KING KONG (1933)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *superior*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*

If there's any film that's been analyzed almost as much as the 1960 PSYCHO, it's the 1933 KING KONG.  And since I don't want to repeat the observations of other critics, I'll pass on repeating a lot of familiar thematic statements, some of which prime mover Merian C. Cooper denied during his lifetime.  These statements include such generalities as "King Kong as racial marker," "King Kong as the horrors of sexuality and/or sexual difference," or "King Kong as innocent country-boy devoured by the big city."  All of these have various degrees of application depending on a viewer's own ethos, for Cooper's KONG is the opposite of Hitchcock's PSYCHO in its approach.  Whereas most viewers will agree that there's some intellectual mystery concealed behind the "shower curtain" of Hitchcock, Cooper's KONG, like Cooper himself, seems to deny that it has any meaning beyond being an exciting story.  However, the elements of that story are so intensified, so extravagant in their approach as compared to similar stories-- including 1932's THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME,which shared some of the themes and behind-the-scenes personnel of KONG-- that a film about a giant ape has become a virtual Rorschach test for a great many people.  Kong can be a great number of things to viewers: the Spectre of Blackness Haunting White Europe, Infantilized Sexuality, the Country Mouse-- and yet he's not exclusively any of them.  Even though MOST DANGEROUS GAME shares some of the same structure, a figure like Count Zaroff cannot even touch Kong in terms of symbolic ambivalence.

The one aspect of Kong I can treat with a degree of originality is the mode of the combative, since I myself have originated the theory of that mode. 

I've also recently written here about a difference between two types of works:

Works that are "ego-oriented" center upon one or more of the story's viewpoint characters; this narrative focus makes such characters the "focal presences" of their narratives.

And works that are "affect-oriented" center upon a "focal presence" who is someone or some thing observed by the viewpoint characters.

In the essay EGO, MEET AFFECT, I used two Rider Haggard works as examples.  KING SOLOMON'S MINES, which focuses on adventurer Allan Quatermain and his companions, is an "ego-oriented" work.  Haggard's SHE, which uses some of the same plot-elements and character-types as MINES, focuses on She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, not the viewpoint characters who observe her majesty.

As it happens, KONG has an antecedent that proves even more influential than MOST DANGEROUS GAME: the 1925 LOST WORLD, on which animator Willis O'Brien perfected his stop-motion wizardry before graduating to KONG.  The original 1912 novel by Conan Doyle is unquestionably an "ego-oriented" work, telling the reader far more about the explorers than the place they explore.  The 1925 film more or less follows the book's example, though it adumbrates some of the strong characterizations of the novel. The film also pays a little more attention than the book to the wonders of the Lost World, particularly to an "ape man" whose principal (and Kong-like) action-- abducting a civilized woman-- does not appear in the Doyle novel.

KONG, however, is definitely "affect-oriented."  Though Denham, Driscoll and Ann Darrow have vital parts to play, they are all supporting roles in Kong's drama.  Kong is the character toward whom everyone else looks, while he himself sees only Ann.  He is, as Denham says, a "god in his world," and he maintains his godhood through his unstinting superiority in combat.  Prior to the great ape's being taken prisoner through human trickery, we see Kong battle and vanquish three prehistoric enemies: a tyrannosaurs, an elasmosaurus, and a pteranodon.  But on an island filled with vicious predators-- so many that one wonders how the local natives have survived, giant wall or not-- it's logical to assume that Kong has had many other such encounters, for all that he seems to be the last of his kind.  One of Kong's most appealing aspects is that though he's not a man, he fights giant beasts just as a man would, punching or wrestling against creatures armed with specialized physical weapons like wings and razor-sharp teeth.

In Kong's world, the men of Denham's party are almost helpless, and Kong massacres the majority of them.  Denham's one technological weapon, a gas-bomb, finally lays Kong low, inspiring Denham to adbuct Kong as Kong abducted Ann-- but for profit, not for love.  To some extent Denham pays for his hubris: Kong can be laid low or killed by human technology, but not-- at least in that era-- bound and put on display.  Even when Kong kills human beings, be they island tribesmen or modern city-dwellers, the ape remains the center of attention.

In many "affect-oriented" works, the viewpoint characters look helplessly on while the "focal presence" of the story works its will, and at best they are only able to slightly alter events.  The aforementioned novel SHE is like this, with the main character accidentally bringing about her own undoing.  Some "affect-oriented" works even offer two focal presences for the price of one, as in Japan's 1962 KING KONG VS. GODZILLA.   The 1933 film takes a more subtle approach: after showing Kong's supremacy in his domain, where he outstrips his prehistoric opponents, it pits him against human technology, the means by which humans sought to equal Nature's gifts to the lower animals.  And Kong, who bested the flying pteranodon, is beaten by the superior fire-power wielded by man's artificial "birds."  Is Kong defeated by beauty alone, or by the (implicitly male) beast in humankind's heart, a beast that female beauty inspires to great acts of valor?

The biplanes are also an insightful touch because the pilots who flew them in World War I became renowned for a knightly code of honor between enemies. In a similar fashion, the entire film is devoted to showing how Kong must be defeated by mankind, and yet how he deserves the respect due a valiant foe. Audiences forget the human beings Kong slaughters and identify with his Herculean feats against the subhuman world of snake, lizard, and bird.  As a fitting ironic touch, the only man who eulogizes Kong in the film is the one who desired to exploit him.  One certainly can't call this love, but it seems that Denham, like the film's audiences, identified with the great ape more than even he expected.

WONDER WOMEN (1973)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *sociological*

Due to the DC Comics character, this Phillipines-lensed oddity often circulated under other names, most often sold to TV as THE DEADLY AND THE BEAUTIFUL. I choose to review it with the name I saw it under, not least because one of the film’s best features is a bouncy little theme song with the same title.

To be sure, one can count those “best features” on the fingers of one hand. I suspect the screenwriter had seen at least one of the two “Sumuru” movies then extant, since the ruler of the wonder women not only sports a similar name, “Doctor Tsu,” but also has her own private island from which she operates her all-girl army. But in one sense Tsu (former A-lister Nancy Kwan) resembles Sumuru less than the many cinematic incarnations of Doctor Moreau. She pays her bills by having her girls abduct prominent athletes, whose organs she transplants to wealthy recipients. But Tsu’s true passion appears to be coming up with all sorts of freakish Frankensteinian abhumans. If she plans to conquer the world, she hides it well.

Tsu’s girl commandos—always dressed in form-flattering costumes—evince the attitude of classic supervillains: when you want to kidnap someone, do it out in the open so that you’ll be able to stomp any cops or public-spirited citizens who try to interfere. Such scenes might have been more appealing, had the dimestore production given the actresses any lessons in good fake-fighting. When I saw the film in my twenties, I thought the stuntwork was pretty good, but now most of the action-scenes look pretty phony, even from Roberta Collins, the girl who beat Pam Grier in THE BIG DOLL HOJSE. Still, the general hottitude of the women does inspire a certain amount of “wonder” anyway.

Insurance investigator Harben (a dreary Ross Hagen) comes to the Phillipines looking for a missing jai alai player. Probably if Tsu’s agents had just stayed away from him, he would have chased his tail from then on, but Tsu sends one of her lady assassins, Linda (Maria d’Aragone) to seduce and kill Harben. Linda succeeds at the first, but though she and Harben have a good cheap fight, Linda finally has to run. Harben is captured and taken to “Transplant Island” by other members of the seduction squad. There, in addition to showing off her vivisected victims, Tsu has “brain sex” with Harben. This comedic scene is probably the film’s highlight, in that Tsu gets mildly stimulated by the experience while Harben dissolves into a figurative puddle—though neither has touched the other’s body.

