Robocop (2014)

It’s hard not to feel the sting of nostalgia when attending the sanitized multiplexes of today. With fantasy quickly seeping out of their stern façade to befit a dubious form of deceitful realism, and all of our cherished memories now being grinded into a gritty paste meant for uneventful digestion, us fans of cinematic excess are left to lumber like melancholy dinosaurs, watching helpless as vampiric corporations are relentlessly producing millions of standardized clones with the stolen DNA from old-time favorites, shamelessly producing wealth from the past efforts of truly inventive artisans. Given this story state of affairs, I was actually surprised to see how long it took for Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 hit Robocop to be given the “gritty reboot” treatment. Being a huge fan of the film, and its scathing critique of American consumer culture, I was happy to see it elude the jagged teeth of the Hollywoodian meat grinder. That is until the inevitable happened, and we were suddenly given a shimmering black new Robocop, glossed over endlessly to better draw attention away from its empty shell.

Released nearly two decades after the original, amidst growing political turmoil abroad and increasing concern with unethical technological upheaval, this new version could’ve easily provided a timely update on the original material, itself a cynical portrait of Reaganomics and the American arms race of the 1980s. And while Robocop 2014 is founded on a very intriguing premise involving military excess in the Middle East and the disturbing political power of American multinationals, the film is eventually dogged down by a lazy, self-indulgent screenplay that slowly transforms a potentially transcendent narrative into a neutered dud on the path to a contrived, action film finish (set on a helipad of all places).

MGM certainly tried hard to recapture many of the major tenets from the original hit, recycling its two most famous lines and memorable score with unabashed shame, but they ultimately lacked Verhoven’s cohesive vision, his biting humor, colorful direction, and every scrap of movie magic necessary to create a truly involving project from such an outlandish premise. The result is a schizoid entity made of two contradicting parts: a metaphysical treatise about free will in the face of rampant automatization and a simplistic revenge thriller with dull shades of sci-fi. With each important issue growing increasingly irrelevant and redundant until the uninspired final act, the spectator can only sulk as the whole ship sinks into the dark ocean of Hollywoodian eugenics, with talented thespians Gary Oldman and Jackie Earle Haley trying vainly to salvage it from oblivion.

Despite some inspired turns, Gary Oldman and Jackie
Earle Haley can't save the film on their own.

The film starts in similar fashion as the original by using a crude parody of right-wing American media in order both to lay out the basic tenets of the story in didactic fashion and to depict the dystopian society home to the story. However this time, none of Verhoeven’s trademark cheese is to be found, only a slick, impersonal stage unto which a stiff Samuel L. Jackson is hoisted as the unwavering flag-bearer of the American right. Using a copious amount of massive interactive screens, which he seamlessly handles to better help illustrate his self-serving drivel, Jackson hams it up in the glaring spotlight of what he calls “The Novak Report”, rambling on about the need to bring home Omnicorp’s brand of military androids to better help safeguard American streets from rampant crime. He then goes on to air an on-location report in occupied Iran to better demonstrate what he feels is the efficiency of combat machines in promoting peace and safety abroad. 

The film subsequently attains a dramatic high by depicting the reality of machine-controlled military hegemony in the Middle East. Battalions of humanoid androids and heavily armed bipedal tanks (recycled ED-209 from the original film) are seen roaming the streets of Tehran, scanning terrorized civilians lined up in front of their homes in search of elusive terrorists. When such terrorists do manifest, we can only watch and cry as they strap bombs around their chest and hopelessly rush forward in a desperate attempt to take out the soulless killers in their midst and draw international attention to their plight. When a disenfranchised teen joins the onslaught, throwing his explosive body unto the cold shell of a roving tank, I felt a bitter tear roll down my face, the very same tear that I shed over and over when learning about dead Middle Eastern kids. The realistic nature of the opening scene and the shocking inhumanity of right-wing American pundits that it depicts are just that powerful, and a chilling reminder of just how horrible the world has now become under the paternalistic embrace of the United States. Unfortunately, the film never reaches such dramatic highs again, its razor-sharp edge being slowly dulled by the need to forward the story from one stand-alone scene to the next.

Momentarily exiting the realm of Pat Novak, only to be confronted with a world filled with even more interactive screens, we soon learn the reasons for the absence of robotic law enforcement in the US. Apparently, some high-minded senator has passed a bill prohibiting the recourse to robots as upholders of human law. His rationale is simple: a machine will see nothing objectionable with the slaughter of children, pulling the trigger while intellectually unable to grasp the value of human life. Obviously, there is a certain amount of hypocrisy involved in promoting life-preserving laws that apply exclusively to US citizens, but that’s keeping in line with almost all of the actual American foreign policies. And while these laws originally prevent robotics mogul Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton) from landing lucrative security contracts with American concerns, it also spurs his Machiavellian brain, which quickly hatches of a foolproof plan to bypass national legislation. That plan is Robocop, a man/machine hybrid with a sufficient sensibility to dispel all ethical concerns with automated law enforcement. 

Thanks to some lazy developments, the film's
breathtaking overture soon fades out of mind.

Chosen as the guinea pig for Sellars' revolutionary moneymaking gimmick is tough cop Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman), whose recent brush with an influential mobster has left him the crippled victim of a brutal car bombing. Hoisting the slim remainders of his body into a cold robotic shell is empathic Dr. Dennett Norton (Gary Oldman), who bickers with fellow engineer Rick Mattox (Jackie Earle Haley) about the efficiency of organics in the process of robotics engineering. When the actual proficiency of Robocop is disproven by Mattox in a series of strenuous simulations, Norton is forced to alter his program, removing all human decision from strategic defense mechanisms, effectively giving his creation the “illusion of free will”. And while this is one of the film’s most intriguing concepts, it is never used to produce any sort of dramatic effect. Instead, we are ultimately given a soulless avenger for which the very notion of free will is irrelevant. This happens when Detroit’s voluminous crime databank is uploaded directly into Alex's brain, causing him to snap and go on a hectic crime-solving spree that lazily propels the narrative through the later part of the film, and all the way past a rather uneventful climax.

Running a full two hours, this new Robocop film features a rather dense narrative that is filled to the brim with intriguing ideas, relevant philosophical interrogations and effective jabs at the American right. Unfortunately, none of these elements are ever bundled in a cohesive whole, living and dying a short life as mere afterthoughts in a busy screenplay that is more concerned with pleasing everybody than actually exploring its more intriguing concepts to their full extent. This unfortunately creates a mixed bag of heterogeneous ideas, hesitantly thrown together to artificially broaden the film's appeal, with each relevant issue being systematically underplayed in order to "go on to the next idea". Hence, the terrifying depiction of American interventionism present in the opening scene is given absolutely no follow-up and the whole critique of military interference is subsequently flushed down the drain, along with scraps of the “free will” issue, which are imperiously brushed aside to promote the showcase of mindless action scenes near the film’s conclusion. By setting up such a vast net to catch the maximal amount of fish, the screenwriters involved here were obviously keen to give drama fans a semblance of tragic substance, while titillating sci-fi fans with tantalizing metaphysics and throwing in some bland gunfights to please the action crowd, never realizing that they were actually creating a schizoid brainchild in the process.

