“Torchwood: Children of Earth” and the future of science fiction

I’ve been a fan of science fiction since I’ve been a fan of fiction. I grew up on Star Trek: The Next Generation and then The X-Files on television from the late ‘80s through the ‘90s; they were a formative influence on my earliest writing. I remember the wonder with which I experienced Jurassic Park and Independence Day for the first time — though the latter hasn’t aged well. In 1998, the visionary Dark City firmly cemented my love of the movies. But this summer I have come to a believe that the future of science fiction is on the small screen, not the silver screen. I reached this conclusion as I watched the BBC miniseries Torchwood: Children of Earth, which aired in the US from July 20-24 on BBC America. It’s a masterpiece.

Torchwood is a Welsh-set drama, spun off from sci-fi stalwart Doctor Who, about an elite group of alien hunters who monitor a rift in the space-time continuum. (They sure don’t make space-time continuums like they used to — they’re always rifting.) The series has produced two previous seasons, but it has never been better. The setup is simple, but diabolical. One day, the prepubescent children of the world — every single one — stop at the exact same time, frozen as if in a trance. When they are entranced again they repeat in unison a disturbing proclamation: “We are coming.” It’s an alien threat, using children to communicate, but what do they want? What will they do when they get here? I will reveal little else of the plot. Though the miniseries has already aired, it is available on DVD July 28 and I want you to see it for yourself. The breathless, moment-to-moment intensity of it is such that I don’t want to spoil a bit of it.

'Torchwood: Children of Earth'

You will seldom see anything like this in a movie theater. Because television operates on a relative shoe-string budget it must traffic in ideas more than effects, and that is evident in Children of Earth, which employs little CGI. We are shown only one alien creature on-screen, and it spends all its time in a glass chamber shrouded in a chemical fog. There are no intergalactic dogfights, no elaborately designed sets — the action takes place largely in British government buildings. Some stuff blows up real good, and the heroine, Gwen Cooper (the superb Eve Myles), double-wields pistols in a way that would make Quentin Tarantino proud, but this is not a showcase for special effects or makeup departments.

Instead, you get scenes rooted in character and theme. The Torchwood team leader is Jack Harkness (John Barrowman, in a dashing yet deeply emotional performance). He is immortal, and you might think that would deflate the tension, but then you’ve never watched a man get sealed in concrete and then dropped from a cliff — and walk away! He is in a relationship with fellow team member Ianto (Gareth David-Lloyd), and the script takes time to deal with the reality of the characters, who know that one of them will still be alive long after the other is dead and gone.

Their relationship is treated matter-of-factly, but it’s groundbreaking. There is a decided lack of LGBT presence in science fiction — big screen and small — especially gay and bisexual men, as if the makers of current sci-fi cannot distance themselves from their adolescent fantasies enough to contemplate how human sexuality may evolve in future eras; Jack was once a time-traveler, and grew up in a distant future when human interaction with alien races renders the distinctions of human orientation irrelevant.

Consider also a scene from the fourth episode: a roundtable between members of the government, who must decide a plan of action. It evokes … no, I won’t reveal what it evokes. You’ll know it when you see it, and you’ll be horrified not just by its implications but by its plausibility. You won’t see a scene like this in any film intended for a mass audience, science fiction or otherwise. It’s a masterstroke that elevates the miniseries from escapist thriller to a meditation on the nature of evil. The writer and producer is Russell T. Davies, who created Torchwood and oversees the current Doctor Who series, and with Children of Earth vaults to the head of the class of modern sci-fi visionaries.

'Star Trek'

Compare it to the highest grossing science fiction films of the year: Star Trek and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. I will discuss only Star Trek at length because I have not seen either of the Transformers films, but even its fans are likely to tell you that its strong suits aren’t character, story, or theme.

Star Trek was greeted with overwhelmingly positive reviews and perhaps more importantly the approval of Trekkers. Well, most Trekkers. I consider myself among their number and could work up little enthusiasm for the reboot. I posted my review on Facebook and received a comment protesting that my two-and-a-half stars were unduly harsh. (I generally give that rating to a film I consider a near-miss.)

Watching Children of Earth, I understand all at once what Star Trek was missing: something new. The Trek franchise was taken over by director J.J. Abrams — whose TV work includes such creatively audacious gems as Alias and Lost — with the intent of refreshing a well-worn formula. But he only replaced the well-worn formula with other well-worn formulas. The screenplay by frequent Abrams collaborators Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman — who also wrote the latest Transformers film — is composed of familiar elements: a rakish hero, a by-the-books counterpart, and a villain hell-bent on revenge. There is one bold story development, but it’s taken straight out of the original Star Wars. Mostly, the plot is a clothesline for action sequences and CGI, which flash across the screen in choppily edited bits.