Tsu makes her main mistake by trying to punish Linda for her failure, for Linda foments a rebellion against Tsu, setting free both Harben and the monster-men. Yet Tsu escapes the forces of the law despite the ruination of her island-enclave, and in a coda, the triumphant hero loses out to the empowerment of women. In addition to this rare turnaround ending, WONDER WOMEN’s only noteworthy aspect is that it’s one of the few times that a starring Asian villain was actually played by someone of Asian ancestry.

FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER (1965)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*


"I'm absolutely confident that nothing can go wrong"-- a fellow who clearly had not read the whole script of FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER.

I should hate this movie. It's very much in the vein of other cheapjack films that padded their running-time with the copious use of stock footage, ranging from Coleman Francis'  1961 BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS to the 1965 Rebane/Lewis monstrosity MONSTER-A-GO-GO.  This sort of film was pretty much on the way to extinction by 1965, at least within the domain of mainstream cinema.  In many respects SPACE MONSTER is pretty much of a piece with the other two films, lacking even the eccentric POV of an Ed Wood to give the proceedings some demented inspiration.

SPACE MONSTER doesn't have a really demented outlook; the most it can muster is a sort of wry proto-campiness. And yet I like it. I like the ham-handed editing, as with the scene, not ten minutes into the story, where a military officer asks scientist Karen Grant how she's doing, and she's cut off by a cutaway to stock footage. I like the fact that almost all the normal people in SPACE MONSTER are either stupid or immoral, while the damaged android "Frank Saunders" is the hero.  And even though the film compromises Mary Shelley's creation by crossbreeding it with a bug-eyed monster, there are a few scenes-- spotty though they are-- that come much closer to the pathos of Shelley's shambling hulk than many films with better production values-- particularly three or four entries in Hammer's "Frankenstein" franchise.

We first meet Colonel Frank Saunders as he speaks before a press conference. The affable, handsome astronaut speaks modestly about his impending launch into space-- and then suddenly freezes. His fellow officers hustle him out of the room, claiming that he's overtired. The truth is that Saunders is an android, created by two scientists, the aforementioned Karen Grant and her senior collaborator, Adam Steele (virtually a double for his creation, since Saunders is an "Adam" made out of steel, among other things).  Steele has somehow convinced the U.S. military to send his android into space to spare human lives. Saunders' little seize-up is accomplished by a simple "freeze-frame," both the cheapest-- and yet the creepiest-- moment in the film. One might think that the military would instantly drop the android astronaut idea like the proverbial hot potato after this incident-- who wants to trust an ultra-expensive space-rocket to a robot that may seize up and cause untold damage that could devolve back onto the heads of those who approved it?  But everyone accepts Steele's assurances that it won't happen again, and the flight goes ahead as scheduled.

As it happens, when the flight goes wrong, it isn't the fault of Steele or his creation.  An alien ship from Mars begins orbiting Earth's atmosphere, commanded by the statuesque Princess Marcuzan and her counselor-figure, the aptly-named Doctor Nadir.  They and their men-- mostly garbed in what looks like earthly astronaut-costumes-- are the winners of an atomic conflict on Mars. However, their victory is an ambivalent one: the war somehow wipes out all Martian women save the Princess-- and since the Princess patently doesn't want to become the new "Eve" of her people, she and her followers come to Earth to gather them up some "sobbin' women."  There have certainly been much better "atomic-warning" films than SPACE MONSTER-- and yet one must admit that these Alex Raymond-aliens do mirror the possible follies of human beings tinkering around with the apocalypse.

Before they can do so, their orbit accidentally takes them straight into the path of Saunders' space-launch.  Despite the Martian's superior technology, they can't figure out the difference between a manned rocket and an attack-missile-- although the Princess roundly insults Nadir after they shoot down the rocket and see a man parachute free. Yet the blasting of the missile has no immediate ill-effect on their mission: apparently cloaked from radar, the Martians land their craft in an Earth-forest. Then the Martian flunkies go girl-hunting, armed with ray-guns and still garbed in their astronaut-gear-- in other words, apparently not the least bit concerned that anyone might track them and their conquests back to their base. There's not many movies that can make MARS NEEDS WOMEN look intelligent by comparison, but SPACE MONSTER succeeds at that rare task.

However, Nadir and Marcuzan create their own destined antagonist through their mammoth stupidity in shooting down the space-launch. The android is severely damaged by his forced landing, with half his face melted away and two big plastic wires sticking out of his chest like extensions from his man-tits.  He wanders around, his intelligence shattered like his body. He has a "James Whale" moment when he tries to get help from a pair of parked motorists. The man attacks the ugly monster, and Saunders kills him, though the android spares the woman, leaving her alone despite her continual shrieking at him.

Meanwhile back at the launch-site, Steele has no idea that aliens caused the catastrophe, though he thinks that Saunders' "master control" may guide him back to the base. However, Steele and Karen don't wait for this to happen, but go out hunting for their little lost android. Eventually they find him in a cave-- again, pretty much by dumb luck rather than as a result of people having seen the monster-naut wandering about.  There's another minor Whale-ism as Steele manages to calm the damaged creature, telling him to lower his hands-- a likely parallel to the "sit down" scene in 1931's FRANKENSTEIN. At this point Karen and Steele have this meaningful exchange:

KAREN: "Frank has become so real to me that I can't bear the thought of his being hurt!"
STEELE: "No one's going to destroy ten years of my work!"

Unlike many iterations of the Frankenstein myth, "Frank" has both a mother and a father, though the mother doesn't really do him much good, nor are there any establishing scenes that might suggest that Karen's had any maternal effect on Saunders. Steele is pretty much the same selfish jerk as the original Frankenstein, for all purposes blind to his creation's feelings. Steele sends Karen off to get help, but she crosses paths with the Martians, who add her to their collection.  Once Karen has been taken to the ship, the Princess subjects the lady scientist to being terrorized by Mull, a huge radiation-created mutant. I confess I forget what if any stated reason the Princess had for torturing Karen. Maybe I was busy trying to figure out why a group of radiation survivors would bring along with them a monster created by radiation. They do end up using Mull as a sort of guard-dog, but it begs the question: why do aliens with ray-guns need a big scary monster?

Again, while the rest of the military scurries about in impotent fashion, Steele finally decides to stop waiting for Karen, and ventures forth with Saunders in tow. Somehow Steele and Saunders stumble across the alien spaceship that no one else has managed to spot. Steele, having seen evidence that Karen was in the area, suspects that she's been taken aboard. While Steele goes for help, he tells Saunders to watch the ship, again showing boundless confidence in his creation, even when severely damaged. But after Steele departs, the aliens catch sight of their metal adversary. They subdue him rather easily, take him into a ship, and leave him laying on a table with no bonds or supervision.

Finally the military finds the ship and begins bombarding it. Steele belatedly shows up and tells them to back off to protect the hostages inside (I'm still not clear if he knows about the other abductees). Aboard the ship Saunders is awakened by Karen's pleas for help. He overcomes a Martian or two and frees all the prisoners, including Karen-- but one of the Martians frees the huge skull-faced monster Mull as well.