Using a clean, nearly surgical break in the narrative, the film actually plays out over two distinctive and nearly independent acts, one dedicated to Robocop’s background, the other being the mere exposition of his retribution, spurred on by the aforementioned glitch in his program. Feeling helpless and inadequate when brutally force-fed a whole database full of unresolved crimes, the protagonist's brain snaps and he becomes precisely what he was engineered NOT to be, namely a mindless crime-fighting machine. With Alex's painstakingly established humanity being suddenly removed from the equation, it now seems that the laborious character development present in the first act was all in vain, effectively prompting us to root for an entirely different protagonist altogether. At this point, what is now a full-fledged robotic entity will need to reclaim his lost humanity in order to become a true character once more. But seeing how this can only be achieved with the systematic elimination of various enemies, paramount of which is power mad creator Raymond Sellars, there is no humanity to be found in his method, nor in his sappy one-liners. From a spectator's point of view, it’s hard not to feel cheated by this sudden reversal of philosophy. After insisting heavily on the need to create a willful machine, after being subjected to the cyborg’s endless hesitations during his lengthy transformation into the final product, we are soon left with the exact opposite of what we were conditioned to expect, namely an automated thug who guns down bad guys like a mere turret and conducts an investigation by simply following computer-generated clues. Aside from baffling the spectator, this 180-degree spin also helps us make sense of the automated nature of narrative progression, which is made to fulfill a certain number of disparate spectator expectations in any way possible.

Revenge is befitting equally of men and machines.

While it is an effort in dramatic contradiction, the film's lazy screenplay also features some truly jarring plot devices. Using technological upheaval at once as a key dramatic issue and a versatile narrative tool, the film relies heavily on a crude overbid of explanatory interactive screens, which effortlessly convey vital stats and additional graphic material while dazzling us with their slick display. Such convenience is cranked up to perplexing extremes with Robocop's new-found ability to remotely assess the emotional state of secondary characters. After being reprimanded by his exasperated spouse for his lack of involvement in their family life, the fully-automated protagonist suddenly indulges in a grotesque form of emotional involvement, using his cybernetic cerebellum to conjure surveillance images of his son and running an "emotional assessment" (those words are actually seen flashing on the theater screen) to better delineate the young man's despair. There's no actual form of human interaction involved here, just a dubious form of robotic sensibility achieved through modern man's agency with screens rather than people. Hence, we ultimately end up watching characters watching screens for the better part of the film, being bombarded by facts and stats in a futile attempt to draw us into a data-dominated future. And while this narrative tactic could be said to propose a relevant critique of today’s fragmented news culture, there remains a blatant intellectual dishonesty in exposing such a would-be human story through constant recourse to cold screens and ineffectual numbers. The same is true for the few sequences featuring “The Novak Report”. While I agree that these sequences successfully emulate the disturbing experience of watching Fox News, that very experience remains an integrant part of the film.

And while many of the film's crucial issues are inhumanely conveyed through explanatory screens, not unlike a video game plot, the simplistic story structure is similarly mechanical in its clinical alternation of scenes. Proceeding from the mere juxtaposition of Alex Murphy's lost humanity and the marketing efforts made by Raymond Sellars to promote his creation, the screenplay clumsily juggles two distinct types of scenes: "Robocop" scenes in which the protagonist discusses his fate with some exasperated human and "Omnicorp" scenes in which the villain discusses profitability with his team in some posh office setting. Such laborious exposition is the film's bread and butter, showcasing nearly the full range of the art direction and acting departments while moving the two main characters forward like pegs on a game of Cribbage. The whole thing is actually so inane as to remind one of a TV show. And while some truly intriguing concepts initially help us swallow the pill, the redundancy of it all soon turns the spectator's experience into a tedious ordeal. You might be surprised by this, but there is a actually a saturation point past which the sight of balding Keaton endlessly pondering on his future in front of some insignificant modern art pieces spread around his office like trophies becomes a grueling chore. And that's notwithstanding the painfully unfunny antics of Samuel L. Jackson and Jay Baruchel, who delivers a telegraphed performance that probably earned him a chunk of change equally large as the amount of credibility he’s lost with me.

The numerous office scenes are not only painful to watch because of their dubious raison d’être, but also because they make use of actors equally dynamic and expressive as the surrounding furniture. With the exception of Gary Oldman and Jackie Earle Haley, who deliver heartfelt and affective performances as two colorful robot engineers, the rest of the cast is strictly on autopilot, which further conveys the idea of a mechanically produced film. Haley’s first appearance is actually quite exhilarating as he brazenly mocks Robocop for his humanity, further providing him with the delicious moniker “Tin Man”. He then goes on to deliver the punchiest line of the film, and a very nice throwback to Verhoeven's original. After seeing one of his own machines kick the shit out of Robocop during a simulated hostage situation, and reflecting on his scrawny response time, Haley blurts out: “I wouldn’t buy that for a dollar”! No he didn’t! Yeah, he just did…And it’s a shame too, since so few of the actors here were asked to go out of their way to create engrossing characters. That said, Swedish actor Joel Kinnaman is appropriately robotic in the titular role, but so is Michael Keaton, whose unsightly baldness is hardly fitting for a high-flying executive such as Raymond Sellars (even Donald Trump makes some kind of effort to conceal the cranial signs of old age). Never raising his voice, but simply delivering his lines in the most unaffected tone possible, Keaton is only out for his paycheck, and so his Canadian comedian Jay Baruchel, who offers a toned-down version of his manic-depressive antics to better please puritanical American audiences.

Believe it or not, there are limits past which the observation of Michael
Keaton blabbering endlessly in his office becomes a chore.

Visually speaking, the film has very little to offer save for the contents of some early scenes. Two of these scenes involve Robocop's rude awakening to his new self. After being initially switched on, the poor man can hardly process the implications of his new state. Freeing himself from his captors, he then proceeds to elope from his containment chamber and run scared through Omnicorp's China-set robotics plant. Passing rows and rows of Chinese drones assembling parts in aseptic metal surroundings on his way to the loading dock, the protagonist then leaps over the outside fence and falls into the watery depths of a large rice field, against which the ominous plant towers like a sore thumb, the unsightly consecration of progress in our globalized economy. And there's another successful jab against corporate culture, which the film ultimately embraces by softening each subsequent blow. Then, there is that traumatic exercise in psychological adjustment, which sees Dr. Norton unveil the interiors of the protagonist's armor. As all robotic limbs are removed, the abdomen dismantled and the breastplates parted, what is left is a pair of lungs confined to transparent sacks, one hand, one spinal cord and a head fitted with a transparent cranium showcasing a damaged brain patched with all sorts of computer chips. That scene is actually awe-inspiring in its ability to break down humanity to its simplest expression. And despite some unsatisfying later developments, it is one that will accompany you long after leaving the theater.

