Category: Science fiction film

Escape from New York (1981)

B-movie thrills and an epic piece of world building in this very fun cult actioner

Director: John Carpenter

Cast: Kurt Russell (Snake Plissken), Lee Van Cleef (Commissioner Bob Hauk), Ernest Borgnine (Cabbie), Donald Pleasance (The President), Isaac Hayes (The Duke), Harry Dean Stanton (Brain), Adrienne Barbeau (Maggie), Tom Atkins (Captain Rehme), Season Hubley (Girl in ChockFull o’ Nuts)

In the 1980s New York was pretty much America’s crime capital, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine an insanely dystopian America of 1997 where Manhattan is turned into a massive jail surrounded by a wall with its population entirely made up of murderous gangs and criminals (sadly without the severed head of the Lady Liberty lying in the middle of the streets). That’s what we get in Escape From New York (great title!). Problem is, it also makes it incredibly hard to get into New York – a real issue when a hijacked Air Force One crashlands there and the President (Donald Pleasence) needs rescuing.

Who ya gonna call? None other than grizzled, scowling, no-nonsense ex-Special Forces legend turned criminal Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell). Plucked from a line of convicts by Commissioner Hauk (Lee Van Cleef), Snake is given a simple offer: fly a glider into Manhattan, find the President and bring him back in 22 hours so he can speak at vital peace conference and in exchange get a pardon. And just to make sure he doesn’t back out? Inject him with explosives that will go off in exactly 22 hours unless Hauk switches them off. Into New York Snake goes, a Mad Max hell under the thumb of kingpin The Duke (Isaac Hayes), with his only allies an eccentric ex-cabbie (Ernest Borgnine) and married couple Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau) and an old (untrustworthy) partner-in-crime Brain (Harry Dean Stanton).

From all this pulp, Carpenter serves up a very entertaining slice of B-movie fun and games, that frequently makes very little narrative sense (by the end relying on hilariously convenient plot developments and off-screen meetings), where the 22-hour countdown seems to alter with as little consistent logic as the shifts between night and day (judging by the sky, at one point it takes Snake well over an hour to take a lift up the World Trade Centre which even in a dystopian hell seems like a long time) and where characters switch allegiances as easily as you and I change socks.

But that hardly matters when Carpenter was so focused on making B-movie fun and use every penny of his tiny budget to maximum effect. Escape From New York is above all a triumph of creative world-building. In broad strokes – the sort of well-built skeleton that leaves the audience wanting to fill in the muscles and skin themselves – it presents a compelling view of an America that has so comprehensively gone-to-shit that a city is now a prison, a forever-war is taking place with both the USSR and China, the President is a corporate stooge (with British accent!) and the whole country is run by a proto-fascist police force. It’s full of neat little touches – not least the computer voice at the Manhattan prisoner processing centre that offers prisoners the chance of voluntarily immediate cremation rather than be chucked into the city – that suggest a panoply of dystopian mess behind it.

The world of Escape From New York is so intriguing, it carries the fairly bog-standard urban warfare against lunatic gangs plot that Carpenter had already mastered with Assault on Precinct 13. Once Snake lands his glider atop the World Trade Centre (for extra un-intentional retrospective impact, hijackers also fly Air Force One into a couple of Manhattan skyscrapers), truthfully there isn’t much in terms of the action that we haven’t seen before. Shoot-outs on streets lined with trashed cars and graffiti, fisticuffs in abandoned train stations and boxing ring match-ups between Snake and a giant bruiser armed with a baseball bat full of nails. Most of the film is basically a hide-and-seek cat-and-mouse chase. Eccentrically presented stuff, but all fairly run-on-the-mill.

What makes it work is that post-apocalyptic mystique and Carpenter’s determination to make every shot count. Not least because the budget only stretched to about a day’s filming in New York (probably why both sequences atop the World Trade Centre illogically take place at nighttime). The rest was shot in a burnt-out district of St Louis. There is a great deal of demented imagination that has gone into the design of the film, not least the cyber-punk barminess of the gang costumes, from the Duke’s Napoleonesque shoulder braids to the punk-rocker scuzziness of his number two Romero (an eye-catching performance of bizarre oddness from Frank Doubleday).

It helps when you have some committed performances, not least from Kurt Russell as ultimate man’s-man maverick Snake Plissken. Strange to think now that Russell, best known for Disney work, was seen as an odd choice for the bitter, shoulder-chipped, ruthless Snake. But it’s a role he embraces whole-heartedly, making Snake both a selfish guy who literally barely cares about anything other than himself and the sort of ideal tough-as-nails maverick who gets things done that we all kind of want to be. He’s also – from his eyepatch to his grizzled monosyllabic dialogue to his unveiled contempt for all the double-dealers and bullies he meets – effortlessly cool.

Russell sets a lot of the tone for the movie, his low-key scowl allowing a lot of the rest of the cast to cut loose in eccentric roles. Ernest Borgnine overflows with cheery New York patter, which doesn’t even slow down when he lights a Molotov cocktail to ward off marauding gang-members. Harry Dean Stanton weasels as a constantly side-shifting guy we are assured is a genius (despite all evidence to the contrary). Donald Pleasance has a whale of a time as an uncharismatic functionary who, it becomes clear, doesn’t care about anyone other than himself. Best of all, Lee Van Cleef (perhaps flattered that Russell seem to be homaging his Spaghetti Western roles) smirks, gloats and scowls as a relentlessly ends-rather-than-means boss.

Escape From New York barrels along to a blackly comic ending (in which our pissed off maverick hero potentially scuppers a major peace conference out of a fit of resentful pique). It’s intriguing world-building riffs wonderfully on Mad Max (in fact, you could argue that later Mad Max films basically riff of Escape From New York) and while its action is fairly routine, it’s acted and directed with huge verve and fun. The sort of thing you call a guilty pleasure.

Megalopolis (2024)

Coppola’s ambitious epic commits the cardinal sins – boring, hard to follow and immensely tedious

Director: Francis Ford Coppola

Cast: Adam Driver (Cesar Catilina), Giancarlo Esposito (Mayor Franklyn Cicero), Nathalie Emmanuel (Julia Cicero), Aubrey Plaza (Wow Platinum), Shia LaBeouf (Clodio Pulcher), Jon Voight (Hamilton Crassus III), Laurence Fishburne (Fundi Romaine), Jason Schwartzman (Jason Zanderz), Kathryn Hunter (Teresa Cicero), Dustin Hoffman (Nush Berman), Talia Shire (Constance Crassus Catilina)

I wanted to like it. Honestly I did. I really respect that Coppola was so passionate about this dream project that he pumped $120 million of his own money into it to make it come true. You can’t deny the ambition about a film that remixes modern American and Ancient Roman history, within a sci-fi dystopia. But Megalopolis is a truly terrible film. Coppola wanted to return to the spirit of 1970s film-making: unfortunately what he’s produced is one of the era’s self-indulgent, overtly arty, unrestrained and pretentious auteur follies where an all-powerful director throws everything at the screen without ever thinking about whether the result is interesting or enjoyable.

In New Rome (basically New York), Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) is a visionary architect and inventor, who created ‘megalon’, a sort of magic liquid metal. His vision is to use it make a glorious new Rome. He’s opposed by Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) who wants to focus spend on practicalities rather than castles-in-the-sky. This leads to a series of increasingly dirty political flights between Catilina, Cicero and Catilina’s cousin Clodio Pulcher (Shia LaBeouf) the degenerately populist nephew of super-wealthy banker Crassus (Jon Voight), who is married to TV star and ambitious social climber (and Catiline’s former girlfriend) Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza). Catilina is also in a tentative relationship with Cicero’s daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel). Or yes and he can mysteriously stop time. Somehow. Even he doesn’t know how.

