Like Tears in Rain: Meditations on Science Fiction Cinema Read online

  Something that, arguably, he’s been doing with tremendous success since the 1980 release of The Empire Strikes Back, when Irvin Kershner, along with screenwriters Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, brought the saga to what many consider to be its very pinnacle.

  Lucas made film history with the original Star Wars in 1977, and he almost lived up to its brilliance when he hit his stride once more with Revenge of the Sith (’05). But the franchise has unquestionably shone its brightest in the hands of the fans themselves.

  As with Troops, Kevin Rubio’s award-winning mockumentary film featuring Imperial stormtroopers making their daily rounds across the dunes of a Cops-inspired Tatooine, complete with the familiar “Bad Boys” theme and a certain smoldering pair of moisture farmers. Or Matthew Stover’s Revenge of the Sith companion novel, which I consider vastly superior to . . . well, at least five of the Star Wars movies, in terms of the writing. The examples go on and on: Shadows of the Empire; Robot Chicken Star Wars, Blue Harvest, and the other Family Guy spoofs; LucasArts’ The Force Unleashed and its sequel; the various Dark Horse Comics runs.

  Some say that the Clone Wars series is the best thing to happen to the franchise since ’77.

  Star Wars is first and foremost a realm defined and upheld by its fans. Always has been, always will be—and Abrams himself knows that as well as anybody. No doubt that’s why he initially denied any involvement whatsoever with the forthcoming sequel trilogy.

  As far as this fan is concerned, having one of us behind the lens this time around means the best of that galaxy far, far away is still yet to come.

  The Ancient Fear

  Was Darth Bane Wrong?

  Let’s talk about J. J. Abrams’s Star Wars film, the working title of which is reportedly The Ancient Fear. When the official cast list was first announced, my first reaction was that it was embarrassingly male-centric, but there was one man whose involvement I couldn’t help but get excited over: Max von Sydow. The assumption being bandied about by fans is that he’ll play the villain—a part he nailed in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002), which happens to be this particular Jedi Archivist’s all-time favorite film.

  A quick scan of Google search results for his name indicates that the widespread, unsubstantiated theory about his role is that he’ll be playing Darth Plagueis, the canonical Sith Lord who mentored Palpatine for decades prior to and during The Phantom Menace and, later, Attack of the Clones. A member of the humanoid species the Muun, Plagueis was first and foremost a businessman who used his vast wealth and influence to advance his Sith agenda, much like Chancellor Palpatine.

  With Andy Serkis heavily involved with production of Episode VII, this idea isn’t entirely without merit. Weta Digital’s MoCap technology would be the perfect VFX solution for translating von Sydow’s performance into a convincing alien Sith.

  That said, I don’t quite buy it. First off: Plagueis was killed—that is, physically destroyed—by Palpatine, or Darth Sidious, in the events of the novel Darth Plagueis by James Luceno, ca. Attack of the Clones (or 22 B.B.Y.); while his life’s ambition had been devoted to achieving immortality through the power of the Force’s Dark Side, Luceno’s book seems to make it sufficiently clear that he failed to achieve that goal.

  Second, I’m not convinced that Lucasfilm’s goal with the sequel trilogy will be to rehash existing Expanded Universe material that at this point has been deemed noncanonical, or that was only really relevant to the prequels. “The Legend of Darth Plagueis the Wise,” as Palpatine refers to it, is a story best left shrouded in mystery—it was a nice plot element in Revenge of the Sith, but we don’t need it going forward.

  Were I writing a film called Star Wars: Episode VII—The Ancient Fear, well, I’d first approach the script with thoughts of something decidedly more ancient. If Plagueis was killed roughly twenty-five years before Jedi, then that’d make him old news by the time the events of the sequel trilogy unfold, some sixty years or so after his death.

  But that ain’t exactly “ancient.”

  Now, I’m not going to claim that I’m some expert on Jedi or Sith history, or assert that von Sydow is playing Bane. The Lucasfilm Story Group would be lucky to have somebody who’s as passionate about this mythos as I am on board, sure, but I don’t consider myself a Star Wars scholar when it comes to the EU and so forth.

