Moon: A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

Duncan Jones’ Moon has the word ‘classic’ written all over it. It is one of the best science fiction films in a long, long time, one that is faithful to the development of the genre and to the tradition of the battle against the Machine that was inaugurated with Kubrick’s 2001. In many ways, the film owes a great debt to Kubrick’s masterpiece, but also to Tarkovsky’s Solaris, for it reworks the latter’s themes of isolation, alienation and identity confusion. The film was reportedly made for only 6 million dollars, but it has the look of a 60 million dollar film, one that happens to have a fresh and innovative screenplay.

The premise is a simple one: Sam Rockwell plays a mining engineer named Sam Bell who has been stationed upon the Moon and is nearing the end of his three year contract. He is, apparently, though, beginning to suffer from cabin fever, for he has begun to hallucinate and see “ghosts” that may, or may not, be real. If you haven’t yet seen the film, then you might want to stop reading here, for I will now proceed to reveal the film’s central mystery in order to excavate its main thematic structures: after suffering an accident in his moon rover while on a mission to recover canisters from a harvester (the harvester owes a debt to Lynch’s Dune) Bell awakens to find himself mysteriously back inside the compound under the watchful eye of his HAL-9000-like computer companion named Gerty 3000. Soon, things get even weirder when Sam makes his way back to the scene of the accident only to find a double of himself still trapped, unconscious, inside the wrecked moon rover. He retrieves this double of himself and heads back to base, where he tries to fathom the mystery of this clone. Is he the one who crashed? Or is he the double of the one who crashed?

It turns out that the awakened Sam is, indeed, a clone. Not only that, but the Sam who crashed in the accident is a clone, too. The original Sam, these two clones soon discover, returned to earth 12 or 13 years ago. Ever since his return, and apparently unbeknownst to the original Sam, he has been replaced by a clone every three years, for the lifespan of each clone is only three years (reminiscent of the four year lifespan of the replicants in Blade Runner). The two new clones, in order to get back to earth, decide to awaken a third clone to help them…

The film is, in short, brilliant, for it is an excavation of our contemporary culture, or rather atemporary culture, disguised as a story about a man trapped on the moon. The thing about the moon is that it is a landscape that exists outside of History: nothing ever happens there, and life does not exist. It is a topology of a perpetual Hell of the Same, in which Time has vanished. The situation is precisely the same on Mars, and it is interesting that it is just these two extraterrestrial bodies that our ahistorical late capitalist society is obsessed with colonizing, for the essence of this society, too, is that Time does not exist and History is no longer: the planet is being overlaid with a thin crust of a civilized Hell of the Same, in which shopping malls, airports and theme parks–not to mention fast food restaurants–are conquering the planet and displacing and replacing the local and the authentic; in short, cultures which have grown up through the slow temporal metabolisms of History.

The goal of our Historyless society is, as Baudrillard has pointed out, simply to repeat and reiterate simulacra, or meaningless clones, without aim and without end, like cancer cells. Sam Bell’s situation on the Moon is an interesting miniaturization of this nihilistic and pointless metabolism.

There is a mythic dimension here as well, since these clones are essentially replaying the myth of the dying and reviving god that originated in the Near East a la Tammuz, Adonis, Osiris, Dionysus, etc. Readers of Frazer know the pattern well. The cloned Sam’s attempt to break out of this cycle and make it to earth weirdly recapitulates the advent of the historical singularity of the incarnation of Christ, whose Event breaks the cycle of the previous dying and reviving gods with a unique and once-only occurrence.

Hell is the place, furthermore, of repetitive, meaningless actions: thus Sisyphus carries the stone up the hill and it rolls back down every day; Prometheus’ liver is eaten by an eagle every night and grows back again every day; Tantalus will never reach the food that dangles just out of his grasp and so on. Thus, in a brilliant reversal of traditional cosomology, Duncan Jones turns the cosmos upside down and puts Hell up in the sky. The goal now is to get out of Hell not by going “Up,” the universal direction of salvation in all ancient religions, but by going “Down” toward earth, where souls incarnate on the physical plane. Jones thus performs a wonderful deconstruction of traditional iconography and cosmology.

Moon is a gem, and it leaves me with some hope that there is further room for great films in visionary cinema. I look forward to Duncan Jones’ next one.

District 9: A (Belated) Movie Review

By John David Ebert 

I finally got around to seeing Neill Blomkamp’s District 9, which is, indeed, a better film than Avatar. The difference between the two films is instructive, for Blomkamp’s film succeeds because it inherits a cliched premise–an alien invasion of the earth–which it then proceeds to subvert by turning upside down, while Cameron merely lines up a string of sci-fi cliches and assembles them  with all the craftsmanship of a prefabricated tract house. Cameron’s film is the celluloid equivalent of styrofoam packaging: it makes a lot of noise, but there’s not much to it; Blomkamp’s movie, on the other hand, is fresh and inventive.

