Sci-fi and Fantasy Movies and Series Reviews, Part 41

Noah (2014)

The only righteous man on Earth hears from the Creator that He’ll be sending some destruction his way, but there’s something he can do about it.

This movie didn’t do well for two reasons. One, because folks wanted The Passion of the Christ, but for Noah, but there was extra-Biblical stuff in there that rankled some religious sensibilities. I don’t know how filling in the gaps of history could be avoided when you make a 150 minute movie from a few chapters of source material, depicting a very different epoch in Earth’s history. This is an important concept to understand, so I will be coming back to it.

The second reason Noah bombed was because it hinted at something very appealing to Lord of the Rings fans, but didn’t deliver because LoTR people won’t accept any imitations. Director Darren Aronofsky tried mighty hard to serve the fantastical part up. My take on this doesn’t have to do with the enjoyability of the movie itself but the practical aspects of historical fiction set in ancient times. I found most of it was plausible and interesting at the very least. There were a few bad aspects, but the bad aspects were really bad and it tended to overshadow the positive parts for me.

Most of what you’ll read presumes the reality of the supernatural domain. If you reject that outright, most of this will be nonsense and may actually be morally repulsive to you. I’m fine if most people reading this has that reaction, but this is your warning.

Here’s a list format, because that’s what I feel like doing for this review. First the bad:

1. There was no cloud canopy before the flood. There was a scene right in the beginning that specifically makes this known, where Noah looks up after the flower blooms and behold: the sky. Genesis suggests that the heavy layer of “cloud” or something over the entire Earth from Adam and Eve’s time still persisted up to Noah, and it’s likely where part of the flood deluge came from. Scripture is not terribly detailed because that’s not what God and the ancient Hebrews considered important to spell out. At least, when the flood happens there’s a very obvious shot of the Earth, from space, and it was basically covered in hurricanes.

2. The Watchers. You’ll notice the Watchers are in the negative list, but also the positive list below. There are reasons for this. The Watchers themselves were from the non-canonical Book of Enoch, which proposes some ideas God didn’t see fit to include with scripture. Their depiction (I don’t have any direct quotes) was that they were fallen and were essentially “forgotten” about by God, which is not how God treats disgraced divine beings. Satan and his crew, and any other beings you might propose, don’t oppose God, at least in the sense as we moderns traditionally think of them in opposition. They literally can’t fight God. Any fallen creature is still very much in service to God, but in a different, much less dignified fashion; they still take orders and are “hedged in” by whatever boundaries God puts on them. This includes humans, too. We are all involved with the production—no one leaves the theater because the theater is everywhere. God is the starring role, but the question is: are you in the cast or the production crew, or are you going to be the guy that sweep up the popcorn and spray down the hobo piss when the performance ends? I would expect any fallen divine being tied to the Earth the way the Watchers were to still give deference to God in some manner. There was also an implication that you could be saved by dying in battle, which is much more of European pagan idea than something revealed in scripture.

3. Shem and Ila banging it out. We don’t know what kind of marriage ceremony existed pre-flood, but there obviously was some kind of formality. Ceremony exists as long as humans are present. Noah likely wouldn’t have taken too kindly to his son randomly shagging his girlfriend. Well, he didn’t take it too kindly in the movie, but it was for different reasons.

4. Noah not killing his grandchildren. This was the killer (haha) for me, and it could’ve easily been fixed in the narrative. In the movie, God told Noah to kill Shem and Ila’s twin daughters because repopulating the Earth was not something He had in mind, and Noah intended to stick to that after communing with God. At least, in Noah’s mind—in reality, God could have said this to Noah at the time as a means of testing him (He does stuff like that; more on this in a bit), to see if he would stick to the plan. Noah openly disobeyed Him, which is completely out of character given the references in scripture to Noah’s righteousness. Sorry, pro-lifers! As much as we wouldn’t have liked it, the real Noah would’ve cut those two CGI bastards to ribbons if God told him to.

