(You know, out of context, that title sounds like something Gilgamesh would say, and not a way to instantly get me to quote that film in its entirety.)
A week ago, I passed a little hobby shop that had Galaxy Quest miniatures in the window. I did a double-take, walked back, pressed my face to the grate until my face looked like a waffle iron, and generally pined for them. It took me a week to get back there at a time when they were actually open. But I did, and now I own this:
Box is labeled “Standard Thermian Issue.” APPROVED.
You’d think that owning this, and being able to take it out of the packaging any time I want, would be the best thing ever. (Collectors, please put down your mint-in-box weapons – the bottom of this box is so damaged there’s no point in keeping it pristine. It’s seen better days; it might as well live out its life being carried around on a belt loop as I cosplay as Brandon-at-home-just-as-Jason-calls-him or something.) However, it turns out that this is NOT, in fact the best thing ever, because as I went looking for pictures of this thing, I found a website that has this on it:
I don’t care if this is the real Japanese poster, or a fan graphic, or a total hoax, because whatever this is, it is the best thing ever. (That gun is shooting “Never Give Up, Never Surrender,” you guys. YOU GUYS.)
My mom’s reaction when I told her I’d bought Thermian away-team gear: “Well, you’re outside.” (This nerd apple did not fall far from the tree.)
[This is the second of three movie reviews that were won in the auction, which assists fans of color who want to attend SFF conventions, principally WisCon.]
So, the first movie I was given for this auction was The Vampire Effect, which was horrible in sort of a whimsical, amusing way. (Plus, we learned an important lesson about the importance of banana extract in the vampire canon, so you can’t say the movie isn’t handy.)
The second movie, I had every reason to expect from LJ comments on the auction, would be Peter Coyote’s second-rate softcore disaster Bitter Moon. However, was apparently playing me like a violin, because her actual request was the literally and figuratively apocalyptic Left Behind.
I knew nothing about the movie when Kathy assigned it to me, except that it was Kirk Cameron’s right-wing wackadoo vanity project.
Now, I know way too much.
I can’t possibly go through this movie beat by beat (it’s too painful for all of us), so I watched it twice (TWICE), and have made a representative sample of data points, so that no one else ever has to see this movie, because seriously, nobody should.
Ten Things You Should Know about Left Behind.
1. Never has an apocalypse been so boring. The Rapture happens about twenty minutes into the movie. This movie is 94 minutes long. I recognize this must be the pre-tribulation Rapture and not the actual Second Coming, but if you blow your big trick in the opening act, then you only have seven years of standard-issue tribulation to look forward to, each of which feel as if they are chronicled in real-time in this film.
2. These jerks are…Left Behind! The half-planet’s worth of people left behind are sort of amazingly sorted. Reporter Buck Williams is an unbeliever. Pastor Bruce Barnes is the only one of his congregation who doesn’t ascend (awkwaaard). Airline pilot Rayford Steele (of course) gets left behind because he’s committing hot, hot adultery with flight-attendant-turned-UN-delegate Hattie (sure, that happens). His wife and son ascend, but his daughter Chloe gets no heavenly invitation because she got a nose ring against her father’s wishes. This is the actual reason she is left out of the Rapture.
3. You can judge a book by its cover. And I don’t mean the several Bibles (and one teen Bible!) that get handed around during this movie.
Look, I am the last person in the world to be a graphics snot, considering that anything beyond MS Paint continues to baffle me. On the other hand, I do have eyes. So, in case you were ever worried that you might pick up this movie by accident because of the slick cover design…uh, you don’t have to worry.
(It just seems like one element too many, you know? Like, take off one graphic element before you leave the house.)
Discarded DVD cover design.
4. Good luck with the plot. Besides all the Bible-passing and hugging, there’s a whole plot about how you can’t grow crops because of the Rapture (which is weird, because if anything, your demand just got cut in half, so there’s really never been a better time for some leisurely farming). Naturally, some scientist has a magical formula that will allow you to grow crops in this harsh wasteland that is often spoken of but never appears, and for some reason the bank president/UN delegate characters arrange some dude to be a pawn in their game to raise crops, and that dude literally turns into the Antichrist and fools everyone but newly-Christian reporter Buck. Full of smug self-satisfaction at not being fooled, Buck returns home to the three people who have made no attempt to gather or comfort others in the meantime and holes up with them in a church to wait out the seven years of turmoil?
