timdalton007 Reviews

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

Snyder's Bloody and Brutal DC Fan Fic

[2/10 · 28 January 2024]

(Note: This review is based on the Ultimate Edition edit of the film.)

With the release of Man of Steel in 2013, it appeared that Zach Snyder and Warner Brothers had successfully launched a shared film franchise based off of DC Comics. Man of Steel, after all, had been a solid 21st century take on Superman's origin story (minus its superfluous fourth act Superman vs Zod battle at any rate). So a follow-up film was much anticipated, even as it added on extra elements that took it away from being a Superman film and into a larger dip into franchise territory.

And that was where everything went wrong. Even with the Ultimate Edition adding 31 minutes to the film, leading it to run ust over three hours. Because if this was an improvement over the theatrical cut, it can't have been much of one. Because this thing was a mess.

Reviewing Snyder's 300 shortly after its cinema release, I noted that Snyder's previous films are visually stunning but otherwise hollow. Elsewhere, I've noted (half-jokingly) that he's only ever read three comics: The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, and 300. All of which comes into play here, as well. Because BvS is a combination of bad DC character fan fic, labored 9/11 allegory, and with Jesse Eisenberg's Lex Luthor being quite possibly the worst performance I've ever seen out of a professionally made film. One that misses the point of its title characters (turning one into a bloodthirsty murderer and the other into a sulking, brooding parody of himself) while taking elements from both The Dark Knight Returns and The Death of Superman without understanding what made them work in context. Snyder's pacing issues persist, including stopping the film for minutes at a time for a nightmare sequence and so Wonder Woman can watch some videos emailed to her on the eve of the film's titular fight (the latter eating up nearly five full minutes of the film). It's also a film weighed down by Affleck's one-note performance or the rightfully well-ridiculed "MARTHA!" twist.

Which isn't to say Batman v Superman doesn't have its moments and pluses. The cast beyond Affleck and Eisenberg is solid but largely wasted (including Cavill and Amy Adams, the actress I spent years waiting to see be Lois Lane). The titular fight and Batman's subsequent warehouse fight is well-realized as an action piece and homage to Frank Miller's work on The Dark Knight Returns (even if the latter sequence has Batman killing left, right, and center). Indeed, it's no surprise that so much of the action seen in the trailers in 2015 came from those sequences as (along with the climactic Doomsday fight) are the only major ones in the entire 182 minute runtime. The Hans Zimmer and Junkie XL score alternates between brooding and near-epic, though never hitting the peaks of Zimmer's work on Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy. Finally, in keeping with Snyder's previous work, it has some wonderful visual moments, however fleeting they are.

In the final analysis, I've rarely seen a film do so much to have so little to show for it. Batman v Superman's (and the DCEU in general, for that matter) biggest problem was that it tired to AstroTurf a franchise in the wake of the 2012 release of The Avengers, using what should have been either a Man of Steel sequel or a solo Batman outing as the springboard for it. As a film, Batman v Superman might well have been a casualty of that, given it throws everything and the kitchen sink into the mix with a convoluted plot with enough reference, subplots, and endings for about three or four different films thrown into one. Part of that, too, being down to Snyder's bloody and brutal fan fic vision of who these characters are and the world they inhabit.

A vision that clearly resonated with some fans, but this reviewer isn't among them.

Batman (1989)

Batman '89 Reconsidered

[8/10 · 28 January 2024]

When it comes to the history of Batman, there are years which mark watershed moments in the character's nearly 85 year history. Among them is 1989 when Tim Burton's eponymous film hit cinemas with Michael Keaton in the role and took the box-office by storm. Not to mention one noted for its "dark and serious" take on the character and Gotham City beyond. Almost 35 years after its release, does Batman '89 live up to its hype and legacy?

Yes and no.

Certainly the reputation for it being "dark and serious" feels increasingly misplaced with the passage of time. It's true that the film has a fair share of Gothic and even noir moments, to be sure, with Gotham being a mix of 1940s noir and grimy 1980s New York City. Yet from Jack Nicholson's Joker much of the time to a number of gags and even cues of Danny Elfman's score, there's moments when it borders on being over the top. It's a tonally odd film, something perhaps more obvious with the passage of time, something partly down Burton as a filmmaker which shows just how much of the film's reputation has been owed to 1989 audiences only major exposure being the Adam West TV series from two decades earlier.

Nor is Batman '89 without further faults. Perhaps owed to the casting of Nicholson as the Joker, this is a film seemingly more interested in its villain than its title character which is to the detriment of the film and Keaton as Batman (which is even more true of Burton's follow-up, Batman Returns). Kim Basinger's Vicky Vale, meanwhile, starts off well enough but once the film arrives at the scene in the museum with her and the Joker, she increasingly becomes a damsel in distress. Basinger does what she can with the material, but it eventually reduces her to nothing but screaming in the second half (and especially the climax). Speaking of the passage of the climax some of the model shots from the otherwise excellent Derek Meddings (of Thunderbirds and James Bond fame) have not aged well at all in the climax.

Yet when Batman '89 works, it soars. Particularly in the moments when it actually leans into the Gothic or noir, something that Keaton's Batman/Bruce Wayne wonderfully suits. Indeed, Keaton's performances are the strongest of the entire film, which makes it even more of a shame that he's sidelined in favor of Nicholson's Joker. Much of the atmosphere of the film is derived from its design and cinematography, creating a mix of eras that somehow feels natural to this world (and carried over into the acclaimed Batman: The Animated Series a few years later) that includes one of the great film cars of all time: the Batmobile, a piece of design and engineering that at once feels retro and futuristic even 35 years later. Adding to all of that is Danny Elfman's score with its iconic Batman Theme.

Despite its faults, , it's easy to understand why the film had both the effect and success that it had 35 years ago, from Keaton's Batman or that rightfully iconic design for the Batmobile. It might not quite live up to its "dark and serious" reputation, but Batman '89 was a stepping stone film and one whose influence can be felt on many of the comic book adaptations made since. For that it has a well-deserved place, even if it is neither the sum of its part or quite worthy of its legendary status in fan circles.

The Flash (I) (2023)

Keaton Soars Even As The Flash Stumbles

[3/10 · 16 January 2024]

The DCEU spent a decade stumbling along. Despite a strong start with Man of Steel (even with the issues of its last act), the effort by Warners and DC to AstroTurf a franchise in the style of Marvel never paid off. For a brief time leading to the summer of 2023, it appeared that it might have a chance to right itself with a film that would allow something of a reboot with a plot inspired by one of the company's strongest recent comic stories: the universe altering Flashpoint. With a host of returning actors and callbacks, the long gestating Flash solo film would have the fate of the franchise on its shoulders.

Except that it stumbled, crashed, and burned on arrival.

Watching all 144 minutes of The Flash, it isn't hard to see how much it deserves all of the roasting that it has received. Something that was clear from the opening "baby shower" sequence that helps to open the film with puns that perhaps even the 1966 Adam West Batman TV series would have hesitated using. From Ezra Miller being alternatively the blandest or most annoying lead of a superhero film this side of Miles Teller in 2015's failed Fantastic Four reboot to some of the most atrocious CGI and green screen work seen in a tentpole studio film with a budget over 200 million dollars, there's plenty to mock The Flash about.

That's without getting into the script. Ultimately, the biggest problem with The Flash is that it's not so much a single film as four competing films taking up nearly two and a half hours. Among those are a Flash origin film and an adaptation of the Flashpoint comic plot line, either of which would have worked potentially in their own right but mashed together don't. Even less so when the film also tries to be an Avengers: Endgame style movie for the DECU with all of its callbacks and returning characters. Like so much of the DCEU, The Flash tries to AstroTurf a gamechanger film into the middle of the franchise, all while lacking any of the emotional investment or stakes that the MCU had built up to for Endgame.

Only one of those four movies actually kind of works and it's the thing that The Flash, ironically, lives and dies by. That's Michael Keaton's return to the Dark Knight, a role he left behind 29 years earlier. Now, perhaps because of when my own childhood took place, I've never quite shared the nostalgia for Keaton's Batman that it seems many others about my age share. He was good, great even, but Burton's two films with him seemed far more keen about the villains than Keaton as the Dark Knight. That said, Keaton is the heart and soul of this film, the thing that makes it finally pick up at the halfway point and drives things right up to the moment he exits the film. That Keaton was meant to become the front and center of a revived DCEU is clear from the film and which makes it a shame that production issues, shifting release schedules, and finally Warner's own poor decision making robbed him of the chance to deliver upon how bloody good he was here. For a film that's wallowing in nostalgia and trying to use it to glue a film together, Keaton's Batman is the one thing that actually works, even if The Flash suffers from the same problem as Burton's two films: squandering a fantastic Batman to focus on other characters.

If you're going to make yourself sit through the nearly two and a half hours that is 2023's The Flash, it's worth seeing for Keaton. Because there isn't much else worth recommending it for, frankly. Which is a shame, but also a fitting epitaph for the DCEU as a whole.

World of Strange Powers (1985)

Science, Not Magic

[8/10 · 8 November 2023]

Across thirteen weeks in 1980, writer of science fact and fiction Arthur C Clarke took viewers on a journey through the mysterious and unusual with the series Mysterious World. A series that focused on what Clarke called "mysteries of the first and second kind." That is, mysteries that no longer were in the modern world and phenomenon where evidence existed but interpretation was debated. In the series opening episode, Clarke noted a third kind of mysteries that included psychic phenomenon, ghosts, and cases where mind might literally be over matter. Five years after Mysterious World aired, Clarke took viewers through some of those mysteries across a World of Strange Powers.

Clarke, introduced at the start of every episode as "the author of 2010 and inventor of the communications satellite," was an ideal choice to act as frontman of the series, appearing around his adopted home on the island of Sri Lanka. As a writer of science fact and fiction, Clarke had addressed many of the topics discussed in the series, including in his novel Childhood's End whose climax was set in motion by an entire generation developing psychic and telekinetic abilities. And, as a self-confessed lover of mysteries used to appearing in programs such as The Sky at Night and news coverage of the Apollo moon landings, he was what we'd term today a "media personality."

Like with Mysterious World, Clarke's presence as front man set a very different tone for the series compared to contemporary series such as the Leonard Nimoy hosted In Search Of..., for example. World of Strange Powers keeps well away from making any sensationalistic claims, with witnesses to the extraordinary given a chance to describe what happened before experts look over the available evidence. The series seventh episode, looking at extraordinary photographs of fairies and ghosts, is a prime example of this approach, including its coverage of the famous Cottingley Fairies. Science, not magic, rules the day with the Clarke and the series as a whole, with newscaster Anna Ford offering narration between Clarke's segments.