Let’s take, for instance, the premise of alien invasion, which goes back to H.G. Wells’ novel War of the Worlds: the version of it which Blomkamp inherits, though, was crystallized by Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 novel Childhood’s End, in which alien spacecraft begin their invasion by first mysteriously appearing and hovering over cities around the world; this scenario is standardized and repeated all the way down through the television mini-series V and Shyamalan’s Signs. In every case, though, the premise is structured around a colonialist semiotic of Masters and Subjects, of aggressive dominators (as Clarke’s “Overlords” clearly imply) and their subjugated human victims. The scenario, indeed, is a vestigial survival from the days of the nineteenth century colonialism of the earth by the British, French and German empires. The Belgian lords of the Congolese natives in Heart of Darkness is structurally isomorphic to Clarke’s Overlords and subjugated humans.

For the first time in the history of the genre, however, Blomkamp turns this scenario upside down and provides us with a “passive” invasion: we are surprised in his film to find that the alien spaceship has stalled in the air over the city of Johannesburg and that no invasion takes place: instead, humans travel up to the spaceship and crack it open like a can of sardines, where they find starving, emaciated aliens which the humans themselves then bring down to the earth and immediately cordon off in a zone which they call “District 9.”

The scenario of alien invasion has lost its colonialist signifiers because history itself has changed: today’s problem isn’t a matter of colonialists and their subjugated peoples, but an entirely new, and altogether unprecedented problem: that of what Giorgio Agamben terms peoples living in a “state of exception.” These are groups of people who, all over the planet, find themselves falling through the cracks of nationhood as globalization tightens down around the earth like a single gigantic dome. The laws of these states do not apply to such individuals since they are not considered “citizens” of their respective geographical locales. They exist in a state of exception: the law does not apply to them and they can therefore be treated with impunity. Thus, the Palestinians in Israel; or the Bantus in South Africa; or the Kurds between Iraq and Turkey; or the Bosnians in the Balkans. Such peoples find themselves largely without legal status, and are treated as “sub-humans” by their respective neighbors.

Hence, Blomkamp’s metaphor: the “aliens” in the “New World” of “Globalization” are those who find themselves without the protective macrosphere of a state. They belong to no nation and have no home: they are, to use Zygmunt Bauman’s phrase “wasted lives.” And they are, furthermore, a growing problem. The new anxiety in the age of all encompassing globalization is precisely that of who belongs where: the paradoxical effect of globalization is that it has made the issue of boundaries more evident than ever before. As we are all sent crashing pell-mell into one another, confusion and anxiety mount, for where one finds oneself on the geographical map says just about everything about one’s situation in the new era. Human rights, you say?

Under whose jurisdiction?

But of course, the side effect of the situation of a disfranchised people which finds itself playing the role of the “cultural inferior” has many historical precedents: we know the process which soon begins to take place and we know it well. It’s called “acculturation,” and it is the revenge of the natives against their subjugators. The displaced and dispossessed blacks soon invent jazz and rock ‘n roll; Native American deities turn up right in the middle of Manhattan as comic book superheroes; in the case of India, the subjugated Harappans soon begin teaching the Vedic Aryans about their native religion of yoga; in Conrad’s narrative, Kurtz “goes native” and begins to transform himself into a god.

In Blomkamp’s film, this occurs when the protagonist, an annoying and (white) racist news reporter stumbles across a hidden canister which contains a “black fluid” which the aliens have been secretly working on, a fluid that will work as fuel for their hidden underground airship that will carry them up to the mother ship, which they will then be able to restart and head back out to the cosmos. This “black fluid”– borrowed, perhaps, from The X-Files–sprays onto the reporter and begins to genetically alter him so that he becomes the first alien-human genetic hybrid to actually survive. One of his arms transforms into an alien arm which confers on him the ability to use alien weaponry, hitherto impenetrable to white (or black) know-how. The racist news reporter soon finds himself sympathetic to the aliens, especially because he is now an outcast in his own (human) society. His goal is to help the aliens get back to their mother ship, if only because they have promised him that in return they will reverse his genetic malformation.

In a battle scene at the film’s climax, the reporter finds himself encased inside the mechanical exoskeleton of one of the alien’s robotic technologies: this enables him to fight the whites with superhuman abilities (this motif of the mechanical - hydraulic exoskeleton is itself becoming something of a cliche: it featured prominently in the climaxes of both Iron Man and Avatar). But it is also an image of the human soul fallen like the Gnostic Anthropos into the prison of his own machinery. Just as in Gnosticism, so too, the goal here is “Up;” the universal direction of salvation in all the world’s traditional cosmologies. “Up” equals salvation; “Down” equals ruination.