All hope is not lost. Behold! I am Aranofsky’s script’s savior come. I would keep the scene in which God tells Noah to slice and dice the two CGI babies, because “as long as there is no land there are to be no more humans.” Mankind—because of his corruption, violence, and his heart’s constant inclination towards evil‐does not deserve the life He had in mind, so He covered everything in water and killed everyone. God, however, saved Noah and co. as final witnesses of His judgment, but they are ultimately doomed to live out the rest of their lives floating aimlessly on the ark. So upon God’s further orders, Noah goes to hack away at the CGI babies when…what’s this? His dove has returned with a tree branch in its beak. Land has appeared! Noah proved himself righteous again, and at the same time God’s giving mankind a second chance. The CGI babies can live! This favorable “gotcha” from God has precedent in scripture with the Abraham and Isaac narrative in Genesis 22.

Now for the good stuff:

1. The general setting. As stated, there’s plenty we don’t know about what it was like in antediluvian times, and there’s no reason to think life was exactly the same as the current iteration of civilization. In Noah, Cain and his descendants were depicted as industrializing the whole face of the Earth, resulting in some advanced technology that we never got to see. No trees mean no wood, so there was the zohar, an fictional incendiary substance, to provide fire and dramatic effect.

2. Noah’s characterization. He wasn’t the Sunday school Noah, clean and smiling as the animals trot, pairs astride, into the ark (which in the movie was more accurately depicted as a massive rectangle of stitched-together logs and not simple a wooden boat). A man living with his family at the edges of an insane world would only play nice with his family, which he does, and act a wild dog with everyone else. Noah mortally injured a man among a trio of hunters who kill animals for sport—remember Noah’s environment: being around people was not a good experience—and often refers to the Creator as his reasons for acting.

3. The Watchers. Yes, they were from the Book of Enoch, but that doesn’t necessarily mean something to similar the Watchers didn’t exist. It, at least, is very possible. Whatever we have in the Bible about pre-Noah is what God wanted known, but again, we have to assume there’s plenty of things that are lost to history, and that includes some fantastical beings. When God gets involved with human matters, we should expect things to get a little weird. Genesis 6:4 is a passing mention but there’s a ton of unwritten backstory behind these Nephilim and “men of renown” into which we have insight. Granted, Samsara and his Watcher gang were there more for the battle scenes as the flood is starting up, and although the Watchers were fallen angels, they weren’t part of the fallen ones that went with Lucifer. Theirs was a different offense, and I can’t say in what ways God could provide a path to redemption to non-human beings. The Bible constantly presents the supernatural domain of existence as a place of sorts that we cannot understand with our minds; it’s maybe more sensed and experienced, when God grants such an experience and visions to humans, rather than phenomena that could be captured with the tools of reason and language.

Here’s a video of the aforementioned antediluvian clear sky, wild dog hunting, and the zohar ignition. It’s in Tamil, so good luck understanding the dialogue beyond “Shem” and “Ham.”

Suzume

A high school girl helps a mysterious man/chair (just go with it) who closes doors across Japan to prevent disasters from happening.

The latest from Makoto Shinkai is getting highly rated—present tense because the movie is still sort of in theaters in the U.S. and elsewhere—by both critics and normal cinema-goers. Think of this as a more mature Child of Kamiari Month.

Probably the worst thing you could say about Suzume is that the plot is too similar to a lot of Shinkai’s previous films. I don’t see it as a bad thing; writers, both books and movies, persist in repeating themselves, looking for a better way to tell the same story they have going on in their head. Personally, I dislike that the movie’s title is merely the protagonist’s name and didn’t relate to her character or the story at all. “Suzume” means “sparrow” in Japanese, and there’s nothing about sparrows in the movie. There is the Japanese fable of the tongue-cut sparrow, “Shita-kiri Suzume,” but I can’t really find any easy parallels with the film. Shinkai’s more recent films also have unmemorable or awkward titles: Weathering With You, Your Name, The Garden of Words. Eh. Compare that with his earlier titles, like 5 Centimeters Per Second, The Place Promised in Our Early Days, The Children Who Chase Lost Voices, or Voices of a Distant Star…all movies, coincidentally, I prefer over his later offerings.

There’s a lot of action and some spectacle, especially when Suzume and Souta learn to address the disasters. I actually think the action scenes work against Shinkai, because he is known for his beautiful background work, where sunny (or moonlit) nature scenes, settled-in living spaces, and precipitation can create some great moods. That sort of thing is sacrificed when you have a lot of fast-paced foreground and character movement.