Photographs are just the tip of the iceberg. Firewalking, the power of hexes, stigmata, and premonitions are just a handful of the topics that the series covers as the series takes viewers around the world. All building up to the series finale, where Clarke takes the opportunity to go through the dozen previous episodes and rank the possibility of each topic. To risk invoking modern internet clickbait, Clarke's stances may well surprise viewers, even if he retains some skepticism on some of the topics.

Yet despite how well the series was made and how well it holds up, it's less satisfying than its predecessor. Something owed, perhaps, to the topics being covered. After all, as Clarke notes at one point, you can prove something happens, you can never prove that it doesn't. Given the series focus on intangible mysteries, definitive answers remain just out of reach.

Even so, Strange Powers remains as watchable even now. From Clarke as frontman to its reserved tone, it remains head and shoulders above many similar series. And for a series approaching forty, that's by no means a bad thing.

Doctor Who: Terror of the Vervoids (Special Edition) (2019 Video)

What Seeds May Grow

[6/10 · 19 July 2023]

In the hot mess of a season that Trial of a Time Lord turned out to be, Terror of the Vervoids manages to stand out. Namely by how shoehorned in its trial sequences are, including over-explaining moments, reducing its status as a whodunit that's not only telegraphed but utterly superfluous. Even so, having watched and suffered my way through viewings of it during watches of Trial, a part of me has always wondered what a version of it without those sequences might be like. Clearly, even sitting in faraway Alabama, I was not alone in having those thoughts as the 2019 Blu-Ray release of the Trial season included just such a Special Edition version, revisiting the story and allowing us to see it anew.

In fact, it's new in more ways than one. From the opening title sequence, it's clear this is far more than just a simple editing out of the trial sequences. There's a new version of the opening title sequence, not just the cleaned-up and remastered one we're so used to by now, influenced by the titles of the time and Modern Who. From there, the serial opens not with a remorseful Sixth Doctor stalking into the courtroom or the rough visual effects shot of the Hyperion III space liner but a new CGI shot of the liner. Whatever else might be said, Terror of the Vervoids is going to look better than it ever has before.

Besides the trial sequences removal, the visual effects are the most notable difference on display. The shots of the Hyperion III and the Black Hole of Tartarus were among the nadirs of eighties Doctor Who, cementing how cheap looking it had become. Surprisingly, the new effects don't wander far off the original shots in terms of look, with the Black Hole of Tartarus still being a swirl of colors in space. What's changed is their quality, with the black hole still looking less like a real one but still less like Christmas lights swirled around on a coat hanger. It's an improvement, one sympathetically done.

Cosmetic changes only go so far, of course. Can this Special Edition redeem the script by Pip and Jane Baker? Surprisingly enough, it does to some extent. The narrative flow, no longer broken up by the trial sequences with their over-exposition and superfluous cutaways, improves. Parts of it feel more organic, even tense in places, including the penultimate installment's cliffhanger. How much of that was less their writing and either the direction of Chris Clough or the edits is unclear, but the Special Edition feels a more coherent version of the story Pip and Jane set out to tell.

The biggest surprise, which also stems from a couple of scenes portraying "unreal events" as revealed in The Ultimate Foe, is in the Sixth Doctor's characterization. Perhaps because of those "unreal events" and the trial cutaways, it's been easy to lump Vervoids in with the rest of this Doctor's era, portraying him as abrasive, arrogant, and more besides. Stripped of those moments, the version of the Sixth Doctor here feels more in keeping with the one that warmed fan hearts in novels and especially when Colin Baker began reprising the role at Big Finish. He's eccentric, still pompous at times, but also friendly, even charming. That one or two of Baker's improvised one-liners didn't make this new cut also helps, yet seeing this performance, one I'd notionally seen several times across sixteen years, came as something of a revelation.

Not that this Special Edition can fix all of the problems the serial had in its original broadcast version. It may flow better as a narrative, but the whodunit still isn't much of one, with Pip and Jane's telegraphing too much of that sub-plot, as does the actor's performance playing the culprit. Something obvious on a first VHS viewing in 2007 is even more so with Blu-Ray in 2023, having read more Agatha Christie in the meantime. Worse, with the inclusion of the Vervoids as monsters, there's no real reason to have a whodunit. Improved flow also doesn't make the Vervoids any better, as they still lack a motive for their murder spree other than their Doctor Who monsters. The writing, from the plotting to much of the characterizations and dialogue, remains rough, a reminder that Eric Saward had vacated the script editor's office and John Nathan-Turner let an underdeveloped script reach the studio floor. Nor can improved visual effects make the sets and costumes feel like a cut-price eighties version of what the future would look like. The roughness can only be taken back so much, given Classic Who's production method and budget.

Even so, this Special Edition has raised Terror of the Vervoids up, at least in my estimation. It's still not a classic, some lost gem from Classic Who's worst era, and Robots of Death's status as the best Christie-inspired Doctor Who story is still uncompromised. Yet, separated from the trial cutaways in this new edit and with its visual effects sequences revisited, there was potential for something better than what audiences first saw across an autumn in the mid-1980s.

Then again, isn't that true for so much of this era?

Titanic: Untold Stories (1998 Video)

Tales From The Abyss

[8/10 · 8 November 2022]

Through a combination of submersible availability and James Cameron's film stirring the interest of cable channels such as Discovery, the mid-late 1990s was something of a golden era for Titanic documentaries. Finding a niche that presented the familiar tale of the 1912 disaster on the North Atlantic was always a challenge. One of the better efforts was Titanic: Untold Stories, shown on Discovery in 1998, which combined different approaches into a fascinating 50-odd-minute piece.

One of those approaches will be familiar to viewers of Discovery's other notable Titanic documentaries of the period. Like Anatomy of a Disaster and The Investigation Begins, part of Untold Stories focuses on the 1990s exploration of the wreck by RMS Titanic, Inc. And their recovery of artifacts from the ocean floor. Likewise, the computer animations of the yellow French submersible Nautile and the disaster itself to Michael Whalen's score come from those earlier documentaries and are well-used here. So far, so familiar.

Something else Untold Stories does is present personal accounts of the sinking. As the title suggests, the focus is on the lesser-known tales of the ship's passengers and crew. Those include a trio of Swedish passengers in steerage, including a newlywed couple whose fate becomes entwined with the liner. There are the below deck's experiences of stoker Frederick Barret and the then-recently publicized tale of Japanese passenger Masabumi Hosono. More well-known stories here, too, such as Second Officer Charles Lightoller and second-class passenger Lawrence Beesley. Their accounts are presented through voiceovers and reenactments, often well-realized despite what one suspects was a low budget. Indeed, the reenactments here often stand head and shoulders above many similar efforts in other documentaries, partly due to them not being overambitious but also via how their shot through tilted angles, affording them a dream or nightmare quality depending on events.

Tying together those approaches are Untold Stories narrators. Linda Hunt offers the more overt narration with her voice offering another dream-like quality to the documentary, taking viewers from the bottom of the ocean to the dives and back into the past. With Hunt giving the wider view, another voice comes to the fore from time to time in the form of Titanic historian Charles Haas. Focusing in part on his dive to the wreck site, Haas takes viewers on a tour of the Titanic's bow section to points in the human drama unfolding nearly a century before. Haas provides the historical context while offering a human angle, someone who has spent a lifetime delving into the disaster's human stories coming face to face with the stage where it took place. Haas and Hunt's narration neatly weave Untold Stories' various strands into a cohesive, even moving narrative of the disaster.

A disaster, we're reminded across 50 or so minutes, full of human beings with hopes and dreams. Lives forever changed across a handful of hours on a dark ocean. As much as the Titanic story can be about missed opportunities, the triumphs and failings of technology, and more, Untold Stories serves as a reminder across nearly 25 years that our interest in Titanic lies as much in the people who went through the unthinkable aboard a supposedly unsinkable ship.

Black Adam (2022)

The DCEU Finds It Superhero Mojo At Last

[7/10 · 25 October 2022]

With the release of Man of Steel in 2013 and announcements that followed in its wake, it seemed nine years ago that a film franchise based on various DC comics properties might well come to rival that of Marvel's burgeoning cinematic universe. Yet while the MCU spent much of the last decade going from strength to strength, the DC Extended Universe (DCEU) has been met with a more mixed reception, both commercially and critically. What's needed is something of a rebound film for an ailing franchise. The release of Black Adam, introducing Dwayne Johnson as Teth-Adam, the titular antihero, seemed to offer such an opportunity, but does it do so?

On the surface, perhaps, the choice of Black Adam might seem an odd one. The character isn't one of DC's well-known trinity and has spent his paperbound life as either a villain or an antihero at his best. Not to mention that the idea of the character, summed up elsewhere as a "Superman that kills," seems oddly redundant given some of the DCEU's antics. But when you have someone with the box-office appeal of Johnson, having pursued the role for the better part of two decades, there's an incentive to make it work.

And to the credit of director Jaume Collet-Serra and the film's trio of writers (Adam Sztykiel, Rory Haines, and Sohrab Noshirvani), they do, and it's something they do in part through the movie's themes and tone.

Because what separates this film from the po-faced earlier superhero outings of the DCEU.is that it stands in stark contrast to them. It's a genuine spectacle from the seemingly endless streets of Kahndaq, with its mix of ancient ruins alongside modern neon lights to its action set pieces. Like James Gunn's superhero-less The Suicide Squad last year, it's a film that relishes in humor amid its chaos. It's not as successful as Gunn's film as its comedic moments, and one-liners especially, can feel forced in places, but Black Adam aims to be something that the DCEU superhero outings haven't been for the most part: fun to watch.

It's also buoyed by two members of its cast, in particular. There's Johnson, of course, bringing his trademark physicality to this super antihero and a sense of the man underneath it all. The notion of his burden with these powers suits this character and Johnson rather well, more so than it did Henry Cavill's Superman, making the film's eventual ending more fulfilling. Upstaging Johnson is no easy feat, but Pierce Brosnan as Doctor Fate manages to do it throughout the film. Brosnan brings all of his charm, charisma, and dramatic presence to bear in this Merlin-esque role. Indeed, Brosnan's might be the best performance in the entire movie, amid a solid supporting cast of new arrivals to the DCEU and a smattering of familiar faces in supporting roles.