What an incredibly vivid world Torchwood creates with so few effects! Imagine what Star Trek could have created on a Hollywood budget! Instead, we get new variations of space ships shooting at each other. But that is the nature of the business of Hollywood these days. A studio will only bankroll what it thinks it can sell, and it’s a safer bet to feed the consumers more of what they’ve consumed before, especially when committing hundreds of millions of dollars to lavish production values.

CGI has taken over blockbuster films. Special effects themselves are not the enemy; they become the enemy only when they replace storytelling and imagination. It required intelligence and wisdom to make Children of Earth. It requires decidedly less to envision ships shooting each other, or robots clanging into each other, or a new spectacular disaster befalling a recognizable skyline like New York City. I’ve seen these things before, and long for things I haven’t seen.

'WALL-E'

There are notable exceptions in recent cinema. In the last ten years, Hollywood has produced WALL-E, Children of Men, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and Minority Report, which are among not only the best science fiction films of the decade but the best films, period. Two of those were directed by Steven Spielberg; it takes the clout of a Spielberg to get a mystifying film like A.I. made at all, and even then its $78 million domestic gross is considered a disappointment. Children of Men received rapturous reviews and Academy Award nominations, but its entire worldwide gross ($69 million) amounts to less than what Star Trek earned domestically in its opening weekend ($75 million). Is that a genuine reflection of public taste, or a matter of aggressive marketing? WALL-E proved that there is an audience for sophisticated sci-fi — even kids! So why isn’t there more of it?

Most viewers who admire the Star Trek movie probably don’t know that a show called Torchwood even exists, or that from July 20-24 it produced some of the most compelling science fiction this decade. They may not know that elsewhere on the dial are other bold sci-fi programs, often neglected, that also explore provocative ideas; I could as easily have written this article about Dollhouse, Lost, the sadly canceled Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, the recently concluded Battlestar Galactica, or Davies’s own Doctor Who, and if we expand the topic to cover fantasy more broadly, the list grows even longer.

We could even include Star Trek: The Next Generation and The X-Files, which are long-ended but both still available on digital formats and in syndication. Still after all these years it is rare to find a film that is equal to them.

“Watchmen”: Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes

Dir. Zack Snyder
(2009, R, 162 min)
★ ★ ½

Watchmen is gorgeous, fascinating, but ultimately unsuccessful. At 162 minutes, it’s chock-full of ideas, but doesn’t settle on any one idea for long enough to make sense of them. What results is a mash-up of conflicting philosophies — mostly bottled in the purple prose of character voice-overs and speeches — without a unifying focus.

The director is Zack Snyder, and I admit I was fully prepared to dislike this film, as I disliked his previous film 300, that brawny box office hit about Spartan warriors with abs and pectorals better developed than the characters sporting them, and hermetically sealed in green-screen effects much too faithful to the aesthetic of their source material. Watchmen is a marked improvement for the director, who shows greater maturity and emotional connection to his material, though I think lacking clarity on what his film is really about. I’m not so sure either.

The story opens with the murder of a superhero known as the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), followed by a main title sequence that made me sit up and think, maybe Snyder is on to something this time. It’s a stirring montage of revisionist 20th Century history, with superheroes taking part in crucial events, from World War II, to Vietnam, to the moon landing, and even the Kennedy assassination, accompanied by Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” on the soundtrack. It’s a terrific opener, immediately setting us up for a caped-crusader story with a sociopolitical bent. When the story picks up in the fall of 1985, Richard Nixon is in the third term of his presidency and the Cold War is on the verge of escalating into a hot one; Russia stockpiles nuclear weapons, and global annihilation seems imminent.

We meet the other superheroes, members of a crime-fighting team called the Watchmen, who have been forced into retirement by the government. Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) is violently unstable. He hides his face behind a mask stained with a continually morphing ink blot. Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) is considered the smartest man in the world and also one of the richest. He markets his own line of action figures, which seems redundant; with his stiffly coifed Ken-doll hair and rigid countenance, he’s already his own action figure.