The film is a sympathetic portrait of Catiline, a powerful Roman who (probably) caused a scandal by shagging a Vestal Virgin then attempted to mount a coup with a heavily pandering populist set of promises which led to his suicide (after defeat in battle) and his followers being executed by then-consul Cicero. Megalopolis’ version mixes this with elements of Caesar’s career and remixes Cicero, Claudius Pulcher and Crassus into versions of their historical forbears. It’s a neat idea, but it’s utterly bungled in delivery. Megalopolis is a film practically drowning in pretension, bombast and self-importance, its script stuffed with faux-philosophy and clumsy political points, its Roman history crude and obvious.

It feels pretty clear Megalopolis should be three to four hours and has been sliced down to two and a quarter. The problem is it feels like it goes on for four hours and practically the last thing I could imagine wanting as the credits roll was watching yet more of this nonsense. The most striking thing about Megalopolis is how boring it is (I nearly dropped off twice – and I was in an early evening showing). It hurtles through a series of impressive-looking-but-dramatically-empty set-pieces that often make no real narrative sense and carry very little emotional force. Characters are introduced with fanfare and then abruptly disappear (Dustin Hoffman’s fixer gets a big moment then literally has a building dropped on him) and the final forty minutes is so sliced down it loses all narrative sense.

Megalopolis feels like a bizarre art project, a collage of influences, opinions, concepts and inspirations, as if Coppola had been collecting ideas in a scrapbook for forty years and then put them all in. His heavily-penned script forces clunkingly artificial lines into its character mouths, frequently feeling like a chance to show off his reading list. Marcus Aureilus, Goethe, Rousseau and Shakespeare among others showily pop-up, alongside speeches from the real Cicero. Driver even does a (to be fair pretty good) rendition of Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy, though it’s a sign of the film’s self-satisfied literariness that I can’t for the life of me work out why he launches into this at a press conference. Laurence Fishburne delivers the occasional narration with such poetic clarity, you almost forget it’s full of dull, gnomic rubbish, straining at adding depth to bland, fortune-cookie level statements.

It’s not just literary influences. The film is awash with pleased-with-itself cinematic references. Most obviously, Metropolis homages abound in its design, while Coppola’s breaking the film up with stone-carved chapter headings is a silent-film inspired touch. As well as Lang, there are clear nods-of-the-head to Abel Gance’s Napoleon (most obviously in its troika shots) while the smorgasbord of influences checks off everything from Ben-Hur to Vertigo to The Greatest Show on Earth (and damningly not as good as any of those, even DeMille’s clunker). All of this is combined with a wild mix of cross-fades, double exposures, sixties-style drug-induced fantasies and half a dozen other filmic techniques that are all very impressive but feel like a young buck looking to impress, rather than providing a coherent visual language for the film. Catiline’s time-stop abilities are some sort of clumsy stand-in for the powers of the film director – calling cut whenever he wants – but what we are supposed to make of the point of this in a film as randomly chaotic as this I have no idea.

The entire tone is all over the place. A scene of tragic maudlin grief will immediately be followed by sex farce. An attempted murder by a Buster Keaton inspired pratfall. A speech so overburdened with philosophical and literary allusions it practically strangles the person speaking it will lead into a joke about boners. The cast splits into two halves: one seems to have been told this is a serious film which requires deathly sombre, middle-distance-starring pontificating; the other half that they are making a flatulent satire. The random mix of acting styles has the worst possible effect: it makes those in the first camp seem portentous and dull; and those in the second like stars of an end-of-pier adult pantomime.

Driver makes a decent fist of holding this together, even if Catiline is an enigmatic, hard-to-understand character whose aims and motivations seem as much a mystery to Coppola as they do to the poor souls watching. But he can deliver a speech with conviction and seems comfortable mixing soul-searching with goofy dancing. Nathalie Emmanuel, though, is utterly constrained by taking the whole thing so painfully seriously that the life drains out of her. On the other side, Aubrey Plaza is the most enjoyable to watch by going for out-right-comedy as a vampish, power-hungry woman who uses her body to dominate men. Shia LaBeouf also goes so ludicrously overtop as a faithful version of the seriously weird Claudius Pulcher – he engages in cross-dressing, murder, incest and drums up crowds by quoting Trump and Mussolini – that it’s either daring or just as much of an unbearably self-satisified art project as the rest of the film depending on your taste.

But the main problem with Megalopolis is that its smug, pat-on-the-back, aren’t-I-clever artistic self-indulgence makes the film painfully slow and terrifically boring. How could a film that features riots, assassination attempts, orgies, murders, an actual meteor strike and magic time-stopping be as dull as this? When everything is thrown together without no emotional coherence whatever. Characters we don’t relate to or understand, who are either po-faced ciphers or flamboyant cartoons, stand around and quote literature at each other, while the director tries a host of flashy tricks he’s liked from other movies and never gives us an honest-to-God reason to give a single, solitary fuck about anything that’s actually happening at any point to anyone in the film.

It is perhaps the ultimate auteur folly. A director creating something that only appeals to him, at huge expense (and I suppose at least he paid for it himself rather than wrecking a studio) where no one was allowed to say at any point “this makes no sense” or “this is heavy-handed” or “this scene doesn’t mesh at all with the one before it”. Instead, it throws a thousand Coppola ideas at the screen, in a film designed to appeal to pretentious lovers of art-house cinema who like to tell themselves Heaven’s Gate is the greatest film ever made or the artform peaked with Melieres and it was all down-hill from there.

To approach the film in its own overblown style: whenever an auteur crafts, Jove plays dice with the Fates to decide on the cut of the cloth for Destiny’s Loom: should it come up sixes, the Muses smile, but should it be Snake Eyes, Pluto himself shall claim his due from those who would seize Promethean fire.

That makes as much sense as chunks of the film.

Alien: Romulus (2024)

Starting as a cleverly structured homage, it becomes increasingly more nostalgia driven as it goes on

Director: Fede Álvarez

Cast: Cailee Spaeny (Rain), David Jonsson (Andy), Archie Renaux (Tyler), Isabela Merced (Kay), Spike Fearn (Bjorn), Aileen Wu (Navarro), Daniel Betts / Ian Holm (Rook)

It’s always a surprise how many Alien films there actually are (at least nine if you count all the Alien vs Predators). Perhaps we forget because so many of them have been less than great. So, saying Alien: Romulus is the third best Alien film isn’t exactly high praise. After all, beyond Alien and Aliens the bar is pretty low. Alien: Romulus has a lot going for it, not least the fact it’s clearly been made with love by a director who adores the series. It makes it all the sadder that, the longer it goes on, the more it becomes a fan-boy remix of a elements from the other films. It ends up as much of a nostalgia obsessed, easter-egg piece of fan bait as any recent Marvel film, but at least entertaining.

Set some time after Alien – it opens with a mysterious Weyland-Yutani ship plucking the original Xenomorph (wrapped in a protective cocoon) from the Nostromo’s wreckage– ourhero is Rain (Cailee Spaeny), a young worker in a grim mining facility planet. Working for credits for passage home – a target the company constantly changes – she lives with her adoptive ‘brother’ Andy (David Jonsson), a gentle, glitchy synthetic reprogrammed by her late father. They have a chance for freedom when her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) and his crew asks her and Andy’s help to plunder cryostasis chambers from an abandoned ship so they can survive the nine-year journey to another world. But the ship (Romulus and Remus) is, of course, the one we saw earlier – and on board are a host of facehugger experiments, leading inevitably to Xenomorph slaughter.