Not that the film doesn't have its issues. One of the consequences of having a lead character and supporting cast whose origin story isn't so well known is that, inevitably, exposition is necessary. And, good grief, there are times when Black Adam feels weighed down by it, especially in its opening and closing acts. The information feels necessary to the story but is clunkily delivered, including a voiceover in the opening minutes that feels like the (fictional) history lesson it is. It also suffers from an over-reliance on slow-motion in its action sequences, often slowing them down without cause. Coupled with some comedic misfires, it's something that knocks the film down a peg or two, but far from fatally since when the film works, it works.

Does Black Adam offer a rebound film for the DCEU? It certainly appears so, from the strength of its central casting to its use of familiar tropes. Beyond that, even with its being exposition and slow-motion heavy, it's an entertaining film in its own right. If nothing else, it's the best DCEU superhero outing since 2017's Wonder Woman.

Given the nature of the DCEU, that may well be damning it with faint praise.

The Man (1972)

Jones, Serling, and "The Man"

[7/10 · 11 March 2022]

From presenting past presidents on the screen to imaging fictional ones dealing with crises ranging from wars to alien invasions, The American presidency and film have often come together throughout the medium's history. They've offered windows into corridors of power and reflected moments in America's history through fiction. Something which makes the 1972 film The Man an intriguing viewing experience, presenting a vision of something that would only come to pass more than thirty years later: the country's first African-American commander in chief.

That president, the titular "man" of the film's title to use the slang of the time, is James Earl Jones' Douglass Dilman. Jones is the film's heart, taking viewers with him on a journey that begins with a fateful phone call that launches the film's main title sequence. One that sees this mild-mannered, often quiet former college professor turned senator into the world's most powerful political office. Watching Jones deal with the aftermath, finding his feet as others try to pull his strings like a puppet or bring him down, is something akin to a masterclass. In every scene, Jones brings the right note to play, from a man out of his depth to Dilman putting morality ahead of political expediency later on. If there's anything that makes The Man worth seeing, even decades later, it's Jones' performance.

It helps that Jones has a solid supporting cast backing him. On the political side of things is Martin Balsam as the White House chief of staff who stays on to help him, Burgess Meredith as a powerful but racist senator, and William Windom as the would-be kingmaker Secretary of State with Barbara Rush as his ambitious wife. Closer to home is Janet MacLachlan as Dilman's activist daughter who butts heads with her father and Georg Stanford Brown as Robert Wheeler, a young activist accused of a crime that puts him at the heart of a diplomatic incident. Their interactions with Jones as Dilman bring out some wonderful moments in his performance, as well as giving each of them some solid material to play with on their own, especially in regards to Meredith and Windom trying to keep the upper hand.

It's as a production that the film is at its most mixed. Joseph Sargent's direction has an assurance throughout, including a surprisingly mobile given The Man was made in the pre-Steadicam. Indeed, there are times when the shots in White House corridors offer pre-echoes of The West Wing's famed "walk and talks" nearly thirty years early. Jerry Goldsmith also hands in a sparse but immensely effective score, built around the main title theme that captures the promise and pomp of the presidency, as well as the poignant loneliness of the office. Yet for all of that, the fact that The Man was a made for TV movie given a cinematic release is abundantly clear throughout, with even the White House sets lacking a feature film's sense of being fully decorated, or how protest scenes are shot really close-up by and large, and especially in the film's final sequence which betrays the budget despite Sargent's direction. None of which is fatal, but it does take the film down a star or two.

If Jones as Dilman is the heart, then the script from Rod Serling is the soul. Serling, the legendary creator of the Twilight Zone and who had previously adapted Seven Days in May for the screen, had the unenviable task of reducing a sprawling nearly 800 page novel by Irving Wallace into a 90-minute script. Given the passage of time between the novel's publication and when the film's production, and knowing it was an eternity in political time, it isn't difficult to imagine that Serling didn't make us of a good deal of the novel's content. What's left here is a compelling narrative centered on the obvious questions of race in America immediately after the Civil Rights era and how that would affect relations with apartheid South Africa. Serling's script does its best to not sugar coat things, which sees some racial epithets used that would be no-goes today, and that itself is something that dates the film. Yet, like much of Serling's scriptwriting, there's also a timely quality to it for the same reason as the questions it asks about race and politics, and how an African-American president would deal with matters of race, have resonance even in the post-Obama world.

The Man was to prove prophetic in other ways. Dilman is thrust into the Oval Office by an unlikely series of events, making him a president that is an accidental and unelected one. With a couple of years of the film's release, Gerald Ford, a congressman appointed vice-president by Richard Nixon and confirmed by Congress, would assume the presidency without ever having been elected thanks to the Watergate scandal. Ford's presidency would, like Dillman's, prove to have its own series of ups and downs until Ford would, after a bitter campaign for his party's nomination, lose the 1976 presidential election.

Perhaps proving that fact is stranger than fiction.

Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World (1980)

Across Clarke's "Mysterious World"

[8/10 · 8 November 2021]

Bigfoot. The Loch Ness Monster. Sea Monsters. UFOs.

These are just a few of the topics that have, over the decades, drawn in television makers seeking to produce documentaries on the odd and the unexplained here on Earth and beyond. Programs and even series that have, for better or worse, delved into sensationalism and muddied the waters. One of the series that stands out from the pack aired four decades ago on Britain's ITV network bucked the trend to a large extent. Fronted by one of the world's most famous authors, it offered a sober look at those topics and much more. That series was Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World.

Clarke, introduced at the start of every episode as "the author of 2001 and inventor of the communications satellite," was an ideal choice to act as frontman of the series, appearing around his adopted home on the island of Sri Lanka. As a writer of science fact and fiction, Clarke had addressed many of the topics discussed in the series, including in the aforementioned 2001 (both on-page and screen) and novels such as The Deep Range. And, as a self-confessed lover of mysteries used to appearing in programs such as The Sky at Night and news coverage of the Apollo moon landings, he was what we'd term today a "media personality."

Clarke's presence had another effect on the series. What sets Mysterious World apart from a series like the Lenoard Nimoy fronted In Search Of I watched as a youngster in re-runs on the History Channel or other paranormal-focused series, even after forty years, is its tone. Perhaps because of Clarke, a name in both science fact and fiction, acting as frontman, the series never dives headlong into sensationalism. Instead, there's a very British sense of reserve to the series, whether it's delving into sea serpents, frogs raining from the sky, or the hypothetical planet Vulcan. With newscaster Gordon Honeycombe bringing his sensible readings to bear as the series narrator, the series also has a more serious air to it, with each half-hour episode serving as something of a crash course on that week's topic.

And what topics the series covers. With its first episode serving as an introduction to the series tone and a taster of what it'll explore, Mysterious World dives headlong into them. There's the usual fare mentioned at the top of this review, of course. Yet there's also what Clarke terms "classical mysteries," such as those featured in the penultimate episode Strange Skies, which deals with astronomical mysteries. There are also episodes dedicated to ancient stone circles, the 1908 Tunguska event, and seemingly anachronistic ancient artifacts such as the crystal skull that serves as the series defacto logo. The series wraps up with a catch-all episode, "Clarke's Cabinet of Curiosities," covering everything from Death Valley's sailing stones to ball lightning. It's a wide-ranging series, and in many ways, a half-hour only scratches the surface of the topics on parade despite featuring experts and witnesses alike. Remarkably for a series as old as Mysterious World is, it manages to be informative even today.

Of course, the series has aged in places. It would be surprising if it hadn't, given how much time has passed. Some of its mysteries, such as the sailing stones, have been effectively solved. Others continue to be the subject of debate, such as the renewed interest in the UFO topic or superseded by ongoing research in the case of Stonehenge in the stone circles episode. Even so, aspects of even those episodes have points of interest, highlighting other mysteries or serving as time capsules of known facts at the time.

And thanks to Clarke's work as frontman and its serious tone, Mysterious World remains as watchable as ever.

No Time to Die (2021)

The End Of An Era, Commander Bond

[9/10 · 10 October 2021]

In a different world, you would have been reading a version of this review nearly two years ago. That was when, after all, the 25th James Bond film from Eon Productions had its original release date. Finally, after a change of directors, writers, and composers and a release date moved multiple times due to the Covid-19 pandemic, that film, No Time to Die, has at long last reached cinemas. Billed as Daniel Craig's final outing in the role, has it proved to be a fitting send-off for his era as the world's most famous secret agent?

Well, as promised, this is very much the tail end of the story that began with Craig's introduction in the role back in 2006's Casino Royale. Outside of the sixties Bond films, and of course, the novels from Ian Fleming that serve as the franchise's source, doing an ongoing narrative or building to something isn't something Bond has often done. The Craig era has essentially been an experiment, birthed in the time of both Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy and the early MCU, that's produced uneven results as films like Quantum of Solace and, to an extent, Spectre has shown. No Time to Die finds itself on the right side of the equation, finding solid in-story reasons to continue the narrative threads it picks up and to bring characters such as Jeffrey Wright's Felix Leiter that we've not seen in some time. The influence of Bond's creator is apparent as well, with the film channeling (as did Skyfall before it) the later Fleming novels, with one book previously adapted essentially in name only having its last act receive a 21st-century update for the film's conclusion. Something which is to the credit of director Cary Joji Fukunaga and the writers (including Bond veterans Neal Purvis and Robert Wade with Phoebe Waller-Bridge).

It also works because of its leading man. Perhaps second only to Timothy Dalton's underrated late eighties Bond, Craig's characterization has gotten the closest to Fleming's wounded man of a secret agent, something which No Time to Die brings out. The Bond of this film is one who not only once more confronting elements of his past through Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) and Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) but facing a new threat, as well. All of the things that made Craig so watchable, the man of action mixed with the at times hardly submerged human side, are on full display here, culminating in the film's final act. It's a send-off that brings out his best as a performer.

The casting, on the whole, is solid, both with new and returning cast members. Both Seydoux and Waltz solidify their chemistry with Craig from Spectre, while the film also builds on the relationships with the team at MI6, including the respectful but antagonistic relationship with Ralph Fiennes as M and the brothers in arms comradely with Wright's Leiter. Elsewhere, there are intriguing moments from the much-discussed Lashana Lynch as 00-agent Nomi, who proves a worthy match for Craig's Bond, and Ana de Armas (Craig's co-star from Knives Out) makes an outstanding but brief appearance as Paloma.

No Time to Die has a weak spot, though. To be specific, in the form of Rami Malek's villain Safin. There is, without question, an immensely unsettling quality to Malek's performance, from his quiet and often near-whisper delivery of lines to some well-done make-up work. Yet, there's also something off in his performance, which means that unsettling never translates to menace. It perhaps also doesn't help that, in the final act, his motivations are never quite clear, either. The Craig era has had its hit and misses when it comes to villains, and Safin counts as a miss if a near one.

