Soylent Green

Year 2, Day 127 - 5/7/10 - Movie #492

BEFORE: Another futuristic film made in the past - this one was made in 1973, and set in the year 2022, when the population of New York City will hit 40 million (!) I passed on this one during last year's post-apocalyptic films, because I figured I'd be doing a Charlton Heston grouping. But then I watched "Earthquake", "Airport '75" and "The Omega Man" separately, and this film was left hanging...

THE PLOT: In an overpopulated futuristic Earth, a New York police detective finds himself marked for murder by government agents when he gets too close to a bizarre state secret involving the origins of a revolutionary new foodstuff.

AFTER: You can definitely tell that a futuristic movie reflects the worldview of the year in which it was made - here the filmmakers predicted the greenhouse effect, a global food shortage, and an impossibly over-crowded NYC. OK, I'll give them 2 out of 3, since global warming is a hot topic these days, and news reports are predicting that man will over-fish the oceans, eating whatever sea life isn't contaminated by oil spills.

In essence, NYC is portrayed here as a hot, crowded disaster zone (who says it isn't that now?) where water and synthetic food are rationed out - thankfully, Soylent Corp. makes three delicious flavors (colors?) called Soylent Red, Soylent Yellow and Soylent Green (Tuesday is Green Day - is that where the band got their name?) As you can tell by the name, Soylent Green is a delicious mix of soy, and plankton. Yeah, that's right, "plankton"...there's still plenty of delicious plankton in the oceans, right?

While basic supplies seems to be running out, there's still plenty of graft and corruption - police are allowed to confiscate "evidence" like food items and furniture while investigating crimes. Charlton Heston plays Thorn, a cop on a murder case, and the victim is an executive at the company that invented the synthetic food - so Thorn follows a trail of corruption (other than his own...) that leads him to learn about the secret ingredient. Of course, the secret ingredient is the theme on which our chefs will offer their succulent variations...

The movie did sort of predict the "right to die" movement that was championed by Dr. Jack Kevorkian earlier this decade - the elderly in this bleak future are encouraged to choose the time of their own deaths, and visit a clean, air-conditioned dying center where they're shown a wide-screen film of nature scenes, with beautiful music, so their last moments will be peaceful ones. Or perhaps the movie is so bad, they just lose the will to live - a feeling I know all too well, after last night's film.

Quibble #1 - the scientists in the future can invent a synthetic food, but they can't seem to make an effective birth control? After years of over-population, wouldn't the government institute some kind of limit on children, like the notorious policy in China?

Quibble #2 - in an overpopulated world where resources are scarce, wouldn't people start dying off in larger numbers, or lack the nutrition to have so many healthy kids? In essence, wouldn't the overpopulation problem start to take care of itself?

Quibble #3 - with all the people who work at the Soylent Green factory, wouldn't rumors ever leak out about how it's made?

Also starring Chuck Connors, Brock Peters, Joseph Cotten and Edward G. Robinson (Heston's co-star in "The Ten Commandments" - nice!)

RATING: 4 out of 10 dump trucks (maybe it's a 6 if you don't know the ending in advance)

The Fifth Element

Year 2, Day 126 - 5/6/10 - Movie #491

BEFORE: Getting near the end of my future-based films. I don't think this one is post-apocalyptic, but I heard it's pretty weird.

THE PLOT: In the colorful future, a cab driver unwittingly becomes the central figure in the search for a legendary cosmic weapon to keep Evil and Mr Zorg at bay.

AFTER: Wow, I totally didn't understand this one - it's much too weird, and I was never sure exactly what was going on. Was that because it was directed by a Frenchman, Luc Besson? The French aren't exactly known for making great sci-fi films...

As near as I can tell, there's this evil that's heading toward Earth, in the form of a giant fireball. It can only be defeated by the Fifth Element, whatever that is. (the movie never really gets around to explaining what it is...what's neither fire, air, water, and earth?)

The helpful aliens who "borrowed" the Fifth Element from Earth's pyramids are shot down by evil aliens while trying to return it - so humans dig up something from the wreckage of their ship that they turn into a "perfect being", a scantily-clad chick named LeeLoo who talks in a strange language.

She hooks up with a cab driver/former soldier named Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) and he brings her to a priest, Vito Cornelius, who understands her language - he's not a regular priest, he's a priest whose religion centers around the aliens, the Fifth Element, and these stones from the pyramid that everyone is looking for, especially an evil businessman named Zorg (Gary Oldman). Then things get weird (er).

They all go to this giant space-yacht that orbits a planet of pleasure, where they're supposed to get the stones that will save the Earth (I think...) and while Korben's watching a space opera, Zorg and the evil aliens crash the party to get the stones.