Alien: Romulus starts very strongly, carefully reconstructing the stylistic look and feel of the original (right down to the spot-on sound design of all those 70’s future computers blinking into life, chuntering old fax machines). The crapsack colony feels perfectly in-tune with Aliens, as a mix of Western frontier town and industrial hellscape. Álvarez’s film brings the franchise back to its roots, after the mystique-shattering of Ridley Scott’s prequels. Romulus is a haunted house in space, a psychopathic alien lucking around every corner. As the tension slowly builds – helped by the fact we, obviously, know a lot more about what those odd spidery-things suspended in animation are – Alien: Romulus feels like a return to the factors that made the series work in the first place.

Álvarez dials up the sexualised body horror of this revolting creature and its unstoppable relentless cunning. Alien: Romulus is full of the revolting invasiveness of these animals, the icky body horror of creatures hatching inside you, with the nightmare-fuel monstrosities getting worse as the film goes on. Playing out in a poorly lit ship, the creatures scuttle from the corners of the screen to impregnate or dissect their victims. He also has some neat original ideas, including deducing the face-huggers detect body heat and movement (having no eyes) so the only way to evade them is to raise the room temperature and move slowly (such a good idea, you wish he made more of it).

It’s also a film that looks at the all-round weapon nature of these creatures, specifically their acid blood. The team can’t shoot the things – they’ll melt through the decks and cause instant decompression – and when one does die, its blood floats through zero-gravity as an almost impossible to evade thread. One character dies not from the jaws of the xenomorph, but from sticking a cattle prod into its cocoon, acid spilling out into his eyes, hands and chest (not pretty).

It’s opening act also offers an intriguing relationship between its two leads, one a potential proto-Ripley with a strong moral compass, the other a very different type of synthetic. Andy, well-played by David Jonsson, is gentle, clumsy and naïve, a vulnerable people-pleaser who loves cringy Dad jokes, prone to the android equivalent of epileptic fits under pressure. By establishing the closeness between these two characters, Alien: Romulus explores a new angle of the series study of the relationship between humans and their creations: are these synthetics people or property?

Rain clearly loves Andy: she may resent the bullying he receives from some of the anti-synthetic crew, but also willingly reprograms him when needed and plans to leave him behind so as not to fall foul of anti-synthetic laws back home. Reprogramming Andy drastically alters his personality – David Jonsson does a great job switching his body language, demeanour and accent (back to his native British) – as Andy becomes a more familiar Alien electric reflexes and ‘needs-of-the-many’ andriod. What’s intriguing here is its implied part of this is due to Andy’s own suppressed resentment at his treatment by the humans as somewhere between a child and a screwdriver.

The complex relationship between these two is the heart of Alien: Romulus and its most original element. It’s a shame the film loses focus on this the longer it goes on. As Romulus hits it’s second half, Álvarez succumbs to fanboy temptation until finally he can’t go more than thirty seconds without referencing an line or scene from an earlier Alien film. Slowly the parade of painfully recognisable features (even an utterly out-of-character reprise of ‘Get away from her you bitch’) begins to depress you as Alien: Romulus gives up the idea of being something fresh and settles for being a passionate piece of fan-fiction, unable to imagine anything beyond the scenarios it’s already seen play out somewhere else.

Alien: Romulus becomes as much a nostalgia trip as anything else Hollywood makes these days. Right down to recreating a digital version of the late Ian Holm as ‘Rook’, Romulus and Remus’ version of Nostromo’s Ash, for a prominent role. The recreation is pretty good, Rook is an interesting character – sympathetic to the heroes at first, but increasingly reverting to form – but there is something uncomfortable about it. This is, after all, a recreation for nostalgia of a dead actor, without his consent (though with his families) not as a visual cameo but as a crucial character. How long before we get more and more of this?

It’s a slightly unsettling note, even if I ended up enjoying Alien: Romulus more than a should have. Part of me liked seeing Ian Holm again. Hypocritically I don’t mind quite so much riffs on films I like –hypocritical since I was annoyed by the same thing in Deadpool & Wolverine. But I wish Alien: Romulus had settled for subtle recreation of details while striking out somewhere unique. What it actually ends up doing is suggesting that, once you strip it down to its roots, there isn’t much to Alien beyond slasher-in-space. Which makes you think, for all its flaws, perhaps Prometheus was a braver movie for trying to do something that wasn’t that.

But then I’ll also definitely watch it again. So maybe that makes me part of the problem.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Paranoia in small-town America is superbly executed in Siegel’s creepy sci-fi thriller

Director: Don Siegel

Cast: Kevin McCarthy (Dr Miles Bennell), Dana Wynter (Becky Driscoll), King Donovan (Jack Belicec), Carolyn Jones (Teddy Belicec), Larry Gates (Dr Dan Kauffman), Virginia Christine (Wilma Lentz), Ralph Dumke (Police Chief Nick Grivett), Jean Wiles (Nurse Sally Withers), Bobby Clark (Jimmy Grimaldi)

‘Look, you fools, you’re in danger! Can’t you see?! They’re after you! They’re after all of us! Our wives, our children, everyone! They’re already here! You’re next!’

Those paranoid screams from Dr Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) are part of the iconic conclusion of Don Siegel’s thrilling B-movie sci-fi conspiracy, full of the creeping horror of not trusting your own eyes or ears. It’s set in small-town Santa Mira, a sweet-as-apple-pie slice of Americana, where everyone knows everyone and life never changes. Until, of course, it does. Dr Bennell returns from a conference in Los Angeles to an epidemic of people claiming their loved ones are no longer their loved ones but that something about them is different. Bennell shrugs this off, more focused on his budding romance with fellow divorcee Becky Driscoll (Dana Wynter) – until he finds a clone of his friend Jack Belicec (King Donovan) growing in their home and faces the horrific truth: alien invaders are replacing people in the town with emotionless duplicates bent on world domination.

Siegal always claimed it was just a movie. That he wasn’t interested in political statements. You can believe that if you like, but Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ power stems from the terrible political and social parallels it draws with the real-world. The inversion reeks of 50s McCarthyite paranoia at communist infiltration, those suspicious Pinkos uninterested in individuality, only in protecting the system, where people are just cogs in its wheel. Even today, it still feeds on our fear of ‘the system’ absorbing us, crushing all that individuality we pride ourselves in having.

Even scarier at the time, Invasion doesn’t happen in the big city (where individuals are all getting lost anyway), but in that most American place of all, sacred small-town America, of picket fences and lifelong neighbours. If it can happen there, Invasions suggests, it really could happen anywhere. It’s one of many instances where Siegel makes the low-budget work effectively: in the same way he made a massive city full of people you don’t know the perfect space for a killer in Dirty Harry, he makes an intimate community the worst possible place to see people drained of humanity.

Invasions of the Body Snatchers uses that low-budget and limited locations to excellent effect. The bulk of the action taking place in the character’s homes and offices is actually more chilling. Watching a pod person mow a lawn, while his terrified niece (an effective performance from Virginia Christie) swears up-and-down he’s definitely not really her uncle, or a child running in terror from the home of his preternaturally calm mother is even more scary. That gets even more disturbing when our heroes discover replicas of themselves growing in their basements, or watch their small-town streets suddenly turn into a sea of emotionless duplicates.