There are two second-generation heroes. The role of Night Owl was passed down from Greatest Generation-era Hollis Mason (Stephen McHattie) to baby boomer Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson). The latter has become doughy and meek since hanging up his cape, but he hasn’t put it behind him entirely; he still keeps his equipment in his basement, including a flying vehicle shaped like an owl. The Silk Spectre persona was passed down from Sally Jupiter (Carla Gugino) to her daughter Laurie (Malin Ackerman). Despite all she has seen, Laurie still has hope for the world and serves more or less as the conscience of the film.

The most interesting of the heroes is Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), who is an utterly original creation, both visually and psychologically. Born Jon Osterman, he was a young physicist in the 1950s who was trapped during a science experiment and had his molecules ripped apart. He soon found himself reassembled in the form of a blue man who can see into the past and future and bend matter to his will. He is as close to a god as mankind has seen, and he feels so detached from humanity that at one point he leaves Earth and sets up residence on Mars. He is naked in most of his scenes, not for the purpose of gratuitous sexuality but to highlight how removed he is from human concerns like modesty or propriety. He perceives mankind from such a distance and with such scope that he cannot withstand it. He is sad and lonely. The film is at its best when the focus is on him.

Other characters — not so much. Rorschach and the Comedian are cynical nihilists, but neither persona is very interesting. Compared to other violence- and chaos-driven characters like The Dark Knight’s Joker and No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh, their world views come off like so much facile bellyaching. Much more interesting is when Rorschach loses his mask and we get to know the tortured soul underneath; he is Walter Kovacs, and when not obscured by the mask actor Jackie Earle Haley is able to convey the angry, disturbed, despairing man behind all that world-is-a-cesspool posturing.

Zack Snyder should cease directing sex scenes. There is no way to segue into the subject and no way to segue out of it, but there you have it. I could go this entire review without addressing it, but this is the second consecutive film in which a Snyder-directed sex scene has inspired an unintended fit of laughter, and it demands comment. Of the Leonidas-Gorgo liaison in 300 I wrote, “… it’s absurd, like a Greek tragedy interrupted by the most pretentious film Cinemax never made.” In Watchmen is an equally preposterous encounter, between Dan and Laurie. It’s set to Leonard Cohen’s song “Hallelujah,” shot in overwrought slow-motion, and is thoroughly ridiculous.

The film drifts during its last thirty minutes or so. The big reveal — who is targeting the former Watchmen and why? — produces a lot of exposition about the kind of convoluted crackpot scheme Lex Luther might have come up with on an off day. The ultimate solution is audacious, but it’s overly simplistic and comes to a conclusion about human nature I didn’t buy. Perhaps that is to be expected. The screenplay by David Hayter and Alex Tse, based on Alan Moore’s acclaimed graphic novel, entertains a lot of opinions about the state of the world but doesn’t express a clear opinion of its own, so by the time it reaches its endgame it’s hard to understand by what logic it got there. It’s the culmination of a film whose pieces don’t quite fit together, but in its ambition it fails in more interesting ways than most movies succeed.

“The Hurt Locker”: Tick, tick, boom

Dir. Kathryn Bigelow
(2009, R, 131 min)
★ ★ ★

I expected more.

Scoring a staggering 93 on MetaCritic and 97% freshness on Rotten Tomatoes, The Hurt Locker has been called the first great film to be made about the current Iraq War. Watching it I thought about another great film about the Iraq War, HBO’s Generation Kill, and how it’s better than The Hurt Locker — clearer, more unified, more complete. The HBO film has the benefit of greater length; it’s a seven-hour miniseries. But then there’s another great film, Taking Chance, also from HBO, which is also better than The Hurt Locker and only 77 minutes. But its focus is different, concerning military rituals of death, and a direct comparison would be unfair.

The Hurt Locker is a good film, but given its praise there’s a feeling that, yes, it should be a better one. Its characters are at times murky, or overly familiar. Several scenes are thrilling individually, but feel fragmented from each other; they don’t build urgency from one to the next.

The story follows three Army soldiers in an Explosive Ordinance Disposal unit: Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), and Specialist Owen Eldredge (Brian Geraghty). Team leader James is a danger junkie who cavalierly risks his safety and the safety of his unit; we’ve seen his ilk before in war films. Sanborn is weary, eager to return home at the end of his rotation, and afraid that James will get him killed before he gets there. Eldredge is riddled with guilt over the death of James’s predecessor; he meets periodically with a colonel who counsels him (Christian Camargo). The colonel is a desk jockey who hasn’t seen combat for quite a while; the payoff of this subplot announces itself well before it should.

