Column Science Fiction Film Club

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians: This Terrible Movie Is Actually Amazing

Hands down the greatest movie ever made about Martians kidnapping Santa.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on December 17, 2025

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Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) Directed by Nicholas Webster. Written by Paul L. Jacobson based on the story by Glenville Mareth. Starring John Call, Leonard Hicks, Vincent Beck, and Bill McCutcheon.

By the time the villainous Voldar says, “One false move and your little ho ho ho man will be destroyed!” I had already decided this is the greatest movie ever made about Martians kidnapping Santa Claus.

I’m not much of a bad movie aficionado. I know there are people who seek out bad movies for fun. I am friends with and have hung out with such people, which is why I’ve seen such gems as Troll 2 (1990) and The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978) and even Death Bed: The Bed That Eats (1977). That last one has lead to some awkward moments, because carelessly referencing Death Bed: The Bed That Eats in casual conversation raises questions one might not be prepared to answer in certain company, such as, “Why did you watch a movie about a demonic bed?” and “But how does the demonic bed eat people?” and “Are you sure that’s a real movie and not a weird dream you had?”

My point is, I don’t seek out movies with “so bad it’s good” reputations on my own, but I do understand and appreciate their appeal. Pretty much all I knew about Santa Claus Conquers the Martians before I sat down to watch it is that a lot of people put it in that category.

They are right to do so. This is not a good movie, but it is an amazing movie. It’s so incredibly stupid. It’s delightful.

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is the brainchild of the film’s producer and screenwriter Paul L. Jacobson, who has no other film credits to his name. Not before, not after. In a 1964 New York Times article about upcoming films, Jacobson explains that he wanted to make a Christmas movie for kids: “Except for the Disneys, there’s very little in film houses during the season that the kids can recognize and claim as their own.” The same article notes that well-known film producer and financier Joseph E. Levine had agreed to distribute the film; Levine was the man who had brought Godzilla (1954) to the United States as Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), and he would later be responsible for the distribution of movies such as The Graduate (1967) and The Producers (1967).

From the very small number of articles that mention the movie, it seems that having Levine linked with the film had people expecting a fairly normal Christmas movie, even if it came from a first-time producer and screenwriter. Jacobson hired Nicholas Webster, a well-regarded documentary filmmaker, to make the movie on a shoestring budget in two weeks at a studio on Long Island.

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians made a healthy amount of money when it came out, but I haven’t been able to find any contemporary reviews, so it’s hard to figure out what critics thought of it at the time. It was released and promoted in November of 1964 and stayed in theaters across the U.S. for several months, even after the Christmas season was over; it would subsequently be rereleased at Christmastime over the years. The success led to more opportunities for Jacobson, but he fumbled every one and never made another movie.

From what I can tell, the film was in the public domain upon release because of the omission of a notice of copyright. That is not a terrible uncommon omission in the history of film; I’ve mentioned it before with The Brother From Another Planet (1984). In the case of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, its public domain status eventually led to the film getting a longer life in various television and home video releases, which is how it found its way into the childhood traditions of a great many people. It was eventually shown on Mystery Science Theater 3000 in 1991, thereby cementing its place among people who love to laugh about silly movies.

Because it is a silly movie. It is such a silly movie.

Here is the story: The people of Mars are worried about their children. The leader of Mars, Kimar (Leonard Hicks), and his wife Momar (Leila Martin), have noticed that their two children are acting glum and listless. Bomar (Chris Month) and Girmar (Pia Ziadora, about twenty years before her brief, unsuccessful Hollywood career and her more successful pop music career) have lost interest in eating, although eating meals on Mars consists of swallowing food pills, so who can blame them. They now spend all their free time watching television programs from Earth. This includes a news broadcast from KIDTV in which a reporter visits the North Pole to interview Santa Claus (John Call). A real news broadcast, that is—in the world of this movie, everybody knows Santa is real.

Also present in their household is Dropo, who is played by Bill McCutcheon, one of the very, very few recognizable actors in this film. I couldn’t figure out why he looked so familiar to me, not until I read his obituary and learned he had played the recurring character of Uncle Wally on Sesame Street during the 1980s. It’s not clear what role Dropo plays in the home of Kimar and Momar. He might be some kind of servant. Do the Martians have slaves? Is Mars a slave-holding society? Already I have so many questions.

Also, before we go any further, I just want to point out that “Kimar” is shortened from King Martian, Momar from Mom Martian, and Bomar and Girmar from Boy and Girl Martian. I have no idea if Jacobson thought he was being clever or just never bothered to give them names, but I suspect it’s a bit of both.

Kimar wants to help the depressed children of Mars, so he does what any parent would do, which is get together other community leaders and go to a cave to summon and talk to an 800-year-old man named Chochem (Carl Don). (“Chochem” is a variant spelling of hakham, a Hebrew word for a wise man or scholar, and more proof that Jacobson did not bother actually naming his characters.) Chochem tells Kimar and the others that the children of Mars are so unhappy lately because they have information beamed into their brain from the moment they are born and have forgotten how to be kids who run around and play and have fun. Chochem does not turn to stare pointedly into the camera while he says this, but it feels like he does, even watching from a safe distance of 61 years in the future.

Chochem also says that children need a Santa Claus-like figure to teach them the whimsical wonders of childhood. So Kimar and the others do what any responsible leaders would do and head to Earth to kidnap Santa. Among the group of abductors is Voldar (Vincent Beck), who does not think Mars needs Santa Claus, does not want children to be whimsical and playful, and wants Mars to regain its glory days as a planet of war. How and why actual Martians, who have never visited Earth, not only know that Mars is named after the god of war but also take pride in that fact, is never explained. Maybe their ancestors interacted with the Romans in the past? In any case, Voldar spends the entire movie trying to murder Santa.

(Beck is the other recognizable actor in the film, as under his Martian antennae is a character actor who had parts in dozens of television shows through the ’60s and ’70s.)

Upon arriving on Earth, the Martians encounter siblings Billy (Victor Stiles) and Betty (Donna Conforti), who helpfully explain that the innumerable Santas ringing bells on city streets are merely helper Santas, while the real Santa is toiling away in his North Pole workshop. Naturally, the Martians decide to go to the North Pole, but they have to abduct the children to stop them from telling anybody.

When they arrive at the North Pole, Billy and Betty overhear the Martians talking about kidnapping Santa Claus, so they sneak out of the spaceship to warn him. They endure the freezing cold, encounter the greatest polar bear puppet in the history of cinema, narrowly avoid being crushed to death by a robot named Torg, and still don’t manage to warn Santa Claus in time.

The Martians successfully kidnap Santa and head back to Mars, but they leave Mrs. Claus (Doris Rich) and several elves behind as witnesses. They also abandon Torg the killer robot, because it malfunctioned upon entering Santa’s Workshop and is now, according to the Martians, a toy. What happens between Mrs. Claus and the seven-foot-tall robotic “toy” in Santa’s absence is left up to the viewers’ imaginations and PornHub search histories.

The movie then spends about five minutes of its 70-minute runtime showing scenes of planes taking off, which is how we know the whole of Earth has mobilized to get Santa back. It never leads to anything, though, because the rest of the action takes place on Mars.

On the journey through space, Voldar tries to murder Santa and the kids by putting them in the spaceship airlock. Santa finds this to be a very amusing escapade. I am beginning to have my doubts about Santa’s mental stability and risk assessment capabilities.

It turns out that Santa’s plan to bring the magic of Christmas to Martian children is to get both the Earthling children and the human children to work in a Martian toy factory. Santa even complains that the work is too easy because it’s all automated; he merely pushes buttons while the children do the work of future Amazon warehouse employees and fulfill the orders. I am fascinated by the ethical and philosophical implications of deciding that children toiling away at unpaid labor is more beneficial to their childlike senses of whimsy than watching TV about life on other planets or learning how to travel through space.

Meanwhile, Voldar is still trying to kill Santa and the kids, but he’s bad at it, so he and his henchmen accidentally abduct Dropo, who is wearing a Santa costume. They also sabotage the Martian toy factory so that it produces only scrambled up toys, such as a doll and a teddy bear with swapped heads. By pure coincidence, two weeks after Santa Claus Conquers the Martians premiered in theaters in 1964, the Rankin/Bass stop-motion film Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer aired on television for the first time. I hereby propose the theory that the Martian toys out of the sabotaged factory are the ones that populate the Island of Misfit Toys.

There is a bit of a fight in the Martian toy workshop, but of course Voldar and his henchmen are overpowered, and Kimar agrees to send Santa, Billy, and Betty back to Earth. And that’s the very abrupt end of the movie. It just ends.

Do the Martian children learn to frolic and play? We have no idea. We only ever see Martian children working in the toy workshop. Does Dropo become the Martian Santa? Probably! Do Santa and the children get home safely? We don’t know. Did Earth actually send astronauts to Mars in an untested spacecraft? Maybe! What happened to them? No idea! Maybe they died! We never find out.

Did the Martians just leave their killer robot at the North Pole for good? It’s possible. Did Santa’s workshop really produce toy rockets with real rocket fuel? I hope so. Why did the elves already know what Martians look like? I suspect a conspiracy. Why did the Martians invent a device called the Tickle Ray? I have so many questions, but I might not want the answer to that one.

Is the entire message of this movie about how toys are the true meaning of Christmas? Sure seems like it! Does Santa Claus conquer any Martians? No! Nobody gets conquered at all!

And finally: Will I now incorporate “One false move and your little ho ho ho man will be destroyed!” into my holiday vernacular at every possible opportunity? YES. Obviously.

It’s so, so ridiculous. The ridiculousness is never-ending. Voldar is so determined to straight-up murder Santa and those kids. Santa is so jolly about everything, even attempted murder, that it starts to look like pharmaceutical mood enhancement after a while. But most of all I can’t get over how the whole premise of the movie is that Martian kids need to learn how to be kids, but we never see them playing. They just work to make toys for other kids. It’s so unintentionally bleak that it goes right back around to being funny.

There was a brief period in the late ’90s when there were rumors of a remake, to be produced by David Zucker and written by Ben Edlund. A lot of places say Jim Carrey was attached to the project, but I can’t find a proper source for that, just a lot of people repeating the rumor. In the years since, the rumors have evolved to involve Cynthia Webster, daughter of director Nicholas Webster and a film cinematographer in her own right, as the director, and based on the IMDb page there might be a treatment or a script in existence, as there are screenwriters listed, but nothing else.

I have no opinion about this. I don’t actually care about Christmas movies, and now that I’ve watched one (1) this year, I’ll go back to not caring about them. The movie business is gonna do what the movie business does.

In conclusion, I can easily see why Santa Claus Conquers the Martians has been both a childhood favorite and a movie snarking favorite. It works on both levels. It’s so stupid, and it gave me a great many laughs, and that’s more than enough.

What do you think of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians? Is that obnoxious jingle now stuck in your head? It’s stuck in my head. It has been for days.

With Cops Like These, Who Needs Criminals?

The Science Fiction Film Club is now taking a break for perfectly normal and innocent reasons, and definitely not to go kidnap Santa Claus and bring him to Mars. We’ll be back in January to watch a selection of films about the dark, disturbing, and violent overlap between science fiction and law enforcement.

January 7 — Mad Max (1979), directed by George Miller

Remember how the original Mad Max was a highway patrol officer? Yeah, I forgot too, until recently.

Watch: Check streaming sources. A lot of streaming sites shuffle things around at the start of the year.

View the trailer.

January 14 — Minority Report (2002), directed by Steven Spielberg

In 2002, the idea of walking into The Gap and having the store’s computer recognize you and immediately give you targeted ads was science fiction.

Watch: Check streaming sources.