There is also a hell of a lot snuck under the censor’s watchful eyes (maybe they only half-watched B-movies?) Its sharp screenplay includes plenty of surprisingly racy talk about between Bennell and Becky about his ‘bedside manner’ (‘that comes later’ he wryly tells her), or the fact that both of these characters talk openly about ‘going to Reno’, a popular euphemism at the time for divorce. For the time this is a surprisingly frank discussion of sex, not to mention the possibility of contented divorce (even Bennell’s nurse teases him about his flirtations with married ladies). What’s interesting is to consider is, if part of the appeal of the film is the horror of the familiar disappearing, perhaps the open acceptance of both divorce and sex suggests the process is already happening in different ways? Perhaps the safe world of picket fences is collapsing anyway, into something more permissive (and, who knows, plenty of people might well prefer that).

The creepy body-horror of the pods the duplicates grow in is also surprisingly disturbing for a 50s sci-fi. Splitting open to reveal the half-formed people inside, covered in foam, or the creepily serene complete copies that emerge, there is something deeply unsettling about it. No wonder Bennell’s instinct is to destroy them if he can with a garden fork, a surprisingly graphic choice. It’s hard to imagine a major Hollywood picture getting away with this sort of nightmare imagery.

It helps to build the terror of the film, which grows more-and-more relentless. Much of the final third of Invasion mixes a cat-and-mouse game with Bennell and Becky’s desperate flight from the town. It culminates in Bennell – in a scene really sold by Kevin McCarthy, who is the picture of (literally) square-jawed determination and reasonableness – disintegrate into just the sort of ranting lunatic (as he would do again in a cameo in the 1978 remake) the pod people decide they can let go, because ‘no one will believe him anyway’. Siegel shoots this sequence of paranoid ranting with a fast-cut mix of close-up and unsettling angles, as Bennell fails utterly to get anyone on the highway to slow down and listen to his warnings, like that nightmare of shouting when no one can hear you.

Perhaps it was too much for the producers, who added their own reassurance, introducing a framing device where Bennell recounts his tale to two reassuring figures of authority. I like to think Siegel – who uses visual metaphors for creeping paranoia and panic effectively throughout the film – deliberately shot these sequences as dully as possible (they remind me above all of the pedestrian final sequence of The Magnificent Ambersons) either so that we forget them (which we do) or perhaps to suggest their mundane nature implies these two-dimensional doctors and FBI agents might just be pod people themselves.

Despite the framing device, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a tightly paced thriller, that builds in intensity throughout and uses its small-town setting as an excellent metaphor for the terrifying thought of your own family being invaded and subverted by a horrendous outside force. It makes for a compelling B-movie and leaves a deeply unsettling feeling behind: no wonder it has inspired so many remakes and reinventions. The terror of the people you know being the same and yet so completely alien and different, is going to have impact on every generation, no matter the context.

The Terminator (1984)

Schwarzenegger becomes an icon in Cameron’s masterpiece, a darkly gripping sci-fi chase-thriller

Director: James Cameron

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger (The Terminator), Michael Biehn (Kyle Reese), Linda Hamilton (Sarah Connor), Paul Winfield (Ed Traxler), Lance Henriksen (Hal Vukovich), Bess Motta (Ginger), Rick Rossovich (Matt), Eal Boen (Dr Peter Silberman), Bill Paxton (Punk)

“It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop… ever, until you are dead!”

If that description doesn’t grab your attention, I don’t know what will. James Cameron cemented his place in cult-film history with The Terminator, such a pure shot-to-the-heart of filmic adrenalin, its hard to think it’s been bettered since. Cameron takes a fairly simple story – essentially a long, relentless chase – and fills it with energy, black humour and a genuine sense of unstoppable menace, in a film that barely draws breath until it’s over an hour in and then promptly throws you straight into a final action set-piece. It uses its low budget effectively to create a world of mystery and dark suggestion and leaves you gagging for more. So much so, they’ve tried to recapture the thrill ride six times since (and only Cameron did it right, with Terminator 2).

It’s 1984 and two naked people arrive in Los Angeles in a ball of light. They’re both from 2029, time-travellers looking for the same woman. One of them nicks a tramp’s piss-stained trousers and runs from the police. The other is a stoic, impassive mountain of muscle who offs a few violent punks after they refuse his blunt instruction to hand over their clothes. Which one do you wish you were eh? Unfortunately, the second one is a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a machine in the skin of a man sent to eliminate Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), mother of the future leader of the post-apocalyptic human resistance to the machines. The first is Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), the man sent to save her. Tough gig, since the Terminator is relentless, almost invulnerable and holds all the cards.

The Terminator is pulpy, dirty, punchy film-making – and its huge success became James Cameron’s calling card for a lifetime of success. Set in a neon-lit, dingy Los Angeles (it never seems to be daytime in The Terminator), it taps into the core of a million nightmares, the fear of being chased and nothing you do ever sees to get you further away. It’s a really elemental fear which The Terminator brilliantly exploits, as impassive and impossible to negotiate with as your deepest, darkest dreads. Throw into that Cameron’s gift for tension and you’ve got the almost perfect thrill-ride.

It’s also a film that gives us the perfect level of information we need. Unlike the cops (and Sarah Connor) who can’t believe this story Reese is peddling them that they are up against an unstoppable metal killing machine, we know from the start the whole story. It’s enough for us to feel a cheeky frustration as they bend over backwards to fit logical explanations to the things they’ve seen and for us to feel the sneaking dread that storing Sarah away in a police precinct crammed full of heavily armed cops isn’t going to make a jot of difference. He won’t let anything stop him.

Is it any wonder quite a few people came out of the film sympathising with Sarah and Kyle – but feeling a sort of guilty admiration for the Terminator? This is the foundation stone of the Schwarzenegger cult, his role as the monosyllabic machine sending him into the upper echelons of Hollywood stardom. Cameron’s original idea was the Terminator should be a perfect infiltration unit, the sort of guy who wouldn’t stand out in a crowd (the original choice was Lance Henriksen, relegated instead to the second-banana cop behind Paul Winfield’s folksily doomed decent guy, fundamentally out of his depth). That went out of the window when Schwarzenegger came on board: say what you like about the Austrian Oak, but he stands out in a crowd.

Why is the Terminator darkly cool? (After all literally no one ever pretended to be Kyle Reese, but everyone has put on a pair of shades and said “I’ll be BACH”.) Because he embodies all the qualities we’ve been taught by films to respect. He’s strong and silent, calm and confident, never complains, doesn’t need help and never gives up. He’s exactly the sort of guy Hollywood has cast admiring eyes at since film spooled through a camera. We can’t help ourselves.

The film becomes about Schwarzenegger (even if he’s not in the last set piece, replaced by a budget-busting CGI android). Cameron knew how to get the best out him, his tiny number of lines (17 in total) delivered in his emotionless, euro-accent make him seem mysterious, different and cool, frequently responding with either deadpan seriousness or sudden violence. His under-statement lines are funny because we anticipate already the bloodbath that will follow. And, unlike despicable villains, he’s not motivated by greed, jealousy or wickedness: he’s almost the quintessential American hero, taking care of business – it just so happens his business is killing people.

