Like Tears in Rain: Meditations on Science Fiction Cinema (3 page)

What Is to Give Light

The Cultural Legacy of
Jodorowsky’s
Dune

Jodorowsky’s Dune
 (Frank Pavich, 2013) is the bittersweet story of one tremendously ambitious filmmaker’s aborted attempt at bringing Frank Herbert’s seminal space opera to the big screen. Alejandro Jodorowsky describes his efforts as stemming not only from an emphasis on art before commerce, but also from a desire “to create a prophet . . . [an] artistical, cinematographical god.” His early career suggests that he was capable of making such a film: 
Fando y Lis
 (1968) incited rioting upon its release, and was subsequently banned by the Mexican government; the western 
El Topo
 (’70) reveals a style as avant-garde and psychedelic as anything Pink Floyd or Herbert himself ever wrote.

“
Soy Dios
,” declares the titular gunslinger—played by Jodorowsky himself—in 
El Topo
. Translation? “I am God.” And it appears, given what we’re shown of the director’s vision for adapting 
Dune
 throughout Pavich’s documentary, that he truly had a grandiosity and work ethic to match.

Of all the conceptual work explored in the film, it is the artist
 Moebius—a veteran storyboarder and designer who worked on such landmarks as 
Alien
, 
Tron
, and 
The Abyss
—whose contribution seems the greatest overall loss to our culture: his costume and character designs, his futuristic weaponry, his sense of scope and camera movement. While we may have reaped some of the artful fruits of his labor years down the road, no doubt his imagination lacked some of the exuberant, reckless abandon on display in the production design and storyboards for Jodorowsky’s would-be masterpiece.

Critics pose the question of what might have happened to popular culture, had
 
Dune
preceded 
Star Wars
, noting that the blockbuster model and all the multimedia and merchandising that goes along with it may well have wound up a very different animal.

On a somewhat cynical note, the structure of the Hero’s Journey monomyth could well have taken a back seat to the more problematic White-Messiah structure at the heart of so many recent films:
 
Avatar
 (James Cameron, 2009), 
The New World
 (Terrence Malick, ’05), 
The Last of the Mohicans
 (Michael Mann, ’92)—the examples are fairly endless. This is perhaps the one thing we gained when production on Jodorowsky’s 
Dune
 collapsed, though Cameron’s 
Avatar
 has ensured that the myth will live on in big-screen science fiction.

But what we lost with the film vastly outweighs this one small win. For instance, the drug culture of the sixties and seventies has been immortalized in a handful of films, ranging from
 
Easy Rider
 (1969) to Terry Gilliam’s 
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
 (’98), but the spiritual, exoticized component of hallucinogens and nineteen-sixties countercultural thought left its mark on the eventual David Lynch 
Dune
 only as a plot element. One can’t help but imagine the kind of acid-trip visuals Jodorowsky might have crafted with the help of sci-fi pioneers like Moebius and Dan O’Bannon at his side. Not to mention the soundtrack, which would’ve been provided by the inimitable space-rockers who called themselves the Pink Floyd.

While working on the picture together, according to
 an interview with the director in 
The Japan Times
, Moebius and O’Bannon coauthored a comic called “The Long Tomorrow,” serialized in 
Heavy Metal
, which later influenced writer William Gibson’s worldbuilding in the seminal novel 
Neuromancer
, the design aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s 
Blade Runner
, and the Imperial probe droid seen landing on Hoth in 
The Empire Strikes Back
.

Ten of Sci-Fi Cinema’s Best-Kept Secrets

A Partial List of My Personal Favorites
, with Brief Reviews

You’ve worked your way through 
Clone Wars
, 
Knights of Sidonia
, and 
Game of Thrones
; you’ve watched all the 
Star Trek
 films again and again to the point of fatigue. The latest
Transformers
 flick had you yawning and questioning your love of all things cosmic—and
Guardians of the Galaxy
 hasn’t yet opened in theaters.