  What I do feel I’ve got a firm grasp on is that period of the saga’s history beginning shortly before the events of BioWare’s Knights of the Old Republic and concluding with the final Darth Bane novel, Dynasty of Evil.

  Drew Karpyshyn has his critics, as does any author given the privilege of playing around in this beloved universe, but I can honestly say that there’s no one whose books I’d more readily suggest to folks looking to get into Star Wars beyond the scope of The Clone Warsand the films themselves. What Karpyshyn did with both Knights of the Old Republic and his Darth Bane trilogy has, in my mind, forever enriched and expanded upon the mythology of the ancient Sith.

  Again, I don’t suppose that von Sydow’s going to be Bane in Episode VII. But I do think he’s going to be playing at least some form of Sith Lord from the pre-B.B.Y., even pre-Dynasty of Evil chronology.

  In Ryder Windham’s Jedi vs. Sith: The Essential Guide to the Force, a piece called “The Shadow of Freedon Nadd” explains that:

  Four centuries after Nadd’s death, . . . Queen Amanoa, wife of Onderon’s ruler King Ommin, was possessed by the spirit of Freedon Nadd. . . . [The Jedi] tracked Amanoa to the deepest sublevels of her palace and discovered Freedon Nadd’s tomb, which had become the focus of dark side energy and enabled his power to pass to his descendants from generation to generation. (p. 17)

  (We’ll just avoid the obvious pop-culture tangent here, where we delve into von Sydow’s role as The Exorcist, and any implications to be made about Sith “possession.”)

  In other words, Plagueis failed in his lifetime to do what at least one Sith Lord had accomplished almost four millennia prior. We’re also told by Yoda on-screen in Revenge of the Sith that Qui-Gon Jinn was perhaps the first Jedi to master the Force and commune with the living beyond death, meaning that Plagueis’s goal can and has been achieved by members on both sides of the ageless war.

  So Darth Plagueis is, essentially, incidental to the larger story of the Skywalker family and their role in the conflict between Jedi and Sith. A quick aside: there exists the possibility, based on the Expanded Universe’s success with the Yuuzhan-Vong War series beginning with R. A. Salvatore’s Vector Prime, that the titular “ancient fear” and any associated characters may not be Sith at all—but if the core six films of the canon are all about the Skywalkers bringing balance to the Force, I very much doubt that we’ll be seeing some alien species heretofore unknown to moviegoers.

  It’d be cool to see the smart but whacky metadrama of Matthew Stover’s Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor played out on the big screen, to offer a third possibility, but based on the track records of people like Abrams, I would err on the side of the sequels focusing on the Sith’s reemergence post-Jedi.

  A Sith Empire, specifically.

  Windham’s account of “The Battle of Ruusan,” also found in Jedi vs. Sith, describes the Sith Order prior to Darth Bane’s seizing of the mantle (through the eyes of Luke Skywalker, via Yoda’s tutelage) as follows:

  Hundreds and hundreds of years ago, a Jedi named Kaan turned away from the light and formed the Brotherhood of Darkness. The Brotherhood used the dark side of the Force to build an empire, and they were well on their way toward expanding it when an army was raised to opposed them. . . . They were Jedi. (p. 27)

  Now, as we know from various (now-noncanonical) storylines in the Star Wars video games published by LucasArts over the past ten to fifteen years, the Brotherhood of Darkness was likely not the only Sith Empire ever to have surfaced—but given Darth Bane’s elevated status among the canon, thanks to his brief appearance in spirit on The Clone Wars during Yoda’s journey to the Sith homeworld of
Moraband (i.e., Korriban), the Brotherhood’s history is one piece of the Star Wars mythos I’m confident that Lucasfilm’s Story Group considers to be canon.

  What do we make of this? Well, most importantly, the Brotherhood of Darkness was, in the context of the Expanded Universe, the original precedent for what constitutes the Sith. The so-called “Rule of Two,” established by Darth Bane after he betrayed and murdered the Brotherhood with an ancient, forgotten Force technique called the Thought Bomb, only exists as the normative mode of being for the Dark Lords for a brief span of time—roughly a thousand years B.B.Y., I’d say.

  Not to mention the fact that the Jedi Order still existed during the Battle of Ruusan. Thirty-some odd years after Return of the Jedi, who knows what remains of its hokey religion and ancient weapons? Probably not much.