These are categories, perhaps, of an outdated “bivalent ontology,” as Peter Sloterdijk has pointed out in his essay “The Operable Man,” and belong in the same rubbish heap along with all such other (now deconstructed) bivalent oppositions as “spirit” vs. “nature,” “man” vs. “machine,” “subject” vs. “object,” “interior” vs. “exterior” and so on. Sloterdijk insists that current humanist condemnations of the machine are reacting from the standpoint of such outdated bivalent ontologies which have failed to keep pace with the new network - polyvalent ontologies which new technologies like the Internet are making possible. He does have a point here.

However, the images and narratives of our contemporary cinema come out of the archaic imagination, which is structured and patterned by millenia of such “outdated” and “deconstructed” bivalent oppositions. Though the postmodern consciousness of contemporary humanity may find them “irrelevant” to the new situation created by the marvels and wonders of our own wondrous technologies, the archaic psyche obviously still thinks that they are quite relevant and, as is evident from Blomkamp’s film, “Up” is not the new “Down,” for it still means “Salvation” while “Down” means “Fallen” and “Corrupt.”

According to the semiotics of Blomkamp’s film, then, modern humanity has gone “astray” and is fallen just exactly as Heidegger once pictured him: he is a spark that has become entombed in a metal sarcophagus that has so far proved to be his ruination, as the catastrophes of the twentieth century have proven. The situation is not just a matter of developing the right philosophical vocabulary: modern man is fallen and he can’t get up. He is still in need of rescue from his fall into Technics, for the situation created by globalization (made possible by these very new “network” technologies Sloterdijk speaks of) has not improved his condition one bit.

The problem of those living in “states of exception” is catastrophic and proves that we are not in any way “progressing.” Machines will not help us to escape from ourselves or our essential humanness, no matter how “spiritual” or “complex” they may become. We are still fallen and still searching for the Light of another World.     

James Cameron’s Kitschy New Age Epic

By John David Ebert 

I keep waiting for those “Wow!” experiences in film that I used to encounter routinely as a child growing up in the middle American suburbs of the 1980s. It seemed that every summer, I would go to the movies and walk away feeling that I had been temporarily transplanted into another world: there was Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, for example, or David Cronenberg’s version of the The Dead Zone (both major improvements upon Stephen King’s novels); I remember the summer when Spielberg hit me over the head with not just one, but two films: E.T. and Poltergeist, and in the same summer, John Carpenter’s The Thing and David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. These were all films of the early 1980s, but as I went into high school, I remember seeing James Cameron’s sequel to Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Alien, itself a sort of sci-fi masterpiece made with an exhilaration and a love of the genre that is rare nowadays. In the 1990s, Cameron wowed me a couple of more times with Terminator 2 and Titanic. After that, he quit making movies. I’m not sure why: maybe those three or four films were enough to prove that he could rival Spielberg and Lucas, and maybe after winning the Oscar for Best Picture for Titanic, he’d decided that his yearnings as an artist, a major director of Hollywood cinema, had been recognized and that was that. Why make any more movies?

Time went by, many years, twelve or thirteen, while Cameron made a couple of documentaries that were moderately interesting, and now, in 2009, he has given us his much anticipated science fiction film Avatar.

I can tell you without reservation that it is the biggest disappointment in my own personal history of cinematic moviegoing. It is without question not only Cameron’s worst film, but an embarrassingly bad film that is excruciatingly painful to sit through. As the years have unspooled, those “Wow!” experiences in film have appeared with less and less frequency, until now we are at the point when they seldom occur at all. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings may have been the last one. And, by the looks of recent trailers, there may not be any more to come.The days of great visionary cinema appear to be reaching its curtain call.

It could be that at forty I’m just getting older and fussier. But it could just as well be that film really is going into the toilet. Every medium, after all, goes through a natural cycle of birth, flourishing and decadence.

So what’s wrong with Avatar? Well, for starters, it’s not really a science fiction film. It’s a disguised allegory of the white man’s conquest and ethnic cleansing of the Native Americans, and its plot is so similar to Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves (a much better film, though I hate to say it) that if you’ve seen that film, then there’s no point in leaving your house to watch Avatar. There are also echoes from Frank Herbert’s Dune. And not only that but he has stolen the dragonriding motif from the novels of Anne McCaffrey.  

The plot of Avatar, if you really need to know what it is, concerns a former Marine named Jake Sully who is trapped in a wheelchair and receives his chance at redemption when his brother, who had been taking part in a science experiment involving Avatars, dies. Since Jake is a twin of his dead brother, the military brings him in and sets him up with a sarcophagus-like pod that enables him to incarnate into the genetically engineered physical body of a race of alien beinsg known as a Na’vi. The Na’vi (notice the similarity to “Native Americans”) are the aboriginal inhabitants of a planet called Pandora, which the American military is colonizing for the purpose of obtaining riches in the form of a rare mineral. These Na’vi are giants, roughly twice the size of human beings and are obviously inspired by the four-armed giants from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter novels, as is the premise of the film generally.