Reese should be someone we admire more: he’s a plucky, resourceful underdog. But, unlike the actions-rather-than-words Terminator, he’s got to speak all the time – while the Terminator is a killing machine, Reese is the exposition machine. Biehn does a terrific job with a difficult role, a decoy protagonist who spends much of the movie alternating between gunplay and spitting out reams and reams of exposition explaining to anyone and everyone the future and terminators. On top of that, while his opponent gets on with, Reese’s constant refrain of how scared he is and everyone else should be (who wants to hear a hero say how terrified he is eh?) and his frustrated whining at no-one listening to his fantastic story marks him as weak. Charismatic heroes persuade their audiences: no one believes Reese until they are literally watching Arnie shrug off a whole clip of ammo.

Reese is, in any case, a decoy protagonist of sorts. His romantic longing for Sarah (having fallen in love with her photo in the future) and nurturing personality actually mark him out as the more conventional ‘female lead’. In the first of several films where Cameron would show-case heroic female characters, the actual ideal rival for the machine is Sarah. One of the most interesting things about The Terminator is watching Linda Hamilton skilfully develop this character from ordinary young woman into the sort of archetypal Western hero the film ends with her as (she even gets the sort of badass kiss-off line “You’re terminated FUCKER” you can’t imagine the less imaginative Reese saying).

On top of this The Terminator is a triumph of atmosphere. With its synth-score, it has an unsettling quality from the off helping to build the sense of grim inevitability that is its stock-in-trade. Just like the Terminator’s never-ending pursuit, the whole film is a well-judged, inevitable, time-loop. Sending people back in time turns out to be the very thing that guarantees that future will happen. Throughout, Cameron’s little titbits about the future (partly constrained by budget) are perfect in giving us just enough information to understand the stakes but leave enough mystery for us to be so desperate to know more, we fill in the gaps from our imagination.

But the reason The Terminator works best is that it’s an undeniably tense thrill ride, an extended chase sequence that rarely eases off and never loses its sense of menace. You never feel relaxed or safe while watching The Terminator and never for a moment that its heroes are on a level playing field with their opponent. Atmospheric, tense and terrifying, it walks a brilliantly fine line (so much so, the Terminator methodically massacring a precinct full of cops is both unnerving and the most popular scene in the film) and never once let’s go of your gut. It’s not only possibly the best, most perfect, Terminator film made also still one of Cameron’s finest hours.

Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2023)

Terminally dull prequel, full of backstory you won’t care about at all

Director: Francis Lawrence

Cast: Tom Blyth (Coriolanus Snow), Rachel Zegler (Lucy Gray Baird), Josh Andrés Rivera (Sejanus Plinth), Viola Davis (Dr Volumnia Gaul), Peter Dinklage (Casca Highbottom), Jason Schwatzman (“Lucky” Flickerman), Hunter Schafer (Tigris Snow), Fionnula Flanagan (Grandma’am), Burn Gorman (Commander Hoff), Ashley Liao (Clemensia Dovecote)

Did you watch Hunger Games and wonder – ‘this is great and all but where did that guy Coriolanus Snow come from, eh’? Not sure I did. And I’m not sure I really needed to know, now that I’ve sat through all interminable 158 minutes of Hunger Games: Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes or Hitler: The Early Days. Imagine, if you will, the original Hunger Games movie – but if it was much longer, had an utterly uninteresting lead character and took itself so seriously you’d think it was offering a solution to third world debt and climate change all at once. Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes worst crime isn’t that it goes on forever, that it retreads old ground with no new ideas or that it feels like a pointlessly over-extended footnote. It’s that it is overwhelmingly, crushingly, dull.

People didn’t care about the back story: they cared about Katniss Everdean, a perfectly crafted character, hugely engaging and relatable on every viewing. I cared about her struggle to protect the people she loved not the backdrop of Panem politics. Did anyone? If I was interested in anything in Panem politics it was the way the Games both terrified the huddle masses of the districts and gave them hope. Unfortunately, this film either didn’t understand that, didn’t care or assumed we’d happily invest in the original’s villain if he was buff and had a dreamy girlfriend.

Young Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth, doing his best to sound like Donald Sutherland) is one of the leading students in Panem, selected to mentor a tribute through the 10^th Hunger Games. Young Snow’s loins heat-up when his tribute is manic pixie dream-girl Lucy Gray (Rachel Zegler) from District Twelve. But what excites him more: a tumble with a girl from the sticks, or persuading outlandishly loopy games master Dr Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis, the only person having fun) he knows how to turn this gladiatorial deathmatch into ratings gold? You got one guess what he picks.

Though it takes him a very, very, very long time to pick it. We watch this Proto-Hitler embrace his inner sociopath, through a weary trudge in Hunger Games lore with the origins of virtually every prop in the original movies lovingly laid out for us. Ever wondered why Snow wears that buttonhole? This is the film for you and then some. Almost every single thing in Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is linked to something in the original movies. It’s the sort of unimaginative, world-shrinking yawn-fest where nearly every character shares a surname of a character from the original films – but of course Caesar Flickerman’s dad has exactly the same job, personae and style as he does!

You could let this go if Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes had an interesting story of its own. But it’s tedious, self-important plot makes Attack of the Clones look like Tolstoy. It chucks in a little bit of arena slaughter, but inexplicably makes it unclear how many of Coriolanus’ suggestions for improving the show are actually changing things. When the tributes perform for ‘favour’ is that something they always did (as most people behave like it is) or because Coriolanus scrawled memo suggested it (as the film implies)? The wider impact is also lost: are people bonding with Lucy Gray or having their child-killing-urges ticked in brand new ways by Coriolanus? Who knows.

It doesn’t help that Ballad seems shy about making Coriolanus himself a villain. It gives Tom Blyth a difficult act to pull off and he’s left playing his cards so close to his (inevitably) buff – his future sadism doesn’t stand in the way of a good topless scene in this film – chest that rather than wondering what will top him into sociopathy, he instead becomes a flat, boring character, with even his lust for Lucy fizzling rather than sizzling.

Rachel Zegler gets a bit more fun as this irritating mix of idealist and realist (she is pretty much whatever the plot needs from scene-to-scene – one minute angrily slapping away offerings of food, the next cowering in shocked fear when danger comes calling), with Ballad at least a good vehicle for Zegler’s vocal talents. But Lucy Gray remains too enigmatic – and, to be honest, just as dull in her unknowability – to ever become someone you care about. And never, for one minute, in her flower-crafted dress and perfect make-up do you believe she is a child of the ghetto in the way you did with Jennifer Lawrence.

Honestly the film misses a hero as complex and multi-layered as Katniss and splitting facets of her into two other characters just creates to incomplete characters. Throw in a plot that lacks any energy – it’s lackadaisical second half, with Coriolanus chucked into the wilderness as a Stormtrooper in District 12, goes on forever – and which gets bogged down in an utterly unengaging and confusing rebellion plotline with is resolved with a nonsensical narrative flourish – and it’s a recipe for disaster. It never, ever get the pulse racing as it stumbles, yawningly, to its end.

The stuff that actually is interesting gets shunted to the sidelines. A bored Peter Dinklage gets a late monologue on the creation of the Hunger Games that you desperately want to hear more about it, but don’t. Viola Davis, barrelling over-the-top under a mountain of demented hair, weird contact lenses and bizarre costumes, keeps talking about ‘the purpose of the Hunger Games’ in a portentous way that sounds like its leading somewhere but never does (so much so, I wondered if the filmmakers even understood the bread-and-circuses-as-control metaphor going on here).