View the trailer.

January 21 — Outland (1981), directed by Peter Hyams

It’s High Noon in space.

Watch: Check streaming sources.

Trailer.

January 28 — RoboCop (1987), directed by Paul Verhoeven

Pretty much the only sci fi satire about American law enforcement that matters.

Watch: Check streaming sources.

View the trailer.

The post <i>Santa Claus Conquers the Martians</i>: This Terrible Movie Is Actually Amazing appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Mars Express: Cyberpunk Noir Will Never Die (And I’m Happy About That)

A truly rich, compelling sci movie that’s flown under the radar for too long…

By Kali Wallace

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Published on December 10, 2025

Credit: Gebeka Films

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Credit: Gebeka Films

Mars Express (2023) Directed by Jérémie Périn. Written by Laurent Sarfati and Jérémie Périn. Starring Léa Drucker, Mathieu Amalric, Daniel Njo Lobé, and Marie Bouvet.

Every time I watch a film about artificial intelligence, I start by looking around for information about the history of the concept. And every time I look, I am reminded that the concept is much older and broader than I can reasonably cover in my column, because humans have pretty much always dreamed about building intelligent machines.

There are stories about clever people (or clever gods) building human-like automata in ancient China and Greece, as well as in other cultures and lore from around the world, and while the ideas and style of the stories have evolved significantly over time, they have never gone away. Whether it’s Homer describing the mechanical helpers in Hephaestus’ workshop or Muslim scholar Ismail al-Jazari imagining designs for mechanical servants and musicians or Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Mechanical Turk (which was not an automaton at all, though it was claimed to be for many decades), humans have always wanted to think we could make an artificial guy that acted just like a real guy.

Of course, it has also been a favorite concept in science fiction since the genre’s earliest days, and in science fiction is where it happily resided for a long time. In the last few years, this idea seems to have come back around to something people crave in the real world, not just in fiction. That makes things a bit awkward for people (like me) who love stories about androids, robots, and artificial intelligence, while also having the burning urge to drop-kick anybody who anthropomorphizes shitty chatbots right into the ocean. Thankfully, AI in fiction can still be fascinating, and there are still sci fi writers making the most of it.

Mars Express is a surprisingly wonderful example. Surprising because I haven’t seen anybody talking about it in sci fi or film circles since its release in 2023. I came across the title while I was specifically looking for recent films set on Mars, and I went in knowing nothing about it beyond the briefest summary. It may well have a niche cohort of fans out there, but it seems to have largely flown under the radar.

That’s unfortunate, because this is a great movie. It’s classic cyberpunk noir following in the footsteps of the best of both those genres. It’s tightly plotted with engaging characters in a wonderfully rich world, and it has the guts to not pull any punches about the consequences of living in that world.

Note: I’m going to spoil the premise and some of the cyberpunk worldbuilding in the film, but I’m not going to spoil the entire plot, because I think you should all go watch it.

Director Jérémie Périn is not shy about naming his inspirations. He and co-writer Laurent Sarfati had previously worked on the French animated series Lastman (2016), based on the comics of the same name. (Lastman has been compared to the Dragon Ball franchise, but I don’t know enough about either to say how accurate that is.) For their first feature film they wanted to do something rather different. They went into Mars Express specifically aiming to craft a noir story with all the classic trappings: the hard-drinking private investigator, the contrast between a city’s surface and its underbelly, and characters getting caught up in conspiracies of the rich and powerful. In a 2024 interview with Polygon, he cites neo-noir films like Chinatown (1974) and The Long Goodbye (1973) as models for the idea, as well as political thrillers like All the President’s Men (1976) and Three Days of the Condor (1975).

But Périn is an animator, not a New Hollywood auteur working in the 1970s, and an animator interested in neo-noir is inevitably going to be working in the very long shadow of some truly excellent Japanese animation. That influence is also obvious in Mars Express, which has a very ’90s anime visual style in its 2D animation.

Mars Express opens with sudden and shocking violence. Dominique (Angéline Henneguelle), a student at a university on Mars, is murdered in her dorm room while her roommate, Jun (Geneviève Doang), hides in the bathtub. The murderer, who came to the door posing as a cop, also shoots their cute robotic cat, which is how we know he’s really evil.

Then the film moves briefly to Earth, where a hacker named Roberta Williams (Marie Bouvet) and her android sidekick LEM (Thomas Roditi) are welcoming two potential clients in a hotel room. Roberta jailbreaks androids, which is illegal in this high-tech future; there are sentient artificial intelligences everywhere as a part of everyday life, but they are strictly controlled and regulated. We soon learn that jailbroken robots have a reputation for being unstable and even violent. (Alas, they don’t just want to be left alone to watch their shows. But maybe nobody has invented The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon yet.)

Roberta’s clients, alas, are not real clients but a private investigator and her android sidekick. Aline Ruby (Léa Drucker) has been hired by the tech mogul Chris Royjacker (Mathieu Amalric) to find Roberta and retrieve or destroy some information she stole from his company. Aline’s own android sidekick, Carlos Rivera (Daniel Njo Lobé), is the sentient AI backup of her dead partner.

All of that happens in about the first ten minutes. This is not a movie that wastes time, although it never feels like it’s rushing through its 89-minute runtime either.

Right away the film lets us see the tension inherent in the android situation. Carlos died as a human, and he’s still here, as the same person with the same memories, but he’s been demoted from one class of being to another through no choice of his own. It’s obvious that this society really doesn’t know what to do with people existing in that limbo—a limbo the society has created for its own benefit.

Aline and Carlos bring Roberta back to Mars, but her warrant has mysteriously disappeared (she is a hacker, after all), so they have to let her go. Royjacker is curiously unconcerned about this, because he’s certain the data she stole has been destroyed.

Aline is ready to take on a new case. A worried father wants her to find his daughter, who turns out to be Jun, the college student who fearfully hid in the bathtub while her roommate was murdered.

Because this is cyberpunk and noir, the different threads of the story are inevitably connected. Jun went missing after getting into trouble with both the university and the police for jailbreaking a robot at a school lab, although camera footage of that incident makes it’s pretty obvious that something else was going on.

Aline and Carlos’ search for Jun takes them into different parts of the city, which also gives us a look at this vision of the future. This Mars is clean and open and bright, with the tidy city of Noctis existing beneath atmosphere domes. In previous films, we’ve seen Mars as an explored wilderness, a grimly stratified monarchy, a post-apocalyptic ruin, and a gritty slum, but this is the first time we’ve seen a Mars that looks like a pretty nice place to live.

But, in true noir fashion, the attractive surface hides a much more complicated truth, because it’s also a city where a college student will create an android backup of herself to moonlight as a sex worker just to pay for tuition, where people will rent out their unconscious minds to do shady processing work, where wealthy men cheerfully talk about how they prefer robot girlfriends because they can simply turn them off whenever they get needy.

Mars, in cinema and in all sci fi storytelling, has always been a place where we put ideas about humanity that we want to examine in a different context. The version of Mars that we see in Mars Express feels like a natural evolution of this. It’s familiar enough that we can easily see how it might sell itself as the high-tech utopia promised by insufferable tech bros, and it’s just far enough in the future that it’s dealing with problems we can easily anticipate but haven’t quite encountered yet.

Aline is at first presented as the main character, as the hard-boiled private eye at the center of the complex case, but it’s Carlos’ story that hits the hardest. There’s a great deal of pain and discomfort in the way he moves through the world and how he interacts with other characters. In this future, everybody wants the benefits of having fully sentient robots, but nobody wants those robots to have any rights or self-determination—not even when those robots contain the minds and personalities and memories of people who were brought back from the dead. Aline still thinks of Carlos as her partner, and she talks to other robots as though they are people, but she still actively upholds the system that says they can’t be people, and they especially can’t be free people. Carlos’ ex-wife won’t let him see their daughter because it would be too complicated, even in a world where these back-up “ghosts” are fairly commonplace. Other androids and robots reach out to Carlos offering connection—they have their own fragile culture, in a way—but he feels disconnected from them as well.

It all makes for an engaging and effective film. There is no separation between the technological element and the human element, because the intersection of the two is where the story happens.

Cyberpunk and noir are well-matched genres because all crime stories are, on some level, about who gets to be treated as important in a society. That’s also what robot stories tend to be about. For all that humans have always imagined building an artificial guy that’s just like a real guy, we have also always had the self-awareness to know that we will be completely freaking about it when it happens. We can’t even agree that all humans deserve to be treated the same; we sure as hell aren’t going to make it easy when there are sentient machines as well.

What it comes down to is that science fictional technology accelerates and amplifies all of the fundamental human darknesses that make a noir story: greed, violence, inequality, secrecy, conspiracy. There are always rich people treating poor people as disposable for their own gain. There are always people who hold conflicting beliefs about the systems of power they live in. There is always danger involved in confronting and opposing those systems. The details inevitably change as our world changes—and right now, at the end of the science fictional year of 2025, it’s impossible to ignore how much consternation and misery comes from what the richest assholes in the world think technology should accomplish to make them richer.

That makes the story and themes of Mars Express uncomfortably timely, even while its obvious inspirations and the visual style have a retro feel. I love that a French film from 2023 can look like ’90s cyberpunk anime while referencing ’70s American crime films. I don’t mind at all that Périn obviously watched Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Blade Runner (1982) at an impressionable age, and obviously went through a New American cinema cinephile phase, and is now making his own movies inspired by thinking, “Damn, that’s cool, what if…?” I think it’s wonderful when great art inspires other art, and this is especially true when sci fi explores concepts that change as the world around us changes.

What do you think about Mars Express? The whole time I was watching I kept thinking about how many times I’ve heard people in the sci fi community declare cyberpunk a dead genre. I’m glad they’ve always been wrong.

Next week: We close out our exploration of Mars and this year of the Sci Fi Film Club year with the notorious “Worst Movies Ever Made” contender Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. It’s in the public domain and available all over the internet. Everywhere. I won’t watch the MST3K version (the last thing I ever want is for some dudes to be interrupting my movie viewing), but I suppose I understand if you want to do that this time…[end-mark]

The post <i>Mars Express</i>: Cyberpunk Noir Will Never Die (And I’m Happy About That) appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Rocketship X-M: The First Space Adventure of the Atomic Era

Even cheap, rushed sci fi can be surprisingly prescient (at least about some things…)

By Kali Wallace

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Published on December 3, 2025

Credit: Lippert Pictures / 20th Century Fox

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Credit: Lippert Pictures / 20th Century Fox

Rocketship X-M (1950). Directed by Kurt Neumann. Written by Kurt Neumann, Orville H. Hampton, and Dalton Trumbo. Starring Lloyd Bridges, Osa Massen, and John Emery.

Let’s go back to 1946. World War II had been over for a matter of months, and postwar anxiety about the future is high. The relationship between United States and the Soviet Union, who had been allies during the war, was rapidly degenerating into what would become the Cold War, but exactly what that would look like was still a few years in the future. This was before the Soviet Union began testing nuclear weapons, before the U.S. declared the so-called “Truman Doctrine” for preventing the spread of communism around the world, before the Iron Curtain and the Warsaw Pact, before the Space Race.

In March of 1946, Hollywood screenwriter, novelist, and columnist Dalton Trumbo published an opinion piece in a weekly magazine called Script. Script was a Hollywood-based film magazine with a strongly literary tone and a very liberal political bent; it had been founded by Rob Wagner, an outspoken progressive socialist, and continued in that vein after his death in 1942.

The article Trumbo wrote for Script in 1946 carried the tongue-in-cheek title “The Russian Menace,” and in it he points out that the U.S. and the Soviet Union are making the same aggressive political, economic, and military moves around the world, and he suggests that the anti-Soviet fear Americans feel is echoed by anti-American fear in the Soviet Union.

