sci-fi Archives - hacking cinema

Picks for Kevin

I was discussing HBO’s Westworld with my college buddy, Kevin, when he mentioned that he had never seen Blade Runner. In general, he felt that he was lacking in the classic sci-fi filmic knowledge appropriate to a card-carrying nerd. To remedy this situation and to help him to expand his overall cinematic palate, I offered to come up with a list of movies for him to watch.

Here you go, K-Money. My hope is that each movie listed here can be a jumping-off point into a different genre or era of film that I think you’ll enjoy. I’ll take it for granted that Blade Runner is already on your to-watch list, and I KNOW you have Blu-Rays of Alien and Aliens, because I saw you stand in line to get them at Comic-Con a year and a half ago. You should watch them.

Total Recall (1990)
Since 2015 brought us an ultra-realistic look at life on Mars in Ridley Scott’s adaptation The Martian, I thought you might like to check out an earlier sci-fi depiction of the Red Planet. Even though it was released in 1990, Total Recall is quintessential 80’s action. Directed by Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Basic Instinct), it’s full of ridiculous body horror and brutal fight scenes along with dumb, awesome one-liners by Arnold Schwarzenegger, in one of his best non-Terminator roles.

Set in 2048, Arnold plays construction worker Douglas Quaid, who’s plagued by nightmares about a mysterious woman on Mars. To remedy this situation (I guess), he decides to try Rekall, a service that will implant the memories of a trip to Mars in his consciousness. Of course craziness ensues, with Quaid finding out that his entire life might not be what he thought it was.

It isn’t just mindless fun, though. Total Recall is an early predecessor to movies like The Matrix and Inception, that deal with questions of the nature of reality. Like Inception, the movie itself is a puzzle that may take a handful of viewings to really crack, if there’s really an answer at all.

WarGames (1983)
As a software engineer, you need to see this film because it’s widely, and I think correctly, regarded as the greatest hacker movie of all time. Additionally, it’ll give you some much-needed context for the book Ready Player One and its forthcoming film adaptation, which is going to be directed by Steven Spielberg. Ready Player One is drenched in 80’s nostalgia, and WarGames is one of its major touchstones.

A pre-Ferris Bueller Matthew Broderick plays a young Seattle computer hobbyist who accidentally hacks into the military’s nuclear control system. He thinks that he’s accessed a nuclear-war themed computer game, but soon discovers that his tinkering has triggered real-world panic.

As much a Cold War movie as it is a hacker movie, WarGames tapped into the long-standing nuclear panic of the 80’s combined with the very new concepts of computers and hacking. At the time of its release, most people didn’t even have computers in their homes, let alone access to the internet. The idea that any person with a computer could influence events on a global scale must have been utterly mind-bending. WarGames even ended up helping to shape our national policy: the film evidently made such a huge impression on President Reagan that it prompted him to launch extensive investigations into the threat of cyber warfare.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
I know you’ve seen this at some point, but it’s worth revisiting. Although only a handful of Steven Spielberg’s films can be considered science fiction, he’s influenced the genre as much as any other director I can think of. His cinematic fingerprints are all over contemporary film and TV. If you re-watch Stranger Things, you’ll notice that multiple shots are directly lifted from his films.

Close Encounters features 70’s everyman Richard Dreyfuss as a father and husband whose relationships are threatened by his growing obsessions after an encounter with a UFO. While most films in the alien invasion subgenre rely on the aliens being a hostile threat to create tension and drive the plot forward, Close Encounters instead builds suspense as the protagonist gradually pieces together what’s happening to him. As a result, the pacing is slower than typical modern sci-fi, but it’s worth the patience that it requires.

If you haven’t seen the recent Arrival yet, I’d recommend watching this first if you have a chance. In many ways, Arrival is a spiritual descendent of Close Encounters, and in my opinion the first film in the genre to really approach the powerful sense of wonder that Spielberg brought to his film.

Chinatown (1974)
Director Roman Polanski and writer Robert Towne’s 1974 neo-noir is essential for anyone interested in the nuts and bolts of cinematic storytelling. Set in late 1930’s Los Angeles, Chinatown features Jack Nicholson in one of his most well-known roles as Jake Gittes, a tough private detective who’s hired to surveil the city’s chief water engineer by a woman claiming to be his wife. The gig turns out to be a set-up, launching Gittes into a web of deception and intrigue.