Unfortunately, the remaining imagery is dubious at best, especially when it comes to the film's lackluster action sequences. The wonderful design of Robocop’s shell is initially transferred as is from the original film, complete with shimmering gray breastplates and a black plastic midsection. But that’s all changed when Sellars brazenly asks that they “make it black” in order to sell it more easily. As for the ED-209, theirs is almost a carbon copy of the original design, but it is sadly deprived of the evocative stop-motion animation that made their clumsy progression so amusing. Hence, while it is peopled with similar automated contraptions, this new iteration of crime-plagued Detroit is the scene of far less involving action sequences, the whole of which functions here as broken clockwork, or to put in contemporary terms, as a sub-par video game. Despite a crude overbid of fired shots, documentary-filmmaker José Padilha fails to generate any sort of excitement from million-dollar set-ups, most disappointing of which is a tedious night-vision confrontation with Antoine Vallon’s henchmen that translates onscreen as a mere alternation of really bad POV shots of Robocop hitting his targets through some hokey thermal tracking system and counter-shots of him being hit by enemy fire. There’s no kineticisim involved here, nor any sense of menace against the protagonist. It’s a shame too, since the film’s only saving grace seemed to derive from entertaining action sequences…

As Jean-François Lyotard posited in his study of postmodern culture, meta-narratives now tend to erode as a certain form of “everyday” realism is being cultivated by peddlers of mass entertainment. Hence, the notions of good and evil are now becoming increasingly blurred in a bid to create more realistic, but eventually less meaningful film characters. Transforming the highly stylized Tim Burton Batmans into the drab political thrillers of today is one such example of the death of cathartic moral tales. And so is the present film, where corporate greed and the suffering of occupied nations are mere facts to be coldly appraised by the audience. No longer are we to bask in the unscrupulous villainy of Kurtwood Smith’s Clarence Boddicker and Ronny Cox’s Dick Jones while wishing for their violent demise. No longer are we to enjoy larger-than-life characters for everything is now life-like. And while some would call the new-found humanity of film villains “nuance”, I call it narrative “indeterminacy”. Hence, by locating Michael Keaton’s Raymond Sellars in a emotional gray zone, the film actually downplays the importance of its anti-corporate message, playing for keeps instead of indulging in truly vitriolic excess. Drama being the expressive counterpart of life, the present brand of would-be realistic drivel fails to involve our most-deeply held feelings, grazing at the surface of our cognitive minds instead, and provoking nothing but a lukewarm tingle instead of the emotional torrents stimulated by 1980s cinema.

So little humanity left in this new Robocop...

In the end, Robocop is a very disappointing film and a rapid drop into the abyss for the spectator exalted by its breathtaking opening. If I were to draw a graph of my enjoyment thereof, it would feature a straight diagonal line stretching from top to bottom. I was amazed at first to see the amount of respect bestowed on Iranian suicide bombers. Given a distinct voice (their dialogue was actually shot in their own language) and some well-deserved empathy, these terrorists go out more sadly than any of their American counterparts. For me, this meant a revolutionary departure from the average Hollywoodian action film, where there is no place for anything foreign but in body bags or the throats of some exotic starlets. Unfortunately, such radiant humanism merely exacerbated my disappointment with the film’s rocky unfolding and its shockingly overdetermined finale. And despite my first impression, it now seems that anything good stemming from my spectatorial experience was purely incidental, the fruit of a confused screenplay meant to corral as many genre fans as possible and a very timely reminder of what contemporary Hollywood is all about: market research realism.

2/5  Not unlike the titular protagonist, this new version of Robocop is strictly the result of corporate thinking, a slick but cold product with a human face meant to conceal its hollow core.

Baise-moi (2000)

Distributed under the title Rape Me in some parts, Baise-moi actually means Fuck Me. And this is precisely what it means within the narrative. The two protagonists do not wish to be raped. Actually, one of them is a rape victim gone mad, using a macho brand of violence to finally exert some control over her sexual life, making male desire a mere operative tool in her own quest for satisfaction. And so, it is not surprising that the two directors would categorically reject the erroneous title, which was probably used only to eschew the use of the word "fuck", hence pointing out to what controversy is all about in the US: vulgar language and its pervasive influence on youth. The fact that the word 'fuck' is the most precise and most logical term to describe the random sexual encounters depicted in the film has no bearing on anyone who would have the nerve to refer to it as Rape Me, a title that should be mercilessly hunted down and invalidated instead of the film itself.

Baise-moi and the art of depicting "coups de bites" (dick hits):
women need not be subtle when tackling phallocentric tastes

That said, with nary any element overstepping the boundaries of traditional exploitation cinema, save for the gender of its directors, Baise-moi should've gracefully dodged any controversy, had it not been for the uptight rating boards who have now taken the burden of moral authority in light of the dwindling influence of the Church. Yes, the film does contain some hardcore sex. So, you just need to apply the rules concerning pornographic material, slap the film a well-deserved X-rating, and get over it already! There's no need to make a big fuss about it. Even I, who rarely ever has sex, still consider it an integral part of life, finding no discomfort in its graphic depiction onscreen. Furthermore, sex is a central tenet of the film, which unfortunately plays more like a trashy genre film that any truly dramatic attempt at depicting their characters beyond the veil of flesh. And so its depiction is crucial to narrative construction. After all, the story does concern two women's quest for freedom in a phallocentric world, which constitutes but a novel angle with which to frame an otherwise sub-par serial killer road movie. Their re-appropriation of sex within the scope of their own, personal desires thus obviously warrants its onscreen depiction, and perhaps, just perhaps was controversy born out of that deconstruction of the male dictates in terms of pornography. As for the parallel between sex and violence, it should come as no surprise for genre film fans, whom are mature enough to understand that they are both intrinsic human desires, and perhaps the last visible remnants of what lies beyond the masks of normalcy which we all slavishly adorn to better thread waters in the sea of business.

Starring porn stars Karen Bach and Raffaëla Anderson, the narrative concerns two disgruntled women who commit their first murder while under the throes of passion, both during an argument about the agency of men over their respective lives. Hooker Nadine strangles her roommate after she comments on her limp attitude toward shady boyfriend Francis, while poor immigrant Manu shoots her own brother when he dubs her a slut after she was raped in an underground parking garage. Stealing some 10,000 francs from her brother's stash, Manu then kidnaps Nadine, whom she randomly meets on the subway, and forces her to drive them to Paris, where they eventually team up and engage in a lucrative killing spree involving numerous sexual pit stops. After we see the girls shoot and fuck their way through half of France, in what basically amounts to an X-rated version of a romantic teenage fantasy, the film ends on a surprisingly harmonious note, making us contemplate the void in the protagonists' lives in particularly effective fashion while opening up the dreary perspective of absence with rare emotional precision, which helps balance the nihilistic stance of the narrative a bit.

Discussing suicide as the only worthy solution to their woes, the
protagonists play along the dotted lines of outsider narrative,
which uses nihilism as self-explanatory dramatic fuel

Shot with a cheap, hand-held video camera that garners interesting results only when used subjectively (such as when it adorns the viewpoint of Nadine getting fucked or that of a young thug getting beat up), the film is devoid of all production values. With its highly unrealistic depiction of violence and ultra realistic depiction of sex (shot using all the loving close-ups of hard-core pornography), the film is bound to catch casual genre fans off guard. Mind you, Baise-moi is not pornographic in nature. As directors Despentes and Trinh Thi so rightfully put it, "if it's not made for jerking off, then it ain't pornography". And, believe me, you probably won't feel like jerking off to this film, which hardly ever dissociates sex from violence, or at least, the possibility of violence. With its wide array of operative images, including close-ups of squirming female flesh, erect penises, bloodied heads and cocaine-snorting, Baise-moi definitely falls into the larger exploitation category, cramming all the dirty stuff that midnight audiences love into one handy 77-minute film.