Francis Lawrence directs as if this background-filling pamphlet from Suzanne Collins was a newly discovered Testament. The film is slow, stately and gives even the smallest, most inconsequential moments an unbearable level of self-important significance. It lacks pace and interest – so much so that even the slaughter of eleven scruffy, malnourished children and teenagers feels tired and ‘seen it all before’. There is no mystery, no sense of roads-not-taken, not even any peril . Just small elements of a more interesting later story being slotted dutifully in place, you realise you never wondered where Coriolanus Snow came from because it never mattered in the first place.

The Running Man (1988)

Gloriously stupid Arnie vehicle, sort of satire but really a chance for violence and wise-cracks

Director: Paul Michael Glaser

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger (Ben Richards), María Conchita Alonso (Amber Mendez), Richard Dawson (Damon Killian), Yaphet Kotto (William Laughlin), Jesse Ventura (Captain Freedom), Jim Brown (Fireball), Erland Van Lidth (Dynamo), Marvin J. McIntyre (Harold Weiss), Gus Rethwisch (Buzzsaw), Professor Toru Tanaka (Professor Subzero), Mick Fleetwood (Mick)

It’s 2017 and the USA has fallen apart (they were more right than they thought…) with a dictatorial government keeping the population in their place and distracting them from their lost freedoms with the violent TV show The Running Man, where criminals fight to the death in gladiatorial contests. The latest contestant? Ben Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a former cop who everyone believes massacred civilians from his helicopter gunship but who we know is actually the hero who tried to stop it. Running Man host Dawson (Damon Killian) thinks Richards is the guy for a ratings slamdunk. But guess what? Arnie is as tough as he looks and might just bring down the system in prime time.

The Running Man makes an interesting contrast with Rollerball. In fact, it’s really just a souped-up 80s version of the same idea, of corporations using violent entertainment to keep the masses in line. The main difference being Rollerball is a sort-of lingering existentialist character study which mixes ambiguity with high-octane sports action, played out with Kubrick-inspired classical music and lingering slow-mo. The Running Man is a loud, brash, hyper-violent film that allows Arnie to flex both his muscles and his wise-cracking wit. Leaving its roots as a Stephen King adaptation far behind, it’s both a lot more stupid and a whole lot more fun than Rollerball.

The Running Man is a bizarre mix of Cronenbergish media satire and ludicrous camp comedy. It’s in-universe TV show has a parade of killers on it, laughable in their cartoonish violent silliness, with methods of killing so elaborate that they would put Bond villains to shame. Subzero is an ice-skating wrestler with a razor-sharp hockey stick! Buzzsaw dispatches opponents using (you guessed it) a chainsaw that can cut through anything! Dynamo dresses up in an electric suit, sings opera and electrocutes people! Fireball burns everything with his gas-filled flame-thrower!

You think that sounds silly? Well don’t worry because Arnie will (surprise, surprise) send them all to their maker with a karmic death (you have one guess as to how they all die) and an apt pun (“He had to split!” he grins slicing Buzzsaw in half with his own chainsaw). This is Arnie at his eighties height, expanding his brand and transforming The Running Man into his very own star vehicle. (He even squeezes in his “I’ll be back!” catchphrase). Ben is the perfect Arnie character: he’s noble but cool, muscular but witty, makes bad-ass threats and delivers on them, smokes stogies like they’re going out of fashion and waltzes off with the girl at the end after saving the world.

Arnie is sort of working alongside a resistance movement, but they don’t get in the way of his manly independence. The principle function of his resistance movement buddies Laughlin (Yaphet Kotto) and Weiss (Michael J McIntyre) is to symbolically lay down their lives to give Arnie even more moral high-ground – The Running Man makes very clear he doesn’t enter this sadistic blood-sport to protect himself (oddly in this totalitarian dictatorship, criminals still have enough rights to choose not to sacrificed on national television) but to save the lives of his Red Shirt pals. Their deaths also serve to justify the ruthless violence Arnie hands out (though of course he refuses to kill an unarmed, injured opponent just so we know all the other bodies he dropped must have deserved it).

It’s all set in a charmingly quaint 80s view of the future: power-suits for the rich and jump-suits for the convicts, with clunky TVs and worn-out urban environments. The Running Man throws in its odd surreal, camp and bizarre touch, not least the sight of Mick Fleetwood (buried under prosthetics) playing himself as the resistance leader. Its pumped-up TV show is packaged like a hyper-violent 80s mega-smash, hosted by real-life actor-turned-quiz-show-host Richard Dawson, gleefully embracing self-parody as a venal, heartless bully full of two-faced smarm with the audience while treating his staff like dirt.

Dawson, in all his larger-than-life awfulness, actually makes a pretty good foil for the muscle-bound Arnie, not least because he understands exactly what the Austrian Oak wanted from this film. Because Arnie knew people didn’t really want social commentary or satire – they wanted a black-and-white world where the ex-Terminator could smack, punch and shoot things with gleeful abandon while testing out a host of potentially quotable catch-phrases. Essentially The Running Man is a sort of Tom-and-Jerry cartoon with a sheen of social commentary, that panders shamelessly for our love of watching outré villains suffer grim and painful ironic deaths.

And you know what? Arnie was right. Because, however stupid (and its very, very stupid) The Running Man is, no matter how cookie-cutter, uninspired and predictable every single second of it is – it’s perfect, brain-dead, beer-in-hand, Friday night fun. And while the progression of Rollerball to this is a perfect example of how lobotomized Hollywood had become, at least this is fun.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Deliriously overblown and full of demented imagination even if it never quite feels necessary

Director: George Miller

Cast: Anya Taylor-Joy (Furiosa), Chris Hemsworth (Dementus), Tom Burke (Praetorian Jack), Lachy Hulme (Immortan Joe), Alyla Browne (Young Furiosa), George Shevtsov (History Man), John Howard (People Eater), Angus Sampson (The Organic Mechanic), Nathan Jones (Rictus Erectus), Josh Helman (Scotus), Charlee Fraser (Mary Jabassa), Elsa Pataky (Mr Norton)

Is there a more demented mainstream film series than Mad Max? Furiosa follows the balls-to-the-wall excess of Mad Max: Fury Road with more of the same and a mythic atmosphere of Godfather Part II-backstory deepening. What you end up with might feel slightly odd or self-important – over two and a half hours of direct build-up for a pay-off we saw almost ten years ago (perhaps that’s why Furiosa ends with a cut-down play-back of the major events of Fury Road spliced into the credits, so we can all be reassured the villains left alive here got their comeuppance later). Furiosa is frequently overlong, a little too full of its love of expansive world-building and never quite convinces you that we actually need it – but then it’s also so bizarre, Grand Guignal and totally nuts perhaps we should just be happy that, in a world of focus-grouped content, it even exists.

We’re back on the desert wasteland of post-apocalyptic Australia as motorbike riding goons kidnap young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) from the Green Place hoping to use her to persuade crazed war lord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) to lead his forces there. Despite the heroic efforts of her mother (Charlee Fraser), Furiosa remains a captive with only a secret tattoo on her arm (guess what’s going to happen to that…) to guide her home. Dementus provokes a resources war with cult-leader Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), with Furiosa traded, then escaping a hideous fate as one of Joe’s wives, instead growing up secretly-disguised as a boy (becoming Anya Taylor-Joy) as part of Praetorian Jack’s (Tom Burke) War Rig crew. Then the war between Immortan Joe and Dementus explodes again, foiling Furiosa and Jack’s plan to escape and giving Furiosa a change at revenge against Dementus.

