 Michael and Rebecca Wong |
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Michael and Rebecca Wong |
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What can I say about Star Wars that hasn't been said before? I went to see it more than a dozen times as a kid back in 1977, I had all the toys and action figures, and I'm still a card-carrying Star Wars fanatic nearly three decades later.
What is it that makes Star Wars a classic? Many things, I suppose. The artsy types would say it has something to do with Joe Campbell's "Hero of a Thousand Faces", with its ideas of universal myth and a prototypical hero's journey. Others would say it's the cool special effects, most of which hold up reasonably well even today although George Lucas decided to update them anyway. For some, it was the visual style of a "used future", in which futuristic technology looked shopworn and beat-up, just like real-life (this has since been copied by countless sci-fi films, but in 1977 it was a true revelation; every sci-fi film prior to Star Wars had invariably depicted spotless antiseptic environments similar to the smooth-surfaced plastic look of the USS Enterprise on Star Trek). And of course, there was the melding of old and new (lightsabres and blasters, spaceships with manned B17-style ball turrets), and the famous cantina, where the film most appealed to the child in us.
But whatever the reason, Star Wars was not just a movie; it was an event which completely changed the entire film industry. For better or worse, it effectively ended the reign of Alan Alda/Woody Allen style filmmaking and ushered in the era of the Hollywood blockbuster. Ever since 1977, every studio has been trying to make another Star Wars every summer. It also revived science fiction in a big way, taking it out of the cult ghetto and putting it into the mainstream. It even created studio interest in reviving the Star Trek franchise on the big-screen (an endeavour which paid off at first but has been essentially driven into the ground by mismanagement, although that is a subject for a different day), not to mention spawning a host of imitators. Even the great director Ridley Scott recounts being stunned by the novelty of George Lucas' vision of a worn-out, lived-in future, and you can see him emulating this style in "Alien".
If you are curious to read Roger Ebert's original 1977 review of Star Wars, click here. I should point out that Ebert is my favourite film reviewer; I don't always agree with him, but he is one of those rare reviewers who actually seems to make up his own mind (imagine that!) rather than trying to figure out which way the intelligentsia will go and then trying to come up with the most witty and urbane way of saying "I agree with them. Please, let them include me in their club!".
Favourite line (ANH): "I find your lack of faith
disturbing."
Favourite line (TESB): "Apology accepted, Captain Needha"
Favourite line (ROTJ): "Now you will pay the price for your lack of
vision!"
After all these years, "Aliens" is still the coolest sci-fi horror film ever made. Their weapons are a real bonus for hardware fetishists too, although I thought it was a little ridiculous of Vasquez and Drake to carry those huge cannons into a building where they would expect to be doing a lot of close-quarters fighting. Oh well, they looked cool. And who doesn't love the xenomorphs, who may be the coolest alien creatures ever devised?
Of course, the film has its flaws. The plot is rather contrived; come on, it's bad enough that Gorman orders them to unload their weapons, it's bad enough that the pilot leaves the dropship's boarding ramp open while sitting in an unsecured area at night, it's bad enough that they don't leave even a single person aboard the orbiting spaceship, but what the fuck are the odds of the resulting alien-infested, out-of-control dropship just happening to crash directly into their APC? It wipes out most of their ammo and equipment, not to mention their transmitter and their air support, all in one fell swoop; how convenient.
Of course, that is necessary in order to weaken the Marines against the Aliens, since a straight-up fight over open ground between well-equipped Marines and a few hundred aliens would be a one-sided massacre. Aliens may be tough, but guns beat claws, and the Marines still had a pretty good kill ratio even after everything went wrong. But this single improbable plot device notwithstanding, it's still a great movie. The characters are sparsely defined but they are drawn with great skill and economy, and the action scenes are taut yet filled with detail.
Favourite line:
HUDSON: "Hey Vasquez, you ever been mistaken for a man?"
VASQUEZ: "No. Have you?"
Dark, twisted, sexually charged, and truly different. Lexx takes politically correct Star Trek-style sci-fi, murders its conventions, and then urinates on their graves. The Captain is a coward and a moron, the girl is horny and vicious, and they don't give a shit about exploration. Need I say more? The series takes a lot of risks, some of which pan out and some of which don't. But after a decade of increasingly predictable sci-fi such as Star Trek and Babylon 5, the quirky, risk-taking Lexx is like a breath of fresh air. It also resurrects some of the wonderfully campy conventions of 1950s sci-fi, including talking brains, re-animated corpses, and short miniskirts (and what red-blooded man doesn't like hot women in miniskirts?) If you haven't seen it yet, then see it now.
Favourite line: "Wrong. I have will. You have given it to me."