For a fight consisting mostly of wild camera-angles, the combat between Saunders and Mull is better than one might expect, though it still leaves me wondering that if the android is this strong, why couldn't he beat the crap out of the ordinary Martians? Anyway, Nadir and the Princess take off to escape the Earth-military, but Saunders manages a pyrrhic victory by blasting their control board and destroying the whole ship-- which may or may not be a tribute to James Whale's convenient "blow-everything-up switch."  The film ends quickly, with another segue to cheery pop music.

SPACE MONSTER isn't quite brain-fried enough to be ranked with the best of the "so bad it's good" crowd. But it does have a few lucid moments amid all the perhaps-intentional idiocies.

WILLOW (1988)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological*

Scripted from a George Lucas story and given a John Williams-sound-alike score by James Horner, WILLOW proves that Lucas and director Ron Howard should have stuck with taking inspiration from serials.  Even calling WILLOW “Tolkien-lite” might insinuate that it possesses even a fraction of the complexity of THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

WILLOW is best regarded as a lively sword-and-sorcery opus with a higher budget than most such efforts.  As with most S&S, the film builds its fantasy-scape out of all sorts of mythic odds’n’ ends. The main character Willow Ufgood (Warwick Davis) is one of a race of dwarfish people called “Nelwyns,” but the rest of the fantasy-peoples are taken from the same European folklore Tolkien raided, yielding the usual crop of elves, trolls, and brownies.  However, human beings are called “Daikinis,” a name lifted from a species of Hindu fairies.  Some names, like Willow’s, are meant to sound vaguely Celtic, but as in most S&S tales other names sound borrowed from a potpourri of sources, as with “Sorsha,” “Bavmorda,” and “Madmartigan.”

The film begins on a “slaughter of the innocents” theme, as the tyrannical sorceress Bavmorda seeks to find an infant who, according to prophecy, will bring about the evil queen’s doom.  The special girl-child, Elora by name, is spirited away by a midwife and sent on a Moses-like journey down a river, where she’s found by Willow’s family.  Unlike Frodo of LOTR, Willow has a wife and two children, so he isn’t too keen on getting involved in the affairs of the oversized Daikini people.  When one of Bavmorda’s beasts attacks Willow’s community, the Nelwyns send a “fellowship” composed of Willow and a few others to give Elora back to the first Daikini they meet.

Much to Willow’s disgust, the first Daikini they meet is a thief penned up in a cage, name of Madmartigan (Val Kilmer).  The Nelwyn fellowship breaks up almost immediately thereafter (so much for that bit of Tolkien-imagery!), for most Nelwyns are eager to let this disreputable human take charge of the infant. With great reluctance, Willow acquiesces and lets Madmartigan take Elora, but the infant is summarily snatched by brownies and Willow once more goes in search of her.  After a few more adventures he partners up with Madmartigan once more, who’s also taken a reluctant shine to the wonder baby.  Meanwhile they encounter one of Bavmorda’s military detachments, led by Bavmorda’s swordswoman daughter Sorsha.  The two heroes spend most of their time dodging soldiers and making new allies before their inevitable confrontation with the evil sorceress.

The overall plot of WILLOW is pretty shaky: though the tale begins by claiming that Elora is supposed to overthrow Bavmorda, in truth her only role is to motivate the two heroes and their allies to oppose the villain.  Willow, unable to fight on the level of his allies, manages to hoax the enchantress.  Yet Bavmorda’s ultimate defeat comes about because of the chance intervention of a lightning bolt, which was a melodramatic cliché back when Sade made fun of it in JUSTINE.

The best parts of WILLOW are the light-hearted character bits.  Madmartigan and Sorsha initially seem to despise each other, but their true feelings are liberated when the hero is exposed to a “love-dust” courtesy of two brownies. (Actors Kilmer and Whalley were married following completion of the picture.)  The brownies Rool and Franjean, who talk with Cajun accents, provide consistent and often much-needed humor whenever the action gets a little too routine.  Ron Howard’s direction of the splashy action-scenes is competent but no single scene is particularly memorable.  Bavmorda is a cardboard villain, evil purely for the sake of being evil. Lucas’ story might have dwelled a little on the unusual relationship of a tyrant-sorceress with a swordswoman for a daughter.  But the script never allows the slightest reflection on how Sorsha feels toward her witchy mother, either while serving her or betraying her.  As with most sword-and-sorcery films, there are no deeper metaphysical themes to the concept of magic: spells are just another weapon.

At its core, WILLOW is a “buddy film.”  The titular character is a husband and father who is marginalized by his own community.  A wealthy Nelwyn disparages Willow as both a “farmer” and a “clown” (the latter because Willow performs feats of stage-magic).  Willow aspires to learn real magic, but even when he gets his own wand in the course of his quest, he never successfully performs a spell.  Ironically he achieves his greatest success with the use of “phony magic.”  In contrast, Madmartigan is a tough fighter, and so much a loner that his only acquaintance disparages him for being loyal to no one.  This is perhaps the strongest borrowing Lucas took from Tolkien.  In LOTR Frodo is a humble figure forced to take extreme actions, while Tolkien’s human protagonist Aragorn is a more glamorous hero-type who in a sense plays second fiddle to Frodo.  Willow and Madmartigan interact more personally than do Frodo and Aragorn, but the formula of pairing humility and glamour remains constant.      

    

ZATOICHI (1962)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *good*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

 In one of my essays for my litcrit blog THE ARCHETYPAL ARCHIVE, I drew a comparison between the medieval adventure-story of the character "Amlethus," which Shakespeare transformed into the sophisticated dramatic play HAMLET:

",,,the original Hamlet stories of the medieval historian Saxo Grammaticus, taking an adventurous approach, present the hero as cleverly pretending madness as a ruse to deceive his enemies.  Shakespeare transforms this notion into a critique of Hamlet's own rational mind and of his responses to his father's murder-- and in so doing, signals that the reader must be more critical toward Hamlet than Hamlet is.  Whereas in the adventure-themed folklore story of Hamlet the evil can be cast out without harm to the society, in a drama the hero is implicated in the evil and is "purged" no less than the villain."

The two films considered here take the opposite approach: the earlier starts out as a purgative drama, while the other takes the shape of a hot-blooded adventure-tale.  Both concern a species of the "uncanny-metaphenomenal" I've not yet written about: that of the blind warrior who seems to possess senses beyond any naturalistic sphere.

In 1962 ZATOICHI (the full title is THE TALE OF ZATOICHI) launched the first in a series of samurai stories focused upon the blind swordsman of the title (though only "Ichi" is his proper name; the entire designation translates to "blind itinerant low-class Ichi.")  The name denotes an important sociological motif in the first of the Zatoichi films, which continues to appear in at least some of the subsequent films in the series.  Like many heroes of popular fiction, Zatoichi addresses conflicts within his society. Prior to losing his vision, Zatoichi, born into a low class in Japan's "Edo era," is expected to be deferential to his betters, but he anticipates ill treatment and becomes a peerless swordsman in order to defend himself.  After losing his sight, Zatoichi wanders Japan, plying his trade as both a masseur and a gambler.  Sooner or later, however, his skills as a swordsman are called into play.  In the first entry, two rival gangster-factions are battling in the town where Zatoichi happens to wander.  One group tries to hire him against their enemies, while the other enlists another samurai to take on the blind swordsman.  There are other dramatic crossplots, but the inevitable conflict of the two warriors is the center of the drama.