He was right, of course, but he was also a member of the Communist Party USA, and being right about American politics in 1946 while also being a communist working in the film industry meant he was making a lot of people very angry in Hollywood. That included Billy Wilkerson, the founder and owner of The Hollywood Reporter, who in 1947 wrote a column called “A Vote for Joe Stalin,” in which he named Trumbo and several others as communist sympathizers. A few months later, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) used the names Wilkerson had published to summon the several directors, screenwriters, and actors to appear before Congress. The “Hollywood Ten,” as they came to be known, refused to cooperate with the hearings and were charged with contempt of Congress. Leaders of the film industry got together immediately afterward and put together the first iteration of the Hollywood blacklist.

Trumbo was one of the cited and blacklisted screenwriters; he went to prison for several months in 1950. But he was also one of the few who kept working over the next decade, albeit quietly, without his name appearing on his films. Those films include Roman Holiday (1953), one of the great romantic comedies of all time; Trumbo was not fully credited on the film until 2011, fifty-seven years after he won, but could not claim, an Academy Award for the story.

Just as he had been central to the beginning of the blacklist era, Trumbo would be equally important in bringing about its end, when actor Kirk Douglas brought him on to write Spartacus (1960) and director Otto Preminger hired him to write Exodus (1960). With one of the most prominent victims of the blacklist being properly and publicly credited on two huge films, and the Hollywood studio system in its dying days, that was the beginning of the end for the blacklist era.

Amidst all of those big, world-changing events, it’s almost a quaint little footnote that while he was blacklisted, right before he went to prison to serve out his sentence, Trumbo also did some speedy script-doctoring on a slapdash, low-budget, barely-more-than-a-B-movie sci fi film about going into space.

Rocketship X-M is certainly no Roman Holiday or Spartacus, but it is a movie that sits at an interesting turning point in cinema history, as it was the first science fiction film of the Atomic Era and the first post-WWII film about space travel. But it only holds those distinctions by a hair, because it went into production specifically to capitalize on interest in the film that ended up being second.

That film was George Pal’s Destination Moon (1950), a highly publicized, much anticipated “serious” movie about the practical problems of space travel. Destination Moon was in production for two years, with a respectable budget and a script co-written by Robert A. Heinlein. (Which also means a script with shades of Heinlein’s post-WWII politics, but that’s a topic for another day.) It was also being filmed in Technicolor in an era when about half of American films being made were still black and white. We’ll watch Destination Moon in the future, but what matters now is that without Destination Moon, Rocketship X-M would never have been made.

When news got out that Destination Moon would be delayed, Lippert Pictures decided to take advantage. Lippert was a studio known for making films very quickly and very cheaply, which is exactly what they did with Rocketship X-M. They called up director Kurt Neumann, who had spent some of the 1940s making Tarzan films for RKO Pictures, to talk about a space travel story he’d shopped around.

The problem with the initial script is that it was basically the same story as Destination Moon. As in, it was about going to the Moon, as suggested by the spaceship being called Rocketship Expedition Moon. The switch to send the ship to Mars instead happened after the fact, just like it does in the movie. That’s when Dalton Trumbo was brought on to doctor the script. He’s the one who refigured the Mars scenes—and in doing so, completely changed the tone of the film.

It took Neumann all of nineteen days to film Rocketship X-M, and less than a month later the movie was released into theaters.

And it shows. It shows that this movie was thrown together in a rush. Nobody so much as cracked a middle school science book, much less consulted any scientists. The film uses stock footage of a V-2 rocket launch for the take-off scenes. The gender politics and clumsy romance are such a mess I could physically feel the feminism curling up to die inside my soul. It’s filmed in a handful of interior sets, one of which looks like a classroom. Nuclear cavemen with rocks beat astronauts armed with guns. There is a Texan. There is always a Texan.

(Aside: The outdoor Mars scenes were filmed at good old Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, years before that same location will once again play Mars in Robinson Crusoe on Mars [1964]. I went looking for what else has been filmed at Zabriskie Point, and I learned that parts of Spartacus were filmed there. There is also a film called Zabriskie Point [1970]; in his review Roger Ebert said of director Michelangelo Antonioni, “He has tried to make a serious movie and hasn’t even achieved a beach-party level of insight.” I haven’t seen the film but: ouch. Zabriskie Point is also famously the location of the cover image on U2’s 1987 album The Joshua Tree. I hope you can all recognize it now by sight. This concludes today’s edition of “Know Your Geology Landscapes.”)

Rocketship X-M would be such a silly movie, if it weren’t for the fact that it’s also a dire warning against nuclear annihilation in which all of the explorers die at the end.

The film opens with one of the most unintentionally funny pre-liftoff sequences I’ve ever seen in a space movie. There is a voice proclaiming over loudspeaker that takeoff is just a few minutes away, but all the characters are having a leisurely press conference in the aforementioned classroom. We meet the members of the crew that’s headed to the moon, which includes rocket scientists Karl Ekstrom (John Emery) and Lisa Van Horn (Osa Massen), and the flight crew of Floyd Graham (Lloyd Bridges), William Corrigan (Noah Beery, Jr.), and Harry Chamberlain (Hugh O’Brian). Nobody at the press conferences asks why the actual rocket scientists are going on the trip, but they do ask why a woman would worry her pretty little head with things like chemistry.

The mission heads into space, but on their way to the Moon they run into some problems. First there’s a flurry of meteors around them, then the ship abruptly loses power. Eckstrom and Van Horn decide that a different fuel mixture will solve the power problems, so they sit down to calculate the appropriate mixture on paper. When they come up with different calculations, Eckstrom tells Van Horn her pretty little head must have made a mistake on account of being too female; they go with his calculations instead. Even when Van Horn once again expresses misgivings about the proposed fuel mixture, they forge ahead with Eckstrom’s solution.

This turns out to be a bad idea, because his fuel mixture sends the ship careening off into space at such a high acceleration that it knocks the entire crew unconscious for several days. When they wake up, they realize they have accidentally flown to Mars. Van Horn is a professional so she does not immediately wake up and say, “I told you dumbfucks there was something wrong with the calculation,” but I said it to the television while I was a watching.

After they get over their initial shock, the crew is actually very excited for a chance to explore Mars. And you know what? I believe that. Of course they ought to be excited! They might have taken a wrong turn, but they are on Mars!

They set out to explore, at which point the film switches from black and white to a reddish-pink tint. A Martian filter, if you will. After tromping around Zabriskie Point for a while, they stumble upon the ruins of a Martian civilization. Their Geiger counters tell them the radiation is very high—so high that they immediately know the civilization was nuked to ashes—but they keep exploring anyway.

During their radioactive campout that night, they finally spot some Martians. The Earthlings eagerly go to meet them, but the Martians respond by attacking. Most of these attacks involve throwing rocks down from clifftops. Corrigan the Texan and Eckstrom are both killed, and Chamberlain is badly injured. The three survivors somehow make it back to the ship and head back to Earth—the film skips over the details pretty quickly—but as they near home, Van Horn and Graham realize they don’t have enough fuel to land. They relay what they can about their mission to ground control, then the ship crashes in Nova Scotia, killing the crew.

Afterward, the mission commander on Earth (played by Morris Ankrum) reassures the press that in spite of the tragic end, the mission was not a failure, because they learned a great deal about both space travel and Mars, and can do better next time.

I am absolutely fascinated by this ending. I wasn’t expecting it at all; I assumed Van Horn and Graham would survive to be obnoxiously heteronormative in the worst 1950s fashion. But they didn’t. They get smashed to pieces in Canada! That’s an ending I didn’t see coming.

Rocketship X-M was made specifically to get carried along in the wake of Destination Moon’s promotional blitz and hype. The two films have strongly different politics, and Destination Moon did overshadow Rocketship X-M when it premiered all of twenty-five days later. But Rocketship X-M’s attempt to borrow some of Destination Moon’s hype actually worked, because it was pretty successful in theaters, especially considering how cheap it was to make. (Dalton Trumbo was serving an eleven-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress when Rocketship X-M came out. Years later, in a documentary about the Hollywood blacklists, he would say about his conviction, “As far as I was concerned, it was a completely just verdict. I had contempt for that Congress and have had contempt for it ever since.”)

Rocketship X-M lived on for a while on television, like so many other low-budget black and white sci fi movies of the ’50s, fading but never entirely vanishing.

One of the people who saw it in the early ’50s was Wade Williams, a theater owner in Kansas City. At some time in the ’70s, he set about trying to figure out what had happened to the film he remembered so fondly. He was able to locate a copy of the film—the original copies had degraded, but there were duplicates—and acquire the rights. He wanted to rerelease Rocketship X-M, but he felt that audiences in the late ’70s would look at it very differently than audiences had in 1950. So he decided to contact some Hollywood special effects people to give the film a bit of makeover. The goal was to replace the stock footage of the V-2 rocket launch and add a handful of spaceship exterior shots.

That’s exactly what they did, although I can’t figure out if the slightly expanded film was ever played in theaters in the ’70s. It is more or less the version that made it to home video releases and eventually to streaming. I say “more or less” because a lot of people have pointed out some discrepancies between the descriptions of the added scenes and what’s in modern versions of the film, so it’s possible some of the added scenes were later removed before the film made it to home video and streaming. I don’t think the original 1950 theatrical version of the movie currently exists anywhere we can watch it.

Rocketship X-M is not a good movie, but I like it anyway. It starts out feeling like exactly what we would expect from a quick-and-dirty cash grab designed to take advantage of another movie’s expensive advertising campaign, but it makes a dark turn that I find so interesting. And that pro-science, anti-war tone ends up being a prescient look at the themes sci fi films would be grappling with through the ’50s and ’60s.

For one thing, the film is very clearly saying that nuclear weapons will destroy civilization. A lot of sci fi films that followed in the 1950s have a cautionary tone toward nuclear weapons, but Rocketship X-M goes beyond cautionary and into prohibitionary. When the characters first encounter the Martians, Ekstrom says, “From Atomic Age to Stone Age,” a solemn pronouncement that is treated as the inevitable outcome of nuclear war. When designing the look of the radiation-scarred Martians, makeup artist Don L. Cash is said to have referenced photos from survivors of the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The film is not being wishy-washy about this matter.

But I’m just as interested in its firmly pro-science stance. In 1950, neither the U.S. nor the Soviet Union had even launched artificial satellites into orbit, much less tried to send an animal or a person into space. Nobody had died trying to get to space yet. And here is Rocketship X-M, the very first movie with a fictional take on what a space mission might look like, coming right out and saying that people will die, but it will be worth it. That’s not something very many sci fi films say outright.

What do you think of Rocketship X-M? Does anybody recall seeing this one back in the day? Does anybody know why there is always a Texan in cinematic spaceship crews?

Next week: We’re skipping over more than 70 years of cinematic history for something completely different. Watch Mars Express on Apple, Amazon, Fandango, or Plex.[end-mark]

The post <i>Rocketship X-M</i>: The First Space Adventure of the Atomic Era appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Aelita: An Ambitious Dream of Bringing the Revolution to Mars

A wild, messy blend of politics, artistry, and propaganda

By Kali Wallace

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Published on November 19, 2025

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Aelita (1924). Directed by Yakov Protazanov. Written by Fedor Ozep and Aleksei Fajko, based on the novel of the same name by Aleksey Tolstoy. Starring Nikolai Tseretelli, Yuliya Solntseva, and Valentina Kuindzhi.

About halfway through watching this movie, I began to text a friend with increasingly bewildered updates about what was happening on screen. My friend did not ask for these updates and probably wasn’t interested, although they were very tolerant of my play-by-play. I just really needed somebody to understand how often I was staring at the screen and thinking, “What the fuck? No, really. What?”