But while it does fiddle with the classic codes of exploitation cinema (remember Thriller, which also featured hard-core pornographic elements within a traditional revenge storyline), the film is not made to rake in the dough in the same way as traditional exploitation does, namely because it features aggressive female sexuality in its midst, dragging the focus away from the phallocentric fantasies made to cater to the average genre film fans. Hence, the Thelma and Louise parallel becomes helpful in trying to better understand the film, for insofar as Ridley Scott's road movie removes Billy and Wyatt's hairy feet from the pedal toward freedom, so too does Baise-moi manages to conjure the memory of Henry and Otis and bring about a direly needed twist on the buddy killers film. Yet, contrary to Thelma and Louise, the present film also involves a specifically feminine take on narrative discourse, if not on filmic practices per se. The end result is a film that fails to really transcend the genre traditions from whence it came, but succeeds in bringing along a novel, eminently feminine outlook on its material. But ultimately, the subversion is only skin-deep, slightly transforming our perception of what would've been dubbed a cautionary tale against sexual abuse and social stigma (had it been shot by males), but which is now called a liberating woman's cry (seeing how it was actually shot by females), while still appealing mostly to undiscriminating thrill-seekers and jaded genre fans.

Grainy, blurred and over-saturated,
Baise-moi looks absolutely dismal

All in all, it is hard for me to qualify the film as more than "Average", for it is not. Once you get past the fact that the film contains actual shots of penetration, you can switch to passive mode and slowly slide into the catatonic stupor of casual genre fans, appreciating the film only as a buffet of juicy morsels. And while Baise-moi does manage to stand out from the formless mass of genre films, if only for the quantity of hardcore sex that it contains, I won't support any attempt at locating it anywhere near the realm of high art, for it is precisely because of its belonging to a very specific brand of popular entertainment that the film manages to formulate a critique of the phallocentric codes contained therein. By dragging it upward, away from the prosaic, foul-smelling depths of exploitation theaters, that is how the film loses its raison d'être. Because only alongside other exploitation efforts will it really stand out and make a difference in our appraisal thereof. That said, while Baise-moi itself is not good at all, at least it managed to spark some inspired intellectual discussions regarding the politics of representation within the fantasy world of genre cinema. Which does elevate it above esthetic concerns and proves once again that the act of censorship necessarily provokes adverse effects: instead of making it so that a film isn't seen, censorship rather bestows instantaneous cult status upon their "targets", thus insuring their perennity and widespread recognition.


2/5 A dismal-looking film that transcends exploitation only insofar as people can find relevance in the fact that it was made by two women. Not unlike The Human Centipede (Full Sequence) recently or the video nasties of the 1970s-1980s, it is mostly a censorship-fueled success.

Motel Hell (1980)

This here wasn't the first time I attempted to watch Motel Hell. The last time I did, I was so repulsed by the dated look thereof that I simply switched off and proceeded to watch Needful Things instead (which happened to be featured in the same bargain boxed set). And while the latter actually proved to be worse, at least it boasted some kind of visual hook into the narrative. Thanks to some spotless cinematography, it was easy to feel right at home in Castle Rock, fast taking the pulse of this small coastal community with the sight of each old homestead surrounded by endless porches. The many problems plaguing the screenplay were invisible then, for at the threshold, the film looked very good. As for the former film, it opens with bland, almost monochrome shots virtually devoid of content. Rory Calhoun posing in front of a defective neon sign that reads Motel Hell(o) isn't exactly what you could call a glorious entry into any film, low-budget horror or otherwise. Seeing this once again, I now managed to resist the urge to press 'Eject'. And ultimately, I was rewarded for my patience with some juicy assets nestled at the heart of the film, making it a flawed but memorable entry in post-TCM country horror.

The film offers some juicy morsels to those
who can get past the atrocious cinematography

As you might ascertain from the tagline ("It takes all kinds of critters to make farmer Vincent's fritters") , the film is a humorous cannibal romp with soft teeth. It stars Rory Calhoun as a Southern farmer and motel owner who sells smoked bits of former tenants to unsuspecting customers, earning himself somewhat of an illustrious reputation amongst locals. But while you'd expect some systematic narrative mechanisms involving a steady flow of victims ringing the bell on the front desk, Motel rather develops as a bitter-sweet family drama that chronicles the attempts made by Vincent and his sheriff brother to woo a young woman sheltered in the titular locale. The film actually begins with the appearance of the farmer's "angel", salvaged from a crashed motor bike during one of his nightly raids for victims. Investigating the "tragic" event, brother Bruce also becomes infatuated with the blonde orphan, soon coming at odds with his brother for her heart, and threatening to destroy the family business in the process. The climax sees the two men involved in a testosterone-filled chainsaw duel that will certainly manage to conjure the fading memories left by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (actually produced six years after the present film).

To be totally frank with you, I must say that this scene is one of the two main selling points of a film that one will surely remember only anecdotally. "What's Motel Hell?", one might ask. "It's that film where they harvest people like carrots", would reply another. "Oh, you mean the one with the chainsaw duel at the end?" Yeah, that's right. This is indeed the kind of outing made memorable by tasty bit parts that barely manage to elevate the ensemble to the level of respectability. As for the rest, as for the very unconvincing romance involving aging Calhoun and twenty-something Terry (Nina Axelrod) and all the narrative weight it is supposed to possess, one will watch the spectacle thereof with the acute eye of soap opera fans, trying to artificially infuse dramatic power within.

Some chainsaw-filled fun near the end helps
elevate the film to the level of respectability

Actually, the whole thing plays out more like a soap, then an horror film per se, focusing on the petty jealousies of Vincent's siblings and the mundane goings-on of the farmer's existence, rather than on the twisted fate of their victims, whom are all as underdeveloped in terms of characterization as the common cattle. And thus, the crux of the drama lies in the lingering revelation awaiting Terry, who is seen as the rightful successor of farmer Vincent, and heir to his secret meat-smoking method. Will she refuse to humor her elderly saviors, or will she instead take on their trade? But more importantly, will she survive sister Ida and the boys' quarrels over her long enough to actually make that decision? That is what you will be poised to anticipate as one finds horror only in the disinterested attitude of the farmers in regards to their choice of livestock.

Yet, even the most mundane dramatic aspects of the narrative strangely manage to stick to the pan, if you can get past the atrocious decors, lame photography, literal acting and slow pacing best befitting TV shows. As the plot unfolds, the characters become increasingly compelling, often coming close to embodying the essence of Southern hospitality, family values and responsible farming. With the signature sequence of the film depicting how "humanely" the human livestock is slaughtered, one becomes nearly adamant to peg Vincent as a good guy who, by his own accord, is crusading to solve both the overpopulation and the hunger problem all at once. And although the film ultimately settles for a contrived finale in which his victims are freed and his production shut down, in which his sheriff brother is redeemed, after being introduced as a potential rapist, most of the drama is localized squarely in the inner sanctum of the motel, where Terry is getting acquainted with her new surroundings. Short of being the main character, it seems to be her ordeal which is delineated by the narrative and not that of the farmer's victims. But then again, the film is a tad scatter-brained in its attempts at creating a unique viewpoint from which to view the narrative, unfolding instead as a series of simple happenings systematically branching toward familiar, obligatory places.

