"Take care of the forest, Dewey."

You know, when I was a kid, I put a note into a bottle and it had my name and address on it. And then I threw the bottle into the ocean. And I never knew if anybody ever found it.

Freeman Lowell, Silent Running

As part of our ongoing wedding planning, Karli and I paid a visit to Vancouver's picturesque Queen Elizabeth Park this past weekend in order to look at possible luncheon and ceremony venues for our wedding.*

 

In addition to wedding pavilions and fine dining, Queen Elizabeth Park is also the home of the Bloedel Conservatory, a charming greenhouse oasis of tropical plants and birds.

 

My first thought on seeing the Conservatory was, "Wait, I recognize that - it's one of the domes from Silent Running!"  Coincidentally, I had just purchased a copy of Douglas Trumbull's 1972 directorial debut on Amazon.ca, so I sat down on Sunday afternoon to do a rewatch.

 

Silent Running is an intriguing movie that rides the fine line between classic and cult. It was produced as part of a series of five low-budget films by novice directors funded by Universal in hopes of repeating the unexpected success of Easy Rider in 1969.**

 

The movie tells the story of Freeman Lowell, part of a four-man crew that maintains the Valley Forge, one of a fleet of converted freighters orbiting Saturn. The ships are equipped with biodomes that house the remaining trees and plants from Earth, preserved against a time when they can be restored to their natural habitat.

When the government decides to destroy the domes and return the fleet to commercial service, Lowell rebels.  He kills his crewmates, and escapes with the ship and the last remaining forest by faking an catastrophic accident.  He takes the ship on a hazardous passage through Saturn's ring system and vanishes into the depths of space, aided by the ship's three robotic drones - one of which is destroyed in their passage through the rings.

Lowell, haunted by guilt over the deaths of his crewmates, reprograms the drones to act as replacements, naming them Huey and Dewey (Louie having been lost to Saturn's rings) and teaching them how to care for the plants and animals.  However, over time the forest begins to die, and Lowell is driven into depression by his inability to solve the problem, even with the help of his robotic companions.

 

Eventually a search party discovers the Valley Forge, and a chance comment by one of the searchers makes Lowell realize that the forest's problem is lack of sunlight.  He erects lights to replace the distant Sun, and then ejects the dome along with Huey. Dewey, damaged in an accident, is unable to reliably help with the forest, and so remains with Lowell as he blows up the ship in order to conceal the fate of the last forest and its robotic caretaker. 

Silent Running is a movie of firsts: it's Bruce Dern's first starring role, it's the (sometimes obvious) directing debut of special effects guru Douglas Trumbull, and the first professional FX credit for the legendary John Dykstra, hired as a student to help out with the spaceship models. Surprisingly, it's also one of the first scriptwriting credits for Steven Bochco, who is more noted for his crime dramas than science fiction.

Lowell, skillfully played by Dern, is an ambiguous figure, as much villain as hero: he's a fanatic who kills three people in his single-minded quest to do what he thinks is right, but he also regrets what he's done, and he's sincere in his love for the forests under his protection, to the point where he's willing to sacrifice his own life as well.  Dern is the perfect casting choice for this role, and he makes Lowell a surprisingly sympathetic character with unexpected depth, a portrayal which marks his transition from playing moody outlaws to more dramatic roles.

The low budget is sometimes obvious, but in some ways it works to the film's advantage. For example, most of the spaceship interiors were shot on the actual Valley Forge, a decommissioned aircraft carrier, which gives those scenes a sense of logic and solid physicality. The shells of the three robot drones are occupied by legless bilateral amputees, which removed the need for expensive electronic models, but which also makes the drones much more anthropomorphic in their reactions and timing.

Overall, Silent Running is an entertaining movie, but it's painted in very large strokes, more of a character study than a fully realized story.  It's also not a subtle film: the ecological message is blatant, right down to having legendary hippy activist/singer Joan Baez provide vocals for the soundtrack, and naming the last defender of the forests Freeman.

However, the simplicity and directness of the movie work well together, making Silent Running into a sort of environmentalist fairy tale, a fairy tale that could easily have started out the way that fairy tales do:

 

"Once upon a time, there was a man who loved the forest..."

  - Sid

* If you're curious, we batted 500: we got the luncheon venue we wanted, but not the wedding pavilion - which, at three grand for 90 minutes, is fine with me.