No Time to Die also takes the Craig era out on a high, production-wise. Mark Tildesley's production design neatly runs a wide gauntlet, from echoing the real world to the last act bringing Ken Adams sets of the 1960s up to date. Linus Sandgren's cinematography makes the film a visual feast, especially in IMAX, from Italian sunshine to the neon lights of Jamaica and Cuba to the muted high-tech glow of Safin's lair. Fukunaga's direction, along with Tom Cross and Elliot Graham as editors, keeps the film moving, making its 163-minute running time go by without hardly noticing. The icing on the cake might be the score from Hans Zimmer and Steve Mazzaro, which brings back a classic Bond sound missing since David Arnold vacated the composer's chair, as well as quoting some classic Bond scores with appropriate, not to mention weaving in Billie Eilish's hauntingly melancholic title song.

In the end, No Time to Die is to Craig's Bond what Avengers: Endgame was to the first decade of the MCU: a celebration and climax, all rolled into one. And it's a successful end of an era, thanks to some solid choices made by Fukunaga and the writers, not to mention how well made it is as a film. And after nearly two years of waiting, it's nice to know it's been worth the wait to finally see the end of an era.

Countdown (1967)

An Overlooked Space Race Movie

[7/10 · 2 May 2021]

The 1960s Space Race has proven a rich vein for filmmakers to mine from, both then and now, with The Right Stuff and Apollo 13 being perhaps the most high-profile examples. But even as it was unfolding, a number of filmmakers depicted visions of the Space Race's near-future. They included John Sturgess' 1969 film Marooned and Countdown, an early film from Robert Altman, depicting a desperate gamble to put an American on the Moon first.

Based on the 1964 novel The Pilgrim Project by Hank Searls and scripted by Loring Mandel, Countdown depicts the implementation of a crash program by NASA upon the news breaking that the Soviets have not only gone into orbit but are preparing a landing. Thankfully, the agency already has a plan in development called Pilgrim involving a one-way trip that will have an astronaut take a Gemini capsule to the Moon, landing it near a shelter, and staying there until Apollo can arrive. And thanks to a diplomatic kerfuffle, assigned astronaut Chiz Stewart (Robert Duvall) is replaced by civilian astronaut and lunar geologist Lee Stegler (James Caan). Stegler now has not only has to be hurriedly trained by the man he's replacing but also the threat of a hurried Soviet effort once word leaks out.

Countdown is certainly a handsomely made piece of work. Altman and his crew were allowed to film at several locations at the Kennedy Space Center, wonderfully capturing its mid-late sixties look, as well as NASA contractor sites. Indeed, eagle-eyed viewers can spot the Apollo 9 Command Module Gumdrop under construction in the scene where Chiz introduces Lee to the Pilgrim-Gemini variant. There's some excellent launch footage presented in widescreen (even if the rockets used contradicts earlier dialogue about what Pilgrim will use to get to the Moon). Not to mention that the attention paid to the costumes and Mission Control set is impressive for the era, and Altman's use of overlapping dialogue is present already here, adding a much-welcome dose of realism to at times melodramatic scenes.

Indeed, Countdown regularly finds itself getting bogged down in melodrama. Be it between NASA officials bickering over the plan or between Lee and his wife Mickey (Joanna Moore), the first hour or more of the movie ends up in frequent scenes of people debating and fussing at one another. While Altman was a master of making such scenes into fine drama (and in the case of his 1984 film Secret Honor, Philip Baker Hall's Richard Nixon on his own), but here he hadn't quite mastered it yet. Thankfully, there are also plenty of scenes between Caan and Duvall in this section of the movie, though watching the two of them butting heads can wear thin at times as well.

Unfortunately, Countdown also suffers in its depiction of the lunar surface. Which, in having been made in the pre-Apollo 11 era, ends up looking like precisely what it is: the Mojave Desert with some matte paintings to depict towering rock spires in the distance. Not to mention having Caan's astronaut walking around in one-g in a Gemini suit with no effort made to portray the one-sixth lunar gravity. The latter choice is even odder given a sequence during training where a "Peter Pan rig" helps simulate lunar gravity. It's a major fault, but one that is just about forgivable if one is in the right frame of mind to do so.

Countdown then is an overlooked, if slightly melodramatic, but entertaining little movie. One featuring some lovely sixties NASA locations and footage plus a solid cast. While not a classic by any means, it remains an underrated, if not entirely accurate, piece of work, both in Altman's filmography and as a space movie.

Doctor Who: The Executioners (1965) Season 2, Episode 30

Cringe Through Eternity

[4/10 · 31 March 2021]

(Note: A Review Of All Six Episodes Of The Serial)

After meeting them on Skaro and then defeating them in 22nd-century Britain, it was perhaps only a matter of time before the First Doctor would face off against the Daleks again. After all, Britain was still in the grips of Dalekmania. So Terry Nation, this time under the eye of script editor Dennis Spooner, had them facing off once again, but this time across time and space in a grand chase. And in a serial called, what else, but The Chase.

It's a story that, on the surface, had all the right ingredients for success. There's the return of director Richard Martin, who'd worked on the first two Dalek serials so effectively, for example. There's the TARDIS crew, with Maureen O'Brien having settled into the role of Vikki alongside the First Doctor, Ian, and Barbara. And with a story set to take in the sights and sounds of the universe, engaging in a "flight through eternity," to quote one of its episode titles, once again pushing the constraints of what was possible in a 1960s BBC studio, what could go wrong?

Surprisingly, a fair amount. Namely, and this is something that likely seems down to Dennis Spooner, given previous serials like The Romans, its tone. The Chase is played far too often for laughs, from the first scene around the space-time visualizer with the TARDIS crew dancing to the Beatles to the various stops in Flight Through Eternity (including a cringe-inducing scene with an Alabama hillbilly at the top of the Empire State Building). When you can take a maritime mystery like the Mary Celeste and make it into something to laugh at, perhaps your story is on slightly shaky ground. Not that the ideas presented are necessarily terrible, having Doctor Who explaining the Mary Celeste is a genius idea, but doing so with a comedic edge undercuts them at every turn.

Just as bad, if not worse, it makes the Daleks themselves into figures for laughing at in places. Whether attacked by robot monsters in one episode or creating a laughably bad android double of the Doctor in another, they increasingly come across less as a threat than a minor nuisance tolerated to get to this week's cliffhanger. It's something that likely played well to a juvenile audience in 1965, something that the viewing numbers hanging around nine million will attest. Yet viewed after more than a half-century, it's enough to make a fan squirm in their seat.

Yet, The Chase has its moments which makes it worth seeing. The final episode, The Planet of Decision, is the best of the lot, played straight with a couple of exceptions. That last episode is likewise notable for introducing the robotic Mechanoids who've become recurring foes for the Daleks in spin-off media right up until the recent Daleks animated YouTube series as part of Time Lord Victorious. The big battle between them and the Daleks is a tad rough in places, again speaking to the limitations, but remains nicely realized as a piece of direction and editing. It also sees the introduction of Peter Purves as Steven Taylor, who will become a companion. Though more on him in the next serial.

Last but not least, it's also where the last of the original companions, Ian and Barbara, departed the series. Their departure is handled differently from Susan's exit a few serials before, with less build-up to it, though it has a certain logic given how the script lines things up. While there's a bittersweet quality to the scenes, what follows it in an epilogue of sorts makes for an utterly delightful closing sequence that is a joy to watch even today. Ian and Barbara leaving is also a turning point for the series itself, marking the end of an era within an era, the breaking-up of the original team.

The Chase, then, is a mixed-bag if ever there was one. A serial that encompasses so much that this era got both right and wrong. The ambition with the experimentation, always reaching but often not quite grasping. It's also an example of something fans of Classic Who have been doing for decades now. Namely, taking the rough with the smooth.

Doctor Who: The Space Museum (1965) Season 2, Episode 26

One Quarter Brilliance, Three Quarters Runaround

[9/10 · 31 March 2021]

(Note: A Review Of All Four Episodes Of The Serial)

The more time I spend looking at it, the more I've come to realize how strange a beast Doctor Who's second season was. Instead of consolidating on the lessons learned from its first year, the show remained experimental, toying with its format in serial after serial. Or perhaps even experimenting within the space of a single story with story structure. That experimentation, and its effects, can be seen writ large on the mid-season four-parter The Space Museum.

Take that first episode, let's say. The opening installment is pretty high concept, with the TARDIS crew arriving at the titular space museum but realizing that something has gone wrong with time. The twenty-odd minutes that follow are atmospheric and tense, featuring them wandering around the museum until they discover a most troubling exhibit: themselves. Messing around with time isn't something that Classic Who often did, which makes how well this first part of the serial works all the more remarkable. It's also full of some great chemistry between the four leads as together they try to figure out what they've gotten themselves into and then watching the realization dawn on them in a genre twist on the questions of predestination explored in The Aztecs. Finally, it all builds up to a classic cliffhanger ending, if ever there was one. It's a great example of 1960s Doctor Who at its best and one of the single strongest episodes made throughout Classic Who's entire quarter-century run.

Unfortunately, The Space Museum goes downhill from there at the speed of an Olympic skier. With time having caught up with the TARDIS crew, you might have expected the three episodes that followed to be a tension-filled exercise in escaping fate. Instead, to the shame of writer Glyn Jones and script editor Dennis Spooner, the whole thing turns into a runaround. One that, even by this early point in the show's history, already feels tired and old hat involving a rebellion that merely needs the Doctor and co to kick it into high gear. A serial that tries to use the opening episode as a thematic Sword of Damocles, but instead leaves the impression its opening episode came from another story altogether.

Worse, it's a runaround that feels almost like a parody. Jones' script feels like a parody of science fiction on the whole, with talk of ray guns and (for the 1960s) high technology and an older "oppressive" group of bureaucratic aliens facing off against a literal group of young rebels. Something which might have worked in a different context, as Douglas Adams would later prove, but which utterly failed to catch fire here. In part because everyone involved plays with the utmost seriousness, despite the absurdity of the lines. That is until it isn't, such as Ian trying to rip Barbara's cardigan with his teeth or a guard late in the serial trying to jump the travelers holding him at gunpoint, leading to a jarring change of tone even within single scenes. It's an example of how to take a good opening episode, with its promise of a science-fiction turn at the "You can't change history, not one line!" pronouncement of the previous season, and utterly let it down.

It's sometimes easy to call Classic Who stories a tale of two halves. In the case of The Space Museum, it's more one of a quarter followed by three lesser ones. Despite the dull, runaround nature of much of what follows in its wake, The Space Museum's opening installment remains a remarkable piece of work. If this story is worth seeing for any reason, it's for those twenty-minutes or so. And to mourn afterward for the serial that should have been.

