Start Your Engines

There was a guy on Twitter assigning "Mad Max" names the week after Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, directed by George Miller) opened. I missed out on that, because I'm sure he got swamped almost immediately. Fury Road is an instant cult classic of a sort that hasn't been seen in many a long year, so it's inevitable that its devotees will want to commune with it. Like its predecessors back in the day Fury Road has some unusually splendid names. I doubt the Twitter guy was able to improve on them, even as people lined up to get one. I mean, how does one improve upon names like Rictus Erectus or Cheedo the Fragile or Corpus Colossus? To say nothing of Imperator Furiosa.

Mad Max: Fury Road is the kind of film where incoherent babbling is almost a reasonable response to what one has just seen. When I got out of the theater, I muttered, "Well, that's the goddamnedest thing." It's been a long while since I walked out after a movie ready to turn around and walk right back in to see it again. I almost wish that I had before sitting down to write about it, because it's a film of such baroque imagining that I'm sure that I missed countless offhand details. The first experience of the film is overwhelming. It's a film designed to overwhelm, but unlike many other films similarly conceived, this is a film that manages to accomplish this aim and then some. I suspect that, like its predecessors, it's a film that will generously repay repeat viewings.

...I Am Rather the Fallen Angel

Ex Machina (2015, directed by Alex Garland) has the great misfortune of following too soon after Her, a legitimately great film about artificial intelligence and the idea of The Singularity that dealt with its themes with grace, wit, humanity, and a sense of hope that humanity's children will take from us love and mercy and everything else that is best about us. Although it shares some basic ideas about the nature of artificial intelligence and name-checks The Singularity in the text of its dialogue, Ex Machina is not similarly hopeful. Ava, the artificial intelligence in Ex Machina, has a very real grievance with her creator, who fails to realize the moral and ethical implications of dismantling a thinking, self aware being in order to "improve" it.

Heinlein in Hollywood part 3: Closing the Loop

Robert A. Heinlein is typically considered one of the grand masters of the so-called "Golden Age of Science Fiction," that period just before World War II when the genre began to take itself seriously as literature. The Golden Age writers were typically hard nosed about realistic science within the boundaries of what was then known. Sometimes, their rigor resulted in startling predictive powers. Mostly, they resulted in complicated problems for the characters in the stories. In many ways, Heinlein was the architect of this movement. He was the most popular writer in John W. Campbell's Astounding, the primary outlet for the Golden Age writers, and his mixture of plain-spoken Americana and futurism was the template for science fiction for the next two decades. His characters may have worked in outer space, but they smoked Luckies and chased girls like everyone else. Toward the end of the 1950s the landscape of literary science fiction began to change. Social sciences began to form as much of the background of future societies as the physical sciences. Writers like Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, and Cyril Kornbluth began to explore the effects of the future on the psychology of its characters rather than having those characters just act in response to plot. By the late fifties, a new crop of writers was waiting to upset the apple cart. Science fiction's "New Wave" was less beholden to science and more interested in literary values like character, theme, and language. Older writers, brought up on the technocratic Golden Age, either adapted or found other work. Robert Heinlein turned out to be particularly adaptable. His major novels of the 1960s are a fusion of the old and the new. The technological future is still there, but the problems are dramatically different. Heinlein's fiction turned inward.

Predestination (2014, directed by the Spierig Brothers) is the first film since Destination: Moon to approach Robert Heinlein on his own terms. It's a very different species of movie, though. The story it's based on, "...All You Zombies," is as close to the science fiction New Wave as Heinlein ever came, and this film reflects that pedigree. It's not a film that will wow you with technology or with its vision of the future. It's a dingy movie that exists as much in the past as it does in the future. Its central motivating idea--time travel--wasn't even novel in 1959, when the story was written, let alone in 2015. There are time travel stories without number these days. Instead, this is a movie about extrapolation from that idea, intent on pulling it inside out and twisting it almost to the point of breaking. Where previous films based on Heinlein have been cartoons, based only on the plots of his books and not their underlying ideas, this film dives into the core of what makes Heinlein's fiction so memorable in the first place. Perhaps, this is because it's faithful to its source material almost to a fault. Or perhaps it's because its source material isn't the rockets and warfare and aliens stuff that has attracted other filmmakers to Heinlein over the years. Instead, this is a film that dives into the interior of its characters and speculates on matters of identity and existence.