I don’t think I mean that in a bad way. I’m pretty sure I don’t. I think I enjoyed watching Aelita, at least as much as anybody can enjoy watching a two-hour Soviet silent movie from 1924 in which a man wants to build a spaceship to Mars and… You know what, we’ll get to the plot in a moment. I definitely enjoyed the exquisitely artistic costume and set design of the Martian scenes, and I never lost interest in what would happen next, even though I was missing a lot of context for the domestic and political convolutions of the Earth-bound scenes.

Aelita is loosely based on a novel, but only some of the movie’s story comes from the source material. The short novel Aelita, or The Decline of Mars was published in 1923 by Russian author Aleksey (or Alexei) Tolstoy. (He was in fact related to Leo Tolstoy, but distantly and a bit scandalously: Aleksey’s mother was married to a count in the Tolstoy family, but she ran off with another man, who raised Aleksey as his own son until mother and son sued to have the count legitimize him when he was in his teens.) The novel is about an engineer who travels to Mars with a soldier companion, where they discover that the planet is inhabited by descendants from Atlantis who live in a rigidly stratified society, with the ruling class enjoying the surface and the worker class toiling underground. If that sounds familiar, well, you’re not wrong, and we’ll get to the link between Aelita and Metropolis (1927) below. In the novel, the engineer and soldier encourage a workers’ revolution on Mars, but the revolution is defeated and they flee back to Earth.

The film keeps the plot of the novel more or less intact, but it wraps the story up in a whole lot more, adding subplots about domestic infidelity, bureaucratic corruption, criminal investigation, cross-dressing to sneak about a spaceship, and murder. Well, sort of murder, but not really. It’s complicated.

To understand how all of that fits together, we have to look at the context in which the film was made.

So let’s travel back to Russia in 1923. It was a tumultuous time, to say the least. Six years earlier, the people of Russia overthrew their monarchy in two successive revolutions in 1917; the first led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, while the second was when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government that had been formed following the abdication. This, in turn, led to years of civil war; then severe drought struck in 1921, leading to widespread famine and the deaths of millions due to starvation and disease.

The Russian Civil War ended in 1922 with the formation of the one-party Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, with Lenin as its first head of government. Historians still debate exactly how many people died during the war, but many estimate it was around ten million. When it was over, the newly formed Soviet Union was in economic shambles, with intense food rationing, a widespread black market, ubiquitous bureaucratic corruption, and waves of outward emigration as people left the country.

Aelita begins in Moscow in 1921, but most of the story takes place several months later, in the immediate aftermath of the civil war. That’s the context that surrounds the whole story, even when it isn’t apparent onscreen to our modern, non-Soviet eyes. It would have been implicitly understood to audiences watching in theaters in 1924.

Another important thing to note is that in 1924, film production happened under the watchful eye of the new Soviet government’s People’s Commissariat for Education. Many cinemas and production studios were still technically independent businesses, but they were in the process of being nationalized and censored. In January of 1922, Lenin issued two “Directives on the Film Business,” in which he states that every film-showing program should include both an entertainment film (“of course, without obscenity and counter-revolution”) and a propaganda film demonstrating how bad life is in other countries (“…such as: Britain’s colonial policy in India, the work of the League of Nations, the starving Berliners, etc., etc.”).

The studio that produced Aelita was the Russian-German company Mezhrabprom-Rus, which is an abbreviation of the full Russian name that means International Workers Relief Studio. The name gives a pretty good indication of what the studio was trying to do: encourage communist workers’ revolutions worldwide through the power of cinema. As I mentioned back when I wrote about Metropolis, this was also a period of intense artistic experimentation in film, especially in Germany. The artform was still fairly young—it had been not quite thirty years since the first public film screening, and not quite twenty since the production of the first feature-length film—and filmmakers were exploring ways the medium could be used to tell bigger, flashier, and more appealing stories.

That’s what the folks at Mezhrabprom-Rus set out to do with Aelita. Their goal from the start was to make a big impression, to create the kind of movie that could compete with films from around the world, because the Russia-based film industry didn’t have a movie like that yet. With a pile of money injected from the German part of the company, Mezhrabprom-Rus called on Yakov Protazanov, one of the founding fathers of Russian cinema, to direct Aelita. Protazanov was a wildly prolific and admired filmmaker, but he’d actually left Russian during the civil war and spent a few years making movies in France and Germany instead. The offer from Mezhrabprom-Rus is what brought him back, and Aelita was his first film after his return.

So we have a novella about a failed workers’ revolution on Mars, in the hands of a director who had established his reputation making realist dramas based on the works of Alexander Pushkin and Leo Tolstoy, in a political environment where movies were pressured by governmental edict to be explicitly in favor of communist revolution while also making a great deal of capitalist money, and to somehow do so without criticizing the hardship of the post-war years nor alienating the audiences who were living that hardship every day.

It is, in retrospect, not really surprising that Aelita turned out to be a bit of an ideological and philosophical muddle. It is a bit surprising that the movie makes any sense at all—so far as it does, which is a matter of debate.

The film opens in 1921, when all around the world radio stations receive a mysterious message. When somebody jokes that the message might come from Mars, an engineer named Los (Nikolai Tseretelli) becomes obsessed with this possibility. He decides he has to build a ship and go to Mars and find out.

Another bit of historical context, because we love historical context: In 1921, only about fifteen years had passed since the first long-distance audio radio transmissions. But filmmakers hadn’t waited that long to start imagining radio transmissions from Mars. The 1913 British film A Message From Mars has Martians pulling the old A Christmas Carol trick on a rich man to convince him to mend his miserly ways. That film was based on a 1903 short film of the same name from New Zealand, which in turn was based on a 1899 play by Richard Ganthony, but in the original play the Martian visits in his dreams. One thing about humans is that we’re always going to be imagining visitors from other realms showing up to tell rich men not to be such assholes.

Back in Moscow, nobody can decipher the mysterious message, but life goes on. Los and his wife, Natasha (Valentina Kuindzhi), become neighbors with the obnoxious Erlich (Pavel Pol), a former businessman who mourns the pre-revolution days when he was wealthy and pampered and could order servants around at will. Erlich works alongside Natasha at what the subtitles call a “checkpoint,” which seems to be a sort of clearinghouse for things like medical care, housing, and food rations in the aftermath of the war. The choice of this setting is not subtle, for it allows the movie to highlight the difference between diligent, incorruptible Natasha and deceitful, corrupt Erlich, who steals food rations and tries to seduce married women and spends all his free time scheming and partying. The investigator looking into the corruption (played by Igor Ilyinsky) suspects Erlich’s friend Spiridonov of the crime. Spiridonov is played by Nikolai Tseretelli in glasses and a fake beard, for reasons that eventually become apparent but are honestly a bit silly.

While all of this is going on, we also get a glimpse into what’s happening on Mars. Aelita (Yuliya Solntseva) is the queen of Mars, but she doesn’t seem to have any real power; that is all in the hands of Tuskub (Konstantin Eggert), who rules over a rigidly divided Martian society where the wealthy live on the surface and the workers live underground and are sometimes frozen and put into cold storage. One of Tuskub’s men, Gol (Yuri Zavadsky), has built a powerful telescope through which he can see life on other planets. Tuskub doesn’t want his people to know about this, but with the help of her servant, Ikhoshka (Aleksandra Peregonets), who is wearing the coolest pants of all time, Aelita persuades Gol to let her have a peek. She becomes enamored of watching life on Earth, particularly when she watches Los kiss Natasha. Martians, it seems, do not know what kissing is.

Meanwhile, back on Earth, Los observes Erlich hitting on his wife, but instead of asking Natasha what’s going on he decides to have a breakdown about it. After he is sent away for several months to rebuild the nation—literally, he’s working on constructing a power plant—he returns and is convinced that Natasha and Elrich are having an affair.

Los draws a gun and shoots Natasha, which comes out of nowhere and is the point at which I began sending my friend bewildered “wtf?” messages. Now it’s time to imagine me taking a big, fortifying breath before I run through the rest of this plot… okay, here we go.

Natasha dies, and Los attends her funeral disguised as Spiridonov, not because he wants to mourn the wife he just murdered, but because he wants a chance to retrieve the plans for his Martian spaceship from where Spiridonov has hidden them in the fireplace.

Los’ plan to evade capture is to go to Mars—which he does, with a Red Army soldier named Gusev (Nikolay Batalov) along for the ride. Gusev is, he says, so very bored now that all the fighting is done, but his wife doesn’t want him to go to Mars, so he has to disguise himself in women’s clothes to get to the ship. They are well on their way before either of them realizes the investigator who is looking into Elrich’s corruption and Natasha’s murder has stowed aboard, although he doesn’t seem to know where they are going.

They arrive on Mars, where the investigator tries to have the Martian guards arrest Los (who he thinks is Spiridonov), and Los begins romancing Aelita, and Aelita has her maid kill Gol. When the maid is taken to the underground prison camp, Gusev goes with her and gives a rousing speech inciting the workers to rebellion. It works, and the workers rise up and overthrow Tuskub, but Aelita turns around, takes control of the army, and has them drive the revolutionaries back underground. Gusev isn’t surprised—he knew a queen would not lead a revolution—but Los is horrified. He’s also confused, because now Aelita looks like Natasha. Los pushes her off the stairs and to her death.

Then he wakes up.

More accurately, he snaps out of his delusion. He’s back on Earth. He’s never been to Mars, because there was never a message from Mars. The mysterious radio signal was a garbled advertisement from a tire company.

But he did, apparently, think the message was from Mars, and he did try to build a spaceship. It’s not immediately clear to me where reality ended and the delusion began. I don’t think he actually shot at Natasha, but it’s possible he did. Either way, the movie thinks the fact that he didn’t harm her—he only daydreamed about it—is reason enough for them to be romantically reconciled at the end. Elrich is arrested for theft, and everybody else can get back to the very important business of nation-building.

I feel like looking for a coherent message in Aelita is an exercise in frustration, even though it’s the type of movie that feels like it wants to say a lot of things: Pay attention to the work that needs doing in your own nation rather than daydreaming about escape to other lands—never mind that Los is very much working as an engineer and seems to doing his job just fine, even while he’s daydreaming about Mars. Spread the message of the workers’ revolution to the downtrodden everywhere—never mind that Gusev’s Martian revolution fails. A rigidly stratified society like the one on Mars needs to keep its people from seeing and hearing about other societies in order for the ruling class to maintain power—but that doesn’t end up mattering in the end.

It’s all quite a mess, which makes sense considering it consists of a short sci fi novella padded out with the elements that the filmmakers thought would make for mainstream dramatic cinematic success.

Alas, Aelita would not end up being that first global success for Soviet cinema. In spite of having a large budget, a lengthy production process, and an extensive advertising campaign, it never gained the attention of international film fans, largely because the Soviet government denied a petition to export it. The honor of drawing serious international attention to Soviet cinema belongs to Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), which became successful in other countries before it was even distributed in the Soviet Union.

However, Aelita did eventually earn a place in sci fi movie history for an entirely different reason: the scenes on Mars look so unbelievably cool.

They look so cool, and the credit for that belongs to three people: set designers Viktor Simov and Isak Rabinovich, and costume designer Alexandra Exter. All three of them created a vision of Mars strongly tied to both the German expressionists that we met when we watched Metropolis and to the constructivist art movement that was spearheaded by Russian artists Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko during WWI. Constructivism incorporated abstract, geometrical, simplified, and highly symbolic imagery to convey the notion of an austere, industrialized society that has done away with the ornamentation and excesses of classical Western European art and architecture.