1984 (1984)

In a totalitarian, militaristic nation—where information, language, and media are tightly controlled and manipulated—a worker in the Ministry of Truth begins to question the system.

So far as I can tell, this was pretty faithful to the book, which was good one despite some parts I thought were a little too meandering. Special props go to the set design (always wanted to use that pun), costuming, and sound. The constant drone in a lot of the scenes of statistics and news about the “front” over that damn intercom impress upon the audience that Winston’s environments are disaster zones. Some places, like inside the Ministry of Truth, and all the devices and technology you see look one day away from breaking down. The movie doesn’t look 40 years old, owing much of this to the non-fashionable clothing and plain haircuts. It feels intentionally timeless. Yeah, it feels a bit vulgar to point out and emphasize the mise en scène in a book-based movie about totalitarianism, but if they didn’t do it right 1984 would’ve appeared dated (heh) not long after it was released.

Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion

An undercover prince, armed with a power to control minds, leads a revolt against the worldwide empire of Britannia.

I investigated this because of all the talk and praise this series received, but I didn’t find it compelling enough after the three episode try-on. The first episode was a complete turn-off, but that’s because I think there’s an adjustment period you go through if you’re not accustomed to, say, the studio’s animation style, or the genre itself. The English voice talent was horribly abused like rental cars; the cast itself was established and talented in themselves, but the dialogue and direction were too much soaked in melodrama. All the dialogue-heavy scenes seemed to be cut short a half minute. Lots of outrageous political oppression p0rn. Every government operation was a false flag, so after a season of all that you have to wonder how the writers keep track of who knows what really happened and who merely knows the official story.

A minor thing, but the opening for the first season felt a lot like Eureka 7‘s first opening. At first blush because they both use a song from the band FLOW, but then there’s the sweet mecha action. I like Eureka 7‘s more because mechs surfing on green energy waves and fighting in the sky sound a little better to me than military mechs on…rollerblades (lol). And Eureka 7‘s opening doesn’t end with the gross praying mantis-looks of the protagonist breaking the fourth wall with his side eye.

The idea that a upper-class teenager would also be an expert battle field strategist with state-of-the-art mechs he’s never piloted before is really what made me decide not to go further. That offense came to pass in the second episode, but I soldiered on through the third episode. I will say it did win me over a bit at the end of that third episode because of the cliff hanger and from getting over the aforementioned adjustment period. Not enough of me was won over, though, so I had to end it there.

The Vision of Escaflowne

An ordinary high school girl is teleported to the Mystic Moon, where she is caught up in a multi-kingdom mech war.

As stated in a previous Wednesday Humpday Midday Music post, this series should’ve been an unwieldly mess because of all the genres stuffed into it. It somehow worked. What also made it great were the characters: you marvel with Hitomi as she discovers new lands, you feel Von’s frustration and determination along with him, Lord Folken’s stoicism with coming to terms with his dashed idealism. There’s other things to help bolster it all, like the political intrigue and Yoko Kano’s symphonic soundtrack. Maybe I just liked this a lot for an unknown reason and I’m attributing my mere preferences to concrete things. Regardless, like the movie version, in which Hitomi has a very different characterization, this series has a lot of replay value for me.

Tales from Earthsea

A wayward prince, a wizard, an ex-priestess, and a freed slave girl contend with an evil wizard.

Despite the title, this is only one story, but like any competent film, multiple tales are told simultaneously so I guess the title isn’t terribly misleading? Even before I knew this was set in an already-established fictional universe, it did feel to me like some backstory was missing. This was partially because of the dragon thing in the beginning, and you didn’t hear or see anything about them until the very end, so you end up thinking through most of the movie that those dragons were a part of something you should’ve already been privy to. It’s a minor thing but it was a little distracting.

This was Hiyao Miyazaki’s son’s, Goro, directorial debut, so you know everyone expecting him to be be as good as Dad and his Studio Ghibli offerings. Of course it wasn’t, so he had that working against him, which may color people’s opinion of the the whole thing.

Even though I enjoyed the scenes that took place on the farm, it did feel like there was a little too much runtime spent on all of that. In thinking about how I might go about fixing that if I were the writer, I ended up fixing a few other small things in the plot that I thought worked against overall story immersion. Time for another list.