Down but not out, the Star Trek franchise pulled its fat out of the fire with this movie. After the failure of the horribly dull, agonizingly self-indulgent "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" fiasco, Captain Kirk and Co. needed to knock one out of the park, and with Khan's help, they did it. If you're one of those people who pokes fun at sci-fi fans and thinks you're above that sort of "geek" entertainment, come down off your high horse and watch this movie with an open mind. You might enjoy it.
I personally watched this one over and over when I was a teenager, and I can still watch it today (unlike recent Trek films such as Generations and Insurrection, which inspired Roger Ebert to defend TPM by saying that "As for the bad rap about the characters--hey, I've seen space operas that put their emphasis on human personalities and relationships. They're called Star Trek movies. Give me transparent underwater cities and vast hollow senatorial spheres any day.")
Favourite line: "According to myth, the Earth was
created in six days.
Now, watch out! Here comes Genesis! We'll do it for you in
six minutes!"
It was brutalized by the critics (with the notable exception of Roger Ebert, who was still only lukewarm toward it), but this movie was a visual feast and an escapist joyride. Take the pole out of your ass and relax; you just might have fun. In a manner somewhat reminiscent of Star Wars in 1977, this movie creates its own visual style. While Star Wars melded Flash Gordon with the Wild West, this one seems to meld Star Wars with New York's Times Square.
It's got a story to go with its visual style; a weird one to be sure, but hey, this is sci-fi. In sci-fi, a weird story is OK as long as it's not stupid. It has something to do with an ancient evil, a weapon of light against darkness, an immortal warrior, and a New York cab driver. Watch it and you will understand.
Favourite line: "Evil begets evil, Mister President. Shooting will only make it stronger."
Speaking of a critic who needs to pull the pole out of his ass, there's a guy named David Brin (creator of "The Postman") who has ranted at length about the evil of the despotism in movies such as Star Wars, because he feels that the demigod/superhero motif (as epitomized by Star Wars' Jedi Knights) is a throwback to medieval attitudes about the superiority and divine authority of kings. He says this despite the fact that the good superheroes, from Superman to Spiderman, the Jedi Knights, and even the ancient Hercules, never sought power.
Based on his bizarre (and arguably either ignorant or deliberately misleading) interpretation of the superhero mythos, he would have hated Highlander too. Yes, Highlander is based on demigods: ancient immortals who walk like giants among us, dueling with one another and ignoring our feeble weapons. But it's also a helluva good ride, and if David Brin doesn't like it, then it's his loss.
Favourite line: "There can be only one!"
A horribly under-rated movie. It didn't make a lot of money at the box office, it didn't do well with the critics, and it has been said that this film singlehandedly sank Fox's animation studio. If this is true, then that's a tragedy because Titan AE is a really cool movie. I liked it, my wife liked it, and my boys liked it. It's not always easy to score 4 for 4, so I'm grateful to the makers of Titan AE for making something our entire family can enjoy. The visuals are fantastic, the soundtrack is well done, and the plot moves along snappily. Does it have simplistic characters and plot holes? Yes. Is it a lot of fun? Hell, yes.
So what's it about, you ask? Let's just say that there are aliens bent on the destruction of the human race, and a young man who discovers his destiny. Classic hero stuff, without too much of the angsty bullshit that you run into far too often nowadays.
Favourite line: "An intelligent guard! Didn't see that one coming."
A vastly underrated sci-fi comedy action movie (yes, it's a film with a serious identity crisis). The plot is unremarkable for a sci-fi movie: arch-criminal Simon Phoenix (Wesley Snipes, sporting blonde-dyed hair) and disgraced cop John Spartan (Sylvester Stallone) are mortal enemies who are frozen in suspended animation and wake up several decades from now, in a world which has changed dramatically. But the execution of that premise is both clever and fun, with loads of amusing little details and in-jokes that anyone who knows the film will remember well even if they haven't seen it in years. In any gathering of sci-fi fans, those who do not know the meaning of the "three seashells" bathroom reference have clearly not done their homework.
The film also raises some interesting questions about the balance between freedom and security in society; questions which resurface in real-life on a regular basis because the maintenance of this balance is a constant struggle. The film depicts a dystopian future in which countless things we take for granted (such as physical sexual intercourse, foul language, and eating red meat) are banned, but in which people seem genuinely happy and are obviously secure (let us leave aside the unlikelihood of this for a moment). It compares this, whether intentionally or not, with the scenes of brutal carnage and destruction from the present-day world which form the opening scene of the film. It presents us with two extremes and concludes that the answer must lie in the middle: an easy answer to be sure, but one could argue for something closer to either extreme. You could probably do a serious university-level dissertation on the themes of "Demolition Man".
Favourite line: "I'm sorry to say that the world
has turned into a pussy-whipped,
Brady Bunch version of itself, run by a bunch of robed
sissies."