9/10 for the opening episode, 3/10 for the remaining episodes.

Challenger (1990 TV Movie)

Could Have Been Better, Could Have Been Worse

[6/10 · 10 November 2020]

On a bright but cold Florida morning in late January 1986, millions of TV viewers and thousands of spectators watched what they thought would be the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Many of whom had tuned in due to the hype around New Hampshire teacher Christa McAuliffe being a part of the crew. It was to end in tragedy less than ninety seconds after launch, leaving behind a shocked nation. It was perhaps inevitable that filmmakers would see dramatic potential in the Challenger story, and 1990 saw the ABC network aired the first such effort.

In many ways, Challenger falls into the late eighties/early nineties TV movie category. Based on a real-life event, it wants to humanize those people who featured so prominently in headlines while also trying to tell a contained story dramatically. The difference here, perhaps, is that as well as telling the story of seven astronauts (or, if we're honest, Christa McAuliffe mainly), you also have the technical side of the Space Shuttle program to deal with involving engineers and NASA management. Challenger the TV movie would aim to present both, using one to give context to the other. So did it work?

Yes and no.

There are things the movie does well. Karen Allen's casting as Christa McAuliffe was an inspired choice, and having seen archive footage of the real McAuliffe, thanks to Netflix's documentary series, she captures her nicely. Without a doubt, of the seven Challenger crew members, she's the one who comes across the best with George Englund's script though the casting for all seven was good with Barry Bostwick in particular as Commander Dick Scobee. The cast is pretty solid all told, including Peter Boyle as Morton Thiokol engineer Roger Boisjoly and Lane Smith as NASA's Larry Mulloy, men who ended up on opposite ends of the decision to launch that day. There's a strong sense of location thanks to filming around Houston and surprisingly well-suited use of NASA archive footage to portray everything from T-38s in flight to the preparations for the Shuttle's launch. For something made on a TV movie budget, it doesn't look half-bad.

That's only the better side of the movie, though. Because Challenger, as a product of the made for TV docudrama genre, runs foul of many problems with it. Namely, it's melodramatic as it can be. For a story with as much dramatic potential as the Challenger one has, neither George Englund's script nor Glenn Jordan's direction seems to find much drama to present. Even the late-night decision to launch (made in what was a fraught teleconference) gets shown in the blandest of terms dramatically. The effort Englund and Jordan make to humanize the astronauts often comes across less like real-life and as corny to the point of laughable. And that's whether it's Scoby and wife dancing in their living room to the song Wind Beneath My Wings to Janelle Onizuka yelling at her astronaut husband for coming home late. The latter, in particular, doesn't seem realistic for Onizuka, and while allowing for a degree of dramatic license, could even come across as borderline insulting. All of those issues are a reminder of the truth in the old saying about finding universality in storytelling. That, while you can help anyone identify with anyone, universality also leads to cafeteria food. And Challenger, for all of its humanizing and dramatic intentions, ends up closer to cafeteria food than real-life.

In the end, perhaps that summarizes Challenger's biggest problem. It wants to be respectful to the memories of those seven astronauts while also laying out the course of went wrong to cause their lives to be lost. Yet, perhaps because of its making being in relatively close proximity to the events, it comes off somewhere between bland and disingenuous. All of which might explain the corny final scene with each member of the crew, in voiceover, reading out a line from a poem before the music swells, and the Shuttle heads into the clear blue sky.

Challenger then isn't a terrible movie, but neither is a great one. The events of that day are still crying out for a fine piece of dramatic filmmaking. What's clear, after seeing this, is that this wasn't to be it.

Challenger: The Final Flight (2020)

Tragedy Revisited & Lives Remembered

[8/10 · 8 November 2020]

Space flight is, by its very definition, a risky proposition. It is something that NASA has learned the hard way across its now six decades of missions. Few losses have been as high profile as what occurred on the morning of the 28th of January 1986 with the Space Shuttle Challenger. The story of what happened that bright but cold January day, the road that led to it, and what followed has been a rich seam for dramatists and documentary makers to mine for nearly thirty-five years now. Netflix's recent documentary series Challenger: The Final Flight revisits those events putting it into context and exploring it from a whole slew of perspectives.

Perhaps it's the passage of three decades, the context of the Challenger disaster has become gradually lost with time, at least to anyone who is not a space history nerd (which I will happily confess to being). What the opening half of the series' four episodes do is re-establish it. From the decision to build the Shuttle in the wake of the Apollo moon landings to the recruitment of a new class of astronauts, those bright early years of the Shuttle program are clearly on display. As is the fact that with it flying so regularly, there was a need to bolster public interest after early flights, leading to the decision to let qualified civilians and eventually a teacher travel as a crewmember. And that problems were brewing behind the scenes with the technology at the heart of this remarkable flying machine. All the while, events, and decisions are laying the seeds for tragedy.

The latter half of the series can fit the description of "before" and "after." The third episode builds up the tension before the launch, with the completion of training, the media attention on teacher Christa McAuliffe, and the delays and concerns that finally culminated in disaster. The final episode deals with the aftermath ranging from immediate reactions to investigations and the tragedy's effects upon many of those involved. In some ways, these are the dramatic highpoint of the series, highlighting the strengths of it.

And let there be no doubt that Challenger: The Final Flight is well-made. Directors Daniel Junge and Steven Leckart (and the series' developers Steven Leckart and Glen Zipper) draw on a wealth of material. A large portion is of archival film, from NASA promotional material to IMAX footage from The Dream Is Alive, to video footage and news coverage of the Shuttle program and Challenger in particular. A fair portion of that footage will likely be familiar to experienced space documentary viewers, but even so, is put together appealingly when combined with limited recreation of unfilmed events such as the meetings and conference calls made in the overnight hours leading to the launch. Combined with a score from Jeff Beal that mixes orchestra with eighties electronic influences and an evocative opening title sequence from designer Charles Christopher Rubino and composer Charles Scott, and you get a retelling fo Challenger that's engaging for newcomers and a refresher for those familiar with the events.

One thing that Challenger: The Final Flight does have, which is new, is in-depth and intimate interviews with many of the players. With all the attention on Christa McAuliffe (whose sister features here in interviews), it has been easy to forget six other human beings on the Shuttle that day. It's something the makers of this don't ever forget, featuring extensive appearances by June Scobee Rodgers (wife of mission commander 'Dick' Scobee) and the other family and friends of the crew, whose emotional recollections of the events of that form the heart of the series. There are perspectives from fellow astronauts, including Robert Crippen and Frederick Gregory, and the engineers such as Brian Russell and Allan J. McDonald, who put up a fight, alongside NASA Resource Analyst Richard Cook, to draw attention to the problem that ultimately led to disaster. Perhaps most surprisingly, the members of NASA management who all but decided to launch, namely William Lucas and Lawrence Mulloy, are here, too, and their reflections on events (or lack thereof) are fascinating to take in. Together, they all help paint a portrait.

A portrait that ultimately shows that the Shuttle was a magnificent flying machine, but one sold on promises it could never deliver. And in the process of trying to, an entirely avoidable timebomb began ticking. If it hadn't been that day, it would have been another mission with a different crew. That fate and decision making led to a nation tuned in on a day in January when, as the series vividly recreates with a mix of playing in real-time archive footage and Beal's score, the dream shattered in the skies above the Florida coast.

Space flight is a risky proposition, but one where stupid risks are unnecessary. If only we listen and pay attention to them. That, and remembering the human drama underpinning it all, might be the most important lessons the series imparts for the next generation of astronauts and those helping them soar into the heavens.

Cuba (1979)

Come The Revolution...

[7/10 · 5 November 2020]

There's something about Cuba, just ninety minutes south of Key West in Florida, and its revolution at the end of the 1950s that has fascinated filmmakers and artists. Perhaps because it marked the end of an era for American interests in the country or how it set the stage for some of the major Cold War confrontations of the decade that followed, including the failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs and the dramatic events of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Whatever the case, director Richard Lester would be one of those who brought their lens to bear exploring it with this 1979 film.

The film's focus, as much as it had one, would be on a former British army major turned mercenary, hired by the toppling Batista government to help deal with their guerilla insurgency. Who better to play Major Dapes than Sean Connery? Connery brings a sense of both presence and world-weariness to the part, a man who comes to do a job only to be surrounded by fools and a chance to rekindle an old flame. Wandering between exasperation, earnestness, and hope for love, it's arguably one of Connery's most underrated performances and one that deserves more attention.

Backing Connery was a large supporting cast, perhaps too large. Brooke Adams plays the old flame Alexandra that seemingly conflicted object of desire whose motives are as elusive to viewers as she is to Major Dapes. More understandable as a character, if far less sympathetic, is Chris Sarandon as her playboy and womanizing husband, blowing money and sleeping his way around. From there, the cast features character actors is ranging from Jack Weston's slimy American businessman to Martin Balsam as the corrupt blowhard of a Cuban general who hires Connery and Denholm Elliott as a fellow British ex-pat flying for anyone with money. There are some notable then up-and-comers in the cast from Hector Elizondo's as Connery's Cuban military escort to Roger Lloyd-Pack as a Cuban revolutionary. While the film is guilty of too much casting of white actors as Cubans, it's full of good actors in parts that too often aren't enough for them to use to the utmost of their talents and seem to wander in and out of the plot without reason.

Mentioning the way characters wander in and out of the film brings us to something that is both a strength and weakness of it. Under both Lester's direction and at the pen of screenwriter Charles Wood, this is a kaleidoscope of a film. One that takes us from the streets, hotels, and clubs of Havanna into the factories and plantations of the countryside. From the strip shows of Louisa Moritz's Miss Wonderly to a group of guerillas and the ex-pats taking advantage of it all, the various strata of Cuban society teetering on edge ready to fall are on display. Thanks to a mix of location filming in Spain, sets, and costumes, it's also vividly presented. Full of both borderline poverty and decay mixed with decadent excess and splendor, and ripe for a change that was perhaps inevitable.

The problem is that it also means the film never comes together. In an ideal world, or maybe with some slight editing, Cuba would flow together as a series of interconnected events, the tale of disparate people who wander in and out of each other's lives. Instead, and where the blame lies isn't clear, the film feels like the scripts for several different ones tossed together. Or like an anthology of short stories linked together without enough connective tissue. Combined with dialogue that can border the cliche at times and downright wooden in others, it knocks the whole work down a few rungs.