Family picnics in the country carry more
dramatic weight than the ordeal of human cattle

As for the hardcore horror fans, which should've been considered more specifically in the elaboration of this half-baked genre parody, they are treated to a few grotesque scenes containing some rather unique imagery, all of it pertaining to the weird "culture" of human beings in soft soil. Forget the overdetermined images of metal bars and grits-filled troughs, and bask instead in the originality of this new culture, the gem of the present screenplay. Aside from that, you've got some outrageous moments of comedy peppering the story, including the apparition of a sadomasochist couple whipping their way through the contents of a motel room in a desire-fueled frenzy. You've got a metal band named "Ivan and the Terribles", thrown off the road by farmer Vincent. But witty wordplays aside, the humor doesn't come across with much success, with the crudest jokes dabbing into flat-out infantilism, making horror but a secondary element of the narrative, visible only in the mundane resort to cannibalism.

In the end, Motel Hell looks and feels like a quickly produced TV movie, with some inspired ideas thrown in the mix to better guarantee its perennity amongst adventurous horror fans. That is, if you can remain unfazed by the amateurish production values and lack of energy in the creative development of the project. Then, you will uncover secrets that will shock you. So I will recommend this film to the curious who wish to behold some unique imagery. Let it be known however, that one will need an open mind to really get into the story and care for grayish characters that cruelly lack intensity and even grayer decors that will remind one of a hillbilly's home movies shot in and around the family farm.


2/5 If it weren't for that crazy scene involving the humane slaughter of half-burrowed human carrots, the movie would've surely sunk into oblivion. Recommended only for the most curious and most undiscriminating or horror fans.

The Burning (1981)

Uninspired title, uninspired film; The Burning is a formulaic vehicle for Tom Savini's stellar FX and a slippery stepping stone for a plethora of future stars, including Seinfeld's Jason Alexander and Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein. Throughout the years, the film has managed to garner a mostly undeserved reputation as one of the strongest "summer camp" slashers of the early 80s, which is at best a dubious honor. Truth of the matter is, there's nothing so novel or unique here as to really stimulate the viewer, especially after ample servings of similar outings, the bulk of which thread water in a sea of moronic jump scenes and awkward teenage coupling. And at heart, The Burning is no exception, being narrowly salvaged by uncut gore scenes and the mild historical interest provided by the presence of many stars to be.

The tacky cover should tell you
precisely what's in store

A trip down Memory Lane
I remember seeing The Burning about a decade ago, during one of the horror film marathons I used to organize with a like-minded friend. We would go to La Boîte Noire (Montreal's finest home video outlet) and pick four films which appealed to our immediate desires, then dash home and indulge in the giddy thrills of our earlier years. Virtually every sub-genre and every era we covered, from classic monster movies to contemporary gore jobs and everything in between, imposing as few limits on ourselves as possible.

During our scuffles for titles, we came across this tacky-looking film cover featuring a shadowy man with outstretched arms holding a nasty-looking pair of shears. Considering the conventional backdrop composed of log cabins over shadowy woods, it wasn't hard to envision the premise: horny teenagers are chased by a slasher hiding in the woods around some summer camp on the East Coast. The teenagers are then picked off one by one by the slasher, who catches them off-guard, then proceeds to stab or cut them under various angles, impaling at least one camper to a tree in the process.

The obligatory shower scene is located way too
early to create any real sense of foreboding

At face value, the product didn't seem interesting, evoking rather boredom from redundancy than entertainment. But then, there were those immense shears, and all the different kinds of violence they could implement. The possibilities seemed endless at the time. And seeing how we weren't concerned by the promise of nudity, having outgrown our girly magazine phase, the promise of latex arteries being slashed open and rubber bodies getting penetrated by blades, all the cutting, impaling, stabbing, sawing that these weapons implied, this is what appealed to our fiendish, infantile desires.



Art and giblets
You see, there is a craft to creating realistic gore effects, a craft just as imaginative and brain-wracking as set design, and which is something that horror fans enjoy even more. Yet, it is almost universally frowned upon as something vulgar and unworthy of praise. Not unlike color photography when it first came about, and was denied any artistic potential by retrograde wise men who stroked their beard and looked at the past for inspiration. Clearly, there's a double standard at play here, and it is mostly informed by popular tastes in matters moralistic. Hence, when a master painter depicts the human body with precise accuracy, he is called great. When a cartoonist draws the face of his subject in vivid details, witnesses are in awe of his art. But when one slices the body open, even though that body is a meticulously duplicated figure, then high-strung sensibilities immediately come into play and start interfering with the appreciation of art. People will suddenly become hostile to the craftsman, whose work proves too close for comfort, an uneasy reminder of what the human form, in all its perceived glory, veils in terms of glistening viscera and dripping arteries.

The Burning is a masterpiece of gory art. Here, a young
Fisher Stevens learns of the slasher's wrath firsthand.

And that's only one of the two major downsides of creating gore FX, the other being the lack of exposition that this form of art has within the medium that is horror. Guys get to see their work onscreen for scant seconds. They spend hours designing and crafting body parts that leak in the proper way, or splatter according to script, all of that for less than three minutes of screentime in a 90-minutes film chock-full of untold filler, scenes of teenagers wandering through the forest, cheap scares, and cheap tits, usually borrowed from young actresses in need of work. But there is a reward in all this: the fact that people come to see the film precisely for those three minutes. And for the three minutes of nudity. The plot around it all is just filler, and it runs in circles, precisely not to alienate audience members, hooking them with the comforting knowledge of forecoming gore or nudity at every predictable turn.

People don't go see slashers because they enjoy the victimization of women, nor because they must comply with murderous instincts. They do so only to appreciate flesh in the most visceral, but ultimately most forbidden fashion. Just think of a roller coaster. Whether you dress it up like a dragon, a train, or a spaceship, it's appreciation will vary only in accordance with the amount of thrills that it provides. It would be naive to think that people see themselves soaring into outer space after being strapped into the Magic Mountain ride. Just like it is naive to think that people play out psychological angst while watching horror films. Horror films are mostly meant to make you react to a rapid series of stimuli, to engage you in the thrills of sexual awakening and/or murderous rage, making you probe just beyond the veil of flesh and into a world that is so real as to endanger the fragile balance of lies that constitute modern life and the comforting thought that we are somehow more than just flesh and blood.


The Scalding
Nostalgic digressions aside, The Burning constitutes a typical example of "summer camp" slashers. The formulaic storyline is punctuated by a series of twists that could be arranged in virtually any order, seeing how the characters barely evolve through the course of the narrative, except when their deaths bring about some mild emotions from their peers. Yet, there is some great gore effects to marvel at... and wait for endlessly. There is some full frontal (female) nudity. But nothing to write mom about. Moreover, the film makes quite a narrative blunder that greatly threatens the fun that one could derive from it. The fact that the killer is clearly identified from the beginning makes it impossible for the viewer to engage in any form of speculation, leaving us only to wonder why he goes on a killing spree without targeting the one character most directly responsible for his accident. What we are left with is only gore and tits, basically.