Only a few scenes are devoted to the blind warrior displaying his peerless skills, easily the superior of many sighted men, and thus are the only manifestations of the uncanny-metaphenomenal within the "outre outfits skills and devices" trope.  These exhibitions are clearly secondary to Zatoichi's interaction with the other characters he meets-- splendidly essayed by lead actor Shintaro Katsu, who exclusively played the role in films and TV until his 1997 death.  Zatoichi himself has decidedly mixed feelings about his lonely, borderline-criminal existence.  In keeping with other serious samurai-dramas of the time, though there are situations that demand combat, there is no pleasure taken in combat, none of the glorification of the hero that marks the adventure-mythos.  Other Zatoichi stories may cleave more toward adventure than this one, but the original opus clearly follows the dramatic path.

TITANS: SEASONS 1-2 (2018-2019)

 

Berlanti’s soap-operatics would reign supreme in all the rest of his Arrowverse productions. But TITANS, produced for HBO and taking place on a “separate Earth,” has more resemblance to the horror-themed melodrama of the nineties BUFFY series than it does to anything in the Arrowverse—or, for that matter, in the celebrated NEW TEEN TITANS series from which most of TITANS derives. In this production Berlanti shares production credits with two other famous (or infamous) names in superhero fare, Geoff Johns and Akiva Goldsman. But since neither man is particularly well known for dark, edgy drama in their respective film-and-TV work, I have to assume all three producers tailored this superhero adaptation to fit HBO’s standards. Since I’ve never liked Johns or Goldsman, and since I’ve found most of Berlanti’s TV shows execrable in the last four years, it’s nothing short of a miracle that the TITANS show comes together as well as it does.

Given that the core idea of TEEN TITANS depends on the formation of a team of heroic young sidekicks, TITANS practically requires the setting of an Earth where numerous superheroes throng the skylines, much like the status quo of DC superhero comics. Most of the “elder” heroes—Superman, Aquaman, Wonder Woman—are referenced but not seen, while Batman is seen only in the non-costumed identity of Bruce Wayne. When the series begins, a Teen Titans hero-group operated some years ago, but that assemblage ceased activity for reasons undisclosed in the first season. Dick Grayson, now a twenty-something rather than a Boy Wonder, has split from his role of Batman’s partner, and he pursues a mundane form of crimefighting in police work. But, as in the introductory issues of the eighties comics series, Grayson becomes involved with some new kids on the superhero block: analogues of Raven, Starfire and Beast Boy. To cope with the various problems of the newbie heroes—most of which revolve around Raven and her rapacious demon-father—the former Robin calls upon members of the former group—the Hawk, the Dove, and Donna (“Wonder Girl”) Troy. Much to his chagrin, Grayson is also obliged to call upon the resources of his erstwhile Bat-mentor, and thus he ends up saddled with Batman’s new partner, a “new Robin” named Tim Drake. The second season adds three more luminaries to the lineup: Conner, a twenty-something clone of Superman, and both Jericho and Rose (“Ravager”) Wilson, son and daughter to the super-hitman Deathstroke.

Despite what might seem an unwieldy ensemble, the TITANS writers do a sterling job of designing strong melodramatic arcs for most of the characters. The weakest link is indubitably Beast Boy. The character became a regular member of the New Teen Titans in order to provide the feature with comedy relief, but this version of Beast Boy is largely played straight, perhaps to avoid undermining the dominant grimness of the show. But this version of Gar Logan remains a weak concept, and the show’s budget can’t handle the character’s specialty, that of transforming into countless animal forms. The alien heroine Starfire presents parallel problems. As long as she’s an energy-wielding alien princess stuck on Earth, she doesn’t strain the limits of the show’s potential. But when the second season makes allusions to her returning to her home on the world of Tamaran, and pursuing a conflict with her acrimonious sibling Blackfire, the experienced TV-watcher knows good and well that TITANS won’t be able to pull off that level of set-design and FX.

The character-arcs in both seasons are generally strong, but the interweaving plots about each season’s respective “Big Bad” lack cohesion. Season One focuses on Raven, bewildered by the onset of her demonic powers and pursued by various groups, some of which work for her father Trigon. By season’s end, it’s hard to recall who was on whose side, and for what reason. But the first-season episodes are strong in maintaining a sense of nightmarish dislocation as the other heroes get pulled into Raven’s outre world.

Second season reveals that the first group of Titans broke up because of the depredations of Deathstroke, who has vowed to destroy any group of Titans Robin puts together because the villain believes the hero responsible for the death of Jericho. The comics-version of Jericho was not particularly memorable, and his contribution to this narrative feels shoehorned in. However, there’s a somewhat better balance between the A-plot of Deathstroke’s vendetta, which includes all of the developments with his daughter Rose, and the B-plot dealing with the genesis of Conner, who’s given life by a laboratory run by Superman’s nemesis Luthor. Season Two concludes with the Death of a Hero, though the producers cannily suggest that it might be one who famously perishes in the comics, in a skillful act of misdirection.

A season 3 for TITANS is in the offing, but I wouldn’t mind if the show closed while it remained relatively “on top,” unlike a certain series about a green-clad archer.

HONOR ROLL #10, JUNE 27

 MINKA KELLY as "the Dove" stands in for the whole of the TITANS series.

The greatest of the blind martial artists was launched by SHINTARO KATSU.

Before he was a big name, VAL KILMER played one of the better Han Solo-swipes in WILLOW.

Mad scientist JAMES KAREN finds himself making the introductions when FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER.

NANCY KWAN unleashes an army of Amazons in WONDER WOMEN.

Where Godzilla has gone, can the original KING KONG be far behind?

GLASS (2019)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*


Now that I've seen the culmination of M. Night Shyamalan's "ordinary superhero" trilogy-- the first two parts of which I reviewed here-- I tend to think of the whole in standard theatrical terms, with UNBREAKABLE as a fairly compelling first act, SPLIT as a weak second act, and GLASS as a strong third act.

As I stated in the earlier review, one of the more impressive things about Shyamalan's take on superheroes is that they don't really seem to escape quotidian existence. Even when a writer like Alan Moore tries to satirize the superhero idiom, he still has to reproduce many if not all of the most notorious superhero tropes in order that his barbs can find their proper target. But Shyamalan's trilogy seems to be more ambitious, in giving the audience superheroes whose powers and talents are difficult to assess.

Of course, a lot of metaphenomenal films have hinged on the ambiguous nature of the marvelous. Sometimes there's no doubt that marvelous entities exist, but there are some doubts as to the true nature of said entities. ("It's a cookbook!") At other times, the marvelous can be given a "realistic" explanation, though in many such works, ranging from Gothics to detective stories, the explanation is not much more realistic than the outright marvelous thing being suggested, thus resulting in the domain of "the uncanny." In both UNBREAKABLE and SPLIT, Shyamalan keeps his apparent marvels within a twilight realm that might transform into the uncanny. Does David Dunn really lose his apparent invulnerability when faced with his "kryptonite," or is that all part of a childhood complex? Does Kevin Crumb, in his monster-like persona of "the Beast," really possess super-strength when he's seen bending iron bars, or is he just doing what a lot of above-average strongmen can do, fueled by his own psychosis? The merely human witnesses to this marvels-- Dunn's son Joseph, Kevin's former captive Casey-- cannot be entirely sure that they have seen wonders, and so neither can the audience be sure. The only character who remains resolutely sure of the existence of modern-day superheroes is Elijah Price, and he's a madman who's killed hundreds of people in his quest to become a true super-villain. But his villainous name, "Mister Glass," constantly reminds the audience that his belief in the strength of superheroes may be a fantasy of compensation, because that strength is something that his eternally fragile body cannot ever possess.