Cuba then remains an intriguing but flawed piece of work. So many of its elements, from Connery's performance to its location and kaleidoscope view, work so well. Yet it's scope is in some ways too wide, with no one and nothing well-defined enough to come entirely into focus. Nevertheless, as a portrait of a time and place, Lester's Cuba works far better than it does as a drama and remains watchable even with its flaws.

Without Warning (1994 TV Movie)

The End Isn't Nigh, It's Live

[7/10 · 21 October 2020]

In 1938, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the Air broadcast an adaptation of The War of the Worlds. That drama, told in the style of a news broadcast for its lengthy opening segment, has become legendary. Legendary, in part, for its creativity and partly for the panic it's said to have caused. Fifty-six years later, CBS would try a similar approach on television with Without Warning, a drama with the look and feel of a breaking newscast, complete with anchors in studio and reporters in the field, covering a cosmic event. The experience remains, after twenty-five years, an intriguing one.

Using the radio War of the Worlds as its starting point, right down to referencing the town where the Martians first landed (albeit moved halfway across the country), Without Warning is very much its own thing. Like the earlier broadcast (and indeed NBC's nuclear terrorism drama Special Bulletin from 1983), it imagines the extraordinary through the eyes of TV news. This TV movie wasn't to feature a Martian invasion, though, but the fall of something else from outer space, something very much back in the headlines following the headlines created by Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 plowing its way into Jupiter over the proceeding summer. The new threat would be asteroids, if with a bit of a twist.

Looking at Without Warning now, having seen it as a youngster on its first broadcast and via DVD a couple of times, it's hard not to be impressed by it. Creating a faux newscast is easy (see the number of films that have done so, including Independence Day released a couple of years later featuring numerous examples). Sustaining it across ninety minutes and a two-hour timeslot with commercials is a different task.

Thankfully, director Robert Iscove (working from a script by journalist turned screenwriter Peter Lance, from a story credited to him, Jeremy Thorn, and Walon Green) keeps up the pretense throughout. That's partly down to employing former news anchors such as Sander Vanocur and Bree Walker, who, despite spending careers behind newsdesks, make good actors, for the most part. There's a couple of moments of stiffness, but, as 9/11 would prove nearly a decade later, that might be closer to reality than one might think. Adding in real-life figures like Arthur C Clarke having interviews alongside plausible talking heads of government officials, SETI scientists, and an Ancient Aliens type, all add to the atmosphere.

Knowing viewers at the time and audiences watching years later know, of course, that none of it is real. The original broadcast had disclaimers on it both at the beginning and in commercial breaks, even citing the Welles War of the Worlds broadcast before featuring a town that was in it. Elsewhere are familiar faces in the cast, such as Jane Kaczmarek, playing the on-air science correspondent Dr. Caroline Jaffe, who would find fame a few years later as the mom in Malcolm in the Middle. Meanwhile, one of the on-site reporters in Wyoming is John de Lancie, who'd found a following as Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation (having appeared in its series finale just a few months earlier). Character actors, faces you'd know if not names, litter the cast, including the ever-dependable Phillip Baker Hall as a NASA scientist and Alan Scarfe as an Air Force General. Like the 1938 radio broadcast that inspired it, the movie also uses accelerated time, with an unlikely number of things happening in the space of two hours to be entirely realistic. That's the secret to its success, doing as Welles had more than a half-century earlier: getting the audience so involved with the drama that the question of time might not occur to them.

Not to say that Without Warning is perfect. The acting from its supporting players is incredibly variable, with the mother of a young girl found at one of the impact sites and the on-site reporter at the Lincoln Memorial in the film's closing minutes both overacting to the point of almost breaking the reality. In terms of being a drama, it also raises some plot threads that it never entirely resolves, including the missing population of a town and various sightings, all of which may, or may not, tie into the eventual plot. Not that real-life reporting isn't like that, but it's something that does hurt the drama of the piece. The movie also suffers from moments where it's lack of a bigger budget are all too apparent, such as Bree Walker's rescue of a young girl toward the start around a couple of small fire, and in some of the less than convincing greenscreen of actors in foreign locations. All of which takes some of the shine off the final product.

On the whole, though, despite some of its issues, Without Warning remains a compelling artifact. While it didn't cause the panic Welles did, though apparently there were some complaints to CBS affiliates across the US, it presented a compelling tale of the end of the world unfolding in front of viewers for Halloween 1994. A quarter of a century later, it remains a slick piece of work, an artifact of a different era. In the age of the internet and social media, it'd be near impossible to pull off the same trick again.

Or would it?

The Spirit of St. Louis (1957)

Capturing The Spirit Of An Age

[8/10 · 20 October 2020]

Real-life events have proven tempting for filmmakers across the history of the medium. One need only look at the number of films based on the sinking of the Titanic, for example, to see their appeal. Other events, one showcasing triumph over tragedy, have proven just as appealing, including Charles Lindbergh's landmark solo transatlantic flight in 1927. Thirty years after the event, Hollywood dramatized it with Billy Wilder's The Spirit of St. Louis, telling the story with one of Hollywood's biggest names in the role of the famous aviator.

That big name was none other than Jimmy Stewart. Let's hit one particular nail on the head straight off: Stewart was too old to be playing the 25-year old pilot, being almost double that age when filming took place, even with dyed blond hair and sometimes all too apparent make-up to make him look younger. That said and to Stewart's credit, despite his age, he captures the spirit of the young aviator all the same. The enthusiasm, the determination, the charm apparent in so many of his best roles are on display throughout the film as we follow Lindbergh's journey from mail pilot to his odyssey across the Atlantic. For what he lacked in youthful appearance, Stewart more than made up for in capturing the spirit of the man he was portraying.

The film is also boosted by how well made it is. The replicas of the famous plane and the effects of it in flight are triumphs of the pre-CGI age of visual effects. It's something that lends a sense of authenticity to proceedings sometimes lacking in modern aviation-based films such as Amelia (though it had script issues all its own, as well). Franz Waxman, one of the golden age's best composers, composed a score full of his trademark lyricism but also a sense of determination and tension, all on display at the right moment. All brought together under the direction of Billy Wilder.

And it's Wilder's approach that makes the film work as well as it does. Though the film might be considered slow in terms of modern pacing, The Spirit of St. Louis, in many ways, the template for films such as Ron Howard's Apollo 13 in dramatically telling real-life stories on the big screen. From following the career of Lindbergh, the building of the plane which allows us to meet the engineers involved, and then the tension of the flight itself. Wilder, as both director and co-screenwriter, wisely plays up events during the flight itself so that, even knowing the outcome, the viewer can get caught up in the moment, wondering just how the pilot is going to get out of the current situation. It's how Wilder plays up the tension and those little moments of triumph, all before a tension-filled climax on the brink of victory, that help make the film as watchable as it is today.

Though overlooked at the time of its original release, The Spirit of St. Louis has been receiving something of a reexamination in recent years. It's the template for films such as Apollo 13, dramatically portraying feats of flight on the silver screen and realized through fine casting and superb effects. It captures the spirit of an age, the promise and tension of the landmark flight, and the young man who flew it. Though perhaps slow by modern standards, for those seeking a sense of the event that no history book can provide, it's an immensely watchable and visceral experience.

The Wreck of the Mary Deare (1959)

2/3 Of A Fine Film

[7/10 · 7 September 2020]

For film buffs, The Wreck of the Mary Deare is the film that Alfred Hitchcock didn't make. It was the project, ultimately abandoned by the famed thriller director and screenwriter Ernest Lehman, that spawned the mich celebrated North By Northwest. Yet the cinematic adaptation of Hammond Innes' best-seller did get made, by a noted director and with two of cinema's most iconic leading men. So what are we to make of the film that did get made?

It certainly has all the makings of a fine film, and it's easy to see why MGM thought of Hitchcock to make it. Innes' novel had been a hit for reading audiences in its original medium, a nautical thriller involving a near-ghost ship, a would-be salvager, and the mystery at the heart of the ship's apparent abandonment mid-ocean. Throw in a legal thriller in the middle between sections at sea, revealing the characters on the stricken vessel in greater detail, and you had a compelling mix. Could it be translated to the screen, though?

Yes and no. The opening and closing thirds of the film, set around the titular freighter, are, without question, it's highpoints. The former dealing with the discovery of the ship by a would-be salvager (Charlton Heston) who not only finds the first officer turned captain (Gary Cooper) onboard but also gets into a race to save the ship, is arguably the film at its best. It's here that director Michael Anderson (not far off his Oscar nomination for Around the World in 80 Days) and screenwriter Eric Ambler (a thriller writer himself) creates a compelling tale of men at sea, struggling against the elements and each other. It promises great things for the rest of the film that follows.

Unfortunately, it isn't quite able to deliver on that promise. The middle third of the film, dealing with a court of inquiry, should solidify the tension and mystery of the piece. Instead, and it isn't clear where the blame lies for this, the entire film loses steam as it goes from nautical thriller to courtroom potboiler. Even with the presence of Cooper and Heston, not to mention the rising star of Richard Harris and character actors such as Alexander Knox, the film flounders under the weight of trying to keep the pace and tension up. The final third, which sees a return to the Mary Deare, thankfully picks things back up as the truth behind the disaster is revealed, with potentially fatal consequences. The result is watchable if unevenly paced.

Elsewhere, the film has plenty to recommend it for featuring. Both Cooper and Heston are in solid form, with Cooper's tired looks suiting his put-upon officer with a questionable past. Heston, as the young salvager thrust into the heart of the mystery, makes a part that feels more like a plot device at times believable. The supporting cast is solid, if not always remarkable, from Richard Harris as Cooper's younger officer and nemesis to Alexander Knox as a representative of the ship's owners and Virginia McKenna as the daughter of the Mary Deare's captain. Anderson, as director, brings together the better parts of the film with aplomb, including some fine model work representing the ship and a score from George Duning. While they can't overcome the problems with the middle of the film, when the film works, it works.

For all of its faults, and there were plenty, The Wreck of the Mary Deare remains a fine thriller. It is ultimately 2/3 of a fine film, sandwiched between a less than stellar middle third. Even so, between the cast and the production as a whole, the film stands up well enough. It just isn't the classic that it perhaps ought to have been, but if nautical thrillers are something you wish, you could a lot worse than give this a watch.

The Satan Bug (1965)

A Sixties Techno-Thriller

[7/10 · 26 July 2020]

For a time between the 1950s and 1970s, the golden age of British thrillers, according to writer Mike Ripley, there were few names bigger than Alistair MacLean. In 1962, originally under the name Ian Stuart and then under his own, MacLean had another success with the novel The Satan Bug. So it was perhaps unsurprising that, on the back of the success of the cinematic adaptation of The Guns of Navarone, that Satan Bug received the Hollywood treatment. Not only that, but with one of the premier action directors of the era at the helm: John Sturges.