That all sounds very high-minded, but I promise you have seen Soviet constructivist art before. Quite a lot of Soviet state imagery is constructivist in style, and a lot of what we think of today as early twentieth-century avant-garde or abstract art is working in the same vein. See, for example, Rodchenko’s poster advertisement for a Soviet state airline or Varvara Stepanova’s poster for promoting literacy or Gustav Klutsis’ Oppressed Peoples of the Whole World.

Turning a political movement in art and architecture into an otherworldly film setting meant building a set made of an abundance of geometric shapes and sharp lines. What we see of Mars is all sweeping staircases, blade-like pillars, and arched walkways. The doors fold and unfold like fans. There is no softness in the design. The Martians do not have cushions, not even on their thrones. The overall effect is cold, unwelcoming, full of hard surfaces and harsh shadows, and absolutely fascinating.

Alexandra Exter’s costumes only emphasize the glorious strangeness of the setting. Exter takes the very same rigid, geometrical forms of the setting and translates them into clothing. Aelita’s headdress radiates rigid spokes and her dress is made up of a series of circles and spirals; her maid’s amazing pants compress like parts of a machine every time the young woman bends her legs; the Martian soldiers wear armor that make them look like the mechanized versions of Roman centurions.

Exter was a renowned artist whose striking work remains valuable and admired today. She left the Soviet Union to live in Paris and pal about with Pablo Picasso and Getrude Stein shortly after finishing work on Aelita. A century later, her costume designs are still the most memorable and recognizable thing about the film, and it’s very easy to see why.

Now, a lot of people see similarities between Aelita and Metropolis, particularly in some elements of costume design. Some articles claim that Aelita was a direct inspiration, while others are a bit more cautious in making the connection, but it’s all speculation. It’s possible that Fritz Lang saw Aelita when it was distributed in Germany, and there was a period when Lang and Protazanov were probably moving in the same filmmaking circles, but there is no direct evidence that Lang was aware of Aelita.

What we do know is that Aelita did not influence other Soviet filmmakers, at least not obviously or immediately, because it was too far removed from the grounded social realism favored in the young Soviet Union. It did fairly well with audiences at first, but it faded pretty quickly, and Protazanov went back to making realist comedies and dramas. He died in 1945 with nearly 80 films to his name. Aelita sank into the background of cinema history, largely inaccessible for many decades, but never fully vanishing from memory.

A 1929 review in The New York Times says of Aelita, “This film is far more interesting to read about than to gaze upon.” Even though I find the Martian scenes very interesting to gaze upon, I can’t really argue with that review. Aelita is a curious part of cinema history. The film doesn’t quite work as a whole, but the insight it provides into the context in which it was made and the bursts of artistry that went into it make it worth watching.

What do you think about Aelita and this glimpse of early Soviet sci fi cinema? Who among you is going to cosplay Aelita and her servant?

Next week we’re off for Thanksgiving, but the week after that we’ll be back with Kurt Neumann’s Rocketship X-M. Watch it on Amazon or Indieflix. It’s also not hard to find if you poke around the internet in all the usual places.[end-mark]

The post <i>Aelita</i>: An Ambitious Dream of Bringing the Revolution to Mars appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Total Recall: Extreme Escapism for Fun and Profit

“Now this is the plan: Get your ass to Mars.”

By Kali Wallace

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Published on November 12, 2025

Credit: Tri-Star Pictures

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Credit: Tri-Star Pictures

Total Recall (1990). Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Written by Ronald Shusett, Dan O’Bannon, and Gary Goldman, based on the story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” by Philip K. Dick. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rachel Ticotin, Sharon Stone, Michael Ironside, and Ronny Cox.

Philip K. Dick died just a few months before the release of Blade Runner (1982). The film had been in development for quite a while, long enough for Dick to shift from extreme skepticism about a film adaptation of his work to appreciation of the scenes he was able to screen before his death. In a 1981 letter to the production company, Dick wrote, “…I can only say that I did not know that a work of mine or a set of ideas of mine could be escalated into such stunning dimensions.”

He wouldn’t live to see the finished film, nor to see his body of work go on to inspire several other major films, which would in turn influence the themes and aesthetics of science fiction across all media for decades to come, with their gritty visions of the future, anxiety about technology, and paranoia regarding what’s going on in our own minds. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner was the first of those films, and Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall (1990) was the second, although both began their long cinematic journeys at about the same time, with film producers optioning the source material in the early 1970s. It just took a little while for Total Recall to make it through a long and twisty production path and finally arrive on screen.

Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” was published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1966, and film producer Ronald Shusett acquired the option to film it in 1974. At the time Shusett had exactly one film to his name (a 1974 thriller called W, starring the iconic ’60s model Twiggy), but some time during that same year he would watch a weird little sci fi student film that piqued his interest: John Carpenter’s Dark Star (1974). After seeing Dark Star,Shusett made the acquaintance of Carpenter’s co-screenwriter, Dan O’Bannon, and the two would go on to develop the story that would eventually become Alien (1979). During that same time, they were also working on adapting “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” into a film, although they had some trouble figuring out how to make it work.

I know I almost always come into these articles saying that I haven’t read (or recently re-read) the source material for a film adaptation, so you might be pleasantly surprised to learn that in this case I did my homework. I went back to reread “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” because I was curious about the story troubles the screenwriters ran into over the years. (I haven’t seen the 2012 Total Recall starring Colin Farrell, but I do know that it credits the 1990 movie, not the Dick story, as its source material.)

The original text tells the story of a man name Douglas Quail who really wants to go to Mars, even though his nagging wife mocks him for this dream. Quail decides that since he can’t afford a real vacation on Mars, he’ll get an artificial one instead. He goes to a company called Rekal, Inc. to have memories of an exciting trip as an interplanetary secret agent implanted in his mind. During the procedure, however, the technicians discover that he already has real memories of having committed a political assassination on Mars, and somebody else has covered them up.

The folks at Rekal naturally want nothing to do with this, so they send Quail on his way. But other secret agents realize—via a telepathic plasma worm in his brain, naturally—that Quail might start to remember being a political assassin, so they confront him. He first tries to flee, but eventually he proposes that they cover up his memory with something else—with his most vivid and powerful daydream, so that he stops obsessing over Mars. They agree and go into his mind to implant a false memory of Quail saving the world from an alien invasion—only to discover that he already remembers that, because it’s also real.

That’s where the story ends. It’s all so very Philip K. Dick, with its themes about memory, identity, and the anxiety of not being able to trust what’s in our own minds and realizing that the mundane world around us is hiding something more sinister. But it’s also very brief, with an abrupt twist ending very typical of ’60s sci fi short fiction. Quail never goes to Mars; the story mostly takes place in offices and cars on Earth. There are no details about Martian politics. There are no Martian mines, no mutants, no rebels fighting against colonial oppressors, no three-breasted sex workers. No romance and very little action.

All of that stuff was added in when Shusett and O’Bannon realized they needed to expand the story to have a full-length movie. But their expansion had some significant problems, as nobody could agree on how the movie should end. They first tried to pitch the movie to Disney—this was during Disney’s early ’80s pivot to older audiences and live action—but Disney didn’t want it, so they took it to De Laurentiis Entertainment. You might recall that De Laurentiis was making a go at big, expensive sci fi in the early ’80s, as they imagined David Lynch’s Dune (1984) as a way to capitalize on the sci fi popularity spurred by the likes of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg.

The first director attached to Total Recall would be David Cronenberg, so we can add can add this movie to the ever-growing list of films that Cronenberg didn’t direct but that I will absolutely seek out if I ever acquire the ability to view movies from alternate universes. But having a director on the film only made the script problems worse, as Cronenberg rewrote the film’s ending several times and could not come up with a version that made everybody happy. According to Cronenberg, his versions took the script closer to the original Dick story, whereas Shusett wanted something more along the lines of the action and humor of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). They could not come to an agreement about the film’s tone or ending, so Cronenberg eventually quit. Around the same time production stalled, in part because Dune ended up being a financial disaster for De Laurentiis. The company went bankrupt in 1988, having already spent a ton of time and money trying and failing to turn Total Recall into a movie.

Enter Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had been interested in the film for a few years but had never been able to convince Dino De Laurentiis to consider him for the lead role. Part of the problem, of course, was that the main character is imagined as a sort of sad-sack everyman, and Schwarzenegger’s on-screen persona in the ’80s was about as far from that as it is possible to be. But he had massive sci fi star power from James Cameron’s Terminator (1984), and he had been able to cross over into campy comedy with Ivan Reitman’s Twins (1988). (Fun movie fact: Prior to that, nobody thought Schwarzenegger could do anything but the most serious shoot-’em-up action. He and Reitman and co-star Danny DeVito all signed on to Twins with an agreement to take no upfront salary and instead take a share of the profits. It ended up being wildly successful, making them all approximately one bajillionzillion dollars, or thereabouts.)

When De Laurentiis went bankrupt and Total Recall went on the market, Schwarzenegger called up some buddies at independent production studio Carolco, which at the time was a very big name in movies that mostly consist of people shooting lots of guns, i.e., the first few Rambo films. He convinced them to take on Total Recall, with the intention of approving the rewrites and starring in it himself.

It was also Schwarzenegger’s idea to bring on Paul Verhoeven as director, because he, like everybody else, had loved Verhoeven’s ultra-violent, satirical RoboCop (1987). Verhoeven was skeptical about doing another effects-heavy sci fi story, but he liked the mind-fuckery of Total Recall enough to sign on. That meant adding another cook to a kitchen that already had quite a lot of cooks, especially when Verhoeven brought in screenwriter Gary Goldman (whose one previous writing credit was John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China [1986]) to work the dozens of existing versions of the story into a working script.

There are so many reasons why none of this should have worked. A screenwriting team that had failed to find a satisfactory ending to the movie for over a decade. A big-name action star backseat-driving the entire production. A studio known for making movies that are synonymous with the “a man with a gun shoots a lot of people” genre. A director whose favorite part of the story happens inside the main character’s mind.

So often in Hollywood, when there are that many big opinions and big personalities pulling in different directions, the result is a muddled, chaotic mess. It would have been so easy for Total Recall to end up as a mess.

But it didn’t. Total Recall is a great movie. Yes, it’s brash and loud and wildly over-the-top. Yes, it might all take place inside the main character’s mind as some self-indulgent delusion of grandeur. Yes, it’s very much a cinematic last gasp of the extravagant sci fi of the ’80s, right down to the color palette and gruesome special effects. And yes, absolutely nobody involved at any stage of the process knew anything about Martian geology and atmosphere.

Who cares? It’s weird, campy, violent, and so fucking fun.

Oh, and another thing: It’s also an incredibly well-made movie.

The acting is solid precisely because everybody knows when to match the over-the-top tone. Schwarzenegger is clearly having the time of his life, Sharon Stone is also enjoying herself as the hot-and-cold fake wife/secret agent Lori, and Michael Ironside and Ronny Cox are delightful villains. Roy Brocksmith makes a brief but memorable appearance as Dr. Edgemar, the man who tries to convince Quaid that the whole ordeal is in his mind. All of the performances are turned up beyond what is natural, but it works, because so is everything else about the film.

When Verhoeven signed on, he brought along with him a lot of the crew from RoboCop. Among them was special effects artist Rob Bottin, whose name you are probably not surprised to see here—not if you were also looking at the character make-up effects of the Martian mutants and thinking, “Huh, I’m feeling disturbed and fascinated in a very familiar way.” It should be familiar, because Bottin is the guy who did the creature effects in The Thing (1982). His style is so delightfully distinctive.