However, the problem with the film is that it is so self-consciously aware of its own moral allegorizing that it leaves no room for the viewer to create his own textile of interpretation. The film is mainly a flat, one level allegory of what happened to the Native Americans on the one hand, and of what American-inspired globalization is presently doing to the indigenous societies of the world right now. And that’s it. There’s nothing else going on. There are no moral ambiguities, no sense of irony, and most of all, no sense of humor. (There aren’t even any fun villains: the bad guys are just the same military dickheads from Cameron’s earlier film The Abyss). The movie takes itself very, very seriously. So seriously that we are hit over the head by Cameron’s self-appointed moral pontificating.Yes, Jim, we are decimating the planet’s ecosystems. Yes, Jim, we did practice ethnic cleansing on the Native Americans. And, yes, there is a connection. But haven’t we already agreed on all that? Now what? How about a fresh idea?

In short, Cameron is more concerned with delivering a message here than he is with telling a story, and that is too bad. He used to be a good storyteller who could care less what his “messages” were. (Such naive directiors–like Spielberg, for instance, make the best storytellers, because they leave it up to the audience to figure out what they’re up to). But Cameron hits the page running here with a morally self-appointed agenda that never lets up with its New Age weightiness.

And that’s the film’s other main problem. It is sickeningly New Agey. Indeed, in terms of its visual look, it is a cross between Heavy Metal magazine and the paintings routinely produced out of Sedona, Arizona. His Na’vi, with their Gaian religion, are nauseating California New Age kitsch, the kind of kitsch that is routinely produced by artists with names like “Silver Bear” or “Sun Wheel.” By the end of the film, I was so disgusted with this New Age tripe that I was ready to throw up.

And while we’re at it, there’s one more problem: visually, the film is made up of a palette of Day-Glo colors that are interesting for about twenty-five minutes. After that, the viewer is so sickened by them that he is ready to go home and dig out some Rembrandt paintings in order to counteract the effect.

This film, in short, is a mess. The 3D effects are neat, for about twenty minutes. Then those get old, too.

You’re better off just waiting for the DVD.          

Or How to Review an Archetypal Movie, Again

By John Lobell

A while back, I did a review of Phantom of the Opera in which I took reviewers to task for not knowing what the movie was about. (See

http://www.cinemadiscourse.com/the-phantom-of-the-opera/  )

As those who make movies move to explore archetypal themes, they are leaving the reviewers behind, who can only comment on production values.

Law Abiding Citizen is, on the surface, one of those revenge movies in which a man’s family is killed, and he takes revenge. In modern incarnation, it begins with Charles Bronson in Death Wish, and will continue with Mel Gibson in Edge of Darkness, the preview for which was shown with the screening of Law Abiding Citizen that I saw.

But actually, Law Abiding Citizen is closer to In the Line of Fire, in which the Malkovich character is a Bodhisattva who sacrifices himself for the redemption of the Clint Eastwood character. What is annoying is that none of the reviewers get it.

A. O. Scott in the New York Times writes:<< “Law Abiding Citizen,” a blunt and sadistic revenge thriller starring Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler, occasionally pauses from the mayhem to stage a solemn debate about law, justice and morality. Mr. Butler, playing a family man whose wife and daughter were murdered by thugs, feels he was let down by the system, which gave one of the thugs a light sentence in exchange for testimony against the other thug, who was sentenced to death. Mr. Foxx, the prosecutor who made that deal, thinks that the system, however imperfect, did its job. But really, “Law Abiding Citizen” has about as much to say about real-life legal issues as “Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen” had to say about defense policy. And it has less ethical gravity than any three of the “Saw” movies.>>

You can go on Rotten Tomatoes for other reviews, but this pretty well sums it up.

To the contrary, Mr. Scott, there could not be more gravity, for there is nothing less here than the transformation of the Western self. How well that is done, we leave to the movie reviews. That it is being done, for that we need CinemaDsicourse.

Foxx’s character, Nick Rice, is an assistant district attorney who is ruthlessly ambitious. He thinks he is a good guy, but he is flawed. He is more interested in his conviction rate and his political advancement than in what we know is right, and he would know is right if he were in touch with his inner moral voice. As Joseph Campbell describes the Western notion of the corruption of the self, it comes from identification with the role rather than the true self. Those around Rice – other ADAs, the defense lawyer, the judge, the district attorney, the mayor, etc. are similarly corrupt.

All of the reviews miss that Clyde Shelton, Butler’s character, is not out for revenge. It is ten years after the incident, and as he says he could have slaughtered everyone, including Rice and his family, any time in those ten years. Law Abiding Citizen is not about “law, justice and morality,” or Shelton’s revenge, it is about the state of Rice’s soul. Shelton has dedicated himself to bringing Rice to a realization of his false way of being, and to opening him to his inner moral voice, which Shelton believes he has, or he would not be making the effort. In other words, Shelton is trying to save Rice’s soul. The others who Shelton kills are similarly corrupt, and if Rice is acting in the mode of a Zen warrior, death is the right thing for each of them at that moment. (Note that in Death Wish, Bronson was playing an architect. In Law Abiding Citizen, Shelton happens to be an undercover agent who is an unstoppable super assassin, so he is well prepared for what he is to do, as is Malkovich in In the Line of Fire.)