Sturges, along with scriptwriters James Clavell and Edward Anhalt, crafted an intriguing thriller out of MacLean's novel. Satan Bug tells the story of government agents, including George Maharis's Lee Barrett, racing to stop the use of a bio-weapon (the titular Satan Bug) after its theft from a secret government lab. In going through the mechanics of the lab, and the efforts of Barrett and agents of a government agency known as SDI to keep its product from being used by a madman, Satan Bug is an early techno-thriller, coming nearly two decades before the term came into use. That said, in keeping with much of MacLean's work, such as the aforementioned Navarone and Where Eagles Dare (released three years later), the plot is convoluted with a tale of crosses, double-crosses, and hidden identities. To the point that there are places where it becomes just a tad ludicrous, especially when the eventual villain has their reveal. For the most part, the film remains engaging and, especially in its closing minutes, suspenseful.

It's also quite well made for the mid-1960s. Fans of mid-century design, architecture, and fashion will have a field day with the film from its depictions of everything from secret labs to homes and locations across California. Some of the background plate work hasn't dated well, which is sadly true of many films made before and after this time, though the film can boast some impressive aerial photography in its climax. The proverbial icing on the cake is the score, a still early one from the late, great Jerry Goldsmith, who shows even at this stage of his career how to build action in suspense to elevate what's happening on screen.

Where the film is perhaps most mixed is in its casting. George Maharis is just a little too bland for the role of agent Barrett, being not so much a character as someone going through the motions as scripted. More successful is Richard Basehart, then best known for his role on TV's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, as a scientist involved with the secret project and Dana Andrews as General Williams who is leading the effort to get the stolen bio-weapons back. Anne Francis does well as the film's sole female character, there more as a love interest that isn't necessary than a proper heroine though her presence is certainly a welcome addition to the film. There's an early film role for Ed Asner as one of the villain's henchmen and even a non-speaking supporting appearance by James Doohan who would fame shortly after the film's release as Scotty on Star Trek. Except for Maharis, the cast is dependable and works well, though it's not easy to point to any standout performances in the film. Indeed, the best way to describe the cast is serviceable if unremarkable.

All told, The Satan Bug is an intriguing, overlooked, but by no means classic thriller. It does have its definite pluses, including Sturges' direction and benefits from a solid score from Jerry Goldsmith. It also stands, alongside films such as the 1950 British thriller Seven Days to Noon, as among the first examples of the cinematic techno-thriller. And with conspiracy theories about killer viruses cooked up in labs being in our current culture, even our political discourse, it's also as timely as ever.

The Dogs of War (1980)

Irvin Goes From Tinker Tailor To Dogs Of War

[7/10 · 24 July 2020]

Basing a film on a bestselling novel can be a recipe for success. Or not, as the case might be. Novelist and former journalist Frederick Forsyth had a proven track record on both page and screen, such as The Day of the Jackal. So it's perhaps no surprise that his 1974 novel about a mercenary coup in Africa should get the cinematic treatment. The result was John Irvin's 1980 film The Dogs of War, a film that, on paper, had a lot going for it.

For one thing, it's source material and director. Forsyth's novel offered readers a crash course in the world of mercenaries and shady business dealings in Africa, yet did so in a way that was immensely entertaining with a cast of characters and plots to entice the reader. Director Irvin, meanwhile, was coming off the success of his BBC TV adaptation of John le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which took audiences on George Smiley's hunt for a mole inside of British intelligence. Have crafted an engaging labyrinthine thriller from le Carre onto the screen, Irvin was a perfect choice for bringing Forsyth's novel to the screen.

Yet, the film faltered to a sizable extent. Much of that isn't the fault of Irvin but the screenwriters, Gary DeVore and George Malko. To be fair to them, getting Forsyth onto the screen isn't easy, as the writer himself is said to have discovered when adapting his later novel The Fourth Protocol to the screen. The problem, writing as someone who finished reading the book not 24 hours before seeing the film version, is how little of it made it to the screen. The basic plot is more or less there, yes, but for much of its length, The Dogs of War film bares the slimmest resemblance to The Dogs of War novel. In itself, this isn't a bad thing, as the film is its own animal, and has to be simply due to the change in medium. What DeVore and Malko did was take an intriguing story and lose much of the motivations and details that made Forsyth's tale so rich and replace it with cardboard characters and a lack of detail. Indeed, without reading the novel, why the whole coup takes place, or the final twist, won't make a lick of sense. Instead of an engaging, driven narrative, the film is like watching a group of dancers perform without backing music, and it loses much of its effectiveness in the process.

The film, though, has plenty to offer viewers, whether they've read the novel or not. Irvin's direction captures, as it did in for le Carre's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a sense of grim reality to the events the film portrays, even when the script doesn't. Between Irving and cinematographer Jack Cardiff, they find in visuals an equivalent to Forsyth's prose, selling the reality of these places scattered across three continents. Irving also excels in the film's bookending well-staged action sequences, including an impressive shot just before the opening title card as a plane takes off as an airfield is under bombardment. Irving also tapped his Tinker Tailor composer Geoffrey Burgon for the score, who delivers a score that captures the tensions and even excitement of events portrayed. For all its faults on the scripting level, let there be no doubt that The Dogs of War is a well-made film.

It's a film that also has an interesting, if underutilized, cast. Christopher Walken would not have been my first choice as a reader for the role of lead mercenary Shannon, but, to his credit, the intelligence Walken brings to his best performances serves him well here. His fellow mercenaries are quite a cast of stock characters, including All-American man of action Drew played by Tom Barranger, and a small but early film role for Ed O'Neill. Hugh Millais brings a sense of menace to British businessman Roy Endean who hires Shannon while Colin Blakely brings an air of intrigue as the nosy journalist North. The cast is rounded off by JoBeth Williams as Shannon's ex-wife, Winston Ntshona in a role not unlike his part in the similarly themed film The Wild Geese, and appearances by character actors Robert Urquhart, Shane Rimmer, and Terrence Rigby (also a Tinker Tailor veteran) in small roles. And, with just a couple of lines, an early screen role for Jim Broadbent. Though no one's character, with the possible exception of Walken's Shannon, is well-developed, the cast does well all things considered.

Perhaps The Dogs of War could have been a first-rate film, a classic even. What it is, thanks mainly to its script, is a decent thriller, albeit one that feels like it's missing something. Even so, it remains an immensely watchable, if flawed, piece of work.

Star Cops (1987)

Law & Orbit

[8/10 · 22 July 2020]

The 1980s isn't a time looked upon fondly in terms of televised British science fiction. It was the decade that saw the end of Doctor Who's original run and saw Jonathan Powell and Michael Grade all but killing the genre on the BBC. Yet, in the midst of all that, Powell commissioned a new high-concept genre series, albeit one with the twist of also being in the detective genre. Star Cops was the result and, even 33 years on from its short-run, remains an intriguing piece of work.

The series was the brainchild of former Doctor Who and Blake's 7 writer Chris Boucher, who envisaged a series set in the near future when space opened into being a proper frontier. As a kid who grew up dreaming of space in the early 1990s, it was everything I could have dreamed of from space stations, space shuttles, and moon bases. Everything dreamt of in the 1980s when the Shuttle program was at its height that, for various reasons, never came to be. All of it realized here with reasonable accuracy and with some superb model work. While the occasional weightless scene looks dodgy, the realization of the world around the series holds up well as a vision of a future that never was.

One suspects, however, it was the detective aspect of the series that led to the series getting the commission from Powell. The near-future setting allowed for some neat twists on old crimes from industrial sabotage and espionage to the stealing of embryos and terrorists hijacking space shuttles. Threats and crimes tackled by the International Space Police Force, led by British police inspector turned Star Cops chief David Calder and surrounded by a cast of international, a move that feels quite forward-leaning today. It also allowed Boucher (and writers Philip Martin and John Collee) to tap into still simmering Cold War tensions, which allowed for the occasional espionage-related plotline to seep into proceedings. The result was an intriguing mix of genres across its run.

Sadly, the show didn't last beyond an initial run of nine episodes. Why? The biggest culprit seems to have been the same problems that plagued the BBC's Moonbase 3 the previous decade and NBC's SeaQuest DSV the following decade: trying to reasonably present the near future, but without the more extreme SF trappings of aliens. It wasn't genre enough for the SF audience and too out there for fans of detective fiction. The series was also not helped by how cheesy it could be in places (there's a hilariously awful bit of fake zero-g acting early in the second episode, for example, with David Cadler's Spring getting into a seat). Or, for that matter, the fact Boucher and his fellow writers took to liberal use stereotypes when it suited the plot. That's without mentioning an opening credits sequence that could rival Star Trek: Enterprise for the most inappropriate choice of music to image with Justin Hayward's It Won't Be Easy played over the iconography of spaceflight.

More than thirty years on, though, it's the ideas and the plots that still stand strong. Boucher (and writers Philip Martin and John Collee) crafted an intriguing world with a solid bunch of lead characters. In some respects, Star Cops was finding its feet just as it ended.

Then again, isn't that the story of SF at the BBC in the 1980s?

The Sum of All Fears (2002)

The Sum Of Unrealized Potential

[6/10 · 25 June 2020]

Starting in the 1980s, the novels of Tom Clancy proved to be massive bestsellers. In the 1990s, Hollywood made a trilogy of blockbuster films from three of them, seeing first Alex Baldwin and then Harrison Ford take on the role of dauntless CIA analyst turned occasional man of action Jack Ryan. Yet, after 1994's Clear and Present Danger, the film series stalled. After eight years, though, Ryan returned to the cinema in a new, younger form, with an adaptation of Clancy's The Sum of All Fears.

That new, younger Ryan was Ben Affleck. Following in the footsteps of Baldwin and Ford was a large order and one that Affleck, on the back of a string of successes, should have been able to fill. Instead, Affleck comes across as rather bland in this part, despite the good looks and intelligence he has. It's a performance that traverses between the extremes of being ineffectively wooden and cringeworthingly shouty. The scene in the White House Situation Room about midway through the film perfectly demonstrates the issues with Affleck's Ryan. Where Affleck is more successful in his interactions with Morgan Freeman's CIA director early on, or in his scenes with Bridget Moynahan as Cathy, where he can play either the fish out of water or charming boyfriend. So, while he might have been Clancy's favorite of the initial trio of Ryan actors, Affleck's Ryan comes across the weakest of the screen Ryans to date.

