By Jason Apuzzo. Because we’ve been following both of these films extensively here at Libertas, I wanted to mention that the ‘Aussie Red Dawn‘ picture Tomorrow When the War Began and Mao’s Last Dancer both took home prizes last week at Australia’s IF Awards.
From "Call of Duty: Black Ops."
Tomorrow won for Best Feature Film, while Mao won a special box office achievement prize – as that little indie production has currently made about $15 million worldwide thus far, which is fantastic. Read more about this at Hollywood Reporter.
And did you catch the early grosses on Call of Duty: Black Ops? $650 million, according to the LA Times … yowza.
Incidentally, Call of Duty is apparently set during the Cold War, and based around a special operative who saves the US from a communist plot (oddly enough, without Angelina Jolie’s assistance). The operative travels between Cuba, Vietnam and Russia – and there’s even apparently a segment of the game in which players can go on a mission to bag Castro! Hola! (The Cuban government is apparently pretty upset at this.)
I like the sound of this game. Of course, you just wonder whether it occurs to anyone in Hollywood that this extremely popular game might make for a viable movie adaptation. (Just doing a little thinking outside the box, here!)
We’re always hearing how ‘money rules’ in Hollywood, rather than politics. Here’s another nice occasion to prove it.
By Jason Apuzzo. Imagine this storyline: foreign invaders launch a spectacular strike on a major American city, killing thousands of people and destroying huge buildings in the process. The strike takes place in the early morning hours, when most citizens are still sleeping or just getting up for the day. At the same time, these invaders aren’t merely out to kill – but in a weird way they’re also here to ‘convert’ and/or steal the minds of their human prey, so humanity can be subsumed into their larger cause. And upon this ‘conversion,’ human beings begin to feel unnaturally powerful and aggressive – just before suicidally extinguishing themselves.
Oh, and the only human recourse to this horrific invasion is the massive intervention of the U.S. military, up to and perhaps including nuclear strikes.
Sound familiar?
No, this isn’t a movie about 9/11 – and yet it might as well be. Following in the footsteps of J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield and Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds (and to some extent Abrams’ Star Trek) – not to mention, of course, James Cameron’s Avatar – Skyline is the latest sci-fi film to use a 9/11-style event as a framing device for its story of alien-vs.-human conflict.
How good Skyline is, however, is another question entirely.
The easiest and most obvious thing to say about Skyline is that it’s a low-budget, indie riff on the increasingly familiar alien invasion theme, and that it exploits certain aspects of post-9/11 anxiety to full effect. Much like J.J. Abrams’ Cloverfield or Star Trek, Skyline puts a group of largely vacuous 20-somethings into a high-pressure, Pearl Harbor-style situation in which its young leads need to to grow up and mature – very quickly.
"OMG!" An LA blonde under attack from alien invaders.
At the same time, what Skyline makes perfectly apparent – and here, comparisons to Cloverfield and Gareth Edwards’ recent low-budget alien invasion thriller Monsters are apt – is that a burgeoning problem with the ‘alien invasion genre’ is the overall vacuity and narcissism of the young people depicted.
To put the matter simply, you may not care whether these young people survive at all.
***SPOILERS AHEAD***
But back to the story. If you’ve seen Independence Day, Cloverfield, or War of the Worlds (either version) – or, for that matter, Earth vs. The Flying Saucers – you know the drill here. Big ships with big bugs/fish inside them show up over a major American city – Los Angeles, in this case – and start laying waste to the place. Are the details of the invasion important in the case of Skyline? Not particularly – except that in Skyline, these malevolent alien creatures aren’t simply interested in conquest and destruction. The alien invaders in Skyline are actually creatures of light who use a kind of unearthly, blue penumbra to attract the attention of human beings, much like drawing moths to a flame. And once human beings stare into this light, the human mind is actually subsumed by the aliens – who apparently need the energy and vitality of human minds in order to keep going. [Why, in that case, they would travel to Los Angeles of all places to harvest brains is never explained.] The creatures then extract the brains from human bodies – through an unpleasant process similar to that from Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (or Roger Corman’s Attack of the Crab Monsters, for that matter) – chuck the human bodies, and go about their merry way.
Except that, in what is perhaps the film’s one interesting twist, we also learn that human minds can ultimately affect the outlook of the aliens, as well …
Like moths drawn to a flame.