So Shelton is not out for revenge and he does not want to kill Rice, he wants to save him. These things are difficult to convey with the clumsy script writing and acting available today, but it is what the movie is about. In the end, Shelton succeeds, and Rice is saved. The screenwriters cannot find words to put in his mouth to convey this conversion, nor can actors today show such things (the last time an actor portrayed transformation was when Li Gong went from dragon lady to drowned rat in the movie, Miami Vice). The best they can give us is that Rice now finds time to go to his daughter’s cello recital.

As I indicated above, there is a long movie tradition of the lone hero who has lost everything and sets out to right things. In the days of the classic western, the motivation was to make the world safe for civilized folk. In the Death Wish movies, it was that plus the satisfaction of personal revenge. Now it is to redeem one of the culprits. The use of skillful means to repair another. Buddhism seeps into the West.

The movie is a bit confused by the fact that it could not allow the blowing up of the entire city administration, despite a mayor more interested in protecting her power than the city, so we need some type of ersatz victory for Rice at the end of the movie. But the movie knows what it wants to say. It would be nice if at least one reviewer got it, but then that is why we have CinemaDiscourse.

(Added October 25)

Toward the end of my above review, I wrote: “Buddhism seeps into the West.” More on this thought.

How do we react to an offence from another? That offence might be a personal slight, or a murderous attack on ones family or even country. In admittedly over simplified terms, we might say that the Old Testament Biblical injunction is “an eye for an eye.” But what is that going to do? It is going to escalate a feud and there is no logic by which it might conclude. In addition, what happens to the souls of those gouging out each others eyes?

The New Testament Biblical injunction is “Turn the other cheek.” But what does that do? Perhaps the attacker will see the error of their ways and desist, but perhaps not. They will continue to strike people, and again, what happens to their soul?Buddhism takes the long view.In discussing Buddhism, there are a couple of premises we need to start with. The first is reincarnation. There is no escape. Even death does not put one out of ones suffering. You keep coming back until you get it right. This was the theme of Groundhog Day. Whether the reincarnation in literal or metaphorical, whether you come back as a human being or possibly a creature on another planet, these views vary. It is also dependant on you notion of time – your incarnations might be simultaneous. But there is no escape, we have to fix the situation.

The next is that your condition (usually suffering) now and in future incarnations is a function of the state of your consciousness (we might say soul, but that is not a Buddhist concept.). People doing bad things usually have not rationally chosen to do so, but are in turmoil. Think of an immature disturbed child.So, back to our attacker. The attacker is disturbed, they are in turmoil, they are in pain. Striking back only reinforces their self-justification that the world is against them, and turning the other cheek still leaves them in distress.

What would be a more developed approach? Suppose you are a parent and your child attacks you, screaming “Daddy, Daddy, I hate you, I hate you!” You do not strike back, and you do not turn the other cheek. You are the adult, you assume that your child is in distress and you seek to resolve that distress. It might be a momentary tantrum; it might be a sign of a serious problem; either way, your responsibility is to understand the problem and help your child work through it, over come it, etc. It is not about you, it is about them. You are the adult.

All of this of course assumes that you have resolved your own turmoils, and that you have the maturity and the skillful means to do what is needed.Now let’s look at the Law Abiding Citizen. Shelton has taken on the role of the adult. He has looked into each of the culprits – the two attackers as well as the prosecutors, defense attorney, and judge.The one who murdered his family is the most difficult. It will take very violent action to get his attention. Hopefully, with the benefit of his horrific death and a few thousand reincarnations in lower forms, he will be able to get somewhere. Rice is the easiest. He has the potential to be saved in this lifetime, and it is on him that Shelton is concentrating his parental efforts.And Shelton is a human being as well as a Bodhisattva, so his actions are not going to be perfect. He is still learning, and can also come to a higher level of understanding in this lifetime before he moves on.

This way of thinking has always been in American movies, (think of The Minister’s Wife, in which Cary Grant, even though an angle, still has things to learn) but not with the focus we are now beginning to see. Law Abiding Citizen is a prime example of this move to a Buddhist view.

Surrogates: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert 

Jonathan Mostow, the director of Terminator 3 (actually a pretty good film) has given us his new film Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis, a sort of reworking of The Stepford Wives crossed with Minority Report.

