So, a couple years ago I got the Black Mirror 2-season series on DVD from Scarecrow and watched them. All of these shows are very, very dark and take a Twilight Zone anthology approach with a bit of Max Headroom (‘twenty minutes into the future’) and then really take a dark, dark turn. Tales from the Darkside – eat your heart out.

At that time, there was one more episode done – ‘White Christmas‘ that I hadn’t watched yet (it came out a few months after the series season 2) – finally saw it today. This has to be among the darkest of all the episodes, with a double-twist ending that hits you right between the eyes. Boom. Not for the easily depressed, or those that believe all these dadburn dystopian shows lately are actually LEADING us to those same dystopias! This is just really messed up stuff.

Anyway, for those who dare, i found it on YT (linked below, with Portuguese subtitles) or you might be able to actually watch it on demand from UK Channel 4.

good luck.

candybowl

I thought I had seen nearly all the dystopian/computer-ruled-future sci-fi movies out there, especially that of the 1970’s (the decade that pretty much invented the genre) but recently came across one I had not – 1970’s Colossus: The Forbin Project.

While this movie is a bit dated given its Cold War theme (the USA builds an invincible computer to run our missile defense system – then we find out the Soviets have done the exact same thing) and the fact that it’s 42+ years old now, it still presents a somewhat different take on the now-common TRON/Terminator/Matrix vision of man handing off control (either by mistake or on purpose) to technology, and then having to fight to regain freedom.

Here, the computer(s) (Colossus from the USA and Guardian from the Soviets) ‘discover’ one another, begin communicating (we never find out what about, save that they progress through simple math into subjects alleged to be beyond human capability within a day or so and never look back) and then start taking over as they gain sentience.  When the humans try to regain control, well, that doesn’t work out so well of course.  Finally Colossus forces the technicians to install a weird-looking speech unit, and issues an edict to the world by the end, that it is ushering in a new era of peace, ‘on my terms’.  Enforced by control over the world’s nuclear arsenal, which is re-aimed at countries still not under its control computer-wise.

The difference to me on this movie was the ‘peace enforcement’ angle – usually all-powerful computers want to enslave or worst case, exterminate all humans once they gain power, right?  Here Colossus hints that he’s going to force Dr Forbin (his creator) to evacuate Crete and build an even bigger, autonomous computer complex there that will control all world communication within 5 years.  To which Dr. Forbin naturally replies – ‘never!’

So on the positive side, the plot is pretty decent, although there could have been a bit more editing of somewhat tedious long shots after the main sets are established – I really liked the opening of Dr. Forbin walking around the huge Colossus complex as it goes online – you really get the impression of scale (it’s an impregnable fortress in the Colorado Rockies). The acting is generally effective, with even a few familiar faces, including Marion Ross, James Hong and William Schallert, although only the latter gets much to do.

What’s also amusing in these movies (and in similar books – helped by hindsight of course) is how the ‘humans never learn’ – they always go creating something magnificent to solve some enormous problem – and it ends up creating far more problems than it solves – and they wonder why? But it must be human nature (or a time-honored/tiresome element of sci-fi plots) to try and try again….

On the negative side – the main computer interface they use is similar to those neon ‘announcement’ lights you see by the side of the highway or in a shop window, backed by typing sounds.  Even 2001’s HAL (from several years earlier) had a much more advanced interface (those all-too-menacing ‘eyes’ located all over the ship) than this.  And that Colossus doesn’t learn to talk until about the last 15 minutes of the movie?  And that we never see or really hear from Guardian (the Soviet computer) at all, save that it effectively becomes Colossus’ partner in world domination by the end – why not have it be a rival instead?  That would be another interesting take – most movies have computers vs. humans – why not computers vs. each other, with us caught in the middle?  While the Matrix addresses that theme a bit, we never really know WHY the computers in that movie decide to help us out, it’s really just assumed that some are ‘good’ and some are ‘bad’…?