Total Recall was made right at the boundary between when elaborate practical effects fell out of fashion and more convincing CGI became possible. And I mean right at the boundary: James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), also from Carolco Pictures, was entering post-production when Total Recall was in the theaters.

Total Recall’s visual effects are almost entirely practical. Bottin’s mutants and many of the character effects are a combination of make-up, prosthetics, puppets, and models. The character of Kuato is a puppet grafted onto the body of actor Marshall Bell. (Aside: I can’t be the only one who noticed that every single character in the film pronounced “Kuato” differently.) The Martian landscapes and vistas are a combination of matte paintings and miniatures. I especially love the huge, gorgeous model of the city sitting in the Martian surface. They built that entire underground glacier setting, where Quaid and Melina (Rachel Ticotin) turn on the alien reactor, at different scales on different sets. They even built a real (small-scale) mountain to blow up at the end. The model was apparently so big, and the explosion so grand in scale, they had to film it in an agricultural hall at the Ventura County Fairground. I understand that there are cost and safety considerations, but I think more movies should build mountains and blow them up at the fairgrounds.

The Total Recall special effects crew did make use of some state-of-the-art (at the time) computer effects—or at least, they tried to. In a 2015 interview with members of the production, visual effects supervisor Eric Brevig and CGI director Tim McGovern talk about how they tried to use motion capture technology to create a digital animation of the scene in which Quaid and others move through the X-ray walkway. Motion capture is used all the time for movies and video games now, but in the late ’80s it was being used primarily for movement analysis in medicine and sports (for purposes like tracking movement recovery after surgery or analyzing a golfer’s swing). McGovern’s attempts at using it didn’t quite work out the way he wanted, but they did use the motion-captured shots as references for the X-ray skeleton animation.

Verhoeven has always maintained that the movie can be interpreted as Quaid’s lived reality or as a heroic daydream that exists entirely in his head. Both interpretations are intentional. In a 2016 interview, Verhoeven said, “…I felt that it was—if you want to use a very big word—post-modern. I felt that basically I should not say ‘This is true, and this not true.’”

He’s also been pretty clear that he prefers the “dream” interpretation because he finds it more interesting, which is not at all surprising. Of course the director behind RoboCop and (years later) Starship Troopers (1997) is most interested in the version of the story that’s about the alluring but ultimately hollow fantasy of acting out extreme violence in service of heroism. It’s almost like he has a favorite theme for his politically-minded sci fi satires…

That’s what makes Total Recall so great: It is a very smart movie wrapped in the costume of a very dumb movie. It’s a bombastic action movie about an ordinary guy who dreams of being important, only to find out that he is important; he’s a badass secret agent, he’s turned against the powerful to help the powerless, he helps the downtrodden and saves the planet and gets the girl. It’s also a movie about the very nature of that kind of violent heroic daydream, about the commercialism that sells the mirage of excitement because people are too busy working to experience real excitement, about imagining planetary exploration as colonial exploitation, about the fantasy that a tough guy can shoot a whole lot of people to save the day.

It’s one of the rare films that succeeds as both an over-the-top action movie and as a razor-sharp critique of the genre, and it does that all while being fast-paced and funny and a lot of fun.

What do you think about Total Recall? I’ve always been sort of vaguely fond of this film, even with the stupid eyeball decompression stuff, and I think I like it even more now. Also, I had not known until researching that Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002)—a movie I also like quite a lot—began life as a Total Recall sequel. But we’ll get into that some other time.[end-mark]

Next week: Let’s watch another movie about a man imagining working-class revolution and beautiful women on Mars. This one is just a little bit older. Watch Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 silent film Aelita on Kanopy, Indieflix, Amazon, Klassiki, as well YouTube, the Internet Archive, and other free video sites.  

The post <i>Total Recall</i>: Extreme Escapism for Fun and Profit appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Robinson Crusoe on Mars: An Optimistic Space Age Survival Tale

An astronaut and his monkey crash-land on the Red Planet…

By Kali Wallace

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Published on November 5, 2025

Credit: Paramount Pictures

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Credit: Paramount Pictures

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964). Directed by Byron Haskin. Written by Ib Melchior and John C. Higgins, based on the novel Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Starring Paul Mantee, Victor Lundin, Adam West, and Barney the Woolly Monkey.

On November 28, 1964, NASA launched the Mariner 4 mission to Mars. It was NASA’s second planned Mars probe, as just a few weeks earlier Mariner 3 had been launched but soon lost power, putting it on a trajectory that would miss Mars by a wide margin. (Thankfully it was just a probe full of scientific instruments and not a futuristic cruise ship filled with depressed travelers.) This was during the height of the Space Race, when the United States and the Soviet Union were flinging spacecraft into space more or less nonstop. It wasn’t just about getting humans to the Moon; they were also racing for every other “first” in space exploration, and that included sending unmanned spacecraft to the other planets in our solar system.

Mariner 4 was a success, and after more than seven months in transit it completed a two-day flyby of Mars in July of 1965. It sent back some 634 kb of data, which is less than a single one of the many thousands of cat pictures I have saved on my phone, but in 1964 it was a whopping amount. That data included information about Mars’ atmosphere (very thin), temperature (very cold), magnetic field (nonexistent), and Van Allen radiation belt (also nonexistent).

Most strikingly, Mariner 4 captured 22 photographs of the surface of Mars, all of which revealed a planet that was pockmarked by craters and devoid of obvious signs of water or life.

That was, alas, not quite what people had expected.

Pardon me for a moment while I set aside my film writer hat and put on my somewhat dusty geologist hat…

These days, living as we are in the era of fondly anthropomorphized Mars landers and abundant surface imagery, it’s a bit hard to conceptualize just how little we knew about Mars in the early ’60s. I’m not just talking about the general public, but about scientists actively involved in the research. Nobody was going there looking for a vast civilization made up of Percival Lowell’s canals, but they did have some expectations of a planet that was rather more similar to Earth than it turned out to be. The eternal problem of planetary geology, then and now, is that we have exactly one well-studied data point, so what we see on Earth inevitably colors all of our theories about how planets work.

Prior to the ’60s space missions, scientists expected Mars to have a magnetic field, because it formed the same way and at the same time as Earth from the same raw material. Earth’s magnetic field protects our atmosphere from being stripped away by solar wind, which in turn protects the surface from ultraviolet radiation, which means that the large molecules necessary for life (such as DNA) are protected from the full force of the Sun’s radiation.

So when the Mariner 4 flyby showed that Mars has no magnetic field and very little atmosphere, as well as significant cratering on the surface that indicates an “old” surface that has not been geologically active, planetary scientists had to very dramatically shift their understanding of exactly how Mars compared to Earth. The fundamental processes that shape the planets are the same, but Mars sits at a different place along the timeline of planetary evolution. Mars had a magnetic dynamo like Earth’s in the past, when it was still cooling and had a partially molten core, but that ceased when the interior completely cooled. (It’s a lot more complicated than that—geomagnetism is always more complicated—but that’s the general idea.) Mars also had a thicker atmosphere in the past, but without the magnetic field to protect it, the solar wind was able to scour most of that atmosphere away, which meant the surface temperatures would drop, most surface water would evaporate or freeze, and any life would be exposed to radiation.

All of that new information hit the planetary science community like a ton of bricks in the summer of ’65. If you poke around scientific articles about Mars prior to Mariner 4, you can find things like scientists theorizing about the biochemical composition of the life they will inevitably find on Mars. Afterward, the focused shifted to searching for evidence there had been life in Mars’ distant pass, rather than expecting it in the present.

All right, I’m taking off the geologist hat and putting the film writer hat back on now.

Naturally, the new data from Mars also changed the way sci fi writers wrote about the planet. That includes movies, although there is a curious dearth of cinematic depictions of Mars between the mid to late ’60s and the ’80s.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars sits right at the boundary of the old type of Mars movie and the new. It came out a year before Mariner 4 reached Mars, so the exciting new discoveries were not incorporated into its vision of the planet. But in the context of what people knew prior to Mariner 4, it is a significantly more grounded view of Mars than what we seen in many movies that preceded it.

That’s by design, but the film didn’t start out that way. The first version of the screenplay was written by Ib Melchior, who had previously written and directed another Mars movie, The Angry Red Planet (1959), and would later write the English-language script for Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires (1965). Melchior was a man who liked to write about terrible things happening to people exploring other planets, and I like that about him. His version of Robinson Crusoe on Mars featured a Martian surface replete with plant and animal life—not quite the classic creature feature that was The Angry Red Planet, but definitely not a lifeless landscape. Melchior had intended to direct the film himself, but he had to abandon it in order to focus on The Time Travelers (1964).

The studio (Paramount) found another director to helm the project, and that was Byron Haskin, who is best known for his collaborations with producer George Pal. Haskin directed The War of the Worlds (1953), as well as a couple of space exploration films: Conquest of Space (1955) and From the Earth to the Moon (1958). He was no stranger to sending characters into space, and with screenwriter John C. Higgins, he revised Melchior’s script to add some realism to both the portrayal of Mars and the process of exploring it.

In a 2011 essay for the Criterion Collection, Michael Lennick points out that variations on the theme of Daniel Defoe’s novel would become all the rage in the second half of the 1960s, with television series like Gilligan’s Island and I Dream of Jeannie using the premise of characters getting stranded on remote islands as a foundation for camp and comedy. I’m sure there is some interesting cultural psychology to study regarding what was going on there, but it’s not relevant to our purposes today because Haskin takes a much more straightforward and earnest approach: An astronaut is stranded alone in a faraway place, and he has to survive.

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719. I’ll let the English lit majors in the audience argue about its impact and significance, but I think most of us have heard of it and know at least the basic premise. I’ve never read it, and my knowledge of it is limited to the general cultural knowledge one acquires as a person who grew up and attended schooling in the English-speaking world. That is, I’ve encountered deeply abridged children’s versions, and I’m aware of the outline of the story, but that’s about it. I didn’t know that the story was inspired by one or more real sailors who had spent years marooned on various islands; the man most frequently cited is Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who tried to mutiny against his captain, failed, and ended up spending four years on an island in the South Pacific. Nor did I know that in the book the titular character is participating in the Atlantic slave trade when his ship is sunk and he becomes stranded. They left the slave-trading out of the abridged versions I encountered as a child.

The men traveling to Mars in Robinson Crusoe on Mars have no evil intentions. Commander Kit Draper (Paul Mantee) and Colonel Dan McReady (Adam West, a few years before he would become Gotham City’s caped crusader) are collecting data aboard Mars Gravity Probe 1. Along for the ride is Mona the Woolly Monkey (played by Barney the Woolly Monkey, who was required to wear a diaper to hide the fact that he was a male monkey, and probably also for the usual diaper reasons). While they are in orbit around Mars, Draper and McReady have to change course to dodge a meteor, which leads to them running out of fuel and ejecting from the ship in separate landers. (It does not, thankfully, lead to them soaring off course and into the unknown where they are obliged to start a doomsday space sex cult.) (Yes, I will continue referencing Aniara any time we encounter a Mars-bound flight gone awry.)

Draper crash-lands on Mars, which looks a lot like Death Valley, because it is Death Valley. Specifically, it’s the gorgeous landscape near Zabriskie Point in the Amargosa Range, which you too would recognize immediately if you had also spent your college years studying rocks instead of reading Robinson Crusoe. Death Valley stars as Mars in nearly all of the exterior scenes, although some are augmented by matte paintings by artist Albert Whitlock, whose work we’ve seen before in The Thing (1982) and Dune (1984).

The giant firestorm and balls of flame are not natural to Death Valley—nor to the real Mars—but they provide some nice peril to welcome Draper to the surface. He quickly realizes he can’t survive breathing the Martian atmosphere for long, so he takes what air and water he can from his wrecked lander and searches for shelter.