1. Don’t reveal Arren killed the king until much later. Earthsea suffers from a similar problem seen in The Running Man, but here’s we know the protag is guilty instead of innocent. I would still have had Arren be away from the palace as it was here, and still have everyone wonder what happened to him afterwards, instead of just in the beginning. He could use the excuse that he heard of his father’s death while he was away and made concocted a story that he was ambushed by the (imaginary) killer on his way back to the palace. The ambush killed his retinue, he barely escaped, etc. That way, along with us knowing about Arren’s rage mode he goes into sometimes, we’d be wondering the whole time if he actually did it or not when he’s accused of it. I’d have to figure something out with his father’s sword, though, and how the king was killed. I find it hard to believe any king would be by himself, with zero protection nearby at the ready, at any time.

2. Have Sparrowhawk know Arren killed the king. A bit of a minor fix, but it would bolster Sparrowhawk’s character and explain why Sparrowhawk wanted Arren to travel with him. As the story is in the movie, there’s really no reason for Sparrowhawk to protect Arren. I suppose Sparrowhawk just wants to be a good guy and help Arren out, but the whole thing would be more meaningful if Sparrowhawk knows Arren did it but decided to protect him anyways, also knowing the king’s folks are looking for him. This will set both Sparrowhawk and Arren up for some big decisions, alongside the fellow I’m inserting in #3.

3. Arren needs to be chased by someone investigating the murder. Where in the world were the king’s security after his murder? The queen, or the king’s advisors, etc., would’ve had the entire continent crawling with whatever the Medieval equivalent of homicide investigators were. Tons of people everywhere would be looking for Arren nonstop even if he wasn’t a suspect, for his safety. We saw no one looking for anyone. I would’ve had another character, maybe some high-ranking retainer, lead the search for the murderer. He’s loyal to the king, obviously, but he’s also close to Arren, so when he slowly starts to suspect Arren of the murder as his investigation and travel lead him, he’ll have some tough decisions to make when he finally finds him. With this retainer and whatever troops he has with him, I can provide a bigger showdown with Cob at the end, and the retainer can join the Arren and the deuterotags in fighting the real villain. Lots of fertile ground for scenes showing all of this, and it could cut down the lengthy time the narrative spends on the farm.

4. Cut the whole slave thing. I get it: modern audiences need slavery (all kinds) vilified by the protagonist. The slavemaster needs to be a huge dickhead, and he almost always needs to embody almost always the Kunta Kinte/Roots version of slavermastering. It’s up there with cartoonishly evil and incompetent Nazi caitiff characterization. I wanted to figure out how to incorporate slavery into the story in a different manner, but moderns would blow their top with outrage for even hinting that maybe slavery wasn’t always the pure hell on Earth we’ve come to regard it as. I actually think I did decent job of that already but no one reads my books, so they can’t get outraged if they don’t know about it. Anyways, there was an easy solution for getting Theru rescued in the movie itself: I would’ve had her in the Hort Town slum area, where the drug dealer tries to sell her his junk instead of trying to sell it to Arren. It would make sense that she’d just appear in the town, without a protector or family after transforming from dragonhood, and the drug dealer would try to take advantage. The whole scene with the dealer and the junkies in the alleyway was a little overwrought to begin with.

Trigun: Stampede

A drunk veteran journalist and his protégé follow a pacifist gunslinger as he fights his twin brother on the desert planet of Noman’s Land.

I almost bailed out after three episodes, but duty stayed my Roku remote hand. Compared with the original series, Stampede was a travesty, while as a standalone series it’s fairly average. Everything that made the original great was sucked out. Instead of a goofy, clever, seemingly-harmless vagrant, Vash spends most of his screen time being desperate, scared, or silently morose. Stampede‘s Vash doesn’t figure out how to solve the issue at hand without violence (usually), he uses his gun often, regrets doing it, then runs away and whines to the other characters if they try to actually stop the bad guy. The fun odd couple dynamic of the stern and determined Meryl and the slightly airheaded but strangely perceptive Millie, is replaced with the boring odd couple dynamic of the “it’s rough out here, kid” grumbly wisdom of Roberto de Niro (lol) and the idealism of the newbie Meryl.