The identity of the killer is revealed
way too early for us to indulge in speculation

For those who care, the story involves an abusive caretaker who was inadvertently set afire when a group of disgruntled campers pulled a nasty prank on him several years back and left him for dead in the woods. Now, instead of fast-forwarding to the same camp in the present day, the film follows the caretaker as he is committed to the burn ward of a big city hospital (shot in near total darkness), then released after a painful recovery. Upon being let loose in the city, he quickly picks up a hooker and stabs her with a pair of scissors, establishing from the get-go that it is he, the shear-wielding slasher. Then, it's all a question of who goes first when the film cuts to the summer camp where Tommy, one of the murderous pranksters from the opening scene, now works as a counselor. With a cast of characters only slightly rounder than archetypes, whatever happens next in terms of exposition is not nearly as interesting as the minute details of the teenagers' foretold deaths.

For those who can appreciate it, I must say that the film is deliciously retro in its musical selection, respectfully paying homage to the gialli, the original slasher films, with its high-pitched, almost contrapuntal use of keyboard sounds. But most importantly, the film is of some historical interest because it contains the work of several future celebrities. Oscar winners Fisher Stevens, Holly Hunter and Harvey Weinstein all used the film as a springboard in their trip toward excellence. And so did Jason Alexander, known worldwide as Seinfeld's George Costanza. And while they are not at their best here, at least they were given that early chance to shine. Which is all the more reason to support cheaply-produced, widely-distributed exploiters, nay, to demand the return of cheaply-produced, widely-distributed exploiters as part of a business strategy to rejuvenate the Hollywoodian machine.

Becsause despite what the detractors of these films will say, these is art to be found in them, and beauty. For the craft of dismemberment is also a celebration of art, and of humanity in its depiction of the most fragile, most prosaic elements of our existence, the soft flesh and the flowing blood which makes us what we are. Then there is the sculptural beauty of teenage Venuses. The spectacle of youth, unveiled by flashy, branded garments. The spectacle of youth in its intrinsic beauty, not in the manufactured beauty of products. But most importantly, the showcasing of humanity in its simplest form, away from the overly intellectualized dramatic humanity of meta-narratives. Hence, the constant reminder of death which characterizes the horror genre, and which finds its expression in the vulnerability of our Earthly beings of flesh and guts, driven not by higher ideals, but by pressing instincts. The celebration of human as animal, and not as a Godly creature, which is at once the genre's driving force and the origin of criticism against it.


Why I digress
Why I digress is obvious. It is because there is so very little to say about The Burning, except to invite readers to look at the tag fastened around it: "A Harvey Weinstein production of a Tony Maylam summer camp slasher starring Jason Alexander, Fisher Stevens and Holly Hunter, with makeup and gore effects by Tom Savini". Given the rigid codes to which this kind of films obeys, you should get a fairly precise idea of what to expect merely from that description. And if you're looking for something more, well, you're not gonna find it. The film is fun for the shears, and for the spectacle of Jason Alexander with hair all the way to his forehead. That's it.


2/5 A fairly standard summer camp gore job with some historical interest deriving for the presence of many stars to be.

The Whisperer in Darkness (2011)

Commissioned by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, the organization which brought the infamous Call of Cthulhu to the screen back in 2005, this ambitious new adaptation was shot using the "Mythoscope" process ("a mix of modern and vintage techniques", as stated on the promotional website) in a bid to create "the most authentic and faithful screen adaptation of a Lovecraft story yet attempted". Oblivious to the monumental contradiction involved in trying to remain "faithful" to Lovecraft's elusive tale of madness, the makers of this film have managed instead to undermine, and even compromise the impregnable opacity of the Cthulhu mythos through an overbid of naive imagery meant to ape 1930s horror films. The end result is at once a commendable effort (in terms paper-mâché) and a very dubious achievement (in terms of adaptation).

Gaps in representation - Exhibit A
R'lyeh as expressionistic nightmare (The Call of Cthulhu)

Gaps in representation - Exhibit B
R'lyeh as postmodern fantasy (South Park, S14E13)

Imagining is always better than seeing
(or how Lovecraftian tales elude depiction)

Members of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society are people of obvious reverence and dedication to the grand master's work. Unfortunately, their very enterprise is meaningless, as the Lovecraftian mythos will forever elude description. A case in point is the feature-length adaptation of The Whisperer in Darkness, which takes great pride in trying to recapture the gloomy atmosphere of the New England countryside by using elaborate models and lovingly painted backgrounds. Where it fails is in its naive depiction of the mi-gos and their famed "brain cylinders". Up until now, these creatures and contraptions existed only as feverish scraps of dreams salvaged from the tale of a madman. But now that they have taken definite shape, their mystique has all but vanished. The resulting film, no matter how carefully crafted it is, remains the umpteenth proof that one cannot successfully adapt Lovecraft to the screen... unless your name is Stuart Gordon and you stay as far as possible from the source material.

Things always look scarier from afar

For those unfamiliar with the eponymous short story from which the film derives, I shall provide a short synopsis. Following an historical flood in the farmlands of Vermont, many locals report sightings of weird carcasses floating amidst tree trunks and debris. While skeptical at first, folklorist Albert Wilmarth eventually engages in a correspondence with one of these locals, aging farmer Henry Akeley, who vies to substantiate his own sightings with material evidence (photos of alien footprints and one strange artifact). After receiving a certain number of letters from an increasingly alarmed Akeley, Wilmarth eventually receives a formal invitation to share in the bucolic splendors of Vermont in order to better grasp the extent of the alien invasion. Obviously, this is all a trap, a trap set up by the deviant mi-gos, a sentient race of flying fungi from outer space hellbent on hiding their existence from humans. Naively enough, Wilmarth falls into that trap, but manages to elude the creatures' grasp momentarily. He then proceeds to figure out how they have harvested Akeley's brain using a custom preservation cylinder and replaced his body with that of a dummy. He also overhears talks of a strange ritual meant to open a rift between Earth and the mi-gos' home planet of Yuggoth (Pluto). Rushing to the scene, he ultimately tries to save Earth from invasion.

What is a mi-go? Let us first consider this pressing question when trying to appraise the relevance of the present film. According to Lovecraft, a mi-go is "a great crab with a lot of pyramided fleshy rings or knots of thick, ropy stuff covered with feelers where a man's head would be." But according to the makers of this film, it is something much less intriguing, and much more rigidly delineated, something that seems to leave the realm of imagination the second it lands onscreen. Now, the very vagueness of the description above is perhaps its greatest literary strength, for it puts the reader at odds against his own sense of wonder. It also insures a lasting legacy for the creatures thus depicted by making them a million things at once, as many things as there are people to try and imagine their features. In that regard, the author's deliberate use of vague and mysterious words such as "stuff", "self-luminous", "things", "growths" and "half-polypous" is meant precisely to create a gap in representation between the readers of his stories, the rationale being that the sight of the monsters depicted is too much for the human mind to process. Hence, remaining "faithful" to Lovecraft can never amount to positing any representation of his words as the definitive one.

