgrim's Progress_ (1678), which is basically a morality play in book form. This film, too, is basically a morality play, with two protagonists, showing one's descent into temptation and final redemption, and the other's initial success but ultimate destruction.
Our two protagonists are cowboys, whom I will call Black Hat and White Hat (the film itself gives them no names); they appear together right at the beginning of the film. Black Hat is very sure of himself and worldly-wise, fast and accurate with his gun. White Hat, on the other hand, is not so sure of himself or what to do -- he seems to see Black Hat as a role model, but he emulates Black Hat's cowboy movements only clumsily and is a terrible shot.
With the exception of the sky, the film is entirely drawn in black and white: either in black lines on a white background or vice versa. Any shading or gray tones are accomplished by means of hatching with thin lines. This use of only two tones is deliberate and important; a lot can be seen by paying careful attention when something is black or white in this film. Empty bottles are black, while full bottles and the water in them are white. White is the color of energy, fullness, giving, beauty, purity and love. Black is the color of exhaustion, emptiness, taking, lust, depravity and sex (or at least loveless sex). The sky sometimes uses shades of gray, but terrestrial objects and characters are limited to black and white.
Black Hat and White Hat are in the desert when the film opens, and we are amply shown that Black Hat isn't very nice to White Hat, but White Hat hangs around him and tries to emulate him anyway. Black Hat then takes him into town, probably to the red-light district, where the scenery grows darker and darker around them and is full of sexually suggestive and borderline pornographic imagery. You can gasp or giggle at the imagery, or you can do the mature thing and realize that, hey, there's a film here, one with a plot and characters.
At the heart of the darkness is the establishment of a woman in a black dress, whom I will be calling the Woman in Black. She stands waiting outside her bordello in front of a fire pit on the ground. She is seemingly drawn in white underneath her black hair, lipstick and dress, but she wears these black items like armor and never removes them. Nobody gets in to see the Woman in Black unless he can toss a coin in the air and shoot a hole through the center of it with his gun. She then catches it on her finger like a ring, blows out her fire, and hops inside her bordello. If you miss, the coin bounces off her finger and lands in the fire, burning up. This is the only reason I can think of why this film's title is "Ring of Fire." White Hat doesn't have either the money or the skill, apparently, but Black Hat has both, and he gets in. But although he's drawn to it by her allure, White Hat doesn't like it here and runs away to a place where things are lighter, and there he meets the fourth and final main character of the film.
He finds himself on top of a hill, where there is a wooden bathtub and a surrealistically nude woman holding a bucket standing next to it, her hair seemingly made of constantly flowing water that always flows out of the frame -- as the narration says, "beauty from somewhere way beyond." The sky is almost completely white here, and the woman, whom I am going to call the Water Woman, is also entirely white. In fact, when White Hat sits down in the bathtub (fully clothed), and she pours water over him with her bucket, his hat and clothes seem to vanish where the water flows, and he seems to be in a state of bliss. Here is the most beauty and purity that we ever see in the film.
Things go downhill from there, though -- she and Black Hat meet, and White Hat tries to save her from him but is too inept and easily distracted to rescue her, and she doesn't realize the danger, until it's too late for White Hat to do anything but help her heal and recover. But Black Hat's lust and greed end up destroying him, as everybody rejects him and he ends up in despair, totally alone.
This film tears down the male "cowboy" role model put forth by society and the media, showing it to be hollow and both destructive and self-destructive at its core. But it doesn't do much for female role models, perpetuating almost perfectly the false "madonna/whore" dichotomy that society presents to females. However, because the two cowboys are present from the very beginning, the film is really about them. It's a morality play in which Black Hat's insatiable greed and emptiness leads to his destruction at the hands of Lust and Vice, and in which White Hat's uncertainty and ineptitude lead him into temptation, preventing him from preserving Purity and Beauty, but in the end his good will leads to his redemption.
Obviously I found this film very thought-provoking. Perhaps you will find other symbolism in it. It was a surreal experience, and it took some time to make sense out of anything I was seeing. But it is currently playing occasionally on the Independent Film Channel, so if you look you might catch it there and see what you think of it.
Legion (2010)
This isn't the movie you think it is -- and that's a good thing
This movie was apparently marketed as some kind of apocalyptic action film. If you go into it expecting such a thing, you will be disappointed. But I tend to judge a movie by what the makers were trying to do, and I think Stewart is trying to tell a "Lifeboat" type story here -- yes, the whole angels vs. humans thing is going on, and that's not spoiling anything if you've seen the trailers, but the focus is on the characters trying to survive it.
And those characters are well written and acted. Focus on them, and this film is a good character-driven action drama with an apocalyptic horror backdrop. Focus on the supernatural action movie you imagine this is, and you won't enjoy it. It's as simple as that.
I liked the movie a lot once I figured out what kind of movie it was. The only problem I have with it is the way it ended. Without spoiling it, it left things open for a sequel -- way too open, without really concluding or explaining anything. The conflict is ended, and it seems unlikely that it will happen again, but more questions are raised than answered about why this happened, and the future of the world is uncertain. The good news is that since the film is really about the characters, and since the characters' individual plot lines seem to have been resolved, one way or another, I'm not left unsatisfied by the movie on that level.
And I totally agree with other reviewers that scenes that are supposed to surprise the audience shouldn't be shown in the trailer -- I really wish they wouldn't do that. The trailer should give you some idea what a movie's about, and maybe show some cool scenes, but it should NOT spoil the movie's surprises, and _Legion_'s trailer spoiled it.
The Village (2004)
Fairy tale or origin story?