So that’s the basic setup for Skyline. And even if the film has a kind of derivative, late-night TV feel to it – almost like an Asylum movie on CGI steroids – there are some things to recommend it. First of all, the second half of Skyline features some exceptional action sequences – particularly of the U.S. military vs. alien invader variety – that are really spectacular, and astonishing for having been accomplished on a budget under $10 million. Unlike in Independence Day, the huge aliens in Skyline – some of which look like the Balrog from Lord of the Rings – come down out of their ships and get down and dirty in the streets of LA. They climb buildings, fight helicopters, squash cars, and generally cause headaches of both a literal and figurative variety. Kudos to the Strause brothers – who both directed this film and handled its visual FX – for staging such gnarly and compelling action sequences with their modest resources.
Also, it’s great to see the intervention of the American military treated in such a positive and heroic light. Skyline goes in the exact opposite direction of Avatar and Monsters by depicting the U.S. military as almost (if not exclusively) our primary hope in this kind of crisis.
How gung-ho is Skyline? Downtown LA gets nuked by the U.S. Air Force as a preventative measure – and nobody utters a peep of complaint. Admittedly, it is LA we’re talking about here …
Channeling anxieties over catastrophic attacks.
In a recent exchange I had with the LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein, one of the things I pointed out was that the whole theme of alien invasion is one that tends to pull filmmakers in the direction of a more ‘conservative’ view of the world, films like Monsters or TV shows like The Event notwithstanding. Skyline is a perfect example of this. The film’s retro-, Cold War vibe is right out of the 1980s or 1950s – although the film makes a few clumsy efforts to make everything seem ‘relevant’ to today’s MTV generation (i.e., hip-hop music, and a cast that looks like it’s straight out of The Hills). With some exceptions, I expect most films in this new alien invasion genre to follow this overall Cold War pattern, updated (obviously) for the era of the War on Terror. Continue reading Fears of Another 9/11? LFM Reviews Skyline
By Jason Apuzzo. Opening this Friday in New York (and expanding across North America in coming weeks) is a superb new film called Disco & Atomic War – a film that both my Libertas colleague Joe Bendel and I agree is one of the most extraordinary documentaries of the year.
Disco & Atomic War deals with how Western popular entertainment ‘bootlegged’ into the Eastern Bloc or played on pirate TV stations – entertainments like Star Wars and Knight Rider and Dallas and the Emmanuelle films – played an enormous role in undermining the Soviet system. [You can read my LA Film Festival review of the film here.]
We’ve previously streamed Disco in its entirety here at Libertas, and overall I can’t recommend this film enough – among other reasons due to its obvious applicability to the current war on terror that we’re fighting, and how that might be won. The film also happens to be very drily amusing – almost a comedy in its own right.
[Here, incidentally, is a new interview with the film’s director, Jaak Kilmi.]
I’ve embedded a witty and unusual trailer from the film above. Enjoy!
By Jason Apuzzo. A really hilarious and courageous little comedy called The Infidel, starring the talented and irrepressible Omid Djalili, just got its DVD release on the new Tribeca Films label. We really loved this film here at Libertas (see our glowing review of it here), and we recommend that everyone pick up a copy today.
The Infidel tells the story of an unassuming Muslim guy in the UK who discovers, by happenstance, that he was actually born Jewish. This wouldn’t be such a problem, except for the fact that his daughter is about to marry the stepson of a radical, jihad-promoting imam from Pakistan.
And that, as they say, is when the hijinks begin.
I’ve embedded the scene above in which Omid finds out about his true heritage. It’s a gas. Enjoy!
Based on the reporting I’ve seen on this film, it appears that Ms. Johansson’s alien character eventually discovers that Earth men aren’t so bad after all. That’s a relief. Truth be told, I’m not a big fan of Ms. Johansson as an actress, although there are clearly other things worth admiring about her. In general I find her cold and dull on-screen – even if she wasn’t bad in Michael Bay’s underrated The Island – so we’ll see whether she can pull this off. Many people have already been commenting on the similarity of Under the Skin‘s plotline to that of the Species series; the storyline is similar, of course, but the concept of the ‘sexually voracious female from outer space’ has actually been around since the 1950s (1954’s Devil Girl from Mars comes to mind, for example).
We’ll definitely keep an eye on this one – both eyes, actually. No word on whether it will be done in 3D. Here’s hoping it is.
• Our first Invasion Alert! merited a response from the LA Times’ Patrick Goldstein, and we want to thank Patrick for his engagement with our ideas here. In response to Patrick’s thoughtful comments, I wanted to say a few things, briefly: first of all, when I said in my last Invasion Alert! that the new wave of ‘political’ sci-fi films are channeling anxieties about (among other things) the somewhat radical turn in American politics of late, I meant that these anxieties are obviously being felt on both the Left and the Right.