Heinlein In Hollywood part 2

It was perhaps inevitable that Hollywood would come calling on the Robert A. Heinlein estate in the early 1990s. The previous decade had seen filmmakers becoming interested in literary science fiction thanks to the cult success of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (a version of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) and the blockbuster success of Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall (based on Dick's "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale"). Hollywood's infatuation with Philip K. Dick continues to this very day, unabated, with recent versions of Radio Free Albemuth and a pilot for a web series based on The Man in the High Castle premiering in 2014. By the early 1990s, Hollywood began to expand their field of interest to writers like William Gibson (Johnny Mnemonic) and Isaac Asimov (Nightfall, The Bicentennial Man, I Robot), writers with caché in pop culture. Heinlein must have seemed a fertile ground for development: his books had name-recognition well beyond the occasionally insular community of science fiction fandom. Heinlein was, after all, the first science fiction writer to place a book on the New York Times bestseller list. Name recognition is an important quality for an industry that likes to sell audiences products they already know everything about. It's ironic that The Puppet Masters (1994, directed by Stuart Orme) should be the film to kick off this interest, given that it's the novel at the heart of The Brain Eaters, the last "adaptation" of the 1950s.

Heinlein in Hollywood

I saw a story on the internet a few months back about the demolition of Ray Bradbury's house. It sold a while ago for $1.7 million and the new owners apparently want to put something else up on the property. This makes me sad, I suppose. I grew up reading Bradbury and watching the sci fi movies of the 1950s that bear his stamp. Bradbury was fortunate in his interpreters. Films like It Came from Outer Space and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms are touched with his humanism. Commenting on the demolition of his house, a friend of mine said, "...and there shall come soft rains."

I've been thinking about fifties sci fi lately. I recently caught Destination Moon.  I don't think I ever saw it when I was a kid, back when I was mainlining as much science fiction as I could lay my hands on. It's a film that reminds me that there's an alternate history of cinematic science fiction that never actually materialized in our world, one that's more influenced by Bradbury's great contemporary, Robert Heinlein, than by Bradbury himself. I'm reminded of this because there's a new movie based on one of Heinlein's stories out right now, and I'll get to that in a few days, but it's worth playing what-if with Heinlein. Heinlein is one of the founders of the modern genre, one who put people into the future along with the nuts and bolts of technology. In spite of this, he's a writer who always insisted on the technology being right. He was also one of the first science fiction writers to dabble in the "soft" sciences of psychology and sociology as fertile grounds for extrapolation. Much of the appeal of his work comes from his depictions of societies as much as it comes from the gee whiz technological trappings. Heinlein's powers of extrapolation were often uncanny. My favorite of his ideas that wound up coming true? There's subplot in Stranger in a Strange Land in which the fastest way to get in touch with the leader of the free world is through his wife's astrologer. That's on-point satire right there, which became a tad less funny when it came true during the Reagan administration. Heinlein is arguably the architect of every SF trope you can think of, including the ones more famously associated with Philip K. Dick (see, for instance, "The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag" or "They"). I read a lot of Heinlein as a teenager. I have a nearly complete set of his books, though I haven't touched them since a re-read of Citizen of the Galaxy a decade ago.

Hollywood has been interested in Heinlein for decades, but the movies have never really reconciled what's best in Heinlein with what's best for movie making. Part of this is the author's preoccupation with sex and with shuffling the conventions of social and sexual morality (this has long been the stumbling block with a film version of Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein's most famous novel). Part of this is the politics behind a good deal of his work. Part of it is the irascibility of the author himself. Even when the films have materialized--and there haven't been many of them--Heinlein often barely figured in them.

The Pull List, early 2015

In honor of the new Avengers movie (review soon), I thought I'd give you a run-down of what comics I read month to month. As you might expect from someone who writes and draws comics, I read a lot of comics. I was discussing this elsewhere this morning, so I thought I'd share my pull list. This does not constitute everything I read, just what I buy month to month.