Nevertheless, long after Price/Glass has been institutionalized, Dunn's desire to be a protector of the weak eventuates in his crossing paths with Kevin Crumb, who has recently begun preying on female victims once more. There's a brief "battle of the titans," but the forces of the ordinary world intrude on the mortal combat, in the force of Dr. Ellie Staple and a contingent of policemen. Both the would-be hero and his monstrous foe are consigned to the same asylum as the villainous Glass, and Staple claims that the only way the three of them can escape eternal imprisonment is to recant their respective belief-systems.

Since Shyamalan himself has cleverly set things up so that the audience cannot be 100 percent sure of  what they've seen, any more than can the diegetical witnesses, the audience of GLASS hangs in a position of uncertainty. Have they indulged in beliefs about the marvelous simply because they, like the characters, want to be removed from the world of the ordinary?

Staple seems, for a time, to possess the "right reading" of the escapist superhero fantasy. However, it wouldn't be a film by M. Night Shyamalan if there wasn't at least the possibility of an ending with a twist, or even a "double twist." The mechanics through which the writer-director realizes the surprise. however, are less important than the implied ethical: that the people preaching "the reality principle" may have a vested interest in controlling the reality of everyone else.

Whereas SPLIT was a little too much James MacAvoy for me at least, his florid Kevin character is nicely counterpointed by the underplayed character of  Bruce Willis's David Dunn, who remains resigned to his grim fate from the first, even when he sacrifices himself to save innocents who arguably don't deserve being saved. Samuel L, Jackson's Elijah is in some ways the moral center of the film despite his heinous acts, for he's willing to perpetrate evil deeds in order to banish a greater evil: the false belief in human limitations. Thus, GLASS may be the first film in which a hero, a villain and a monster share center-stage as part of the core ensemble. (Prior to this, the biggest admixture of persona-types I'd ever seen in a single film would be CHRONICLE, where its two co-equal stars are what I term "monster" and "demihero.")

All this, and a pretty good super-fight at the conclusion.

LARA CROFT TOMB RAIDER (2001), LARA CROFT TOMB RAIDER: THE CRADLE OF LIFE (2003)

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair,* (2) *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, metaphysical*

 

 

 

                             

 

To justify their existence, movies adapted from video games need to fulfill one requirement: lots of spectacular action-sequences with a minimum of character motivation. Whereas a few creators have been able to slightly upgrade characterization in movies based on the somewhat related form of chapterplay serials—RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK being the obvious go-to here—in video game movies, this would seem like gilding the lily.

 

In the first Lara Croft movie, the titular daredevil archeologist (Angelina Jolie) has just one strong motive for her derring-do: to obey an injunction left behind by her missing-and-presumed-dead archeologist father (Jon Voigt, Jolie’s real-life paternal unit). A note from dead daddy informs the adventurous English heiress that she must seek out an arcane relic, the Triangle of Life, and destroy it. The Triangle, created from a fallen meteor by a prehistoric civilization, gives its owners control over time and space, and it can only be accessed when all nine planets become aligned—which they are just about to do, for the first time in 5,000 years. Both Lara and an inevitable band of enemy tomb raiders, the Illuminati, have just one chance to find the Triangle, though its usage has already destroyed the people who first created the object, and may well spell doom for modern existence.

 

The time-changing element of the Triangle holds the greatest significance for Lara Croft. Her father’s disappearance has cheated her of the time she could have enjoyed with him, and she considers going against her late father’s wishes in order to violate time and bring him back to life. Clocks and clockwork symbols abound throughout TOMB RAIDER, as if the scripter was afraid the audience might not pick up on The Temptation of Lara regarding escaping the surly bonds of time. As a slight mirroring of the heroine’s father-dilemma, her primary opponent, an Illuminati servant named Powell, reports to an older commander at first, but eventually overthrows his mentor in his quest for power. Throughout the adventure—and director Simon West supplies the viewer with numerous strong set-pieces—Lara has ambiguous encounters with entities that may be time-guardians of some sort—talking to her dead father in a dream, meeting Asian children who seem to know all about her. The climax includes Powell offering Lara a devil’s bargain, that of using the Triangle to resuscitate a love-interest she’s picked up along the way (a not-yet-famous Daniel Craig). But Lara proves herself a hero both by refusing the bargain and kicking Powell’s ass in one of the more credible female-against-male battles in American action-film. Indeed, Jolie’s transformation into a lean-and-mean tough girl sells the film far more than any single set-piece.

 

Whereas the first Lara Croft film wrapped itself in the metaphysics of time and space, CRADLE OF LIFE attempts to do so with the genesis on all life on Earth. The titular cradle refers to a domain in Africa where a meteor (another one?) fell to Earth and was forged into a mystic box, later conflated with the Pandora’s Box of folklore. In an illustration of the aphorism “Nothing repeats like success,” this item is like the light-triangle another means by which unscrupulous tomb raiders can seek to rule the world—but only by getting Lara’s help.

 

Since the first film allowed the heroine to lay her father-complex to rest, this does allow Lara more time for romance, as she rekindles relations with an old flame name of Terry (Gerard Butler, also not yet famous). Lara and Terry have been in the same business, and their past hookups haven’t kept Terry from poaching on Lara’s discoveries. Nevertheless, they seek out Pandora’s Box, while pursued by a rather forgettable group of bad guys. The repetition of familiar elements continues on through the climax, where once again Lara must make a momentous decision in order to triumph.

 

The LARA CROFT script might have been a little overdone with its reiteration of time-motifs, but the script for CRADLE is by comparison underdone. The metaphysical ideas of the genesis of life and all the association inherent in the myth of Pandora’s Box are trotted out like show-ponies, but they never become an organic part of the narrative. More tellingly, though Jolie still looks great doing her stunts, the script just doesn’t deliver on exciting spectacle. This is presumably not the failure of director Jan deBont, who had become famous for his work on the thriller SPEED, and who more or less dropped out of the directing chair after the second and last Lara Croft movie. In one online interview deBont complained that the producers cut his budget significantly, which may have compromised the action-quotient. Viewers did not embrace the sequel at the box office, and though there are rumors that it might have been just profitable enough for another outing, it’s hard to imagine the studios pumping the dollars back into the series. Thus it was providential that Jolie refused to reprise the Tomb Raider role again, for another entry would have been cheaper still, showing that there’s more than one bad thing that can come from robbing the CRADLE. 

CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, psychological*

To date the first CONAN film, despite all the changes it made to the Conan mythos of Robert E. Howard, remains the only sword-and-sorcery film to delve into the mythic symbolism of this type of otherworldly fantasy.  Naturally the icon of Conan was made possible in an immediate sense by the perfect casting of bodybuilder-turned-actor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  However, the script by Oliver Stone and director John Milius is most responsible for the deeper aspects of the film, whose lack would become apparent in Schwarzenegger’s only sequel, to say nothing of dozens of other empty-headed barbarian flicks.

The film wears its lofty soul on its sleeve, opening with a Nietzsche quote, images of fiery sword-crafting (in which both Conan’s father and mother participate), and narration by the actor Mako, identifying himself as the “chronicler” of Conan’s rise to prominence.  It also proves to be one of the few films that, though replete with father-images, shows an orientation more Jungian than Freudian.