Gaps in representation - Exhibit C
The colour as translucent jellyfish (19 Nocturne Boulevard)

After all, there is no definite shape for the limbs of Cthulian creatures, nor is there a shape for the impossible angles covering the lost city of R'lyeh. As for the colour out of space, it is one that varies from reader to reader, boggling the mind of anyone who would attempt to imagine it, for it is, by definition, unimaginable. The colour is perhaps the best example of Lovecraftian excess, as it quite explicitly fails to fit in the spectrum of human understanding. For those unfamiliar with the short story of the same name, the colour out of space is one that possess no equivalent on Earth. That is why it is dubbed "colour". It is for lack of a more precise term. Hence, if one were to show the colour using Earthly means, they would immediately betray its nature. And so, we can see how the embodiment of anything Lovecraft transforms it into something lesser than what it was, namely a glimpse of otherworldly horror.

While the writer often offers elaborate descriptions of sets and moods, he rarely gives his monsters too many details so as to preserve the unholy mystique surrounding their apparition. Unlike Homeric tales, where every single element is rendered using wordy descriptions of epic length, Lovecraft often circumvents monstrous depictions. Which basically means that, these creatures he mentions cannot be described accurately, given their alien shape and unimaginable features which push observers beyond the limits of sanity. That said, they shouldn't be described at length because as many things horrific, seeing them amounts to much less than imagining them. And this is particularly true here, as the mi-gos are so carefully crafted by the nerds at the helm so as to alienate the imagination of all who would rather revel in their own personal fears than to partake in the fears imposed by others. And ultimately, it is a very egotistic pursuit to try and create "definitive" incarnations of literary creatures such as the the flying devils from the present short story, or the orks and dwarves of The Lord of the Rings, which become breathing stereotypes under the thumb of Peter Jackson and crew. And thus the literary mystique crumbles under the weight of rigid images meant to crystallize their constantly fluctuating meaning.

Written using the first person, Lovecraft's stories all share the intimate tone necessary to convey madness as a quintessentially personal experience. Monstrous occurrences, feverish dreams and uneasy impressions, all are detailed as if right in front of the reader. Insofar as film rather takes the "invisible" approach to the narrator, it contributes to the deconstruction of Lovecraft's entire enterprise. In that regard, it would be somewhat of a crude mistake to equate voice-over narration with literary narration, as the former is involved in an antagonist relationship with the images it accompanies. At best, voice-over narration is a worthy complement to the images onscreen. At worst, it will completely ruin an author's attempt at cultivating ambiguity (see Blade Runner). But here, it is merely a way to convey a false sense of faithfulness to the story. It does not add anything more to an adaptation that has shed the diary mode of storytelling as soon as it chose to emulate the theatrical techniques of early Hollywood. What is thus found lacking is the personal "experience" of vision conveyed by Lovecraft's characters and which helps locate the mythos outside the realm of natural perception, and into the realm of madness. Which is something that only Brakhage or other such talented experimental filmmakers can hope to achieve, by equating the camera not to an eye per se, but a mind's eye. After all, while Lovecraft often privileges naturalistic depictions of his sets, he always manages to touch on something alien whose experience will forever remain out of grasp. And while it is relatively easy to convey the sense of something alien with words, or the absence thereof, the same cannot be said of the invisible camera, which is naturalistic by default in its framing of reality. That said, it would take quite a supplementary effort to allow it to convey any form of "personal" realism. And that effort, I'm sorry to say, remains far beyond the reach of the filmmakers at work here.

Fancy marquee posters and dubious gimmicks such as "Mythoscope"
are only meant to hide the fact Lovecraft adaptations are completely
absurd...unless they feature blonde bombshells having their pussy
licked by severed heads.

Koodos for attempting the impossible
While I insist strongly here on the foolishness of slavishly bringing Lovecraft to the screen, I must admit that Sean Branney's film does boast some undeniable craftsmanship qualities, mostly where art direction and set design are concerned. The lovingly crafted sets meant to depict the thick forests of Vermont, with their recessed caves and hooked corpses, the stuffy interiors of the Akeley farm, with their long shadows drawn over cloaked figures, everything in sight is in its rightful place. As for the more high-minded concepts included in the film, such as the plane ride and aerial confrontation with the mi-gos, as well as the otherworldly contraption meant to project the consciousness of the encased brains, they all appear just naive enough to convey the candid sense of wonder derived from early horror films. This prompts me to remark, as I did when I saw Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, that the creators at work here have done a great "nerd's job" of bringing the film's universe to the screen. Unfortunately for Branney and crew, their source material is far more involving and impenetrable than Jackson's, making the ordeal of adapting it nearly insurmountable.

The photography may be sharp and the lightning quite befitting the atmosphere the producers were aiming for. But the direction and general imagery are so conventional, so naive, as to completely miss the mark when it comes to creating a spiritual filiation with the source material at hand. After all, other such inspirational films mentioned by the crew include Dracula and Frankenstein, both of which are based on novels which lend themselves much more readily to the kind of theatrical adaptation attempted here than Lovecraft's stories. And this also informs part of the shapelessness of the work, which tries too hard to peg down the source material to an epoch which it transcended even when it was released. And this doesn't seem to stem from a lack of Lovecraftian knowledge however, but a lack of film knowledge. That said, German expressionism or French impressionism might have proved a better, albeit harder to replicate, technique to convey Lovecraft's word onscreen. At this point, I'd like to refer back to The Call of Cthulhu, where the engrossing images of R'lyeh and it's "impossible angles" (which seem to point directly to German expressionism) are imbued with a distinctly Caligari-esque quality (see image above). As for the elaborate sets created for the present film, they fail both to transcend their nature and to add anything meaningful to the mood of the film.

The Whisperer in Darkness is a monumental achievement in set
design. Here,we see the scale model used to depict the Vermont
mountainsides.

Crafting a contemporary reworking wouldn't have been such a bad idea either, considering that the story itself was perfect in its original, literary iteration. One shouldn't be burdened with slavish adaptations. One should instead demand that the author upgrades on the source material in order to create a distinct cultural item than that from which it came. But seeing how the producers are grouped under the name "historical society", their dedication to the exactitude of facts must be precise, and so their artistic temperament is diluted in purely intellectual concerns. Which points out to a blatant contradiction in their work, that of appraising Lovecraft's work in a purely scientific, rational fashion, whereas it is one that should be depicted in a expressionistic fashion. By choosing to opt for the candor of early Hollywood cinema, the authors are effectively pointing to their own candor, which finds its quintessential expression in the narrow artistic enterprise within which they have tried to cram Lovecraft's otherworldly, ever-expanding genius.


2/5 A well-made, useless film, and a slavish adaptation of the classic H.P. Lovecraft tale.

Love (2011)

Contrarily to what some critics would have you believe, Love is not too ambitious. The problem here lies not in scale or feasibility, but in the crew's lack of confidence in their own skills as filmmakers. And while it does seem like an ordeal to seamlessly merge two timelines almost two hundred years apart (one will probably be reminded of Aronofsky's The Fountain here), it could've been carried out successfully hadn't it been for the overwhelming soundtrack by Angel & Airwaves and the overly wordy screenplay. But as it stands, despite great cinematography and some extremely crafty art direction (the futuristic space station and replicated 19th century battlefield are a sight to behold), the film reminds one of a music video, stretched to the unbearable length of 90 minutes.