** One of the other films was American Graffiti, which launched the career of George Lucas*** and paved the way for Star Wars. So, really, Dennis Hopper is responsible for the Star Wars franchise.

*** And Harrison Ford's career as well, come to think of it.

"...I'm Batman."

Well, a guy who dresses up like a bat clearly has issues.

- Bruce Wayne, Batman Begins

 

  - Sid

A foolish consistency.

 

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Karli and I are away for the weekend in picturesque Victoria, where we're staying in an AirBnB micro-loft that can't be much more than 250 square feet - now I know what life would be like in the space-challenged megacities of some Malthusian version of the future (although the ceilings will probably be lower).*

We've visited Victoria a couple of times now, and we've started to develop a list of things to do and places to visit, which, in my case, obviously includes Munro's, Victoria's excellent indie bookstore.

I have yet to visit Munro's without finding something that a) I didn't expect to find; and b) wanted to buy. This visit was no exception - there in the science fiction and fantasy section was the full four book set of Chris Wooding's Tales of the Ketty Jay, an entertaining steampunk fantasy series that I'd previously read and enjoyed in digital format.

Unlike most steampunk, the Ketty Jay series takes place in its own reality, rather than an alternate history version of our own world. As such, Wooding is free to populate his tale with airships, pirates, golems, zombies, daemonists, and whatever else catches his fancy. The result is a fun light reading experience, full of adventure, drama, conflict, romance and dry humour.

Finding the entire Ketty Jay series is a bit of a happy coincidence in terms of timing – my friend Chris has been going through a bit of a steampunk phase in his reading, and I’d recommended the series to him. However, since I only have it as e-books and he doesn’t use any sort of e-reader, I was unable to lend it to him.

The only problem was that the four books at Munro's - all British imports - didn't match.  Parts one, two and four of the series were Gollancz Fantasy editions, and part three, The Iron Jackal, was from Indigo, with a completely different design sensibility. (And a note on the copyright page that it had originally been published by Gollancz.)

It actually hurt me a little bit to buy this mismatched quartet of novels, although I can't quite bring myself to blame Munro's buyer for the situation. At least they had the full set, and if this is the price that they had to pay to make that happen, then so be it. It does make me a little curious, though. These aren't just different editions, they're different publishing houses. How does this happen? Did Wooding have contractual issues between the second and third books?

A little research reveals that the matching Gollancz edition of The Iron Jackal is available on Amazon.ca, so apparently he didn't have to switch publishers, but it's ridiculously expensive, clocking in at close to $60 for a new copy. Interesting - is there some reason that the third book in that production run is in short supply?

(Damn it...I also see that there's an omnibus edition of all four books for $30....no, wait, that's for Kindle, so I haven't made a huge mistake in buying them separately.)

I realize full well that it’s irrelevant that one of the copies came from a different publisher: the content will be the same**, it’s just a bit of foolish consistency to want the cover designs to match. Regardless, if I see the opportunity to purchase a (reasonably priced) replacement copy of the Gollancz edition of The Iron Jackal, rest assured that my little mind will jump, JUMP at the chance - hobgoblin or not.

  - Sid

* Actually, it's quite comfortable for a weekend away, as well as being affordable and perfectly located.  But small.

** Probably. After all, I have a Science Fiction Book of the Month Club omnibus edition of Michael Moorcock Elric novels which disappointingly omits a line from my much-read Lancer edition of Stormbringer, the final novel in the series. So you never know.

"You really have no idea what it was. "

The movie adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer's 2014 novel Annihilation represents a very specific area of science fiction storytelling:  the alien enigma.  Very few of those stories end with a resolution to the central mystery, and Annihilation is not an exception to the rule.

It's been described as a combination of Contact, Arrival and The Fountain, but none of those references really touch the core of the movie.  For a better cinematic starting point in the challenges of comprehending the unknown, I'd suggest 2001, the 2010 guerilla film Monsters*, or either of the movie adaptations of Solaris, Stanislau Lem's classic SF novel.

As in those films, the unknown in Annihilation remains just that: unknown.  The mystery is never solved or understood, and we are left to judge it only by its ambiguous effects on those who have attempted to explore it.

At the core of Annihilation is the Shimmer, a zone of anomalous effects that surrounds the impact point of a meteorite at a lighthouse on the Florida coastline.  The slowly expanding Shimmer has defied analysis, and no one has returned from any of the attempts to explore it.