File this one right next to Mortal Kombat under the "guilty pleasures" category of kung-fu action movies. The critics hated this film, but I loved it. Sure, its plot is threadbare, and you could argue that it squanders some rather generous opportunities for creative visionary filmmaking which are afforded by its fantastic premise, but it's still a lot of fun, and Yu-Law is a great villain. And for the record, Rebecca liked it too (although she hated Mortal Kombat, so it's not as if our guilty-pleasure tastes always coincide).
And yes, that's Jet Li about to smash some hapless police officer with a pair of motorcycles. Did I mention that the movie's plot has to do with a man murdering his doppelgängers in parallel universes in order to take their life force and become superhuman?
Favourite line: "I am Yu-Law! I am nobody's bitch!"
Yes, it's another film that the critics hated but I loved! Its blatantly satirical take on militaristic culture may be offensive to some (particularly those who advocate the kind of militaristic jingoism that the film satirizes so gleefully), and there will always be Robert Heinlein fans who cry in their beer about how it doesn't accurately describe his book's silly power armour or portray its futuristic two-tiered society in a positive light, but that's their problem, not mine.
The movie has been unfairly lambasted by the critics in my view; some of then even criticized its propagandistic style, almost as if they were too stupid to realize that it was obviously satirizing jingoistic news coverage. And yes, the tactics of the Mobile Infantry in this film are deplorably stupid. Here's an important tip: do not watch this as a real war movie; watch it as a satire on 1950s alien invasion bug movies and 1950s-style propaganda, because that's precisely what it is (but with nudity).
Favourite line: "The enemy cannot push a button, if you disable his hand!"
An all-time sci-fi classic. Like Alien, it created an alien species which became a massively popular in its own right (so it came as no surprise that the aliens and predators would eventually share the big-screen in "Alien vs Predator"). To be honest, I don't care for the manner in which the predators' culture was caricatured in subsequent films and books into a one-note parody of civilization (can someone please inform the screenwriters' guild that sci-fi species which "live for the hunt" are a fucking stupid cliché based on stereotypes of aboriginal tribesmen and are not realistic technologically advanced societies?). Why couldn't the aliens' society be like ours, with some people who hunt for sport and many who don't? But this criticism doesn't apply to the first film, which did not promote any of this nonsense and showed us only one predator.
And yes, I like Arnold Schwarzenegger films. Sue me.
Favourite line: "Bunch of slack-jawed faggots
around here!
This stuff will make you a goddamned sexual Tyrannosaurus, just
like me!"
Let me get one thing out of the way right now: I was not as impressed by the whole "Lord of the Rings" trilogy as the critics were. In fact, while the critics were practically falling over each other to heap more praise on each new film in the series (culminating in the Academy Award for Best Picture that was given to "Return of the King"), I actually thought that each successive film in the series got worse, not better. That's why I specifically name the first of the three films, not the second or third.
So what makes the first film the best one in the series? Well, let's see. It has the best beginning, with the quick but very well-done and dramatic summary of the history of Middle Earth. It also has the single best scene: the fellowship's passage through the Mines of Moria. Other scenes in the trilogy have more fantastic special effects, but the Mines of Moria sequence is so well-constructed and tautly edited that drama and the magic of myth and combat all blend together seamlessly, with no disjointed elements to distract the viewer.
The second and third films grew progressively more self-indulgent, and interestingly enough, they also suggested that the director Peter Jackson was becoming more and more arrogant, with increasingly severe deviations from the original story in the books. There were entire subplots in the second and third films that were totally unnecessary, such as the pointless attempt to create romantic tension between Eowyn and Aragorn in the second film or the painfully long, meandering slow-motion scenes between Elrond and Arwen in the third film (hint: that entire sequence was accurately summarized in a few lines of dialogue by Elrond when he met Aragorn at the camp, so why force the audience to sit through it?)
The first film also had the best battle scenes. This may sound odd since they are much smaller than the relatively spectacular large-scale orc assaults on Helms Deep or Minas Tirith, but they were so well choreographed and dramatic that they trumped the bigger battles anyway. Both of the battle scenes in Fellowship of the Ring involve sacrifice: Gandalf falling at the Bridge of Khazad Dum in the Mines of Moria, and Boromir's redemption and death at Amon Hen. Both of those sacrifices were incredibly dramatic and powerful. There was death at Helms Deep and at Minas Tirith as well, but those battles were hamfisted in many ways, with laugh-out-loud bad tactics and too many attempts to inject light-hearted humour in what should have been very dramatic scenes. Notice how Legolas at Amon Hen exhibits none of the annoying surfer-dude showboating of the second and third films, nor do he and Gimli carry on with their silly kill-score rivalry. Those are artifacts of the second and third films but not the first.
In any case, while I was not particularly impressed with the sequels, I did really like this movie.
Favourite line: "I would have followed you, my brother. My captain. My king!"
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