In these kinds of situations, what can you do? Well, it turns out that science fiction cinema is a vast and uneven terrain. Sometimes the best works slide out of memory or go unnoticed. Other movies, perhaps, don’t hit the right chord on a first viewing.

To help you out, I’ve compiled a list of ten personal favorites that I think you’re likely to enjoy. You may have heard of some or even most of them, but such is the nature of the science-fiction readership.

At the very least, I hope I’ll be able to convince you that most of these films are worth a second look.

1.
Source Code
 (2011) is the kind of film I’m hoping for each time I go to the theater and pay my eight bucks—but I’m not surprised when, as all too often, a movie comes up short. Duncan Jones’s impressive sophomore outing is no such disappointment: it’s smart, tense, and manages to marry two seemingly disparate high-concept ideas into a single (mostly) cohesive whole. It will keep you guessing, as the cliché goes, but in a way that’s ultimately very satisfying. Don’t ask me for any spoilers; just go check it out. Great performances by Jake Gyllenhaal, Vera Farmiga, Michelle Monaghan, and Jeffrey Wright round off a flawed but faultlessly ambitious, 
must-see
 sci-fi thriller.

2.
Director Michael Bay has perpetrated his fair share of failed attempts at telling a story on film, but 2005’s action-heavy biotech thriller 
The Island
 stands as a testament to his capabilities as a filmmaker. Ewan McGregor, Scarlett Johansson, scene-stealer Djimon Hounsou, and Sean Bean—in one of his greatest movie roles, 
The Fellowship of the Ring
notwithstanding—make for a balanced, believable cast struggling to navigate a near-future world where the obscenely rich can own adult clones of themselves for the purposes of harvesting organs and tissue, carrying fetuses to term, and otherwise serving as a living insurance policy. It’s a beautiful film, full of genuine hope, and is notable for being the first film co-written by Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman.

3.
If there’s one thing 
The Island
 did wrong—and I can hear the Bay-haters laughing all the way over here, so I’m going to have to ask you to please, 
please
 calm yourselves a moment—it’s the heavy borrowing from other, earlier dystopian films. Especially in terms of the white-heavy, sterile imagery straight out of George Lucas’s full-length directorial debut,
THX 1138
 (1971), a film I have mixed feelings about but which is nevertheless invaluable for its long-lasting impact on our greater cinematic landscape. Starring Robert Duvall, Maggie McOmie (who, according to IMDb, has acted onscreen only a handful of times since), and Donald Pleasence (perhaps best known as Dr. Loomis in John Carpenter’s
Halloween
), it’s a slow-moving, sparse allegory about surveillance and—equally relevant, these days—legislated reproduction. An exercise almost entirely in the art of 
visual
storytelling, 
THX 1138
 foretells of Lucas’s incredible vision, and serves as a stark contrast to the loosely structured, fun-loving feel of his next film, 
American Graffiti
 (1973).

4.
V for Vendetta
 (2006) is a film very much of its time—even more so, perhaps, than the Alan Moore graphic novel that inspired it. First-timer James McTeigue brings a seasoned veteran’s eye to this post-
Matrix
 script by the Wachowskis, and performances by the likes of Natalie Portman, Hugo Weaving, and Stephen Fry make for one of the first defining pictures of the twenty-first century. A grim fact, one might say, but its imagery and resonances continue to pervade the public consciousness even eight years following its opening. The Guy Fawkes mask worn by the titular V, for instance, is immediately recognizable as the one worn by members of the worldwide hacktivist organization known as Anonymous. Whether you consider them cyberterrorists or vigilantes, the influence of the film’s message about fighting injustice is clear: “People should not be afraid of their governments; governments should be afraid of their people.”