This is the least comforting shot of a church I have seen in a long time. Well-done, filmmakers.
5. This movie is offensive. This movie, uh, plays fast and loose, shall we say, with perceptions of non-Christian groups. For instance, the scientist who perfects the magical serum is Chaim Rosenzweig, the only person of Jewish descent we meet, and he happily hands the serum over to the UN bank presidents and then gets the wool pulled over his eyes by the Antichrist. (Wow.)
6. NO SERIOUSLY. That whole scientist bit is not the worst thing in this movie. That would be this line, spoken from one bank executive/UN representative (sure) to another, regarding the Middle East: “What will we do with the Arabs? Their children cry from hunger, yet they still choose war.”
WOW, YOU GUYS. WOW.
7. Dogs are fucked. The Rapture is poignant. To bring home how poignant the Rapture is, there are not one, but two shots of dogs who have been left behind by their heaven-bound owners. I am not sure what this is supposed to convey, except that devout Christians are de facto bad pet owners. What it does mean is that we have a chance to compare two very different dogs, and how they approach their new lives.
First, we look at Jake. Jake is a noble, loyal animal that stays by his master’s side, pining majestically.
I don’t know if his real name is Jake, but he just looks like one, doesn’t he?
And then we have Noodles. Noodles must not have liked his previous owner much, because the minute the rapture hits, that dog hits the streets. Noodles has better things than you coming up, you departed jerks!
Please note that both these dogs are in scenes with our protagonists also in them, and at no time do our protagonists take a break from reading the Bible, quoting the Bible at each other, and tearfully hugging to help a helpless animal so that it doesn’t starve to death. I’m just saying.
8. The More You Know!They never explain how the bank presidents knew the Rapture was coming, but those dudes totally did! They bought property and crop serum and arranged for a UN president who would take action at the right moment and everything! If you are willing to sit through a whole movie to figure out the secret behind accurately predicting the date of the Rapture, this is not the movie for you.
9. The trailer.
10. Why this movie is so creepy.
After I saw the movie, I wanted to somehow articulate why this movie was so creepy. I mean, it’s not as if it was well-made, or even particularly effective or insidious in its message. It was the equivalent of being stuck on a subway car with an evangelist who hits you over the head with his Bible at random intervals.
Then I went to YouTube to find the trailer for this article, and saw the comments people had left, and then I understood exactly why this movie creeped me out.
“okaaay, not that we don’t NEED to change the conversation or anything but…would i be wrong in saying that some of the things that tim lahaye mentions in this series are happening right now? earthquakes being one of them, another being that part of obama’s new health care reform is to mircrochip americans. when you look to the rational explanations that explain why certain phenomenons happen you’re ignoring the major signs that point to events like this.”
“it’s not proven. it’s a theory. the so called “transitional species” have either been faked or occurred long before the time they should have existed. Carbon dating has even proved to be rubbish. A freshly killed seal was dated to be +/- 4000 years old. WTF?”
“I’m not sure what to make of Obama either. The ONLY reason I think he might not be the antichrist is because it just seems too soon and too obvious. I agree with you though; in my opinion he’s probably a catalyst for the antichrist to come out, but, he COULD still be. I think it’s best not to point fingers just yet and to sit back and look for signs: the entire polish government going down in a freak plane accident, for example. Coincidence?”
Turns out that this movie creeped me out because it was crafted for a wide, vocal, willfully-ignorant audience that actually BUYS IT ALL. And there’s really nothing I can think of right now that’s creepier than that.
Generally, my movie-watching habits throughout life have been about 70% things I want to see, 30% things I saw under some social obligation. This has no bearing on their quality (obviously – I mean, look at me); it’s just a baseline measurement. And weirdly, it doesn’t change much even after I look at when I started to review movies for real. Sure, I would take back the two hours of my life I spent watching Repo Men (and Legion), but in most movies there is a nice moment, or a grain of truth, or some extra who is clearly overjoyed to be there, and even if not, I love movies enough to sit through a few hundred duds in my lifetime.