  Suppose Bane was wrong about the nature of the Dark Side. Suppose the ancient Rule of One, with a vast empire of disciples at the sole Dark Lord’s disposal, proves a source of greater power for the Sith, despite the apparent sacrifice of secrecy and stability.

  Rumor has it that Han Solo hasn’t seen Luke in years at the time of Episode VII’s opening crawl—which could mean that, if Asajj Ventress or Darth Maul is still alive and seeking vengeance, a centuries- or millennia-old Dark Lord of the Sith looking to return from the netherworld of the Force and assemble an empire of Sith acolytes would be in a pretty advantageous position. With no Jedi to oppose him, a Freedon Nadd or Naga Sadow or Lord Vitiate might well cast the whole of the galaxy into a new era of darkness.

  Guardians of the Galaxy

  An Insta-Classic that Goes All the Way

  Nobody ever told me I needed to watch Parks and Recreation, that it was the funniest television series since Dave Chappelle broke all the rules over a decade ago. But my fiancée had the good sense to give it a go one night when there was nothing else to see on Netflix, and we’ve watched the hell out of it ever since. Seeing people like Amy Poehler, Aziz Ansari, Nick Offerman, and Aubrey Plaza hitting their stride was its own reward—and every episode is eminently rewatchable, which is more than I can say for some of the more disposable programming the big networks are churning out these days—but it’s the sudden and total self-reinvention of familiar character actors, like Rob Lowe, that makes Parks and Rec the finest sitcom I’ve ever had the pleasure of watching.

  Enter Chris Pratt, who has made memorable appearances in films ranging from the graphic-novel adaptation Wanted (2008, Timur Bekmambetov) to the unexpectedly brilliant romcom The Five-Year Engagement (’12). As the underachieving shoeshine boy with a big heart and small intellect, Pratt rounds out the core of Parks and Rec’s truly perfect cast, offering up ironic deadpan and lowbrow one-liners with the kind of timing and delivery that have grown to define his raw, enormous talent.

  When Marvel announced a Guardians of the Galaxy film, I remember thinking, Well, cool. If it’s got more than a hint of Star Wars flavor, which seems a fair guess, how can it not be fun? And then they announced the cast. . . .

  It was clear Feige and the rest of the people who’d made Joss Whedon’s The Avengers (2012) such a colossal success were willing to take some chances and play around with the greater universe to which they’d staked their claim. This was around the time of the Marvel NOW! relaunch, which included a new ongoing Guardians of the Galaxy title—a comic that would go on to develop a reputation as one of the best things to come out of the Marvel universe in ages.

  “It’s got a talking raccoon with a big-ass machine gun!”

  That was how Stone, the guy who runs my local comics shop, summarized the new series. And it was impossible not to be curious. If Marvel was making Guardians their big post-Avengers tentpole film, something exciting had to be going on. I was pleased to discover that Tony Stark makes the occasional appearance, for starters. And Peter Quill and Gamora both hit all the right notes for me.

  To say my hopes for the film adaptation became high might be something of an understatement, especially once I’d seen the trailer.

  “I feel like this is maybe the movie I’ve been waiting my whole life to see,” I commented to a friend online. Then the months flew by, July 31st arrived, and somehow James Gunn didn’t disappoint.

  The soundtrack alone—from ’70s staple “Go All the Way,” by the Raspberries, to The Runaways’ energetic “Cherrie Bomb,” not to mention Tyler Bates’s epic original score—gives the movie a certain insta-classic quality by balancing modern sounds with a healthy dose of nostalgia.

  Star-Lord’s introductory sequence on the planet Morag demonstrates Gunn’s competence as a director right away, from the well-choreographed action of Quill’s escape to the polished feel of the wide opening shots of the tomblike world and the augmented-reality technology necessary for Star-Lord to navigate it. Pratt earns a few laughs right out of the gate, doing what he does best; stellar actor Djimon Hounsou makes an appearance as Korath the Pursuer; the otherworldly Star-Lord mask is a given an immediate closeup, to ensure that its red-eyed stare becomes as iconic as the film itself seems destined to.

  It never really slows down from there on out.