What follows is a survival story that hits all the familiar beats, but it’s interesting and engaging as it does so. McCready doesn’t survive his own rough landing, although Mona does, so Draper is alone with a monkey companion. He’s lucky enough to find some rocks that not only burn but somehow produce oxygen while they burn, so he can take shelter in a cave, stay warm, and breathe for a little longer. Mona is the one who finds the Martian cave pools filled with edible plants that can somehow also be processed into fiber for textiles. (I have… so many questions about those plants. And about what happens to the digestive systems of both man and monkey after eating nothing but fiber for months.)

Draper approaches it all with a can-do attitude, but he does suffer from some moments of despair. Mantee was chosen for the role largely based on being an unknown and resembling American astronaut Alan Shepard, but he plays those heavier scenes well. Even though I find the idea of NASA sending astronauts to Mars with videotapes of “How To Survive on Other Planets” hilarious, I still like that the film takes a practical approach to the problems Draper faces. I also really like that even when Draper thinks he’s never going to leave Mars, Draper dutifully records observations about what he finds. He’s an astronaut who has come to Mars to explore the planet, and nothing will keep him from doing that.

Of course, just as in the original Robinson Crusoe, Draper’s solitude does not last. Defoe’s character encounters a group of cannibals and befriends one of their escaped captives, whereas the astronaut version encounters an extraterrestrial interplanetary mining operation and befriends one of the escaped slaves, who is played by Victor Lundin. (A few years later, Lundin would make an appearance in the Star Trek episode “Errand of Mercy” as one of the first Klingons shown in the series.) The two of them help each other (and Mona) survive, evading the relentless alien miners by first descending into volcanic caverns, then by heading for one of Mars’ polar ice caps (which have been known to astronomers since the 17^th century). There, they are finally rescued by another mission from Earth.

If you looked at the three-pointed shape of the alien spacecraft and thought, “Gosh, those look familiar,” well, there’s a reason for that, but it’s not quite the reason I first assumed. Like others before me, I thought Haskin had merely reused the models from War of the Worlds, but the truth is he just really liked that shape for alien spaceships and had special effects artist Albert Nozaki make him another set of similar ships for this film. Haskin also did the film’s small amount of spaceship animation himself, making use of the special effects experience he had developed during the earlier part of his career.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars ends on a bit of a silly note—melting the Martian ice cap is a bit much—and there are moments throughout where the 1960s of it all invites a bit of eyerolling, but overall I found it to be an enjoyable movie and a fun sci fi take on one of literature’s most familiar survival stories.

The film occupies an interesting spot in sci fi movie history. It’s one of the more grounded takes on space exploration from the era, making good use of what science was available at the time while leaving room for a fairly light and optimistic tone. Just a few years earlier, space exploration films had leaned more heavily into monsters and metaphors and cautionary tales; just a few years later and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) would enter the scene and nudge the genre toward high-minded solemnity.

But right there in the mid ’60s sits Robinson Crusoe on Mars, which firmly set aside the paranoia and science skepticism of the Atomic Age to embrace the adventurous spirit of the Space Race. The film tries to match the mood of the era, and I think it does a pretty good job.

What do you think of Robinson Crusoe on Mars? Does it make you want to go to Mars? It makes me want to go to Mars, even though I know Mars is not Death Valley and there are no fibrous cave plants to turn into hallucinatory sausage and weave into blankets. I still want to go.

(A final note: I’m sure many of us have seen the premise of The Martian, the novel by Andy Weir, also described as “Robinson Crusoe on Mars.” I really like The Martian—both the book and the film version—but I have no idea if Weir has ever spoken about knowledge of the film Robinson Crusoe on Mars. I haven’t looked into it and, honestly, asking if an English-language author knows the premise of Defoe’s novel is a bit like asking if somebody in a swimming pool knows water is wet. Also, everybody should write more sci fi planetary exploration survival stories, so I can read them.)[end-mark]

Next week: We can and will remember all kinds of things for you wholesale with Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall. Watch it on Apple, Kanopy, or Amazon.

The post <i>Robinson Crusoe on Mars</i>: An Optimistic Space Age Survival Tale appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

The Last Starfighter: Let’s Go Join a Star War!

Predictable? Derivative? Sure, but it’s also a genuinely fun movie…

By Kali Wallace

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Published on October 29, 2025

Credit: Universal Pictures

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Credit: Universal Pictures

The Last Starfighter (1984). Directed by Nick Castle. Written by Jonathan R. Betuel. Starring Lance Guest, Dan O’Herlihy, Catherine Mary Stewart, and Robert Preston.

It’s impossible to talk about cinema, and especially sci fi cinema, without acknowledging the tremendous impact Star Wars (1977) had on the movie industry. But for all of its vast and indelible cultural influence, there aren’t actually that many movies that are consciously trying to tell a Star Wars-style story—at least not many that have retained any sort of staying power beyond the initial grab for cash and attention.

The reasons for that are pretty simply: when something has that big of an immediate, universal cultural impact, most of what references it and draws on its legacy is going to feel like either a knock-off or a parody. There are several films that tried to benefit from the Star Wars craze when it was hot, including Starcrash (1978), Star Odyssey (1979), and Roger Corman’s Battle Beyond the Stars (1980), which features a screenplay by John Sayles and special effects by a new-to-the-business James Cameron. But most of those are pretty much remembered only as being Star Wars copycats. (And of course we’ve already watched Spaceballs, one of the very few high-profile Star Wars-inspired films with enduring success, but sanctioned parody is really its own thing.)

So The Last Starfighter is a bit of an oddball. It’s very obviously a movie made to capitalize on the popularity of Star Wars, but it is also doing its own thing in ways that make it quite charming, and it has grown to have a fond, nostalgic cult status separate from the Star Wars influence.

In a 2024 podcast interview, screenwriter Jonathan Betuel explains where he got the idea for The Last Starfighter. He was working at an ad agency in Manhattan, and during his lunch break he would go to an arcade around the corner to play the games. This was during the golden age of video game arcades, and when Betuel saw how heated people got about the games, he started thinking about how to turn that into a story. At some point he decided to combine it with ideas he took from reading T.H. White’s Once and Future King, particularly the bit about the future King Arthur proving his worth by pulling the sword from the stone. (This kernel of inspiration is preserved in the film in a brief exchange between the characters Centauri and Grig about Centauri’s recruiting ideas.)

That’s where Betuel came up with the idea of a video game as a sort of Sword in the Stone, a test for identifying a much-needed hero. He shopped his script around, and it was picked up by Lorimar Productions, a studio that mostly made television shows (including Dallas) but did produce a few movies as well.

Even before the studio found a director, they brought on Digital Productions, a visual effects company founded by computer animators Gary Demos and John Whitney Jr. after they left Information International, Inc. (Triple-I) during that company’s work on Tron (1982). Putting computer generated images (CGI) into movies was a new thing at the time, but its use was baked into the production of The Last Starfighter from the very beginning. The reasons were largely practical: Digital Productions argued that they could create the effects sequences faster and cheaper than practical effects. As for whether it worked out that way… Well, not quite. But that was the goal going in.

The director the studio brought on for the project was Nick Castle, whom we have encountered before during our John Carpenter month last year. Castle is a long-time friend and collaborator of Carpenter’s: He helped produce Dark Star (1974), he played Michael Myers in Halloween (1978), and he co-wrote Escape From New York (1981). Castle had only one director credit to his name before The Last Starfighter—his feature debut TAG: The Assassination Game (1982), which according to Wikipedia is about (you guessed it) a game of tag that turns deadly.

Along with Castle came Ron Cobb, the production designer and visual effects artist who had also gotten his start as a Disney animator before working on Dark Star, then going on to do concept art and design for Star Wars, Alien (1979), and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), among many, many other things. He’s one of those artists and designers whose work is all over sci fi cinema.

It’s obvious from interviews that everybody knew they were making a movie that would be compared to the sci fi juggernauts of the Star Wars trilogy and E.T. (1982), so Castle wanted some way to differentiate their film. One thing he suggested was moving the story out of the middle-class suburbs—which were strongly associated with Steven Spielberg’s sci fi—and into a rural trailer park. Another change came after they cast Robert Preston to play Centauri. Betuel approached Castle with the idea of rewriting the character to play on the legacy of Preston’s most famous role: con artist Harold Hill in The Music Man (1962).

The Last Starfighter introduces us to teenager Alex (Lance Guest), who wants nothing more than to go to college so he and his girlfriend, Maggie (Catherine Mary Stewart), can move away from the SoCal trailer park they call home. (The movie never specifies that they’re in California, but the Earthbound scenes were filmed in Soledad Canyon east of Santa Clarita.) When he’s not working as a handyman around the trailer park, Alex spends his free time playing an arcade game called Starfighter, which he is very good at even when his little brother (played by Chris Hebert) is backseat-driving the pixelated space battles.

One night Alex achieves the games highest score, which everybody thinks is really exciting even though he appears to be the only person to play the game seriously at this location. In any case, it turns out it is exciting, but not for the reasons Alex’s close-knit community of neighbors might think. That same night, after Alex gets news that he has been turned down for a college loan and he’s outside venting his frustration at the desert, a stranger drives up in a car that is not a DeLorean crossed with a Volaré station wagon but totally looks like a DeLorean crossed with a Volaré station wagon.

That stranger is an alien named Centauri, and he’s come to Earth to recruit the best Starfighter player into a real space war. Okay, to be fair, “recruit” is a generous term. Centauri doesn’t tell Alex what’s going on before whipping him away to the planet Rylos to become an actual starfighter. He helpfully leaves an android behind to assume Alex’s look and take his place.

Alex is, understandably, not remotely interested in getting involved in a space war he did not sign up for. But when all the other starfighter recruits are killed and alien assassins come to Earth, he agrees to help Grig (Dan O’Herlihy) take out the enemy armada.

It’s all very predictable, yes, with a very derivative Chosen One plot, but as I was watching I found that I didn’t much care. It’s a fun movie! The cast is very charming, the story clips along at a nice pace, and the inherent zaniness of “what if your favorite video game was actually real?” is handled with good humor. I also like this little glimpse into the early video game era, when gaming was still mostly in arcades, not on consoles, and before pop culture would adopt the “video games will rot your brain” approach that came along later in the ’80s.

(Naturally I have to think about how this plot would look like here and now, when there are esports and global gaming competitions and all of that. Not the Ready Player One approach, which is something different, but the exact The Last Starfighter plot. Will the aliens come down to Earth to recruit somebody like Faker or Ninja or… sorry, those two names represent the full extent of my knowledge about professional gamers, but you get the point. What if the savior of humanity is some kid who is really, really, really good at winning Super Smash Bros. as the Wii Fit Trainer? What will our future hold?!)

Fun facts about the visual effects: Centauri’s Starcar was built by Gene Winfield, the same car customizer who built the flying cop car and many other vehicles for Blade Runner (1982). The Starcar was, apparently, a sheet metal exterior wrapped around a VW engine, so it couldn’t go very fast. But it did what it needed to do. Winfield was also the guy who built the shuttle Galileo for the original Star Trek, Robocop’s (1987) 6000 SUX, and spy cars for both Get Smart and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Winfield was pretty much the go-to guy for building custom cars for film and TV, which is a pretty cool thing to be. In the grand Hollywood tradition of reusing props, Centauri’s Starcar makes an appearance in Back to the Future Part II (1989), where it can be seen parked on a street.

The car is one of the few practical effects in The Last Starfighter, but it’s not entirely practical; it also exists as a digital effect, such as when it’s flying through space and arriving at Rylos. There are a handful of other practical effects in the film: the beta unit’s mid-transformation form and the various alien faces. The beta unit (also played by Guest, naturally) was another late change to the story; Castle expanded his role after test audiences liked seeing the android’s Earth hijinks.