5.
Rian Johnson’s a name that might sound familiar, even if you can’t say for sure where you’ve heard it. He was recently announced as the director for 
Star Wars
 Episodes VIII and IX, so there’s that—but he got his start doing an inventive neo-noir film called 
Brick
, and later directed an episode of 
Breaking Bad
, titled “Ozymandias.” You might remember it as being . . . well, probably the single greatest episode of television ever to air. But he also wrote and directed an arthouse action film called 
Looper
 (2012), about the ugly uses organized crime has found for time travel—namely, its application as an evidence-free, no-mess method of corpse disposal. The mechanics of this technology are left to the imagination, and it gets a little derivative in its willingness to bring 1950s sci-fi tropes like mutant telekinetics into the story, but mostly the film serves up some of the most memorable scenes of near-future crime in recent memory. Bruce Willis plays an older version of the exceptional Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s “Joe,” but Emily Blunt and child actor Pierce Gagnon each do their best to upstage the leads at every opportunity. This one’s a bit open to interpretation, which is fun.

6.
Kathryn Bigelow’s done a handful of really exciting, gutsy films—
Point Break
, 
The Hurt Locker
, 
Zero Dark Thirty
—but you probably haven’t seen or even heard of the 1995 William Gibson pastiche 
Strange Days
, starring Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Juliette Lewis, and Tom Sizemore, and penned by none other than James Cameron, who at that point was known mostly for his work on 
Aliens
 and the 
Terminator
 franchise. While the premise of using “SQUID” technology to record one’s perceptual experiences digitally is lifted directly from a number of earlier cyberpunk works, the film’s social commentary (the Rodney King Riots of ’92 are a loud-and-clear presence throughout Cameron’s script), along with some exceedingly clever camerawork, make for a memorable but harrowing blend of dystopian allegory and tech-noir.

7.
Moon
 (2009)—a small-budget psycho-noir picture set on the lunar surface—is the first film from 
Source Code
 director Duncan Jones. There isn’t much to be said about the career-best performance by Sam Rockwell without revealing the plot’s key surprises, so suffice it to say, this isn’t one to be missed. Listen for Kevin Spacey as the somber voice of an artificial intelligence reminiscent of HAL-9000.

8.
And here’s one I revisited just this morning: Richard Linklater’s 2006 adaptation of 
A Scanner Darkly
, an acclaimed, semiautobiographical 1977 novel by Philip K. Dick. An understated tour de force for the 
Dazed and Confused
 director, the film boasts a talented cast that includes Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder, and Robert Downey Jr. Not to mention some groundbreaking rotoscoped visuals that give the film a trippy, comic-bookish aesthetic well suited for a film about substance abuse. It’s also an astute exploration of human psychology and paranoia in the age of mass surveillance.

9.
Danny Boyle’s 2007 psychological thriller set in outer space, 
Sunshine
, features early-career performances by Cillian Murphy (
Batman Begins
, 
Inception
), Chris Evans (Captain America in Marvel’s 
The Avengers
), Rose Byrne (
Insidious
, 
The Place Beyond the Pines
), and Mark Strong (Guy Ritchie’s 
Sherlock Holmes
, 
Zero Dark Thirty
). A lot of criticism has been leveled at the film’s dark, disturbing ending sequences—but I’d argue that it works tremendously well as a horror film in addition to its initial science-fictional premise. Turns out that when the sun is growing dim and life on Earth is desperate to survive, whatever the cost, technical glitches and good old-fashioned fundamentalism will be there to toss a wrench in things.

10.
I’ve saved my all-time favorite for last. Everybody knows and loves Ridley Scott’s 
Blade Runner
, adapted from Philip K. Dick’s novel 
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
—and I’ve already mentioned 
A Scanner Darkly
 as another great big-screen example of Dick’s paranoid, metaphysical storytelling—but Steven Spielberg pulled out all the stops for 2002’s 
Minority Report
, starring Tom Cruise, Samantha Morton, Max von Sydow, and Colin Farrell. When the drug addicts of the not-too-distant future begin giving birth to children who dream of real-life murders before they happen, law enforcement steps in to capitalize on the miracle. And while this may sound a bit far-fetched, it’s actually the film’s only Dickian conceit; everything else feels all too believable, and the all-around stellar performances from the cast serve to really sell it all. Thematically, it tackles questions of guilt and innocence, free will and determinism, and the transformative grief of child loss.