In some ways, it might be a case that Affleck had a cast around him that highlighted the problems with his performance. Freeman's CIA director Bill Cabot isn't a flashy role, by any means, but one which he imbues with a sense of presence and authority. James Cromwell's President Fowler offers the character actor a meaty role, one which explores the different facets of decision making both at times of peace and crisis, with Cromwell bringing presence and humanity to his performance. The film also proved the Hollywood breakthrough for Irish actor Ciarán Hinds, playing the Russian leader Nemerov in a role that could have been a walking cliche but, instead, Hinds brings a sense of humanity to as a man trying to avert crisis beyond his control. Bringing to life new versions of Clancy's characters are Bridget Moynahan as Ryan's girlfriend Cathy and Liev Schreiber as agent in the field John Clark, and it remains a shame that this would prove to be their only times in the roles. With the cast being rounded off by character actors including Michael Byrne, Philip Baker Hall, Alan Bates, and Bruce McGill, it's as strong a cast as any of the Ryan outings before it.

Beyond the cast, there's certainly plenty to recommend in terms of the actual production. Phil Alden Robinson proved an inspired choice for director, assembling a first-rate crew including cinematographer John Lindley. Between them, and the production design of Jeannine Oppewall, capture the behind the scenes, "you are there" feel of Clancy's novels and earlier films. The visual effects work on the film, some subtle in addition to more apparent sequences, come across well and have aged nicely, with the nuclear bomb detonation midway through being the film's set-piece. Finally, Jerry Goldsmith, in one of his last works, delivered a thoughtful and suspenseful score, one which highlighted growing tensions but also the hope potentially lost in the chaos. There's little doubt, then, that Sum of All Fears was well-made.

Perhaps the biggest problem the film has lies in its script and, consequently, in its pacing. Taking an 800+ page Clancy novel and turning it into something that runs two hours is not an enviable task, in the slightest. Even more so when one is both updating one published a decade earlier in a very different political climate and placing it far sooner in your lead character's timeline. The result is a functional adaptation of the novel, albeit one that feels like a Cliffnotes version of it, perhaps suggesting what it needed was a miniseries rather than a feature film. In doing so, the screenwriters left the film crammed to the gills with plot. In part, because the first half has to establish, in a somewhat convincing fashion, how tensions between the US and Russia in the post-Cold War era so quickly that they can lead to the brink of nuclear war in the second half. The result is a film that feels oddly slow in its first half in places, but with the back half having too much going on, racing from place to place. Something which left Clancy fans annoyed (and the author himself to obverse on the audio commentary that he was the author of "the book the director ignored."), and baffled many viewers unfamiliar with the book, ultimately serving neither audience well.

In the end, The Sum of All Fears proved not to be the sum of its parts. For as strong as aspects of it were, overcoming its lead actor or the issues in scripting and pacing. In a way, it's a shame that this proved to be a stillbirth for the revived franchise, which saw another reboot attempt before it moved to the small screen. Then again, given Affleck's lackluster Ryan, maybe we should be grateful that we're left with a film full of moments, but ultimately the sum of unrealized potential.

Batman Forever (1995)

Forever Reconsidered

[8/10 · 24 June 2020]

Conventional wisdom (if there is such a thing) has it that the Batman franchise of the 1990s suffered from diminishing returns. Primarily, that the opening two Tim Burton-directed installments were better than the entries directed by Joel Schumacher. While there is little doubt that Batman & Robin was the nadir of the franchise in this incarnation (if not in the Dark Knight's cinematic career), can the same be said for Batman Forever?

This reviewer thinks not.

With Burton's Returns having viewed as too dark and maybe a bit too odd for its own good, it's safe to say Forever was a course-correction picture by those making it. Watching the film, it's clear that was the case. There are still traces of Burton's influence in the themes and designs, but, from the opening minutes set to Elliot Goldenthal's rousing but Danny Elfman themeless score, it's clear that this will be a different kettle of fish altogether. It's abundantly clear as Schumacher takes the viewer from the Batcave into a brighter, flashier version of Gotham City than the grimy 1980s NYC inspired depiction Burton's films gave us, one that has a life, an ethos all its own.

Indeed, what was the case for Gotham is also the case for the film as a whole. From its action sequences and production design to the Goldenthal score, Forever often eschews the darker edge of Burton for something lighter, pacier, perhaps more playful in places. Yet, it doesn't lose sight of the gothic elements introduced in the earlier films, as the character exploration for Bruce Wayne/Batman, and the twisted duality found in those he faces off against can attest. Forever also goes a step further in exploring Bruce Wayne's headspace, of a hero tiring of being a masked vigilante and perhaps harboring guilt about the event that set him down this path. More than anything else, the film charts a path between the extremes of the two films time would see it sandwiched between in the form of the dark oddness of Returns and toyetic over the top cringe-inducement of Batman & Robin.

It's also clear from its Batman. With Burton gone, Michael Keaton left the role of Batman behind, with Val Kilmer stepping into the part. Whereas Keaton had a quirky quality alongside a brooding intelligence, Kilmer brings both intellect and a sense of vulnerability. The latter required for a film that's occupied with Bruce Wayne's headspace, as discussed above. While the film never quite explored in-depth (though further explored in deleted scenes on the DVD release), there's still a sense of wheels turning behind Kilmer's eyes that brings a new dimension to the part. Kilmer also looks good in the Batsuit, a prerequisite, and there's no denying his chemistry with Nicole Kidman's Doctor Chase Meridian either. Watching Kilmer as Batman is like watching George Lazenby playing James Bond: there's a lot of potential in the performance, but it's a shame there's not more of it in later films. For this film, though, one gets the sense of a Batman film actually interested in Batman, rather than using him as an excuse to feature villains one feels Burton might have been more interested in featuring.

In some ways, however, the villains are the weak point of the film. The biggest mistake Batman Forever (and Batman & Robin for that matter) makes is that both of its antagonists are over the top. Tommy Lee Jones's Two-Face not as much as Jim Carrey's Riddler, for obvious reasons, but there's a need for a more anchored threat to be there, the straight man, to use a comedic term. Instead, viewers get a duo who seem to be trying to upstage each other, leaving the film feeling out of balance. Jones, though, has some solid moments on his own early on, particularly his opening lines, before the role descends into theatricality. It's Carrey who steals the show, and how could he not with his antics on full display, even if they're not generally to the film's benefit.

Over the last two decades, it's become easy to lump Batman Forever in with Batman & Robin, writing off both films. While fair in the case of that film, it is not something Forever deserves. For it charted a path all its own, bringing a lighter sense to proceedings while also picking up the pace a bit. Yet, unlike the film that followed it, it didn't lose sight of the Gothic roots of the character, and the cinematic works that proceeded it. The result might not be up to the heights (dizzying for some) of Burton's 1989 film, but it's an immensely watchable piece of work.

And one can think of nothing better to say about the late Joel Schumacher's first, and best, Batman outing.

Doctor Who: The Web Planet (1965) Season 2, Episode 16

The Longest Web

[3/10 · 15 June 2020]

(Note: A review of the entire serial)

What is the quintessential First Doctor story? Is it the first Dalek tale? Or something like The Aztecs? Perhaps, it's The Web Planet, the story that marks the mid-way point of this opening era for the series. It is, after all, a serial that features so much of what makes this era what it is, for better and for worse.

Definitely for worse.

It's the ambition of producer Verity Lambert and director Richard Martin that's most on display. Here is Doctor Who as a series, barely a year old at this point, betting that it can bring to life not only an alien world a lot like the Moon but populate it. Fill it with beings who aren't just humanoid but make it full of creatures that include giant ants, grub creatures, anthropomorphized moths, and something akin to a Lovecraftian Elder God. All of which was a tall order, but one they attempted anyway.

It does all of that inside a story that, fundamentally, is a science-fiction version of the Second World War epic The Longest Day, released as a film in 1962 from the Cornelius Ryan non-fiction work published in 1959. As with the account of the Normandy invasion, The Web Planet features an invasion force dropping out of the sky, scouting parties sent to gather key intel, a literal underground force, and a pervasive enemy trying to discover both when and where the invasion is coming due. That its writer, Australian Bill Strutton, had served in the war and even been a prisoner of war suggests that this allegory was likely very intentional indeed. As with The Reign of Terror's French Resistance atmosphere before it, the idea that The Dalek Invasion of Earth was Classic Who as its most influenced by the events of the war twenty years earlier is very much a mistaken belief, as this story shows.

On the other hand, it's over-ambitious to a fault. It's hard to imagine Modern Who, with all of its resources, being able to bring this story to life convincingly, let alone a feature film of this era with the budget of, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey. With the budget of 1960s Doctor Who, it was practically a fool's errand. The Zarbi, those aforementioned giant ants, look like precisely what they are: actors wearing an ant over from the waist up. That's without forgetting the moment that one of them crashes into a camera, a sequence left in presumably due to the pressures of recording episodes "as live." Elsewhere, the grub-like Optera are just downright laughable with actors shouting and hopping around, as if in a sack race, despite shots revealing their legs are very much apart. Of the various aliens, its the moth-esque Menoptra who come across the best as pieces of design, but, even so, the attempt to make them alien with their hand gestures and speech patterns renders them laughable instead. As commendable as the effort to expand what the show could do was, it was something that created many of the cliches that would be invoked against it later on.

It doesn't help that, despite Strutton's interesting thematics, the script didn't match the ambitions of those making it. After stories such as The Reign of Terror and The Dalek Invasion of Earth, Strutton's script feels like it's aimed at children with some laughable technobabble, such as the Isop-Tope (isotope with an extra letter and hyphen thrown into it). Pacing is also an issue, something that the script is as much at fault for as the production is, with even individual episodes feeling short of incident at times, particularly in the early installments. Indeed, the script feels like one written by a writer with no real experience of science fiction as a genre, something that a look over Strutton's other credits suggests was very much the case. Perhaps it's no wonder he wouldn't write for the TV series again, with the 2013 Big Finish Lost Story adaptation of his outline for The Mega featuring the Third Doctor being the closest he would even come to writing for the series again.

In the end, The Web Planet is something of a failure. Yet, it's a noble one, speaking to the ambition, and over-ambition at that, of the people making it at the time. Rarely again would those making the show take quite a throw of the dice and stretch the capabilities of the series they were making, though perhaps that was due to seeing what had happened when they had done so here? It's just a shame they didn't put those efforts behind a script that one of this era's best director, and the talents of all involved, couldn't keep interesting.

For, as the Fifth Doctor would observe in another story famously let down by the production values, "There should have been another way."