This changes at the start of the film with the unexpected reappearance of one of the mission members: Sergeant Kane, the husband of cellular biologist Lena, played by Natalie Portman.  Kane, who has been missing for a year, is disoriented and suffering from some kind of physical trauma when he returns to their home.

Taken into custody by the government on their way to the hospital, Kane and Lena are transferred to Area X, the research base for examining the phenomenon, where Lena decides to join the next group of explorers to enter the Shimmer as Kane slowly deteriorates in quarantine.

Annihilation's disjointed, staccato pacing only emphasizes the strangeness of the environment that the five-woman team of scientists ventures into.  This small group of interlopers offers a full spectrum of responses to the strangeness of the Shimmer and its disconcerting effects on their minds and bodies: confrontation, defiance, curiousity, acceptance, and fear, as demonstrated through strong performances by the excellent ensemble cast of Jennifer Jason Leigh, Portman, Tuva Novotny, Tessa Thompson, and Gina Rodriguez.

My main criticism of the film is that it doesn't go far enough in its evocation of the alien - I expected it to be far more extreme in its depiction of the oddities created by the Shimmer.  Only during the final scenes at the impact point of the meteorite does the movie attempt to fully reach into the bizarre possibilities of alien existence.

 

It's hard to say whether Annihilation succeeds or not - that would depend entirely on what you think it's trying to do.  It's deliberately non-linear, ambiguous and open ended, and as such it falls well outside of the standard approach to storytelling.  It may be that its success lies in exactly that, its lack of answers to the questions it raises.

- Sid

* In which the Mexican/US border is defended by a massive wall, in case you were wondering where Donald Trump gets his ideas.

One single tribe.

"What happens now determines what happens to the rest of the world."

T'Challa, Black Panther

Black Panther, the 18th film set in the Marvel Comics Universe, has proven to be an incredible success.  The movie is full of powerful dramatic performances by a superb cast of actors, and its record-breaking box office performance clearly demonstrates that the story of T'challa, king of Wakanda, resonates with audiences on an international level.

That being said, I have to confess that there were some parts of Black Panther that disappointed me.  It may be caused by sheer familiarity with the various obligatory tropes and themes, but there weren't very many places where the movie surprised me - let's be honest, T'challa's journey from victory to defeat to victory is very much what you would expect it to be.

In fact, his opponent's journey is a more interesting one in some ways, to the point where Erik Killmonger comes very close to being the hero of the movie.  It would only take a very slight change in the plot for the film to become the tale of a lost son of Wakanda who returns from exile after the cowardly murder of his father, and then fights the son of the killer for the throne of the country, after which he will have the opportunity to use his new position to change the outside world.

Ultimately, the thing that does set Black Panther apart from the standard superhero movie formula is the cultural and moral background to the story, as symbolized by the country of Wakanda.

 

An impressive creation that draws upon a myriad of cultural influences to create an idealized African city-state with one foot in the past, and one in the future, Wakanda combines tradition and innovation:  its skyscrapers feature elements from thatched huts, its scientists wear clothing patterned after classic African tribal costumes, and it relies upon both technology and ritual observances.

Wakanda is also a thought experiment, the idealized dream of African country that has been free from the consequences of exploitation, colonization, and war.  However, the dream is a tainted one: the Wakandans are very aware of their privileged status compared to the countries that surround them, and justifiably fearful that to extend a helping hand would be to share the issues that plague their neighbours.  As W'Kabi, leader of the Border Tribe, says to T'Challa, "You let the refugees in, you let in all their problems."  As such, they are only willing to provide minimal aid to other countries through undercover operatives.

The dream is also something of a sad one when it is compared to real world. Wakanda is a what-if Africa, one which stands in stark contrast to the problems that have plagued the real African subcontinent for generations, problems caused by both long-standing tribal conflicts and the unwanted interventions of European interlopers.

It is the problems of Africa and of the underprivileged around the planet that provide the real story for this movie.  The underlying theme of Black Panther deals specifically with the fundamental question of intervention versus inaction, of community and unity, of whether or not power should be used to help the weak, even if it means the end of one's own comfortable security and the possibility of mutual failure.

 

In the final analysis, the hero decides to do exactly what heroes are supposed to do:  save the world.  Except in this case, he decides that the world should be saved for everyone, by a little bit, every single day.  It's a shame that there aren't more heroes like that in the real world.

- Sid