In the opening, Conan’s father provides his son with a vision of a world where strength is a gift from the gods, incarnate in the forging of steel.  Crom is a distant, uncaring god who lives deep in a mountain, but in olden times certain “giants” stole the Promethean “secret of steel” from Crom.  Crom responded by killing the giants.  Mortal men inherited the secret of the dead giants, and Conan’s father claims that only steel can earn Conan’s trust, unlike men or women.  Conan’s later experience with fast friends Valeria and Subotai will disprove this, but only because they, like he, have made their souls as strong as steel.

Enter the villain; Thulsa Doom (James Earl Jones), a ruthless warlord who in Jungian terms takes over from the young barbarian’s father by demonstrating his greater strength.  Doom leads a small army of raiders and decimates Conan’s Cimmerian village, apparently (though it’s not stated) to purloin the magnificent forged steel of Conan’s father—though much later, Doom will reveal that he lost interest in the secret.  To further displace Conan’s father—ignominiously killed by Doom’s trained dogs—the evil wizard himself subdues Conan’s mother, who is prepared to swordfight anyone who threatens her son.  Doom hypnotizes the unnamed mother into yielding her throat to his sword, which some authors might equate with a sexual violation.  Doom shows nothing resembling lust, though.

Young Conan is implicitly traumatized by the loss of his world.  The narrator tells us that the village’s devastation is so total that “no one would ever know that my lord’s people had existed at all”—a sentiment very much in tune with Robert E. Howard’s reflections on the transitory nature of even great races.  Conan submits to the yoke of slavery for the next decade or so, until a new father-figure—billed only as “Red Hair”—purchases the barbarian to use as a pit-fighter.  Conan proves such an excellent fighter that he’s given martial training in the East, taught how to read, and given his own slave-girl-- whom he treats gently, indicating that he hasn’t descended into total bestiality.  Not long after the mature Conan utters the film’s landmark line about “what is good in life,” Red Hair apparently becomes so paternally inclined toward the barbarian that the slave-owner cuts Conan loose and drives him into the wastes to seek his destiny.

Two more encounters take place before Conan even seems to remember his sufferings at Thulsa Doom’s hands.  First, the barbarian flees a pack of wolves and fortuitously stumbles into a cave.  Within the cave lies the remnants of an ancient Atlantean city, where Conan claims a great sword from an enthroned skeletal warrior.  It takes no great leap to see the dead warrior as one with the dead father, once more bestowing the power of steel upon the young warrior.

Second, Conan comes across the hut of a sexy young woman, identified as a “wolf-witch” by Milius on a DVD track.  Only once Conan meets this temptress does he start asking about the “serpent-standard” of Thulsa Doom.  She offers to exchange information for sex.  Conan is happy to oblige, but is more than a little concerned when the witch takes on wolfish characteristics during coitus.  The witch manages to spout a few sibylline prophecies before she tries to tear the warrior to pieces, and even after he flings her into a fire, her spirit survives, zooming away into the night like a will-o’-the-wisp. 

In addition to getting directions to the city of Zamora, Conan also meets and liberates Subotai, apparently being kept as food for the witch’s friends the wolves.  Subotai, being a thief, leads Conan to make an assault on the treasure-room of the Tower of Set in Zamora, where they meet and join up with the lady thief Valeria.  After a deadly battle against the snake-cult of Set and a giant serpent, the three escape the tower.  Then they are captured and recruited by King Osric—himself yet another father-figure, since he was “once a powerful Northman” comparable to Conan’s Cimmerian people.  Osric’s daughter has been drawn into the brainwashing cult of Thulsa Doom, and the king wants her freed.  Valeria (who has become Conan’s lover) and Subotai want no part of such an adventure. Conan sees the mission as his chance for vengeance.

At the “Mountain of Power,” Conan encounters the cultists of Thulsa Doom, who are patently a satire of the hippie movement, in that they walk around chanting and carrying flowers. Conan befriends a local shaman (Mako), who makes his home amid a graveyard of standing skeletons and menhirs, who becomes important later in bringing the barbarian back from the death given him by his “evil father.”

Pretending to be a flower-child—easily the film’s funniest scene—Conan infiltrates Doom’s temple on the Mountain of Power. Doom’s lieutenants Rexor and Thorgrim—also present during the devastation of the village—find him out.  After Conan’s been captured and beaten into helplessness, Doom confronts him, having forgotten their earlier encounter and whatever interest he once possessed in “the secret of steel.”  The villain boasts that he’s found a greater strength, “the strength of flesh”—which ironically, actually connotes Doom’s ability to manipulate humans through the weakness of their will.  For instance, the wizard demonstrates “the strength of flesh” by commanding a random acolyte to dive to her doom.  He also claims credit for the strength that Conan has gained through adversity, as per Nietzsche’s famous “what does not kill me” quote. 

Doom sentences Conan to be crucified on a tree in the wilderness.  This scene is the one most clearly derived from one in a Howard short story, down to Conan killing a vulture with his teeth.  However, in contrast to the Howard story, Conan is rescued from death by his friends, Valeria and Subotai.  Even then, the barbarian remains close to death.  The shaman observes that the death-spirits will come for Conan unless they can be driven away by mortals.  Valeria accepts the mission, even after the shaman’s warning that the gods may levy a price for her defiance.

Valeria succeeds in driving away the death-spirits, and Conan survives as he slowly heals from his ordeal.  Once he is recovered, Valeria and Subotai agree to help Conan storm the temple—though again, as professional thieves they’re not willing to fight Doom; only to liberate Osric’s unnamed daughter.  Conan implicitly agrees, though it’s also a given that he plans to attack Doom if he can.

The raid on the temple—where it’s revealed that the real purpose of Doom’s “enlightenment” is to turn his followers into cannibal-broth—succeeds.  There’s a cost, though: as the liberators ride off with their prize, Doom borrows a trick from the books of Moses: causing a snake to go rigid and using it as an arrow to impale Valeria during her flight.  Valeria perishes but promises her lover that she’ll return if he needs her.

At this point Subotai yields to Conan’s desire for vengeance.  Instead of fleeing, the two warriors stake out the princess on one of the menhirs and wait for Doom’s army.  Doom, his lieutenants and a handful of other soldiers duly attack, only to be decimated as was Conan’s village—though Conan gets some brief last-minute aid from the ghost of Valeria.  Doom survives, but he finally shows his true colors to the princess.  He tries to kill her with another snake-arrow, but Subotai saves her.

Strangely, Subotai is absent from the final scene: Conan enters the temple once more with the help of the princess (though she’s absent in the original release-version).  As Doom addresses his mindless followers, Conan confronts him.  Once more Doom tries the old “I’m-your-true-father” line—an idea possibly indebted to Jones’ previous incarnation as another “evil father” in 1980’s THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK.  Conan is briefly enthralled by Doom’s hypnotic influence, but still manages to behead his enemy, scatter his followers and destroy the temple.  The film ends with prophesizing more adventures of Conan as he progresses toward his destiny—though the only sequel with Schwarzenegger doesn’t accord with any aspect of Milius’ vision, much less Robert E. Howard’s.