However, in the last two weeks or so, I have seen a disproportionate number of movies that are really, truly awful. Some were my fault. One was the fault of the person who won a review in the Carl Brandon auction, and made me watch one of the most unbelievable things ever, which you will hear about next week.
And one of them was No Reservations, which I watched for Fair Food Fight. It was awful, but the worst part is probably this, at a key moment in the third act:
Kate: [indicating kitchen] This is who I am.
Nick: No, it’s not.
…THUMBS UP, EVERYONE.
I handle this in the review (complete with killshot!), but I had to mention it here, just because I hate it so, so much.
I mean, pretty much any way you parse it, that is a loaded little conversation. (Keep in mind this guy is currently in a brand-new relationship with her, one in which he has addressed the problem of workplace authority by saying almost verbatim, “Well, you’ll tell me what to do and I’ll do what I want, just like always,” and it is never discussed again and things actually play out that way. Plus, as I recall, they are having this conversation because he has just been offered her job and is treating her like a ridiculous harpy for being angry at this news.)
But beyond that (and as also discussed in the review), it’s probably more than a little disingenuous to pretend that “chef” is the sort of job you try to rise above, rather than an actual Personage you hope to become, and that for a chef to say that about the kitchen is actually a statement of fact and career accomplishment, not some sort of romantic hangup to be overcome by some coworker you barely know who shows up on your doorstep late at night demanding you eat this unknown substance he made…while you’re blindfolded.
Needless to say, my plan for this weekend will be heavy on movies I actually WANT to see. (Suspect Awesome British Actor Camp will feature heavily.)
Monday night, SyFy premiered Riverworld, a four-hour miniseries based on the series of novels by Philip José Farmer. The novels chronicled the adventures of those resurrected after death, living on a cultivated river-planet overseen by extraterrestrial powers.
SyFy is notorious for hilariously abysmal weekly movies. Their miniseries have fared a little better from additional time and care—not that this tempers the glee with which they can throw a decent cast into a cauldron of plot soup for four hours. (Lookin’ at you, Tin Man, and Alice, and Children of Dune, and…)
With Riverworld, SyFy was more ambitious, and this backdoor pilot is a full-on narrative bouillabaisse, thick with confusion and seasoned with questionable overtones. (Mmm, soup metaphor.)
SyFy hopes the miniseries will act as a backdoor pilot to a series. A similar gambit in 2003 failed. This time, however, the network took steps to ensure an audience by recruiting old stalwarts from spec series past and present: the oft-shirtless Tahmoh Penikett and the oft-clothed Alessandro Juliani (Battlestar Galactica), the oft-expressionless Laura Vandervoort (V), the oft-game Alan Cumming (Tin Man), and the oft-British Peter Wingfield (Highlander), joined by a host of TV veterans like Kwesi Amiyaw and Jeananne Goossen.
Many of these actors will try to rise above the material. Several of these actors will have suspiciously broad accents. One of these actors will paint his face blue (again). All of them will be hamstrung by the plot.
Penikett is Matt, a photojournalist. His reunion with his girlfriend of two months, Jessie (in a nightclub full of teen extras and her middle-aged friends), goes sour when a suicide bomber blows up the club. Matt awakes on a riverbank, along with younger, hotter versions of his middle-aged acquaintances, and proceeds to gather friends and foes in his quest to find his missing girlfriend and/or save the world, whichever comes first.
Matt is alternately aided and hindered by mysterious blue-skinned overseers, a nuclear-powered steamboat captained by Mark Twain, Senegalese warrior bands, Richard Burton (no, the other Richard Burton), lightning, a terrarium, a 13th-century woman samurai, his videographer, dirigible pilots, and Francisco Pizarro. (SyFy Channel: No Plot Element Left Behind.)