  John C. Reilly makes a couple amiable appearances as a Nova Corps officer, with Glenn Close portraying his commander-in-chief, Nova Prime. Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel steal much of the show by lending their voices to the wildly lovable Rocket Raccoon and sentient tree-thing Groot, respectively.

  And by the end of the film’s two-hour runtime, you’re left buying it all—to the fullest extent possible. Instead of just having Rocket be a fast-talking, clever raccoon, the script mentions that he’s the result of experimentation using cybernetic uplift technology. Instead of Gamora (Zoë Saldana) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) having a petty, baseless sibling rivalry, we’re told that only one of them is Thanos’s daughter by blood; Gamora might as well have been called his prisoner of war, her family having been slaughtered by the Mad Titan (voiced and portrayed via MoCap by the inimitable Josh Brolin).

  The backstories of Drax the Destroyer (Dave Bautista) and Groot are slightly less developed, and the film does its best to avoid the matter of Quill’s crown-prince-of-Spartax heritage—but given Gunn’s deft handling of the material that’s present in the film, I can’t help but feel all this will be handled sufficiently in the inevitable sequel. Ultimately, I suppose, the villains are the film’s one weak point. Benicio del Toro’s The Collector feels criminally underused, despite his space fortress serving as one of the main settings of the film’s second act. And Lee Pace is a bit of a caricature in his turn as Ronan the Accuser, who acts as a kind of Darth Maul to Thanos’s Sidious, to draw an all-too-easy comparison.

  But Guardians of the Galaxy is, at the end of the day, something fresher and bigger than a mere Star Wars pastiche. Given its place within the larger context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it has free reign when it comes to making Starkian references to pop culture and the recognizable DNA of blockbuster filmmaking. And it makes full, unabashed use of its lead’s strengths. When Quill hollers, from the cockpit of his starship Milano, “They got my ‘dick’ message!”—well, you don’t have to roll your eyes. Because this flick has so much heart, and contributes to the fun-loving genre that is home to everything from Raiders of the Lost Ark to Back to the Future, the audience is willing to follow Star-Lord and his ragtag team of Guardians anywhere.

  What Is to Give Light

  The Cultural Legacy of Jodorowsky’s Dune

  Jodorowsky’s Dune (Frank Pavich, 2013) is the bittersweet story of one tremendously ambitious filmmaker’s aborted attempt at bringing Frank Herbert’s seminal space opera to the big screen. Alejandro Jodorowsky describes his efforts as stemming not only from an emphasis on art before commerce, but also from a desire “to create a prophet . . . [an] artistical, cinematographical god.” His early career suggests that he was capable of making such a film: Fando y Lis (1968) incited rioting upon its release, and was subsequently banned by the Mexican government; the western El Topo (’70) reveals a style as ava
nt-garde and psychedelic as anything Pink Floyd or Herbert himself ever wrote.

  “Soy Dios,” declares the titular gunslinger—played by Jodorowsky himself—in El Topo. Translation? “I am God.” And it appears, given what we’re shown of the director’s vision for adapting Dune throughout Pavich’s documentary, that he truly had a grandiosity and work ethic to match.

  Of all the conceptual work explored in the film, it is the artist Moebius—a veteran storyboarder and designer who worked on such landmarks as Alien, Tron, and The Abyss—whose contribution seems the greatest overall loss to our culture: his costume and character designs, his futuristic weaponry, his sense of scope and camera movement. While we may have reaped some of the artful fruits of his labor years down the road, no doubt his imagination lacked some of the exuberant, reckless abandon on display in the production design and storyboards for Jodorowsky’s would-be masterpiece.

  Critics pose the question of what might have happened to popular culture, had Dunepreceded Star Wars, noting that the blockbuster model and all the multimedia and merchandising that goes along with it may well have wound up a very different animal.

  On a somewhat cynical note, the structure of the Hero’s Journey monomyth could well have taken a back seat to the more problematic White-Messiah structure at the heart of so many recent films: Avatar (James Cameron, 2009), The New World (Terrence Malick, ’05), The Last of the Mohicans (Michael Mann, ’92)—the examples are fairly endless. This is perhaps the one thing we gained when production on Jodorowsky’s Dune collapsed, though Cameron’s Avatar has ensured that the myth will live on in big-screen science fiction.