Every screenwriting book I’ve ever read uses Chinatown as an example of rock-solid story structure, pacing, and dialog. It can also serve as an entry point to New Hollywood, a renaissance era of filmmaking that stretched from the late sixties to the early eighties. Kicked off by Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde and Mike Nichols’ The Graduate in 1967, the movement was heavily inspired by French New Wave Directors like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and focused on the importance of the director as the film’s primary creative force, as opposed to the film studio.

Some Like it Hot (1959)
Let’s bring it back even further with a comedy that I think you’ll enjoy. Some Like it Hot was written and directed by Billy Wilder, one of the most prolific and versatile filmmakers of the twentieth century. It follows a pair of jazz musicians (Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis) who witness the 1929 St. Valentine’s day Massacre and escape by pretending to be women and joining an all-female band. This results in some surprisingly nuanced gender commentary that pushed cultural boundaries at the time of its release in the late fifties. It’s also a masterpiece of screwball comedy, ranked the Funniest Movie of All time by the American Film Institute. Some of its classic one-liners have become so embedded in the zeitgeist that you’ve probably heard them already, even if you’ve never seen it.

Rope (1948)
I thought that this would be an interesting entry point into the world of Alfred Hitchcock, which you’ve yet to delve into. Rope is unique within Hitchcock’s oeuvre of suspense movies in that it takes place in real time over the course of one evening in an apartment, and was edited to appear to be one long, continuous shot. This gives it a stagey quality that I think you’ll appreciate as a theater guy. It’s actually extremely reminiscent of The Hateful 8 (minus all the gore), to the point that I would bet money that Tarantino was strongly inspired by it.

If you want to explore more Hitchcock, I’d follow this up with Dial M for Murder, Rear Window, and Vertigo.

Double Indemnity (1944)
Classic 40’s film noir is both a genre unto itself and a hugely influential cinematic style, so I thought I would recommend the noir-iest of all noirs, as determined by this super scientific infographic .

Double Indemnity also happens to be one of my favorite movies ever, a film that I find myself going back to over and over. Directed by the same guy who did Some Like it Hot (he had some serious range), it follows an insurance salesman who gets talked into plotting his own wife’s murder.

The noir style had a massive influence on comics as well as film. Batman (especially Frank Miller’s interpretation), Watchmen, Daredevil, Hellboy, and many others can trace their stylistic DNA back to the dark, crime-focused movies of this era.

Quick Takes – Arrival, Trolls

Arrival

I have been anticipating Arrival since I saw the trailer running before Ghostbusters this summer. It didn’t disappoint. Sicario director Denis Villaneuve’s adaptation of a short story by sci-fi author Ted Chiang is a thoughtful and mature genre piece that delivers on its premise in a way most similar films fail to do.

The world has been visited by twelve huge, Pringle-shaped monoliths, each in a different country. These “shells” open up every eighteen hours, allowing a small number of human beings to enter and have an audience with their occupants.

Arrival doesn’t waste any time building up to the reveal of the extraterrestrial visitors — it thrusts linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) into their presence before she even has time to decide against becoming involved. What the creatures look like, a mystery that so many films of the alien subgenre rely on for suspense, doesn’t really matter. What matters is what they have to say, and how they say it.

While the trigger-happy military brass look for the first excuse to open fire on the shells, Banks methodically works to understand the visitors and their intentions. What they learn from each other ultimately transforms them both.

Trolls

The Trolls property is nothing more than a line of weird little poofy-haired dolls, so the creators at Dreamworks had a pretty blank slate to work with when developing it into a feature film. In the mythology of the movie, the tiny, colorful Trolls are menaced by the frankly much more troll-like Bergens, who must eat them in order to be happy. This is a refreshingly dark premise for a film geared towards children.

While the plot doesn’t take the setup to a very interesting or original conclusion, Trolls’ style makes it worth seeing, especially for well-versed animation fans. Both the humor and animation call to mind the goofy, left-field sensibilities of Cartoon Network’s current creative renaissance, including shows like Adventure Time, Regular Show, and Uncle Grandpa.

I was rendered a little skeptical by this film’s marketing campaign, which heavily featured characters with A-list celebrity voice talent singing pop songs. The musical numbers are a little hit-or-miss, but the best ones are cleverly chosen and accompanied by delightfully weird visuals; the Bergens’ stomping rendition of Gorillaz’ Clint Eastwood in a declaration of their Troll-starved misery is possibly one of my favorite movie moments of the year.