Often when critics deem films to have a Jungian orientation, they mean that it’s full of many dreamlike fantasy-images.  This is not the case with Milius’ CONAN THE BARBARIAN.  However, Milius uses the sanguinary Howard-esque imagery to show a definite progress of Conan’s soul from his traumatized beginnings to his triumph over the negative image of his father.  “When I am gone, you will have never been,” asserts Thulsa Doom to Conan.  This assertion captures Freud’s notion of the male psyche, eternally enthralled by the influence of the father.  But Conan has internalized his real father’s message as to the “rule of steel,” an internal toughness that goes beyond mere violence, so that he can refuse Doom’s false tidings.

There are other leitmotifs in Milius' version of the mighty barbarian that could reward Jungian investigation, particularly his quasi-Wagnerian uses of fire-imagery.  But this review can't investigate them in detail.

STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS (2015)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological, metaphysical*

Given all the ballyhoo surrounding the Disney Croporation’s purchase of George Locas’s most famous creation, this film might have been credibly subtitled THE FRANCHISE AWAKENS.

While the purchase put a lot of shekels in Lucas’s pockets, it could have resulted in a poor exchange for all audiences looking for a new STAR WARS adventures. Corporations that take over properties have been known to re-assert their “brand” over said properties by attempting ill-considered remakes or reboots of said properties. Of course, remakes and reboots come about even when corporate properties don’t change hands—the most relevant one being the 2009 reboot of the STAR TREK franchise. Producer-director J.J. Abrams orchestrated that re-branding, which, as I’ve noted here, was something less than a total aesthetic success.

        When I first viewed Abrams’ STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS last year, I was much more impressed with the results of this work. I’m sure that some of my satisfaction eventuated from the fact that FORCE was not a remake or reboot, but a continuation of the ongoing saga. That said, the continuation follows some patterns of the re-brainding process. The story, though technically new, follows a pattern that some fans found repetitious way back when Lucas repeated his ‘destroy the Death Star” schtick in 1983’s RETURN OF THE JEDI. The script makes no bones about originality, either: BB-8, a new “cute droid,” is introduced early on, but late in the film the story had BB-8 come in contact with both C3P-O and R2D2. Thus the new kid on the block seems to picking up a passed torch rather than usurping a beloved role.

In the case of actors who aren’t playing non-aging droids, the necessity of replacement is far more crucial. Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess (now General) Leia, and Chewbacca all make appearances, with Harrison Ford’s Solo getting the lion’s share of screen-time, for reasons relating to  the film’s denouement. But all four are on the second tier next to two more new kids, Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Finn (John Boyega). In future chapters the two of them will almost certainly accrue further allies of consequence, but FORCE is constructed to sell Rey and Finn as the new core of Disney’s STAR WARS universe. 

Before going into greater detail regarding the film’s heroes, I'll touch on the greater weakness of "New Star Wars": its villains. The original Empire has fallen within a time-span roughly covalent with that of the older actors’ life-spans. Now a new threat to the Republic arises: the First Order, said to have been built from the remnants of the old Empire, and once more empowered behind the scenes by two Sith Lords. The elder Sith, Snoke, is no better or worse than Lucas’s Emperor, but Kylo Ren, “the new Darth Vader,” reminds me less of the original’s samurai-like formidability and more of “whiny Anakin” from the prequel trilogy. His entire arc is predicated on the tremendous irony that he is the seed of the love between Han and Leia, but this alone is not enough to make him a memorable opponent. 

Similarly, the fact that Kylo trained under Luke Skywalker doesn’t give him any gravitas, either. However, it’s an interesting psychological touch that the script, by having Luke be Kylo’s teacher, makes him the symbolic offspring of the Luke-Leia-Han triangle. Skywalker fled the inhabited galaxies prior to the rise of the First Order, specifically because he, as much as Kylo’s literal parents, failed in the parental duty of keeping the kid from Turning to the Darth Side.

Skywalker himself is the prize sought by Rey, Finn and assorted Republic allies, and the script does an admirable job of hewing to the simple charm of the original STAR WARS: two opposed sides seeking the same McGuffin. It’s certainly preferable to Lucas’s elephantine attempts at governmental conspiracy in the prequel trilogy, though here the Republic takes a back seat to the Resistance commanded by General Leia.

 As for the First Order, its name alone gave me some hope that it might not be just another space-opera version of the Roman Empire; that it might more of a theocratic rebellion along the lines of al-Qaeda. No such luck, though: it’s the same old Stormtrooper methods.

That said, the Stormtroopers themselves get a “soft reboot.” I’m not enough of a WARS expert to know how serious George Lucas was when he suggested, in ATTACK OF THE CLONES, that all of the Empire’s soldiers were clones descended from one individual, Jango Fett. I’m not even sure what advantage Lucas thought this would give troops: to be dependent on one skill-set. 

Here alone the Disney franchise significantly rewrites Lucas: now most if not all Stormtroopers are abducted from their homeworlds and trained to be obedient soldiers. In this essay, I noted how the misprision between Lucas’s ideas and those conceived under the Disney regime resulted in WARS fans evincing a negative reaction to the reaction that Finn would be a black stormtrooper. This was not, as some leftist pundits claimed, racism, but a perception regarding continuity. The Disney rewrite takes the emphasis off Lucas’s attempt to justify a tossed-off reference to “clone wars,” and implicates the Empire/First Order in a space-faring version of organized slavery, including, but not limited to, the Africa Diaspora.

That said, the character of Finn, though an improvement on the one-dimensional Lando Calrissian, remains underdeveloped in FORCE. He’s sometimes given the aura of  a “Han Solo in training,” but this aspect of his function gets sidetracked when Rey, not Finn, forms a quasi-paternal bond with the original. In fact Rey displays aspects of all of her parental influences,combining Han’s talents for piloting and scrounging, Leia’s feminine hauteur, and Luke’s instinctive connection with the Force. The film ends with her making contact with Luke, who, I assume, will become her mentor. Whether or not Finn receives comparable character development remains to be seen in the sequel.

Surprisingly, director Abrams is as good a fit in the Lucas Universe as he was bad in the Roddenberry one. In my first viewing of FORCE, I was impressed by a simple scene in which Rey, having scavenged a wrecked ship, uses an improvised “sled’ to descend a high sand-dune. That one scene, more than any number of animated ray-blasts or whizzing tie-fighters, captures the essence of the original STAR WARS: full of Lucas’s love for the cinema’s transformation of sheer motion into visual poetry.

To be sure, Abrams doesn’t possess the talent evinced by the Lucas of 1977 for synthesizing great action-scenes from Classic Hollywood: the western’s saloon-confrontation, the pirate film’s yardarm-flights, the war film’s airborne strafing-runs. But then, given that even later Lucas lost his mojo in this department, it’s hard to expect Abrams to do him one better. FORCE AWAKENS is at least a good start to a new franchise, and a much better reworking than others that I could have—or already have—

DEADLIER THAN THE MALE (1967), SOME GIRLS DO (1969)

 

PHENOMENALITY: (1) *uncanny,* (2) *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: (1) *fair,* (2) *poor*

FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure *

CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*




These films featured a Bond-style updating of the 1920 toughguy-hero Bulldog Drummond, DEADLIER THAN THE MALE is one of the few eminently watchable 1960s imitations of the James Bond series.  In contrast, the second and only sequel, SOME GIRLS DO, is so tedious that one can hardly believe it emanated from essentially the same team of producer, director, writers, et al.