The future here is strange, very colorful, and sexually ambiguous (I think). But it's good to know that in the future cabbies still drive like maniacs, DJs are still incredibly annoying, and love conquers all (I think...)

But if the stones are so important in saving Earth, why take them away from the pyramids in the first place? How about explaining something, anything, I'm not that picky - what was the fifth element? How was she a perfect being? Can a cab driver and a perfect alien being live together, without driving each other crazy?

Also starring Ian Holm, Milla Jojovich, Chris Tucker, Luke Perry, and Tommy "Tiny" Lister (as the President!)

RATING: 2 out of 10 plane tickets

The Postman

Year 2, Day 125 - 5/6/10 - Movie #490

BEFORE: Tonight's film looks to be a test of my endurance - it's 3 hours long! Other than "Ben-Hur" and "Titanic", should any film be 3 hours long? I'll probably have to watch 1/2 of it tonight and the other 1/2 tomorrow, since I was out for dinner earlier, at a beer dinner for Cinco de Mayo.

THE PLOT: What begins as a con game becomes one man's quest to rebuild civilization by resuming postal service.

AFTER: Made in 1997, and set in the far-off future of 2013, this film hints at some kind of breakdown in U.S. society, without getting too specific about what happened, possibly nuclear war, possibly environmental disaster and/or complete governmental bankruptcy?

The political vacuum seems to be filled by private militias, run by madmen, who shanghai their recruits, and pillage from towns as needed. Kevin Costner's unnamed character, a roving Shakespearean actor (with a mule and no talent), gets roped into the "Holeness", named after a shadowy figure (an author? a patriot? a motivational speaker?) named Nathan Hole. It's the kind of organization that people don't ever leave, because at some point they'll break one of the Commander's obscure rules and be put to death.

But our nameless hero finds a way out, and stumbles upon an old mail vehicle with a dead mailman, and a few bags of pre-disaster undelivered mail. With no other direction, he takes the mail and the uniform and delivers mail to an Oregon town, in exchange for food and a hot bath. He ends up fabricating news of the "restored government" in order to boost their spirits, and before long, news of the Postman and his tidings spreads across the state.

The Postman spins a yarn about the new President, one "Richard Starkey", and the new capital in Minneapolis, MN...and people are so in need of hope that the stories take on a life of their own, and the postal service is formed even when the Postman is out of commission. However, I debate whether a shadow government, formed on a fiction, is better than no government at all.

I have to take issue with the forced sentimentality of it all. The movie spends about half of its prodigious length breaking us down, so that it can get all weepy about what it means to believe in something, in hopes of building us back up. It all seems like a long way to go...

And I got very hopeful when I saw Tom Petty's name in the opening credits. He plays someone who "used to be famous" - possibly a rock star? And he really is criminally underused as an actor - I wish he could have had a bigger role.

I have to admit that I didn't see the ending coming - something like "Braveheart" crossed with "Dances With Wolves" with a "Princess Bride"-style showdown...pretty clever, actually. Anyone that lives by the sword can die by the sword, and those that make "rules" are beholden to them as well.

Also starring Larenz Tate (another cast member from the great ensemble seen on "Rescue Me"), Will Patton as the deranged General Bethlehem, Olivia Williams, Giovanni Ribisi, Peggy Lipton, Rex Linn (most famous as Det. Frank Tripp on "CSI: Miami") and Daniel Von Bargen (another of those character actors, he played Kruger, George Costanza's boss at Kruger Industrial Smoothing on "Seinfeld" and Commandant Spangler on "Malcolm in the Middle")

RATING: 6 out of 10 bowls of mule gruel (Yum!)

Escape From L.A.

Year 2, Day 124 - 5/4/10 - Movie #489

BEFORE: Oh, that wacky Snake Plissken...always escaping from somewhere...
At least this film is set in 2013, so it hasn't "not happened" yet.

THE PLOT: Snake Plissken is once again called in by the United States government to recover a potential doomsday device from Los Angeles, now an autonomous island where undesirables are deported.

AFTER: OK, some vast improvements in special effects since the first film, but that's to be expected. Special effects are probably needed to make it look like Kurt Russell can shoot hoops without getting winded...

The massive earthquake in the year 2000 (!) separated downtown L.A. from the mainland, and it's been turned into the dumping ground for criminals and illegal aliens after they get deported. But it's also where the President's daughter escapes to, with the country's secret weapon - where she meets her boyfriend, a Che Guevara-style revolutionary named Cuervo. (what's his last name, Gold?)

Snake is sent in to retrieve the device - and he's injected with a deadly substance that will kill him in just 10 hours if he doesn't succeed. Again, it's mostly good campy popcorn action/fun - but with Steve Buscemi and Pam Grier as his allies on the inside, this feels more like a lost Tarantino film than anything else.