Get Excited About Jeff Nichols

I saw the sci-fi mystery Midnight Special on a whim one Friday night, drawn in by an understated advertising campaign that didn’t give much indication as to the film’s plot. In a cinematic world dominated by sequels and adaptations, it’s rare to go the theater without knowing fairly well what you’re getting into, and even rarer to see an original sci-fi film by a rising young director with an indie bent. I came out of the theater wanting more, and eagerly burned through two more of his films. What I found is a filmmaker with a new, unique voice, making original, thoughtful films.

I saw Take Shelter, Mud, and Midnight Special out of sequence, but I’ll talk about them here in chronological order.

Thoughts on Take Shelter

Take Shelter is actually Nichols’ sophomore effort, following up his 2007 debut, Shotgun Stories. Michael Shannon plays Curtis, a blue-collar Ohio man haunted by otherworldly dreams of an impending disaster. Convinced that his family is in real danger, he sets to building a tornado shelter in his back yard, which alarms his wife (Jessica Chastain).

The feeling that something very bad is about to happen is inescapable at the moment. In Take Shelter, Nichols’ uncanny storm feels like a stand-in for every brewing apocalyptic nightmare plastered across our social media feeds and cable news. This disaster itself and its consequences are of secondary importance within the story: the focus instead zeroes in on the relationship between Curtis and his wife, and its ability to survive an outside threat that may or may not be real. These two people have to get on the same page, or they’ll lose each other.

It’s difficult to imagine this film working as well with any actor other than Michael Shannon in the lead role. He is able to evoke dread without ever actually freaking out as his character goes about his life under a looming terror. It’s no wonder he became Nichols’ go-to leading man.

Thoughts on Mud

Mud is a tense and evocative take on the coming-of-age genre, set in Nichols’ native Arkansas. The Mark Twain-tinged story centers on 14-year-old river dweller Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and his pal Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), who happen upon a lovelorn drifter named Mud (Matthew McConaughey) during an excursion to find a boat in a tree on an island and end up involving themselves in their new friend’s mission to find his girlfriend (Reese Witherspoon). Meanwhile, Ellis’ home life begins to unravel as he watches the erosion of his parents’ marriage.

Mud takes a different look at romantic relationships: their beginnings, their ends, and the lengths that we will go to preserve them, even when we shouldn’t. Ellis, desperate for an example of real love, latches onto Mud’s relationship as a prototype when his parents’ fails. He tries to replicate that love himself, and ultimately finds that it isn’t the ideal that he had hoped for.

A striking aspect of Mud is its sense of place and time. Nichols obviously knows the area intimately and captures it in its beautiful, mundane glory. It’s recognizably the South, but is devoid of the stereotypes that often plague Hollywood depictions. All of the lead players are natives of Southern states, lending a dose of authenticity to the performances and dialog. In front this rich backdrop is the most resonant depiction of American boyhood that I can recall since Stand By Me. As in that film, young men are faced with a situation that pushes them over the edge into the adult world, with all the emotional upheaval that goes with such a transition.

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Thoughts on Midnight Special

If Nichols dipped his toes into the sci-fi genre with Take Shelter, he takes the plunge with Midnight Special. Tapping into a budget twice the size of his first three films combined, he’s got a much bigger sandbox in which to play with the genre. Nichols wisely eschews CGI-laden spectacle in favor of solid storytelling and suspense, resulting in one of the most entertaining and genuinely spooky films of the year thus far.

We drop into the story as Roy (Michael Shannon) smuggles his young son Alton (Jaeden Lieberher) away from a cult-like religious group’s rural compound, accompanied by off-duty state trooper Lucas (Joel Edgerton). From there, details about who Alton is and the purpose of the mission come out in small doses, keeping the tension relentlessly high as both the religious group and the federal government pursue the boy.

The directorial approach is unapologetically Spielbergian, combining economical pacing with arresting, otherworldly imagery and more than a handful of lens flares. Nichols is able to capture some of the awe and magic of the eighties sci-fi classics without falling into the territory of homage, employing more restraint than JJ Abrams did in his unabashed throwback Super 8 (2011). Midnight Special’s aesthetic serves its story, not the other way around.

Beneath the sci-fi conceit, Midnight Special is a story about the lengths to which parents will go for their children, especially in the face of outside judgement and opposition. Shannon’s performance crucially captures the stress and joy of parenthood, while young actor Jaeden Lieberher gives Alton enough realism to make the father-son dynamic work.

Throughout Nichols’ films, we see different versions of human relationships that are struggling to survive. Nichols plays with genre and visuals in interesting ways, but only to the extent that they support the human-centered stories. It’s an extremely encouraging pattern to observe in an up-and-coming director’s work.