It’s quite evident that filmmakers on the Left like James Cameron, for example, are using their films to address what they perceive to be new strains of corporatist/anti-environmental extremism on the Right, as well as what they consider to be American ‘imperial’ overreach around the world. Those were clearly messages from Avatar.
"Look, aliens!" Rosie Huntington in "Transformers 3."
Or there’s Gareth Edwards’ Monsters, which is obviously a response to what Edwards considers to be right-wing American ‘extremism’ on the immigration issue; or there’s NBC’s The Event, which is using an alien invasion scenario to backhandedly comment on ostensive human rights abuses by the CIA during the Bush years. So sci-fi is being used as an open platform for many different people to comment on many different things right now, and frequently from a liberal perspective. (And undoubtedly many – if not most – sci-fi films coming down the pike will betray no political perspective at all.)
At the same time, it seems highly likely to me that this new alien invasion genre – which actually encompasses about 40 projects right now (either films or TV shows on the books) – will follow thematic patterns similar to the 1950s and 1980s that will pull the material toward a more ‘conservative’/Cold War view of the world. Because let’s face it, none of these proposed alien invasion projects involve friendly alien invasions of America’s Heartland, if you know what I mean.
And although most of these projects will probably be riffing off the War on Terror (Battle: Los Angeles and Dreamworks’ proposed Halo adaptation come to mind here), it’s interesting to note that the plotines for several of the more recently announced alien invasion projects even seem to have a retro-Cold War feel to them – I’m thinking of Sam Raimi’s Earth Defense Force (which actually begins with America fighting the communist Chinese), or Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov’s The Darkest Hour and Apollo 18, or even Michael Bay’s Transformers 3, which apparently features a retro-style, U.S.-vs.-Russia spacerace storyline.
So we’ll see how all this develops. Whatever else, it should be fun to watch. Thanks to Patrick for keeping an eye on us, here.
"Shoot me some more inane dialogue there, sport!"
• We have to talk Tron, of course. The film has a new and final trailer out, which looks spectacular (as always) … and also completely shallow. So that’s now what I’m expecting from this film, along with a light dusting of liberal nonsense about Jeff Bridges’ former company becoming a defense contractor. [Gasp!] In any case, Disney is really going to the mat on this one, releasing one new, boffo poster after another (see here) and even opening Tron stores. They’d better hope the film doesn’t lay an egg. Plus, Olivia Wilde just posed for Vanity Fair. She’s certainly cute; it’s too bad she’s so annoying.
• One of the big announcements of the past week on the Alien Invasion Front was the pickup of Russian filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov’s Apollo 18 project. Bekmambetov is already shooting (in 3D) right now The Darkest Hour, another alien invasion thriller, set in Moscow. Apollo 18 will be riffing off the real-world history of the space race, apparently; here is how the project is described:
With the recent discovery of Russian film footage that suggests that America’s Apollo 18 space mission actually did occur, despite being canceled by President Nixon in the early 1970s, The Weinstein Company (TWC) announced today that it has acquired the rights to a provocative new film project, titled Apollo 18. To be directed by Trevor Cawood from a screenplay by Brian Miller, the documentary-style sci-fi thriller will be produced by Russian filmmaker Timur Behmambetov …
A quintessential Cold War story, Apollo 18 casts light on the covert and undocumented lunar mission that officially “never happened.” Bekmambetov, hired by Russia to shoot a documentary about the Russian space station, recently came across footage in its space archives that bolsters the idea that an Apollo 18 mission did, in fact, take place, and reveals startling evidence of extraterrestrial life forms. This actual footage will be part of Apollo 18, a paranormal thriller that will interpolate fact and fiction.
• If you have any doubts about whether sci-fi is going political right now, check out this poster for the new Brit sci-fi adaptation of Henry V, starring Michael Caine and Ray Winstone. In case you can’t see it, the poster’s tagline reads: “How will they justify why they went to war?” Hmmm …
• The whole blonde Scarlett Johansson alien thing reminds me, by the way, that the old Roger Corman-Traci Lords alien invasion cult classic Not of This Earth (1988) just go released on DVD this week. This cheeky, fun little flick – featuring Traci Lords fighting off an alien invader while in a nurse’s outfit (when she’s clothed, that is) – is definitely worth checking out, although it’s not as good as Corman’s original. Also just out on DVD this week is Season 1 of ABC’s reboot of V. Season Two of that series debuts in January. On a somewhat lamer note, here are the full, excruciating details on the huge forthcoming Avatar Blu-ray set, as enumerated by James Cameron himself. [Sigh.] The money in my wallet for that Blu-ray might be called ‘unobtanium.’
• Here are some more new set photos of Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in Transformers 3. Hooray!