If they ever make another sequel, the next logical step would be "Escape From Chicago" - but the characters keep making reference to "that time in Cleveland" - so there's an untold Snake Plissken tale waiting in the wings...

Also starring Stacy Keach, Cliff Robertson (as the President), Peter Fonda (as a surfing hippie burn-out, that's a stretch...), Valeria Golino, Bruce Campbell, Michelle Forbes, and my buddy Peter Jason. Oh, and there's Leland Orser again, who was also in "Alien: Resurrection"!

RATING: 6 out of 10 missile launchers

Escape From New York

Year 2, Day 123 - 5/3/10 - Movie #488

BEFORE: I saw bits of this film when I was a kid, but I don't think I've ever watched the whole thing straight through. The film was made in 1981, and was set in the far-off future of 1997, by which time Manhattan had become a prison, separated from the rest of the country by a giant wall, with its own rules, a near-lawless society. Oh, if only they knew how accurate their prediction would be...

THE PLOT: In 1997, when the US President crashes into Manhattan, now a giant maximum security prison, a convicted bank robber is sent in for a rescue.

AFTER: Unfortunately this is another film that doesn't really hold up years later - it was made very cheaply, and it looks like it, and special effects have become so great since then, that the future looks very outdated. Hmmm, what tense do I use to describe events that were in the future at the time, but now have come and gone, and not taken place? Past future subjunctive?

Air Force One crashes (willan on-crash) down in New York City, and the convicts take (willan on-take) him hostage. Snake Plisken (Kurt Russell) is given (wioll given be) a chance to clear his name by entering (have enteront) the prison, finding (willing founden) the President, and then getting (mayan on-gotten) him out. Screw it, this is too hard...

Snake lands his glider on top of the World Trade Center (you could still do that in 1997...) and then checks out the devastated downtown area - yep, still too soon. These images still hit too close to the mark for New Yorkers, I think. Snake has under 24 hours to infiltrate this city-sized prison society, figure out who's in charge, who has the President, and how to get him out. You should have just fought in the Thunderdome, Snake - it would have been much easier...

Fortunately Snake has a reputation, and some old friends in the NY lock-up, like Brain (Harry Dean Stanton) and Cabbie (Ernest Borgnine). Together with Maggie (Adrienne Barbeau, in her most famous role) they go up against the Duke (Isaac Hayes) to try and rescue the president (Donald Pleasance).

It's funny, people in the "future" still use cassette tapes instead of CDs, and walkie-talkies instead of cell phones...though I guess within the prison environment, you use whatever technology you have.

And they manage to drive from the World Trade Center to the 59th Street Bridge in under 20 minutes - see what you can do when there's no other traffic on the streets?

Not a bad little film, perhaps a bit over-the-top and campy.

RATING: 5 out of 10 molotov cocktails

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

Year 2, Day 122 - 5/2/10 - Movie #487

BEFORE: I suppose after watching "Terminator Salvation" it would make the most sense for me to watch "Avatar" - futuristic setting, starring Sam Worthington, and Sigourney Weaver (tying in with the "Aliens" movies as a bonus). Problem is, I don't have a copy. I could have run out today and bought one, but that sort of runs counter to the spirit of this project, which is to watch the films already in my collection, particularly the classics which have gone unwatched. So I will watch "Avatar"...but in the future!

So, I'll finish off another franchise that I fell out of touch with. Yes, it's time once again for post-apocalyptic films. I covered this topic last year, by watching films like "Children of Men", "A Boy and His Dog", and "Waterworld". So these will be similar films that I've acquired since then.

As the Jim Steinman song goes, "The Future Ain't What It Used To Be". Back in the 1950's and 60's, people's impression of the future was that it would include flying cars, manned spaceflight to other planets, and cures for all diseases. What happened? Now our vision of the future is all about global warming, melting icecaps, and plagues like swine flu and monkey pox...unless our alien or robot overlords find some solution to those problems.

THE PLOT: Mad Max becomes a pawn in a decadent oasis of technological society, and when exiled, becomes the deliverer of a colony of children.

AFTER: This movie started out with such promise - our hero enters a backwater town in the middle of the dystopian post-apocalypse desert, and gets tricked into fighting in the Thunderdome, which is like a WWE steel cage match, but with weapons, and the combatants are in these cool bunjee harnesses so they can jump around the dome. This match was like the highlight of the film, but it was much too short.

Max breaks the rules of the fight, so his punishment is to spin the wheel of (mis-)fortune. I thought for a second that the punishment might be another Thunderdome match, but no such luck - it's exile to the desert.