The film works less as psychology than as a series of vignettes chronicling life on the front lines. The opening scene of a bomb disposal generates subtle dread. Later, the soldiers come under sniper fire, and director Kathryn Bigelow emphasizes the way time hangs, allowing room for the mundane details: cleaning blood off of bullets, grabbing juice pouches while the enemy lays low. The film’s best shot shows James following a single wire until he reaches a junction of wires hidden in the dirt; we feel the sudden terror — in the quiet of the desert, a web of death all around.

Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times”: Rage against the machine

Modern Times is slapstick with a Marxist bent. It is the 1936 silent comedy directed by legendary British comedian Charlie Chaplin, who still made silent films well into the sound era. It is not a film of belly laughs, as, say, Buster Keaton’s sublime The General, which ranks among my favorite films; Chaplin’s broad physical comedy is tempered by sly but lacerating social satire … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.org

“Two Lovers”: Affairs to remember

Dir. James Gray
(2009, R, 109 min)
★ ★ ★ ½

The ending of Two Lovers does not come as a surprise, as might be the intent of other films about love triangles, which seek to divide our sympathies and confound our expectations. Explains writer-director James Gray in the DVD audio commentary, he hopes his film is predictable, but not in the way of formula films. He echoes exactly the feeling I had when watching it for the first time. There’s an inevitability in the fates of its characters, whom the screenplay observes so well that their behavior moves us, but doesn’t surprise us.

Joaquin Phoenix stars as Leonard Kraditor, a troubled New Yorker who has returned to his parents’ home on the heels of a broken engagement. This is the role Phoenix was promoting earlier in the year when he had his supposed breakdown, quitting acting to become a rap singer, growing a beard, and making inexplicable public appearances like his infamous interview with David Letterman. This may prove to be merely fodder for an upcoming mockumentary, which would make it all the more unfortunate that the actor’s public spectacle overshadowed what is a fine film and one of his best performances.

Leonard is drawn to two women: Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of a family friend, whom his Jewish immigrant parents approve of, and Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow), a beguiling upstairs neighbor who is having an affair with a married man and may have had trouble with drugs. Considering the two women, my sympathies were not divided at all. Sandra is the healthier relationship, the more grounded in reality, the more stabilizing for Leonard, who is bipolar and has attempted suicide enough times that his mother (played perfectly by Isabella Rossellini) warns his father, “I think he tried again,” when their son comes home dripping wet from “falling” into Sheepshead Bay. Leonard cannot see how right she is for him because she is bound up in familial pressures and a life path he’s determined to get away from. She tells him she wants to take care of him, when all he wants is to feel like he can take care of himself.

He doesn’t see how wrong Michelle is for him because he wants to fix her, which makes him feel less like someone who needs to be fixed. She draws him in and pushes him away, all the while stumbling through an emotional battlefield largely of her own making. She can scarcely take care of herself, and together they form a bond of co-dependency. I want to yell “No! No! No!” at her when she, perhaps unwittingly, pulls him back into her orbit, and at him when he lets her.

Perhaps you will feel differently. You may bring your biases as I have brought mine and decide that Sandra represents stifling obligation. But Shaw gives a performance that radiates warmth, compassion, and steadiness of character; she plays Sandra as such a force of goodness that if she thinks she can fix you, you hand her a wrench.

Paltrow is just as good as Michelle, who is Sandra’s complete opposite: scattered, ruled by emotions, clouded of judgment. The actress at first seems miscast: too aristocratic to play a naive Brooklynite who believes the promises of her married lover, her edges too clean to play a woman so frayed. I can’t point to precisely the moment where she finally convinces me, but we eventually come to understand her as an unattainable fantasy for Leonard, a beautiful damsel in a high tower waiting for her rescuer. But he is not Prince Charming, and she is not Cinderella. Their scenes together are sad, because we can see through their illusions.

Some films know their characters — just know them, so well that we never need to question it. Gray’s screenplay, co-written by Ric Menello, is one of clear-eyed understanding, simple and direct. Everything is character. Nothing is contrivance. We often grieve at the decisions of the characters, but the heart wants what it wants, even when it should want something else. They say love is blind …

The “Up” Documentaries: As time goes by …

The world has changed drastically since the Up project began in 1964. Our multimedia culture produces virtual worlds like Facebook, YouTube, and the blogosphere. We broadcast our lives to each other daily — some of us hourly or minutely who habitually announce what we’ve had for lunch on Twitter. I wonder if any of us truly understand how we are marking the passage of our lives … Read the rest of my review at Culturazzi.org