• Paramount apparently needs to get rolling on its long-in-development adaptation of Dune, or else Frank Herbert’s family will be pulling the rights from that studio. I’ve always thought Dune deserved much better than what it got years ago from David Lynch; with that said, part of the problem here is that George Lucas has been successfully using Star Wars to riff off Dune for years, so there’s some question as to whether it’s worth going back to that well. We’ll see. It’s worth noting here that Paramount recently wanted director Peter Berg to do the Dune adaptation, until he decamped to Universal to direct the $200 million alien invasion thriller, Battleship …
• … and a lot of insider dirt is being dished right now about Universal’s $200 million alien invasion thriller Battleship, starring Rihanna, Brooklyn Decker and Liam Neeson. (Clips of the film just got shown yesterday in Rhode Island for the first time.) Apparently Ron Meyer’s head may be rolling because the film was hastily greenlit at a steep price and with a bizarre, trendy premise (i.e., aliens landing on Earth and getting themselves into a naval battle). Stranger still, it seems that Hasbro has been calling a lot of the shots at Universal lately – no doubt due to the success of their other alien invasion franchise, Transformers.
A novel idea that Universal might want to consider – in part because of the money it would savie them – is developing their own, original ideas in-house. Just a thought.
• All eyes are on the Skyline, so to speak, set to open Friday. The LA Times just did an interesting feature on the film’s low-budget origins (see here), ShockTillYouDrop is running one of its interesting set-visits from the film (see here), and you can catch cast interviews (here) and new clips from the film (see here, here and here), as well. JoBlo’s site is also running a feature on the film’s young new hottie, Crystal Reed.
So will the film be any good? Or will it have an ideological subtext worth mentioning? I have no idea. I’m actually trying to avoid the film’s media onslaught right now, because I’d like to be at least somewhat surprised by what I see in the theater. So far it’s looking like the film will be on the vapid side; or at least, they’re not letting anything loose in the media indicating that the film is treading on any new ground. The question is whether this film will have negative repercussions for the alien invasion genre generally, if it fails. In the short term I think the answer is ‘yes’; but in the long term? Not a chance.
• If anybody is still interested in Gareth Edwards’ Monsters, Aint It Cool News interviews him here. He’s not done with sci-fi, apparently. Too bad.
• On the TV front, Steven Spielberg’s big-budget sci-fi series Terra Nova is having cost-overrun problems. [Side note: Harrison Ford says there’s no new update on Spielberg’s Indy 5 yet, as George Lucas and his team are still apparently working on the script.] Also, did you known that NBC’s alien invasion show The Event is more or less turning out as I predicted (see here and here)? A lot of snarky people swamped Libertas months ago and told me how crazy I was when I predicted what direction that show was going in. I notice they’re not coming back to gloat. It’s actually easy to predict this stuff; all you need to know are: 1) liberals, and; 2) how sci-fi works.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … the unnervingly hot Brooklyn Decker, star of the forthcoming, $200 million alien invasion thriller Battleship, also has a new trailer out for Just Go With It, in which she stars with Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. If this movie heads where I think it’s heading, with Sandler dropping Decker for Aniston … I’m going to wretch. Who actually likes Jennifer Aniston these days?
And that’s what’s happening today on the Alien Invasion Front!
By Jason Apuzzo. This is actually a rather weird piece from THR. It’s purpose is to show that Republican audiences are crucial to success in getting good TV ratings. That’s fine – and heartening, in a way – but I think the article’s author, James Hibberd, makes the argument (which isn’t exactly a major revelation in the era of Fox News or 24) in a strange and somewhat incomprehensible way. His argument breaks down to this: Republicans have a tendency to watch most of the same stuff everybody else is watching already – while avoiding smaller, quirkier shows that survive off more liberal audiences. That’s not too surprising, frankly.
Basically, when you look at the numbers what it comes down to is this: Democrats watch more TV, but only when Republicans jump on board does a show become a hit. Is that encouraging? I suppose so – if you’re content with today’s ‘hit’ TV series, most of which come across to me as lame, at best. If the idea here is that Hollywood may now ‘sit up and start to take notice’ of its newfound Republican audiences, please wake me when that happens. I’ll believe it when I see it.
I think Hibberd is over-thinking/analyzing this stuff, in essence. In any case, here are the shows below, with the numbers breakdown. Feel free to comment on all this, including your own show preferences.
It’s a pity so many Republicans watch a show called Lie to Me. At the same time, it’s funny that so many Democrats in the Obama era would watch Breaking Bad.
I guess this means I’m the only guy watching Hellcats.
[UPDATE: This post has been substantially revised.]