That sprawling plot outline hopefully gives an idea of the ambitious bite George Miller is taking out of his world. While Fury Road took place over, at most, a few days, Furiosa stretches well over twenty, so gargantuan in scale and newly invented locations (as well as the mountainous citadel, we get the oil-rig nightmare of Gas Town and the Mordor-like Bullet Town) that it squeezes most of the entire Act Five war between Dementus and Immortan Joe into a brief, tracking-shot, montage. Furiosa is actually rather like a fever-dream Freud might have had after reading an airplane thriller, split into on-screen chapter titles – each with portentous (and sometimes pretentious) names like ‘The Pole of Inaccessibility’ – and a self-important narration dialling up mythic importance. If Fury Road was like someone stabbing an adrenalin-filled syringe straight into your heart, Furiosa is a like being told a detour-crammed story by someone a bit the worse-the-wear after a long night.

Not that Furiosa shirks on the banging madness of Fury Road’s slap-in-the-face action. It features a mid-film War Rig vs motor-bike raiders pitched-driving battle that is so extreme you wonder no one got crushed under wheel while making it, perfectly capturing the addled madness of Fury Road. A Chapter 4 pitched battle at one of Furiosa’s Dystopian-on-speed locations sees destruction, devastation and disaster on an even grander scale than anything else Miller has done before in this series, with an entire mining crater turned into a whirligig of firey destruction. That’s not forgetting three desperate desert chases – the finest of which is the film’s opening sequence, which see Furiosa’s mother track down and ruthlessly dispatch Furiosa’s kidnappers with a velociraptor-like ruthlessness and efficiency. No wonder Miller can put a whole war into a single shot – and why he feels comfortable ending Furiosa with a surprisingly personal and small-scale confrontation.

The main confrontation is between Furiosa and her self-proclaimed warlord – and would-be surrogate Dad – Dementus. Furiosa gives Chris Hemsworth the opportunity he’s been waiting for, allowing to flex his comic muscles, chew hilarious lumps out of the scenery and still show his menace. He makes Dementus an overgrown child, brilliant at stealing but with no idea about how to use them, obsessed with self-improvement (his dialogue is full of verbose, overwritten phrases, like a psychotic thesaurus) and only really happy when he’s smashing something. Introduced framing himself like a zen-like messiah, it doesn’t take long until he’s charging around on a chariot drawn by motorbikes, tasting other people’s tears and giving self-aggrandizing speeches while torturing Furiosa’s nearest-and-dearest. It’s a gift of a part, funny, scary, loathsome but strangely likeable even when he does awful things.

Opposite him, Anya Taylor-Joy actually has less to work with as Furiosa (she only takes over the part almost an hour into the film). Although this is meant to be a Furiosa film, it rarely feels like its telling us much more than we already know, especially since much the skills that ‘makes’ Furiosa what she is in Fury Road takes place in montage and her desire for freedom and to protect others are swiftly established so that any new-comers can unhesitatingly root for her. If Dementus is all talk, Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa is silent and simmering, her humanity either shrinking or quietly growing from moment-to-moment. She has a quiet romance with Tom Burke’s world-weary Praetorian Jack, but this really about converting her into a mythic figure of vengeance rather than making her a personality.

A vengeance we’ve already seen pan-out in Fury Road. I’ll be honest, for all the grand scale of Furiosa, I don’t really feel I learned anything about its central character here I hadn’t already picked up from Theron’s brilliantly expressive performance in the first film. For all the impressiveness of the scale, a lot of Furiosa boils down to physically showing us things that were implied in the first (second?) film – from locations, to the reasons why Furiosa lost her arm to giving us clear reasons for her motivations. But all this is already there – and with brilliant economy – in Fury Road. Telling us all again feels like Miller giving us the footnotes (Furiosa Silmarillon perhaps?) rather than anything truly new and the Homeric backdrop Miller is going for never really clicks into place.

So the most successful swings are not narrative but visual. Furiosa reminds you what an absolutely insane extreme world Mad Max is. Death cults of radiation-deformed albinos? Villains who bottle milk straight from the nipple (not a cow’s), while another obsessively fondles his exposed, pierced ones? A villain who straps a battered old Teddy bear to himself? Action set-pieces that throw in everything – flying bikes, lava lakes and arms stoically lopped off? Even time-jumps are done imaginatively, like a wig, caught in a branch, decaying in front of our eyes. Every single design decision in this – and the gorgeously sun-kissed photography – is dialled up to eleven for George Miller’s very personal vision of pulpy, dystopian chaos.

You can wonder at times – as I did – whether we really needed a two-and-a-half hour film that’s expands the thematic depth of a chase movie which already outlined its characters motivations and personalities with impressive economy. But then, there are moments in Furiosa that just feel like they’ve been pulled out of someone’s crazy dreams. It’s put together with such a good mix of pulp poetry and head-banging craziness by George Miller that after a while you just go with it. And it sticks with you in a way focus-grouped Marvel films never seem to.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024)

Intelligent and engaging entry in a continuously rewarding sci-fi series

Director: Wes Ball

Cast: Owen Teague (Noa), Freya Allan (Nova), Kevin Durand (Proximus Caesar), Peter Macon (Raka), William H Macy (Trevathan), Lydia Peckham (Soona), Travis Jeffery (Anaya), Sara Wiseman (Dar), Neil Sandilands (Koro), Eka Darville (Sylva)

Apes Together Strong! Their battle cry never works out that way does it? Because apes are more like humans than they would like to think – just as humans can be as dangerous as they fear. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes picks up the franchise hundreds of years after the death of ape-leader Caesar. The human’s world is lost under a vast forest and apes live in separate clans, barely able to remember the teachings of their one-time leader.

One clan – living in the forest-covered remains of Los Angeles – live peacefully, rearing and bonding with eagles. All that is shattered when the clan is captured by the soldiers of would-be ape emperor, the self-styled Proximus (Kevin Durand). The only one to escape is young Noa (Owen Teague) who sets out on a pilgrimage to free his people, encountering along the way Raka (Peter Macon), an orangutan who is the last of the Cult of Caesar and mysterious human Nova (Freya Allan) who is being hunted by Proximus’s soldiers. At the heart of Proximus’ kingdom Noa discovers many are willing to go to extreme lengths to gain access to a mysterious structure they believe is the key to dominating the planet.

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is sharply directed by Wes Ball and follows the trend of putting the apes front-and-centre of their own story (it’s nearly an hour into the film before we see a human). It almost goes without saying now, but the special effects and motion-capture work is extraordinary: the apes feel utterly real and the human performers behind these evolved simians are flawless in their physicality. All of this is set in a superbly designed post-apocalyptic world, where locations slowly become recognisable as overgrown skyscrapers, observatories, airports and oil tankers.

Ball’s film takes it’s time – perhaps, at times, a little too much – to build our connection with the eagle clan. Peaceful and with a rich, humanitarian (apeitarian?) community, they live in harmony with their surroundings, carefully obeying set rules to avoid over-exploiting their environment. Noa and his friends Soona and Anaya are carefully established as a contrasting group each with their own flaws and strengths. Noa, in particular, displays early quiet leadership skills and an intuitive understanding of machinery: from manipulating the ruins around him as unexpected climbing tools, to working out how to repair damaged equipment.

It makes it even more affecting when this community is torn apart by brutal violence – especially since the main threat of Proximus’s forces is a terrifyingly, psychotic gorilla who murders without a second thought. It’s particularly unsettling as this destruction and violence is constantly done “in the name of Caesar”. How could the hero – the funeral of whom the film opens with – who was so full of respect for others have become the byword for such hate.