The premise is a by now familiar one, for it reworks the theme of the avatar or alternate self that we have seen explored in films like Total Recall, Strange Days and Existenz: we are to imagine a future society in which the creation of synthetic robots has reached such a state of perfection that nearly everyone has replaced himself with his own double. The only difference is that the synthetics are shinier and usually younger and more attractive versions of one’s self. People hide in their houses, where they sit on chairs with pods on their heads that enable them to inhabit their synths via long distance. You can be anyone you want: if you’re a man, you can be a beautiful young woman, say, or if you’re an older man you can replace yourself with a younger, more attractive double. Whatever you want.

The social effects of the replacement of everybody with synths is that crime is virtually nonexistent. So when a couple of murders take place, the Bruce Willis character and his sidekick are brought in as detectives to track down the person who is somehow managing to use a weapon that not only destroys one’s synth, but then fries the user’s brain in the chair where he sits. Eventually, we discover that the man who invented the synths has had a complete turn around and now wishes to destroy them. He wants to get rid of all this artifice and he has a plan that will destroy all the synths.

At the end of the film, there comes a moment when the Bruce Willis character can, at the touch of a button, destroy all the synths or else just turn the bad guys in. He opts to hit the button, and everybody in the streets suddenly falls down in their tracks. They’re all synths. After a few minutes, their operators, in various modes of dishevelment, come shuffling out of their apartments, blinking in the sunlight which they have apparently not seen for a long time.

Philosophically, then, there is a wonderful rejection of technology here on the part of the filmmakers, who recognize that all this electronic technology that enables the creation and proliferation of artificial selves really has only a numbing effect on us all; it covers and displaces our real humanity. Technology, as McLuhan never tired of pointing out, numbs the self: people in cars are often more hostile than people on the street, since the car numbs one’s sensitivities to others. Bombers have no psychological trouble dropping bombs on civilians, but ask one of them to pour gasoline on a child and light him on fire and you are most likely going to get some resistance. The airplane, you see, numbs the human sensitivity.

Surrogates has its thematic heart in the right place, certainly, for its central metaphor is all about how electronic technology, and indeed, the culture of hyperreality in general, enables us to replace and displace the world. As Baudrillard put it, we are building a gigantic double of the world. The real Lascaux must be shut down and closed to the public while an exact replica is built nearby. This is the Disneyfication of the world. The idea of the surrogate is basically a development of Disney’s animatronic robots which so excited him.

It can also be read as a metaphor for the Internet: online you can be anyone you want to be. Identities shift and change and become as slippery as demonic beings in Bardo. Is that woman you’re thinking of dating really a woman at all, or some 12 year old boy just having a few laughs at your expense? Who knows? We all like to hide, these days, behind false selves, electronic personae that cover and disguise who we really are. And it is all completely confusing and socially upsetting. We think, with all these clever gadgets that we’re “progressing” somehow, but we’re really just muddling up the world and creating ever more intricate webs of social chaos and confusion.

Surrogates makes another point, too, about the technological imitation of the astral body: the person sitting in the chair with the mask on is like someone asleep and dreaming, while the synth replicates his dream self, what Rudolf Steiner would call his “astral body.” We are using technology, then, to try to imitate the architecture of the subtle body, as William Irwin Thompson has talked about in his books.

So, the film has the right themes and has chosen good material to work with, but the problem is that the screenplay is not well written nor is the film well directed. It moves along at a jerky, spasmodic clip, and sometimes leaves plot mechanisms unexplained. There is also a certain dullness and lack of imagination about it: compare the look of the synths when their human flesh is off with the robots in Spielberg and Kubrick’s A.I. and you’ll see what I mean. Not much money was spent on the special effects, evidently. The film’s futuristic look, furthermore, basically duplicates that of Minority Report. There is little in the way of original production design and art direction here.

In short, I would skip Surrogates: it actually watches like a made-for-TV movie from the 1970s, one of those run of the mill cop dramas that, once upon a time, you could turn on at two o’clock in the morning. 

9: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert

Just to get right to the point: 9 is a visionary masterpiece. It represents what I have termed “visionary film” perfectly, and moreover, it embodies and plays out the myth of the battle against the machine that I wrote about in my book Celluloid Heroes & Mechanical Dragons four years ago. It is yet another chapter in the long battle against Hal 9000. 

The story is set in a post-apocalyptic world that takes up the baton from the ending of Spielberg and Kubrick’s A.I., which envisions a future in which human beings have become extinct from the earth and have been replaced by robots, or in the case of 9, by strange little assembled patchwork beings that we might as well call “homunculi,” since the director Shane Acker at one point in the film visually quotes from a Paracelsus text showing the creation of a homunculus. 

There are nine of these little beings, and they are menaced by strange monsters that are cobbled together by sentient machines which have been sent forth to destroy them. The protagonist, number 9 himself, inadvertently awakens a spider-like mechanical monstrosity with a single glowing red eye that very much reminds one of Hal 9000’s eye (note the reiteration of the “9″ motif). The nine little homunculi engage these mechanical monsters in battle and the film recounts their exploits in charming and very inventive fashion. By the end of the film, we learn that the nine are actually the nine components of a mad scientist’s personality, the very same mad scientist who brought the spider creature into being originally as a synthetic brain and then came to regret it. Then he built these nine little homunculi, invested them with components of his soul, and died. They are all that remains of humanity.