Nicholas D. Wolfwood is mostly the same but a little more tame than the pugnacious original. His cover story in Stampede is that he’s a wandering undertaker, which makes no sense and none of the other characters question it. A wandering priest makes much more sense, but claiming to be an undertaker brands Wolfwood a dummy for thinking that’s a believable thing, and everyone else is branded a dummy for accepting it.

Even the rousing, provocative rock ‘n’ roll opening of the original series is replaced with the drowsy, navel-gazing Gen Z electronica of Stampede.

Stampede is a competently-paced modern tragedy, which is the problem. It’s not a terribly different story and narrative dynamic than any new series recently produced. The original was a action-slapstick-comedy about a jokester that everyone was scared of but everyone was pursuing. It took its time with storytelling; you got to know Vash and co. as they struggled with the Problem of the Episode, where Stampede rushes you through the main arc in twelve episodes. You didn’t even get much of a glimpse of the original Vash’s backstory on the ship until episode 17 (halfway through the series), so you’re wondering the whole time if this guy is for real or is he being set up somehow. Stampede‘s first darn scene revealed a lot of that already.

To the series’ credit, some of the action scenes in Stampede were quite good. Jonny Yong Bosch reprised the English voice for Vash, but that doesn’t matter because Stampede‘s Vash has the Big Sad all the time and hardly talks.

That’s about it. If there’s a second season, I don’t see the value in watching.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

1000 years after giants destroyed the Earth, an adventurous princess and her village is caught between two warring kingdoms, a toxic forest, and the feral creatures that inhabit it.

Here we are again, where I am trying not to shut the movie off after an outlandishly impossible scene flashes across my eyeballs. I can forgive certain violations of physics or chemistry, like the hanggliders that would toss off its driver if it accelerates the way it does in the movie, some really high jumping, and maybe the fact that two people survived a 100+ foot fall without permanent injury, because they landed on sand. But I can’t abide by a 16 year old girl who takes down—as in, outright kills—four trained soldiers with swords, who are twice her weight, with merely a cane…and a fifth, the commanding officer, is knocked down with his sword shattered. This is extra egregious because the scene could’ve avoided this nonsense easily while still communicating what it needs to. In this scene, Nausicaä finds her father dead on the floor, surrounded by another kingdom’s soldiers. She’s super upset, understandably, and rage-attacks the soldiers. I’ll give her knocking one of them out pretty hard, because she caught them by surprise. But right after that, the armored guys step into the room and she starts attacking the one in front like she does in the scene, and Lord Yupa steps in, etc. Cutting back the ridiculous results like this, in this pivotal scene, we still get to see Nausicaa break her pacifist rules (which she seemed to get over real quick), and we see Lord Yupa’s courage and willingness to stop a needless conflict.

It feels bad doing this because this an influential Miyazaki film and we’re not supposed to be saying things like this. The film does have it’s good points overall—the entire setting and backstory are compelling, for one, and

The Golden Child

A nefarious cult kidnaps a mystical child, and Tibetan woman recruits a social worker in Los Angeles to find him.

I saw this a lot when I was a pre-teen and beyond; it was one of those movies I just seemed to encounter a lot. Maybe it’s the nostalgia goggles working overtime, but I felt like Eddie Murphy’s still stands almost 40 years later. Or maybe it’s just so different than the humor you see in comedies nowadays that Murphy acting just feels novel. That would contradict the “nostalgia goggles” narrative I have for myself, but there it is. Some of the novelty is probably Murphy’s ineloquent delivery during heated scenes. The flow of his dialogue isn’t steady, like it is with other actors in modern comedies, who rely on perfectly-timed and expressed dialogue. I don’t watch any modern comedies so I could be off with this. The dynamic fits Murphy’s character of the street-smart, skeptical, inner city everyman. The scene where he sneaks the mystical dagger past customs is a good example—his character, Chandler Jarrell, ad libs the strategy and fumbles through the whole cover-up after he recovers the dagger. Maybe Murphy ad libbed some of his lines there. Who knows? It seems to work.

I like that it wasn’t explained why the antagonist, Sardo Numspa, couldn’t pronounce j’s. It was explicitly acknowledged during the dream sequence, but left at that. It adds to his mysterious origins.