Anyway, this was an interesting movie, if you like old-school sci-fi and don’t mind that the Cold War is now over (replaced by the ‘invent-a-war’ nature of the world now, arguably more unstable in some ways)….

Other reviews:
The Chicago Reader
Eccentric Cinema

candybowl

So I watched the movie Monsters this evening. I had never actually heard of this movie, even though it apparently came out in 2010. It was on the DVD rack while I was walking out of the library, so I checked it out. While I don’t think it will be contending for The Academy anytime soon, it’s an interesting movie for a number of reasons.

The plot is pretty simple – NASA detected evidence of alien life several years ago and sent a probe, which returned to Earth but crashed in the general region of the US/Mexican border, and caused an alien infestation. As a result, a big swath of territory – mostly in MX but some across the southwest US – has become the ‘infected zone’ and is walled off on the US side, while heavily bombed and monitored by US and MX troops to attempt to control the aliens. The central character(s) are a young(er) freelance photographer in MX (trying to take closeups of the aliens he can cash in when back in the US) and a young female, possibly a marine biologist (hinted at but never confirmed) – whom he retrieves from a hospital on behalf of her father (his publication employer back in the USA) and together they try to get back to the USA – he to his estranged young son, she to her fiancee so she can get married and resume her life.

So while this story has been done in quite a few variations, not all of them science fiction (e.g. road trip, quest/journey movies, etc.), there are interesting departures from even the recent versions of this theme.

First, while the monsters here largely look like huge, 100-ft+ walking octopi with many extra tentacles, you don’t get much of a sense of them as characters (e.g. unlike District 9) nor much variation (unlike Cloverfield), although they seem to have a stationary incubation form too. The ‘infected zone’ here is much more a quarantine rather than an implied racist encampment as was the case in District 9 (or even the much earlier Alien Nation).

Second, the film goes out of its way, possibly due to a lower budget (not sure) to have long sequences of bleak music and no dialogue between the characters or their Mexican handlers (a variety of boat, truck and caravan drivers/armed guards help transport them north for much of their journey). While sometimes this gets a bit repetitive – other times it provides moments of reflection and identification with the main characters – what would YOU do in such a situation? How would the world deal with such an ‘infected zone’ if it actually existed? Would the Mexican govt. tolerate frequent American jet-bombing raids over their country in the name of killing aliens? The main two characters discuss at least some of this with their handlers around the campfire one night, and again, while not much dialogue there either – it still provokes thought for them and the viewer – the mexican perspective is quite different.

The end sequence with the aliens is also different than most such movies (certainly way different than Cloverfield’s end and any Godzilla/kaiju movie I’ve ever seen) but it doesn’t explain much, either. It leaves the interpretation up to the viewer – but at least a few of those have to be on the optimistic side?

The effects are on balance pretty good but I suspect they kept alien activity to a minimum to save on money. Nearly all the movie seems to have been shot on location and this is pretty effective – I have to believe that the burned out neighborhoods they show in the infected zone had to have been (still) leftover, abandoned housing from Katrina or similar. Certainly much of the journey would not have lent itself to special effects, although it’s not clear whether they are really in Latin America or not. There is at least a decent amount of hand-held camera work, again reminiscent of Cloverfield, but not nearly as frantic in most cases.

What’s also interesting is that the various Mexican characters – almost none of which have names or many scenes, they usually function to keep the plot rolling forward in most cases – seem to take the situation in their same ‘live life as it comes’ way they always have. Even as the Americans proceed deeper and deeper into the infected zone, there are still people living there and trying to survive, same as always. A veiled commentary on the US? Perhaps….

Ultimately, the overall impression is one of a world even more paranoid and unstable than the one we already live in – not unlike that of 28 Days Later or Children of Men, especially the latter’s very bleak, dystopian view of the future world.

Anyway, if you like such movies, you may like this one as a quick view – it’s only 90 min. or so long.

candybowl