Early jitters: first-time director Eubank isn't convinced by
the intelligibility of his images, needs explanatory dialogue to
complement every one of them

The year is 2039. Gunner Wright stars as Lee Miller, a single astronaut aboard a space station, which he is given the task of maintaining. All is well and good until the man loses contact with his base back on Earth and becomes stranded in the sidereal void, completely cut-off from his loved ones, and the oh-so awesome humanity he has left behind. At first, he manages to keep his sanity by exercising and trying his hand at the ship's comm station. But as years pass by, he becomes increasingly desperate and starts sinking into madness, which is depicted with all the conventional signs thereof (endless monologues, writings on the wall, hallucinations, dwindling personal hygiene...). At some point, Miller stumbles upon a handwritten diary describing the exploits of a soldier in the American Civil War on a mission to investigate some alien remnants in the desert. And thus, two distinct timelines collide, the earliest of which contains the brief, introductory chapter of the film. As the astronaut starts reading, endlessly pursuing a tedious conversation with himself, so does time pass, until the year 2045, when he decides to exit the space station, no matter the cost.

And so Miller's ordeal lasts from 2039 through to 2045, two dates which weren't chosen arbitrarily. After all, the film is about memory, memory as one's last recourse against death. Since science has now located the cradle of thoughts and feelings directly in the brain, death necessarily implies the disappearance of what we understand as "conscience". While this has allowed the liberation of many from the clutches of religion, it has also left them in a distressing void. The death of one's conscience is not a very exciting perspective and so people strive to be remembered after their deaths so as to attain immortality through agency. That is why one needs peers so dearly: for remembrance, and for providing material on which to leave a lasting imprint. And so the titular emotion, while it is hardly an item that can be precisely delineated, is understood as a way to leave an indelible mark on humanity and thus transcend the reality of death, which is what grants it supreme relevance within the narrative.

This is all well and good and there are many unseen depths to the screenplay. Unfortunately, the execution is completely atrocious. While one would need to reflect on the images onscreen and to bask in solitude in order to better understand the protagonist's plight, the director constantly overwhelms us with the presence of humanity. While silence would've best befitted most scenes, as Love vies to use absence in order to convince its audience of the need for agency, we get deafening music all the way through. And I do mean deafening, as the soundtrack becomes increasingly distracting from the images at hand. Then, there's the incessant blabbering as lonely Miller enters in an endless dialogue with himself, his home base and various hallucinatory characters.

Director Eubank seems to think that Angels & Airwaves hold
the whole world in the palm of their hand

Hell, there is one instant where he picks up an instruction manual detailing how to service a certain control panel. When he does, the camera frames the pages as he flips through them. A Russian text appears onscreen. And so we understand that the protagonist cannot grasp the instructions. Any further reaction of frustration coming from him should become immediately intelligible. So there is no need to have the actor whine about the instructions being in Russian, or worst, make a joke about it. So why does director Eubank do it? Is it because he doesn't give us credit for understanding the images onscreen, or is it rather that he doesn't give himself credit for creating immediately intelligible images? In all fairness, I believe that the latter assumption is true, and that is precisely what torpedoes the film.

While the images Eubank crafts bear some definite narrative weight in themselves, the man decides instead to put sound in charge of propelling the storyline. Which is a terrible mistake considering that the film aims (not unlike Tarkovsky's wondrous adaptation of Lem's Solaris) at cultivating a sort of nostalgia for human contact and what one could call the paramount human feature, love. And while it is hard to convey the feeling of love through the sight of Malibu sunsets (which Miller dubs the grandest sight he ever beheld) and some snippets of a half-naked beach bimbo (the astronaut's wife) who seems to have crawled out of some Miami strip club, it is even harder to convey solitude when the film is crowded with extra-loud noise and incessant dialogue. Strangely unhappy with the well-composed shots he has painstakingly crafted, Eubank doesn't abide by the principle according to which an image is worth a thousand words. He rather seems to think that each image is worth no word at all, and that they all need to be complemented by a thousand words. This creates a film far too dense for its own good, one which eventually self-destructs under the weight of its own uncertainty. It is as if every point Eubank was trying to make couldn't be shown pictorially, but needed instead to be hammered home with an abundance of dumb, explanatory texts and one hell of a nasty power drill called Angels and Airwaves, which ends up numbing the viewers' sensory apparatus to the point of obliviousness.

A distinct feeling of déjà-vu overshadows the entire project

The use of talking heads is a further example of Eubank's lack of self-confidence, and a surprising one at that. Popping up here and there while the main narrative is unfolding are random people's confessions, all of which would feel more at home in a TV report about recovering alcoholics. While all these interventions follow a common thread, each vying for the need of human agency, they feel completely superfluous considering the nature of the narrative, which itself emphasizes that point a great deal. Said interventions actually impair the flow of the film and its unrealized need for absence. They also point to the crippling legitimacy crisis plaguing Eubank's work. By resorting to such a vox populi, the director seems to require outside intervention to help him establish his own, very personal message, trading the author's mastery over his own material for the reassuring multiplicity of arguments. Unfortunately, a film is not a philosophical treaty and so the accumulation of proof will not necessarily amount to a better result, only a more tangled one.

Strangely enough, ex-cinematographer Eubank doesn't even seem to grasp the importance of cinematography in setting the mood of a film, but also in telling the story outright. And so he relies far too heavily on sound, as if trying to find crutches for an Olympic sprinter. Metaphors aside, his film would've been much, much better had there been no sound at all and had one been given the chance to watch the screen and not the cracks forming behind the speakers. In a bid to strengthen his central thesis by every mean at his disposal, and trying to make sure everybody got the point, what Eubank ended up doing is alienating his target audience, fans of space as a black, empty void, those very people who look at the stars in quiet awe, hoping that film could capture, as Kubrick, Tarkovsky and Scott did, the feeling of wonder one derives from otherworldly silence and solitude. Which is precisely the kind of expectations that the director generates when blatantly referencing untouchable classics such as Solaris and 2001: A Space Odyssey, two films without which most of the ideas contained in Love would be non-existent. That said, attempting to crossover those two latter films is a very dangerous move for it necessarily forces comparison, highlighting Eubank's weaknesses as a director and making his film seem pointless.

Upon exiting the theater, a close friend and sci-fi enthusiast voiced his lack of appreciation for Love with a somewhat relevant question: "Whose idea was it to make a lesser copy of 2001?", he asked. And while this comparison is rather unfair, it should precisely reflect the inner reaction of any film buff at the threshold of the revolving doors. After all, Eubank's work will always draw that kind of resentment for it replicates too many of Kubrick's images without even thinking twice about their contemplative nature. But while some might call this a travesty, I call it merely a faux-pas. After all, the man at the helm shows some definite potential, which he shall exploit fully when he stops borrowing and finds a voice of his own.


2/5 Love underplays some superb pictorial assets to better showcase its derivative ideas, knack for superfluous dialogue and pathological obsession with Angels and Airwaves (from whom the title of the present film is borrowed!). It's a shame because first-time director Eubank shows some definite potential, which should come to fruition when he starts taking control over his own material.