DEADLIER rates a "fair" rating not because its script is any more nuanced than the second film's, but because it centers upon the "femme formidable" aspect of the cinematic Bond-series.  It's axiomatic that the Bond film-series emphasizes the hero's playboy adventures far more than the book-series does. However, as a result of the cinema's greater emphasis on spectacular violence, some female characters, notably Pussy Galore of GOLDFINGER, are far more "empowered" than they are in prose.  Though the male hero remains the center of the audience's attention, many of the films play up the role of women as heroines or villainesses whose activities contradict their reputation as "the weaker sex."


Where films like GOLDFINGER and THUNDERBALL offered the femme formidable as a kind of attractive side-dish, in both of these films the curvaceous killers come close to overshadowing central hero Drummond.  Granted, the lady assassins also report to a male mastermind, Carl Peterson.  But unlike the villain of the Drummond books from whom the character takes his name, the films' main villain is even more colorless than the main hero.  At least 1960s Drummond gets a few quips almost worthy of the best Bond-lines.

Perhaps director Ralph Thomas and his collaborators wanted to steer clear of the Bondfilms' sociopolitical arena, for this Drummond is not a spy but an insurance investigator.  His adversary Peterson is a non-political game-player who sends his lady assassins hither and yon to assassinate anyone who gets in the way of his business-oriented plans for world domination.  Drummond's main purpose is to investigate the deaths for his insurance company, and he doesn't even carry a gun unless he takes it from one of his foes.

Without a doubt the strongest scenes in DEADLIER are those in which Peterson's malicious molls-- Irma (Elke Sommer) and Penelope (Sylva Koscina) go hunting for human-- and exclusively male-- prey. Peterson has a few other beauties working for him at his sanctum, but Irma and Penelope are the only ones who go about executing well-constructed scenes of sadistic murder. Some of these scenes include the use of such uncanny weapons as (1) cigars that shoot bullets when lit and (2) a poison that paralyzes its victim, but leaves him conscious as Irma and Penelope toss him from the roof of a skyscraper.


Did the scripters construct such scenes with any awareness of sadism as such?  That's hard to say, but there seems to be some slight awareness of the psychological appeal of sadomasochism. Following a scene in which Penelope binds and tortures Drummond's young nephew for information, Drummond rescues his nephew with the quip, "I never knew you were into this sort of thing."


Overall production values are good, the pace is brisk, and Richard Johnson makes a dashing albeit flatly characterized hero. The most amusing character-scene involves the nephew's girlfriend making a none-too-subtle play for "older man" Drummond, and the hero finds himself fleeing her youthful attentions, for reasons that are never specified.

Wikipedia asserts that the film was meant to serve as a de facto pilot for a Drummond teleseries, which never came to be.  Perhaps it's just as well, for two years later SOME GIRLS DO showed what happened when Thomas and Co were no longer bothering to put their best feet forward.


Again Peterson, who survives the destruction of his HQ in the first film (but is played by a new actor), sends forth beauteous hitwomen, but though two of the women, Helga and Pandora, are the "featured slayers," other women in the villain's harem/army are seen commiting murders as well. Unfortunately, most of them are desultory and forgettable.  Characteristic of the poorly imagined death-scenes include (1) Helga and Pandora giving their victim's car a tow in their own auto, and end up hurling the guy and his car off a cliff, and (2) Pandora killing a guy with an "infrasonic" camera.  The latter scene is particularly egregious in that the budget allowed for no FX, so all we see is the actress pointing the boxlike camera at her target, whereupon the actor screams and falls down.  I wouldn't be a good myth-critic if I didn't observe that Pandora and her camera are probably meant to provide a loose parallel to the Pandora of myth and her box-- which in turn is probably a silly and labored sexual pun.  If so, the game is hardly worth the candle.


In addition to the sonic camera, some or all of the girls are now equipped with "artificial brains" that make them into de facto robots, but the script doesn't do much of anything with this notion, except occasionally have the girls short-circuit or do silly slapstick things. The girls are as beautiful as those of the first film, but they aren't given anything empowering, or even just fun, to do. Heroic Drummond-- this time saddled with two comic sidekicks-- doesn't get as many good lines.  For all I know the production costs may have been the same as the first film, but if so the filmmakers didn't know what to do with the money this time.  The only thing SOME GIRLS DO has going for it is a moderately memorable theme song.

LOGAN (2017)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*

In my review of the graphic novel OLD MAN LOGAN, I said:

...once I read the Millar GN, I was happily disabused of the idea that anything by Millar could have had quality in its original form. Like the 2008 movie WANTED, the 2017 LOGAN-- directed by James Mangold, who also helmed the respectable 2013 WOLVERINE-- just borrows dribs and drabs from the Millar continuity. In fact, the only things Mangold really takes away from Millar's GN are the ideas that (1) in some future setting, Wolverine has gotten very old and beat-down by coping with everyday life, which is a consequence of the fact that (2) most mutants and superheroes are out of the picture. 

I should note that in the comic book another reason that Wolverine-- whom I should start calling Logan, as the film does-- is so beat-down is because he killed some or all of his fellow X-Men, in keeping with Millar's apparent love of wholesale slaughter. Mangold's script alters this plot-detail, briefly explaining that the other X-Men were accidentally slain by an aging Professor X, whose mental powers have become lethal due to a degenerative disease. This makes for a much better dramatic tension between Logan and the Professor, as the aging ex-hero seeks to care for his ninety-something former mentor. Further, Logan too is sick, thanks to a slow-acting poison introduced into his system in the previous X-film X-MEN APOCALYPSE.  Thus Mangold's scenario places both former heroes behind the eight ball, aging and dying, apparent relics of the X-franchise that's been almost extinguished by the deaths of the heroes and the dwindling births of mutants.

However, Mangold provides redemption with his most rewarding deviation from Millar's brain-dead scenario. Thus the two older men are forced to take custody of an 11-year-old mutant girl named Laura, who is based on the character X-23 from other X-comics. Laura is eerily silent for almost half the film, since she's spent most of her young life in a research facility involved in creating mutant children as living weapons. In a patently political reworking of the comics-origin, Laura is one of several mutants whose sperm was taken from mutant donors and birthed from poor Mexican mothers (who aren't allowed to survive their role as brood-mares). Laura is also silent due to an extreme ambivalence toward Logan, since he is her biological father.

The research facility, known as Alkali Transigen, may be in Mexico, but the parent corporation is American, and is staffed primarily by Americans, including mad scientist Doctor Rice and nasty enforcer Pierce. Thus America, which has often been portrayed as the "golden gate" of freedom for immigrants, is a place of peril for Laura and other children who escaped the Mexican facility. Logan, who has taken a job as an uber-driver, is approached to take Laura to a rendezvous-point on the Canadian border, where the escapees are supposed to converge. The pursuit of Pierce and his mercenaries has much to do with helping Logan decide to help the enigmatic eleven-year-old. Thus LOGAN becomes a road trip in which two moribund heroes seek to liberate a young female heroine from evil corporate types-- who are, incidentally, also responsible for the downturn in mutant births, through their manipulation of genetically-modified foodstuffs.

Though LOGAN is rife with extreme R-rated violence-- particularly when Rice brings in a new, almost mindless attack-dog, another clawed warrior named X-24-- Mangold's script earns the audience's sympathy with its nuanced study of main characters Logan, Laura and the Professor. I'd rate it as one of the most dramatically successful X-films, though in terms of its symbolic discourse (a.k.a. mythicity) never goes beyond the rating of "fair."