Max finds a colony of children lost in the desert who have been awaiting rescue - and come on, he's the film's hero...what do you THINK he's going to do - walk away? This leads to another of those great chase scenes through the desert with those cool patchwork Franken-vehicles that explode whenever they hit something. It's thrilling, but much too similar to the desert chases that rocked "Mad Max" and "Road Warrior". Still, I suppose a "Mad Max" film without a desert chase would be like a "Star Wars" film without a lightsaber battle.

Speaking of "Star Wars", I realized that the actor who played Jedediah, the pilot (and the only actor besides Mel Gibson who carried over from "Road Warrior") had a small role in "Star Wars: Episode VI" - Bruce Spence played Tion Medon, who was the character talking to Obi-Wan on the planet Utapau (sinkhole planet) and alerted him to General Grievous' presence on the planet. And I've got his autograph on my wall - cool!

And just like the "Terminator" franchise (and every franchise these days) there's supposedly another sequel in the works, called "Fury Road". But Mel Gibson's not attached at the moment - without him, how good could it be?

RATING: 6 out of 10 canteens

Terminator Salvation

Year 2, Day 121 - 5/1/10 - Movie #486

BEFORE: I know that I said I would start my superhero/comic-book movies today, but I realized that my wife wants to watch a few of them with me, like "Iron Man" and "Incredible Hulk", and she doesn't have much time right now, what with "Glee", "Lost", "American Idol" and "Survivor" still airing new episodes. But, I figure that by this time next month, all of those shows will have aired their season finales, and she'll have a bit more time for some movies. So, I'm delaying those films until June - I still need to watch them before July, or else I can't show my face at San Diego Comic-Con.

What to watch in the meantime? Surely I can pick another 30 movies from my remaining list of nearly 400 films. See, that's the easy part - I really can't make a "wrong" pick! Sure, I like organizing them according to themes, but I don't have to! I'm completely free! For now, I think I'll keep the sci-fi theme going, then in a bit I can transition into something else.

When I think of May 1, I think of May Day, and revolutions, and taking up arms and rising up against our alien, or robot, overlords...

THE PLOT: After Skynet has destroyed much of humanity in a nuclear holocaust, a group of survivors led by John Connor struggles to keep the machines from finishing the job.

AFTER: I stopped watching this franchise after "T2", so I never watched "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines" - but from what I've read, I don't think that's a prerequisite. The third film took the plot in a different direction, and this film chose yet another path.

This film is set in 2018, and centers on the adult John Connor, who is fighting in the resistance against the machines. Thanks to the audio tapes that were left to him by his mother (he still plays them on an old tape-recorder, I guess he never converted them to CDs or MP3 files...) he knows that someday he will have to find a man named Kyle Reese, and send him back to the past, where Kyle will battle the Schwarzenegger Terminator, and father a child named John Connor (the events depicted in the first film).

But the tapes are not fully complete - Sarah Connor only learned bits and pieces about the future robot wars from Kyle. And the future was constantly in motion - remember how the Terminator robot was evil in the first film, but then heroic in the second film? Plus, she never warned him about Terminators that were part machine, and part organic human...

The resistance gets hold of a code that will supposedly send a signal that will switch off the evil machines - and an offensive is mounted to take down Skynet. Connor refuses to go along with the plan, because he wants to rescue the human hostages that Skynet is holding. I don't understand, though, why the choice is between disabling the machines OR rescuing the hostages - wouldn't doing the first thing make the second thing a whole lot easier?

I wouldn't dare give away all the twists and turns of this plot, so let me instead give high marks for the special effects. They really kept this one hopping, with all kinds of giant robots and explosions and noisy stuff. There were quite a few action sequences that made me sit up and take notice - and they had battle scenes taking place at night and in the rain, and you could STILL see what was going on (See, makers of "Alien vs. Predator", it is possible...)

One quibble, though - what happened to those really cool "liquid-metal" Terminators, as seen in "Terminator 2" - what were those, the T-1000's? I guess maybe they haven't been invented yet in 2018? Maybe the "self-healing" Terminator seen in this film is a step in that direction...but if that's the case, and we know that Terminators can be sent back in time, why aren't the toughest Terminators sent back to critical moments in history, like the ones depicted in this film? Can there be a sequel that shows the invention of the T-1000?

It feels good to watch a film that's only about a year old. I should try and do more of that, it makes me feel like I'm catching up, even though my list of films is still huge. And hey, here's a franchise where the fourth film didn't totally suck! Ask and ye shall receive, I guess...

Starring Christian Bale (as Connor), Sam Worthington, Moon Bloodgood (from that TV show "Journeyman" that I liked a couple years ago), Helena Bonham Carter, Anton Yelchin (the new Chekhov), Bryce Dallas Howard, and Common.

RATING: 8 out of 10 land-mines