Nine, of course, is an interesting number mythologically speaking: in Rudolf Steiner’s microcosmology, for instance, the subtle body has nine components, three each for the body, the soul and the spirit. In the classical tradition, there were nine Muses, each one of which later became the patron of one of the arts, and so we have the association of 9 in conjunction with the humanities and the subtle body pitted against the world of Blake’s dark satanic mills, i.e. the realm of the machine as personified in this film by the various mechanical monsters.

The myth of the homunculus comes from alchemy, which involved the attempt to create in the laboratory a tiny little man: it is this alchemical myth which inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein, and which Goethe then borrowed for his epic Faust Part 2. It is the guiding myth behind the attempt of science to steal the creative powers from Nature and use them to create artificial beings, the very same beings which Rudolf Steiner termed “Ahrimanic beings,” meaning those little spirits and entelechies that inhabit our machines.

As 9 shows us, we humans are very much in peril from assault by our machines and we are engaged in a desperate struggle against them, without even realizing it. Consciously, we spend our daytime hours invested in the Myth of the Machine, building more and ever more of them, while at night we go to movies and watch projected dreams of how they are threatening to ruin our existence. And ruin it, they certainly have done: depression, divorce, drug addiction, gangs; all of these are stress responses to human beings attempting to live under the weight of servitude to monstrously gigantic mechanical systems that attempt to capture and enslave their spirits. In the movie, the spider machine that sucks the souls out of each of the nine remaining members of the human spirit is no mere metaphor: this is literally what our technologies are doing to us, sucking the life out of each and every one of us. We have become slaves to a vast and apparently sentient machine that demands, in order for us to receive social approval, the sacrifice of our personal creativity and individuality on behalf of economic slavery.

It is not, as anarchists like John Zerzan would have it, that civilization itself is the problem: the problem is too much of a good thing. Technology is all right when it is on a human scale and when it knows its place, when it blends into the background like the windmills in the paintings of the 17th century Dutch artists. Ask yourself this question as you look around your city streets, no matter where you are: what has happened to the artists and painters who used to occupy the hills and streetcorners of Paris at the turn of the twentieth century? Where have they gone, these painters? Let me answer for you: there is no longer any room for them. They have been pushed aside by traffic lights and grimy rumbling automobiles, which are full of people moving too quickly through their surroundings to even bother to have the kind of musing thoughts about the landscape that is necessary to produce the kind of ecology of consciousness in which such painters can thrive. When a society’s painters have vanished from the streets–as ours have very obviously have done–then the machines have won the battle.

9 is right: we are engaged in a desperate struggle to find our humanity in a world which demands the same compliance and routinization out of us that we would expect from a well functioning factory.      

Pandorum: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert

Christian Alvart’s Pandorum aspires to the great science fiction tradition in cinema that began with 2001: A Space Odyssey and continues down through Alien and Sunshine. In the latter film, there is evident not only an increasing pessimism regarding technology and space exploration in general, but there is also a decline of artistic quality, coherence and clarity of vision.

Pandorum takes a dim view of space exploration and colonization. Its plot concerns an exodus from earth of thousands of human beings aboard a space ark that is sent to colonize a newly discovered world named Tanis, which has a climate and environment exactly like that of earth’s. The entire crew is put into hypersleep for the many years that the voyage takes, and as the film opens, two crew members have awakened to find themselves in a dire situation. It is gradually revealed that other humans aboard the ship have awoken from their slumbers and gradually, over time, have devolved into a race of strange mutants reminiscent of the creatures in the movie I am Legend.

The problem with the film, though, is that it is composed of a mosaic of cliched scenes stolen from every science fiction film that has been made since Alien: it is a sort of cross between that film and the zombie genre, which has become increasingly and drearily more and more popular as time has transpired. The film lacks originality and it is completely uninspired.

Pandorum reminds me of all the low grade sci-fi movies of the 1970s, the epoch of the great drive in space operas: remember “gems” like Saturn 3 with Farrah Fawcett or Damnation Alley or Battle Beyond the Stars? Atrocious films, all, but fun to watch nevertheless. Pandorum exists on the level of these films, with slightly better special effects, but it lacks the charm and naivety of that wonderful epoch.

Science fiction films, it seems, are on the wane. They are thoughtlessly made and based largely on rehashes of films from the 70s and 80s. They dazzle with all their hi-tech artifice, but they are churned out by anonymous directors and screenwriters with no real love for, or understanding of, the genre.

I look forward to James Cameron’s Avatar, but it remains to be seen whether the genre can be rescued or is becoming as moribund as the Western was in the late 1970s.