I kept thinking while watching "The Village" that M. Night Shyamalan had obviously been reading "Little Red Riding Hood" late one night and decided to look for a way to make it scary again. One of the theories about fairy tales like Red Riding Hood is that they were once used as a means of social control -- "go into the forest and the Wolf will get you." I went into this wondering whether this was a werewolf movie, but the Big Bad Wolf was something quite different here.
In truth the whole movie exists to support the final act: Red Riding Hood's journey into the forest. The rules of this village are so hard and fast, and the elders support them so adamantly, that a truly exceptional situation has to occur before anyone will be allowed to bend them; the tension has to build to unheard-of proportions before anybody cracks. And the final act is worth it: Ivy (Howard) is deserted by her frightened erstwhile comrades, leaving her to face her fear alone in a long, tense, dialogueless sequence. Howard's acting talent is really showcased here.
Shyamalan seems to have a penchant for writing superhero origin stories; "The Sixth Sense" clearly sets the boy up for future adventures as a psychic ghost investigator, and although I have not seen "Unbreakable" I understand it is also basically the origin of a superhero. It is likely that Ivy too will be revered as a superhero in her village after things settle down again, and although she knows the truth, it is not clear that she will tell anyone else about it, at least until she becomes an elder herself and is put in charge of maintaining the social order.
I was not disappointed by this movie in general. It was a tale well told in a small world well put together. But there were two small disappointments for me: first, it was not entirely clear at first that this was Ivy's story.
Lucius (Phoenix) is strongly featured from the start, but once we are into the final stretch, well, to avoid spoiling it, Phoenix has no further lines, and Ivy is suddenly thrust to the fore to make her journey. Also, after all the anticipation that there is something supernatural happening here, there is nothing. Nothing beyond the natural. Then there were those sudden gratuitous shots upward toward the treetops during the chase sequences in the last act, as if Shyamalan thought viewers might feel deprived of commercial breaks, or was perhaps worried about the plot resolving too quickly. The score seemed not to quite fill the sonic gaps during the wordless chase sequences late in the movie; I found myself thinking of things the composer could have done to make the music more emotionally effective.
The characters were clearly drawn: even minor characters had their recognizable personality traits to make them memorable. Romance between Alice (Weaver) and Edward (Hurt) seems to be slowly developing, but their story is not what we're focusing on in this film. We're given the impression that something could develop later, and that's fine, because the film isn't really about them. And then there's Christoph Crane, always worried about his shirt getting wrinkled.
"The Village," like "Signs" before it, has a claustrophobic intensity; the characters are thrown into a small crucible, and pressure is applied to them to see what they will do, reminiscent of "Lifeboat." The difference is that some of the characters have lived inside this crucible all their lives, and don't know what it's like to live outside it -- indeed, to them the outside seems more frightening than the crucible itself. I would also compare this movie to "The Navigator" (1988), where a group of medieval villagers seeking a cure to the plague find themselves in the modern world, which to them is as alien as another planet would be to us.
"The Village" is about characters and tension, stories and their power, boundaries and whether they really keep us safe. Do not see it for the Shyamalan surprise plot twists. See it if you like to see modern adaptations of fairy tales, especially developed in the direction of suspense and horror. This is a werewolf movie without any werewolves.
The Undertaker and His Pals (1966)
Uneven attempt at black comedy
Take one part 1960s soft-porn, one part 1960s horror, and one part Scooby Doo, stir unevenly, and you get "The Undertaker and His Pals." A bald, extremely gay funeral-home director has a deal with the psychotic waiter and equally psychotic cook at a greasy spoon -- no, really, it's called the Greasy Spoon Café -- that has something for everybody. The cook gets to dissect people, sometimes while they're still alive, to further his medical career, which he pursues without benefit of education. The undertaker gets the funeral business, for which he overcharges the bereaved. And the waiter -- no, I guess he's just psychotic. He gets to make up clever phrases to write on the "Daily Special" chalkboard. But anyway, this plan of theirs apparently requires them to dress up in biker helmets and leather jackets, complete with skull insignia, go to the apartments of young, single women whose addresses they pick at random out of the phone book, and kill them, sometimes after beating their knickknacks senseless with chains. The police detective and the P.I. don't really solve the case, unless you count by accident, making one wonder why they're even in this movie.
The film suffers from a sort of cinematic Tourette's syndrome, suddenly interrupting long strings of dreary drama and ho-hum horror with an out-of-place slapstick comedy sequence that is funny only unintentionally. The entire score is played by a small jazz combo; sometimes an entire scene will be scored by a lone sax or trombone noodling around -- perhaps everyone else fell asleep. At any rate, the score doesn't seem to pay any attention to the movie except when a woman is taking off her clothes (to reveal that she has more clothes on underneath -- yes, it's the SQUARE 1960s). To enjoy this movie, be prepared not to take anything seriously, not even the comedy.
Laugh at the fact that this somehow got made. "Oh, YOU'LL pay."
Wizards (1977)
A fantasy art tribute and a cult classic
I first saw "Wizards" when I was 10, and it quickly became one of my favorite movies. I rediscovered it at college, when it was shown at a movie night at my dorm. "Wizards" had quietly become a cult classic. In "Wizards," Ralph Bakshi of "Fritz the Cat" and "Lord of the Rings" fame pays tribute to the fantasy and alternative-comic art of artists like Vaughn Bode and Frank Frazetta (listen carefully to one of Avatar's incantations). With its violent war scenes and themes of mistrust, despair, and betrayal, "Wizards" is also a rarity, especially for the 1970s: an American animated feature that is not targeted at children.