It’s because this is a world where the apes’ ability to build communities has outstripped their ability to create records of their history. None of the apes have any knowledge of the past – the eagle clan have never heard of Caesar and has no idea that humans (or echoes as they call them, implying some past knowledge has been lost) used to talk and rule the planet. Even Raka’s Cult of Caesar learning equates to fractionally less than a casual viewer of this franchise would remember and guards a series of books he has no idea how to read. Noa stares in wonder at these symbols on the page, understanding that this ability to record and recall the past can be used to bring power to the future.

It’s certainly understood by Proximus, the only ape who seems to have any understanding of their past, but has used this knowledge to twist himself into the demagogue figurehead of his own cult of personality, building an empire he models after the Romans. Proximus has an extremist ideology, taking the Apes Together Strong as a mantra for forging his own empire, terrified that humans could rise again and take back the world they once owned and also yearning (like a violent King Louis) to learn the secrets of their skills and technology.

And perhaps he’s right. As Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes develops, its narrative takes unexpected twists and turns as Noa and the eagle clan become the peaceful eye of a storm of extremist megalomania. Perhaps Noa suspects this from the start – his instincts on whether to trust or not are shown to be consistently strong – but Ball takes the film into unexpected directions that forces us to ask whose side we are on, especially as the ending tees us up for a sequel where we could potentially find our loyalties fiercely divided. It’s telling that the closing moments of Ball’s film, using the framing and style of a traditional triumphant ending, are invested by him with a great deal of dread and menace.

It’s fitting that an intelligent film like this, mixing action with subtle commentary on human (and ape) nature, draws out some fine performances. Owen Teague makes for highly engaging and relatable lead as Noa, a young buck who becomes a leader. Kevin Durand is wonderfully bombastic as Proximus and Peter Macon warm, charming and witty as Raka. Freya Allan brings a great deal of light, share and ambiguity to a challenging part while William H Macy is a similarly ambiguous delight, as someone both right and wrong, in a great cameo.

Above all, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes suggests there is plenty of life left in this franchise yet, which still sits near the top of the list of intelligent, engaging and exciting sci-fi series. Continuing a rich run of form, this entry in the franchise leaves you fascinated as to where the film will turn next.

Rollerball (1975)

Violent science-fiction dystopia satire ends up making blunt, uncertain points

Director: Norman Jewison

Cast: James Caan (Jonathan E.), John Houseman (Mr. Bartholomew), Maud Adams (Ella), John Beck (‘Moonpie’), Moses Gunn (Cletus), Ralph Richardson (The Librarian), Pamela Hensley (Mackie), Barbara Trentham (Daphne), Shane Rimmer (Rusty), Richard LeParmentier (Bartholomew’s Aide)

It’s the future, but it might as well be Ancient Rome. The world is ruled by Corporate Caesars, holding supreme power, controlling information and plucking anyone they want for anything, be it for a job or as a partner in bed. The masses are kept pliant and happy by being fed Bread and Circuses. Namely Rollerball, the world’s most popular sport, a hyper-violent mix of American football and ice hockey played in a velodrome, with teams competing to score by thrusting a metal ball into their opponent’s goal, with rules to prevent only the most egregiously violent acts. It’s a game designed by with a simple message: the individual is powerless, the system is all.

Problem is, like any game, some players are better at it than others. And the best player there has ever been Jonathan E (James Caan) is a living legend for Houston, tougher and more passionate about the game than anyone else alive. He’s a living contradiction of the secret principle of the game: an individual can make a difference. Naturally the Corporation want him gone, offering him a generous package to retire. Problem is Jonathan doesn’t want to retire. What else is there to do, but to remove the few rules Rollerball has, and establish how futile individual effort is by killing Jonathan in the game. But Rollerball’s greatest ever player isn’t that easy to kill.

All of which makes Rollerball sound both cleverer and more exciting than it actually is. Because Rollerball is a deeply sombre, rather self-important film that makes obscure, slightly fumbled points about the war between the system and the individual, within a coldly Kubrickian framework that suggests Jewison and co misunderstood what made 2001 a sensation (it wasn’t just clean surfaces and classical music). It’s actually quite a problem that the only time Rollerball even remotely comes to exciting life for the viewer is during the game sequences: and seeing as the film is criticising our love of gladiatorial blood sports, that can hardly be what it’s aiming for.

Rollerball is shockingly po-faced and lacks even a hint of humour at any point (except perhaps a reliably eccentric cameo from Ralph Richardson as an only half-sane custodian of an all-seeing computer). There is little satirical spice that might provide a bit of lighter insight into the ruthless, business-driven world the film is set in, or that might demonstrate how concepts we are familiar with (sports and television) have been tweaked to manipulate and pander to the masses. Combined with that, every character in the film is sullen, serious and (whisper it) dull and hard to relate to.

This is best captured in Jonathan himself, played with a lack of an uneasy stoic quality by James Caan. Caan later commented he found the character lifeless and lacking depth, and you can see this in his performance. Caan never seems sure what angle to take: is Jonathan a defiant individualist or a guy utterly at sea in the system who can’t understand why he is being told to stop playing the game he loves? Rollerball wants to settle for both: it doesn’t really work. Jonathan spends his time outside the ring, moping and staring into the middle-distance. He holds a candle for the wife taken from him by an executive, but this is never channelled into a motivating grief or ever used as way to make the scales fall from his eyes about the nature of the system he’s working in.

In fact, Jonathan remains pretty much oblivious to the brutality and cruelty of the sport he’s playing – which, by the end of the film, regularly clocks up impressive body counts in every match. He’s still perfectly capable of throwing an opponent under the wheels of a motorbike, thrust a goal home and then bellow “I love this game!”. Never once does he, or the film, question this love. Not even an on-pitch assault on his best friend (which leaves him in a vegetative state) or watching his teammates being crushed, incinerated, battered and smashed seems to register with him intellectually or emotionally.

Rollerball needed a character with enough hinterland to grow into that or could denounce on some level (even privately) the violent spectacle he’s wrapped in, capable of a moral journey or making an imaginative leap. We don’t get either. Instead, Jonathan E feels like a care-free jock who wants to carry on doing his thing, because he has a good-old-fashioned dislike of being told what to do. In the end it fudges the whole film: Jonathan E is neither sympathetic or interesting enough to be a vehicle for the sort of satirical or political points the film wants to make.

Not that these ideas are really that interesting anyway, essentially boiling down to a mix of familiar “Big Business Bad” and “the proles will take any loss of freedom lying down, so long as they get some juicy violent action to watch”. None of this hasn’t been explored with more wit and wisdom elsewhere. Never-the-less Rollerball lets its points practically play trumpets to herald their arrival as they stumble towards the screen. There is nothing here Orwell didn’t cover better in a few paragraphs of 1984.

Norman Jewison does a decent job staging this though, in particular the violence of the Rollerball games, with bodies crushed, maimed and thrown-around. There is a fine performance of heartless corporate chill from John Houseman. But, when the film makes its points, I’m not sure what on earth it’s trying to say. Is it a tribute to the strength of one man’s character? Does it matter if Jonathan E acts out of a stubborn lack of knowledge or understanding? As the crowd watches a deadly match in stunned silence, have they finally had enough? As they praise Jonathan E rapturously is Rollerball suggesting we are just naturally inclined to love strong-men dictators? I’ve no idea what is happening here – and I’m not sure that Rollerball does either.