Miyazaki’s Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea: A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

Nobody makes animated movies like Miyazaki. Disney is incapable of making a good film and nowadays relies for its credibility on distributing Pixar and Studio Ghibli movies as though to suggest that it had something to do with the wonderful creativity of those two studios, but in fact, Disney movies are so saccharine sweet and badly scripted that they are generally nauseating even to eight-year-old children. Disney, nowadays, it is safe to say, just can’t get it right because they don’t understand that filmmaking is not about recycling cliches but about good writing and original ideas.

And that’s what works about Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea: its originality. I took my five year old son to see this film and we were in an auditorium full of parents with children. I would like to point out that this is the first time I’ve ever been in such a scenario when, for the entire duration of the movie, I didn’t hear a single sound from any of the children. No crying, no squirming, no impatience. Just dead silence. The kids were riveted.

Disney has a few things to learn from Miyazaki. And one of those things is how to write a story that is simultaneously watchable for both parents and children, as Pixar’s movies are so often touted to be, and which, with few exceptions, really aren’t. Pixar movies are made mainly for children with a few adult gags thrown in on top of sickening kitsch and puerile writing. Miyazaki’s films are made with the same sensibility as the early work of Steven Spielberg, and are generally watchable for everybody.

Ponyo is Miyazaki’s version of the Flood Myth: a boy named Soskei discovers a strange half-human, half-fish hybrid washed ashore near his house on a cliff by the sea and decides to take care of it. He names it Ponyo and carries it around in a water pail. The creature likes the ham that Soskei feeds it, and it also tastes a bit of Soskei’s blood from a cut. From thereafter, Ponyo develops a deep, ardent desire to become a human being. Her father is the king of an underwater city; he once used to be human but has now developed a hatred for all things human, since human beings have polluted the sea.

When he manages to take his daughter Ponyo back from the humans, he discovers that she no longer wishes to live with him in his undersea kingdom. She wishes for arms and feet and grows them, spontaneously. Then she manages to let the floodwaters loose and the fish spirits follow her to land where they submerge civilization with a gigantic flood while she manages to find her way back to her beloved playmate Soskei.

The flood that washes over the earth, submerging bridges and roads and entire cities, manages to regress the earth back to the forgotten geological era of the Devonian age when the moon was much closer to the earth and looms in the sky like a giant: the floodwaters teem with huge, prehistoric looking extinct fish and trilobites.

Ponyo and Soskei are reunited, but this time Ponyo is in the form of a little girl, and the two set forth in a tiny boat on the floodwaters to find Ponyo’s mother, who had returned to the nursing center where she worked in order to help out. The remainder of the film concerns the children’s adventures.

There is not a cliched moment in this film. Everything is completely fresh and totally inventive.

It is Miyazaki’s exploration of the ancient mythological theme of the love of the spirit world for time: “Eternity is in love with the forms of Time,” as Blake once put it. Simultaneously, the film manages to rather subtly recapitulate the myth of our evolution from sea creatures who crawled upon land one fine day, apparently simply because they desired to live there and so developed the organs necessary for them to survive on land.

Industrial society is washed away by the earth’s Gaian forces and a new world is prepared, one in which humans will temper their technologies and live in harmony with the spirit world.

The kami beings of Shinto myth are never far from Miyazaki’s imagination. Indeed, sometimes one has the impression that he somehow manages to speak on their behalf against the depredations which industrial society has inflicted upon the earth.

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea is a masterpiece from Miyazaki and belongs somewhere in the same company with E.T. and Wall-E.

Indeed, I had almost completely forgotten what it’s like to watch an intelligent, well-written film. Hollywood, like everything else these days, is in crisis, and Ponyo stands out from the usual celluloid dregs like an island surrounded by an ocean of mediocrity.     

APOCALYPSE NOW
Directed and produced by Francis Ford Coppola

A movie review by John Lobell

Apocalypse Now is number five on Ebert’s list on this site of visionary movies (2001 is number 1). He writes: “Coppola’s epic retelling of The Odyssey combined with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a totally unique, absolutely original cinematic vision. Again, as with Kubrick and Lucas before him, the mythic structures are consciously intended, as Coppola shows us in the climax when his camera pans over a shelf of Kurtz’s books to reveal copies of Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance and of The Golden Bough. The central myth of Coppola’s movie is the death of the old, sick king and along with him, his entire crumbling kingdom of Iron age madmen….”

Ebert also has a two-part YouTube discussion of the move that you can click on the left of this site. Read the rest of this entry »

Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom: A Fresh Look, 25 Years Later

By John David Ebert 

After a casual viewing of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom over the weekend, I decided that it would be fun to write a retroactive review of the film, which I thought actually contains some interesting implications for where we’re at now, twenty five years later. This was the second of the Indiana Jones films, made just a few years after the release of Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1980, and it is the best of the sequels, which become gradually weaker with each subsequent entry in the series. Read the rest of this entry »