There’s no point in dissecting the plot, for two reasons. Firstly, the narrative doesn’t bother to wrap up so much as set up—this may seem endless, but all four hours are just the introduction to the in-series through line. Secondly, nitpicking a plot does no good if the basic themes are flawed, and oh, are they. You have to look sidelong at a plot where the hero’s only motivation throughout is to find his girlfriend of two months, at the cost of the greater quest and many of his friends’ lives. (You dated her for two months, dude. Dial it down.) And oh heavens, what are the chances that our antagonist, Richard Burton, is also hopelessly in love with the bland Jessie? (Three hundred percent.*)
On an even larger thematic level, Riverworld repeatedly resurrects people at random locations, leaving them demonstrably isolated, bereft, and/or held hostage by Vikings. Yet Burton, out to destroy the regeneration machine, is a madman who must be destroyed at all costs. Even though Matt himself hates his omnipotent alien overlords and their mind games, he never thinks for a moment that Burton might have a salient point. (Several characters, knowing their departed loved ones are on Riverworld but still probably lost forever on its vast surface, seem confused by this dismissal of an interesting but morally-gray question. Not more confused than I, characters! Get in line.)
Not that there’s a dearth of nitpicks, either: this plot is rampant with things like food-accessing/tracking bracelets absent from persons deemed important, which in theory is a gesture of freedom but really just means we have whole conversations about how to feed Matt the Wristless. And of course, there’s the ever-popular Withholding-of-vital-information-itis that leads to Vague Conversation Syndrome and the fatal Expositiontosis.
To be fair, whenever the exposition settles down there are actually fleeting moments of solid pulp fun from a cast that seems largely to be getting along and enjoying the scenery despite occasional dialogue clunk. Unfortunately, the series’ wild unevenness makes even its good points hard to enjoy:
There are many characters of color. (That’s good!) Most of whom are suicide bombers, wisecracking sidekicks who die avoidably, all-knowing Asian monk-warriors, or Francisco Pizarro. (That’s awkward!) A woman character is portrayed in a sex-positive way! (That’s good!) Because she’s a historical hooker. (That’s awkward!) There’s a gay couple! (That’s good!) When they’re reunited as hostage and undercover conquistador, the first question is, “Ooh, can you keep the uniform?” (…really?)
To be fair, it is good that SyFy is trying to find speculative works to bring to the screen. It’s good that they’re pulling from a stable of recognizable sci-fi actors while seeding the field with some newer faces. It’s good that they’re attempting a diverse set of characters. In fact, with all that good, it’s strange to see how bad Riverworld ended up being. Here’s hoping that they keep cooking up dishes like this until they get it right. (Soup metaphor!)
* Peter Wingfield never settles for only one hundred percent.
So, as promised, I reviewed Riverworld for Tor.com.
It was…plentiful? I don’t even know what to say about it. They somehow managed to undercut most of their good points by accident (though every once in a while my jaw would hit the floor when something egregious stereotyped through the frame).
They did try very hard with the casting, which is generally passable and occasionally enjoyable. Sam Clemens and Allegra the courtesan did very well for themselves, and of course, Peter Wingfield never met an outdoor set he couldn’t halfheartedly stage-fight his way across. (I also suspect he had a contract rider that stipulated he be making out for at least 40% of his screen time.)
I’d be surprised if it makes it to a long-term series, only because renting a riverboat like that must be expensive, and because they burned all four hours of it on a Sunday night in April, which doesn’t speak much to their confidence about holding an audience from week to week.
But here’s the thing: I tease SyFy (and rightly), but I do think that with all this “reimagine-classic miniseries” stuff they’re getting closer and closer to something good that they can sustain. I mean, sure, Tin Man was a disaster. And Alice had a decent first half and then kind of imploded, but the cast was actually surprisingly good, and I enjoyed it quite a bit whenever I could forget the WORST PLOT IN THE ENTIRE WORLD. Frankly, if SyFy could have come up with a better premise, I would have tuned in to that show every week, no problems. A nice pulpy hour every week full of actors I like? SOLD.
This one had a multicultural cast (thumbs up) who are mostly sci-fi TV veterans (thumbs up!) in a script with an ensemble feel (thumbs up), in a setting where they can be held hostage by Vikings at any moment (thumb sideways), and a standard Chosen One quest plot (thumbs down) where the hero is looking for his impossible, dull, virginal girlfriend (thumbs down), and where blue aliens manipulate you with cryptic messages and sometimes tie you to a table and taunt you for no reason and then let you escape from your prison and then transport you a hundred miles away from the prison anyway, making your escape moot and leaving you staring at your costar in the middle of the Vancouver woods. (Uh, thumbs down.)
They managed to strike gold for a whole season after the BSG miniseries. (And then three more, which were like brass.) Someday soon, they’ll get it right again.