Of course, it’s not the practical effects that The Last Starfighter is known for, but the digital effects. And, yes, it is absolutely true that watching the movie now it’s very obvious that it’s CGI was created in the early ’80s—but that’s what makes it so significant. There are 27 minutes of CGI in The Last Starfighter, comprising some 300 scenes that encompass nearly all of the space flight, the exteriors of the base on Rylos, the exteriors of the spaceships, the space frontier, the asteroid, the armada… It’s a lot of complex computer imagery, significantly more than was in Tron, which had forged new ground in computer effects just a couple years earlier.

Whitney and Demos, the computer animators who founded Digital productions, had left Triple-I in part because they knew they could do more with more computer power. They leased (at considerable expense) a Cray X-MP, which was at the time the world’s faster supercomputer, and was vastly more expensive than most people in Hollywood wanted to spend on computer imagery that didn’t even look better than what George Lucas’ people were doing the old-fashioned way.

Even with that much computing power, the amount of human power that went into the CGI was tremendous. These days we think of CGI as a shortcut, a way to make things easier and faster, but that was definitely not the case when they were making this film. They were building everything from the (digital) ground up, which meant they had to spends months coding in all of the geometric shapes for all of the CGI elements. The Gunstar, the ship Alex and Grig fly against the Ko-dan armada, is made up of 750,000 polygons. They could duplicate and manipulate the digital ship where needed, but they ran into problems due to the fact that geometric shapes in a computer don’t have any solidity or directionality unless they are programmed to have it. According to Cobb, “We had a few funny instances like that when we had ships passing through things or flying backwards.”

It took so long and raised so many problems that Jeffery Okun, the visual effects coordinator, wanted to build practical models instead and was ready to call a model-building company at any moment, but the film’s producers were committed to the digital approach.

I don’t know if doing everything digitally saved them any time or money in the end. The movie was expensive to make and didn’t earn much at the box office. Most of the contemporary reactions were that it was pleasant and fun but derivative, which is fair, because that’s what it is. It ends with Alex and Grig saving the day, then Alex and Maggie leaving their trailer park to go off to live in space. It’s all very earnest and light-hearted, the kind of story where we never really doubt that the good guys will be victorious and live happily ever after.

But The Last Starfighter did demonstrate, unquestionably, that a film could be made with entire scenes and set-pieces being computer-generated.

I know that’s commonplace to us now. I know sci fi fans and movie fans love to argue about whether or not it’s a good thing. I don’t happen to think that’s a very interesting or productive argument, because every movie comes from a series of choices and limitations. I know I will often talk more about practical effects in movies, but that’s simply because I love making things with my hands and learning about how other people do as well. We all know that CGI, like all tools used in making movies, can be used well, and it can be used poorly.

Here’s the thing about The Last Starfighter: It might not look great to us. It looks awkward and dated. Some of the CGI is—by the admission of the people who made it—quite flawed. (Cobb described the asteroid as “melted ice cream.” They knew when it didn’t look good!) But that’s not because they were using a filmmaking tool poorly. They were doing amazing work. They were building on the innovations used in Tron and doing things that nobody had done before. They were experimenting to figure out what was possible. It’s a hell of an achievement, and one that deserves a place of admiration in movie history.

And you know what? It’s also a fun movie. I enjoyed watching it. It seems irrelevant to care if it holds up or not, because it’s so very much of a particular era in pop culture. It’s a good time, cheesy as it is, and that’s really all a movie needs to be.

What do you think about The Last Starfighter? What game are you into that will have aliens coming down to Earth to steal you away for space heroics?[end-mark]

A Century of Visiting the Red Planet

Due to the upcoming holidays, we’ll be combining November and December into a single theme. That theme has been one of sci fi cinema’s favorite topics since the very beginning: Mars.

Sci fi filmmakers have quite literally been making movies about Mars for over a hundred years, and there are dozens of Mars movies to chose from. We’re going to watch just six of them from across the decades.

November 5 — Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964), directed by Byron Haskin

No points for guessing the premise of this movie. It’s right there in the title.

Watch: Apple, Cultpix, Kanopy, Amazon, and more.

View the trailer.

November 12 — Total Recall (1990), directed by Paul Verhoeven

I understand that the question of whether it actually takes place on Mars or entirely in the main character’s head is central to the movie’s theme, but I’m including it anyway because I want to watch it.

Watch: Apple, Kanopy, Amazon.

View the trailer.

November 19 — Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924), directed by Yakov Protazanov

We’re going way, way back to one of the very first sci movies ever made.

Watch: Kanopy, Indieflix, Amazon, Klassiki, as well as several versions on YouTube, the Internet Archive, and other free video sites. The movie is in the public domain, although the music might not be, so some versions don’t have a score. Other versions have converted the intertitles to subtitles, which reduces the total running time by about 30 minutes. There is also a colorized version floating around. Choose your own adventure.

View the trailer.

December 3 — Rocketship X-M (1950), directed by Kurt Neumann

We’ve watched a lot of post-WWII sci fi cautionary tales, but this was the first to take the atomic era into space.

Watch: Amazon, Indieflix.

View the trailer.

December 10 — Mars Express (2023), directed by Jérémie Périn

If you aren’t interested in animated French cyberpunk noir, I just don’t know what to tell you.

Watch: Apple, Amazon, Fandango, Plex. I can’t easily tell which versions are subbed and which are dubbed.

View the trailer.

December 17 — Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964), directed by Nicholas Webster

I don’t usually include movies that have earned a spot on several “Worst Films Ever” lists, but it’s the end of the year, we’re all stressed, let’s watch something completely ridiculous.

Watch: Everywhere. It’s in the public domain and available many places online.

View the trailer.

The post <i>The Last Starfighter</i>: Let’s Go Join a Star War! appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

The Secret of NIMH: The Unlikely Film That Revived American Animation

How Don Bluth turned a beloved children’s book into a lovely, heartfelt classic.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on October 22, 2025

Credit: MGM / United Artists

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Credit: MGM / United Artists

The Secret of NIMH (1982). Directed by Don Bluth. Written by Don Bluth, John Pomeroy, Gary Goldman, and Will Finn, based on the novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien. Starring Elizabeth Hartman, Dom DeLuise, and Derek Jacobi.

In the February 1962 issue of Scientific American, zoologist John B. Calhoun published an article titled “Population Density and Social Pathology,” in which he details his experiments using rats to study changes in social behavior in response to overpopulation. Calhoun had spent several years conducting the experiments at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland. He built what he called “rat utopias” (which don’t look like utopias at all), or enclosed spaces in which populations of brown rats were provided access to unlimited food and water and allowed unrestricted population growth.

Calhoun, working with his many pens of rats, was interested in separating the effects of population growth from the pressures of resource scarcity. He coined the term “behavioral sink” to describe what he found, which was that even if they didn’t have to fight over food, the rats still developed “behavior disturbances” such as a drop in fertility, high infant mortality, cannibalism, and behavior that ranged from “frenetic overactivity” to “pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep.” Oh, and “sexual deviation,” of course. His overall conclusion was that high population density led to a range of aberrant behavior even with an abundance of resources—in rats, yes, but Calhoun was also very clear that he was conducting these studies because he was interested in extrapolating the results to human societies, and specifically to the presumed moral decay that comes along with the urbanization of human societies.

Now, at this moment you are probably thinking, “Why are we talking about rat sex in an article about a children’s movie?”

Let’s cast ourselves back in time to the 1960s, just for a moment. There was a lot going around the world, and right alongside all the wars and revolutions and movements, overpopulation was a growing source of concern. When Paul R. Ehrlich (and his uncredited coauthor and wife Anne Ehrlich) published The Population Bomb in 1968, it was a runaway bestseller, largely thanks to its dire predictions about the many terrible catastrophes that would inevitably happen as the human population exploded. Most of which, it must be noted, have not come to pass, and certainly did not come to pass on the very rapid timeline that Ehrlich predicted.

If you’re a fan of classic sci fi, you know that fiction writers were also exploring those ideas in the ’60s and ’70s. Harry Harrison published Make Room! Make Room! in 1966 (which would go on to become the movie Soylent Green in 1973), William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson published Logan’s Run in 1967 (the film would arrive in 1976), and the next year John Brunner published Stand on Zanzibar—all classics of overpopulation sci fi, and I’m sure there are more that I’m forgetting.

Among the writers paying attention at the time was a National Geographic journalist by the name of Robert Conly, who in his spare time wrote fiction under the pen name Robert C. O’Brien. He published his first novel, The Silver Crown, in 1968; it’s a sci fi children’s story about a mind-control machine, and it didn’t make much impression at the time.

But O’Brien’s second book was different. O’Brien had read about Calhoun’s rat studies; it’s possible he even visited Calhoun’s lab. But instead of extrapolating the studies to human populations, O’Brien kept the rats and gave them human-like intelligence. The possibility of scientifically increasing intelligence was another favorite sci fi topic at the time, most famously in Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon, first published as a short story in 1959, then as a novel in 1966. (I have no idea if O’Brien was aware of Keyes’ story. O’Brien died in 1973, so there isn’t much out there about his literary works in his own words. His fourth and final book, the 1974 post-apocalyptic novel Z for Zachariah, was published after his death.)

O’Brien took his ideas about rats and how they live, and he wrote beloved children’s classic Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, which was published in 1972.

It’s a beloved classic both in the usual sense, as it won the Newbery Medal and immediately became a classroom reading staple, and in the personal sense, because it is deeply beloved by me. It was one of my absolute favorite books when I was a kid. I read it cover to cover dozens of times. I didn’t really pick up on any of the ideas about industrialization and self-sufficiency in communities; I just thought it was cool that the rats were so smart. I had absolutely no idea what NIMH was, and only after I was well into adulthood did I consider that perhaps Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of the National Institute of Mental Health was a rather odd title for a children’s book.

It was one of my favorite books, and it also my first experience with being a smug “the book was better” kind of fan, or at least as smug as an elementary school student can be when scorning her classmates for preferring an animated film. My objection to the film wasn’t just that it scared me—which it did, as it has some delightfully spooky parts—but that I didn’t understand why they added magic. Or why they changed “Mrs. Frisby” to “Mrs. Brisby,” because I was a child and did not understand the legal liability of potential trademark infringement.

My opinion on the film has softened since I was nine years old. I understand now why they added magic. (And why they changed the name.) I still think the book is better, but the movie is a lovely example of traditional, hand-drawn animation that came along right when the American film industry was flailing around trying to figure out what to do about kids’ movies.

I wrote a bit last week, in my piece about Escape to Witch Mountain (1975), about how during the ’70s Disney was shifting away from animated films for children and toward live action films for older audiences. That attempted pivot led to significant conflict behind the scenes, especially among the animators who felt like the studio didn’t much care for their work anymore. That included the higher-ups, such as Disney producer and future CEO Ron W. Miller, dismissing the animators’ attempts to develop their artistry and filmmaking skills and maintain what they believed ought to be the standard for animation quality.

A group of Disney animators, including Don Bluth, Gary Goldman, and John Pomeroy, got together and started working on their own film anyway. Working in Bluth’s garage, they put together the short film Banjo the Woodpile Cat (1979). They brought it to Disney as a example of what they could do, but the studio wasn’t interested. So in September of 1979, they left Disney to form their own company. Eleven animators in all quit at the same time—which doesn’t sound like much these days, when film credits contain hundreds or thousands of names, but that was a significant percentage of Disney’s animation department. (As best I can tell, there were perhaps fewer than a hundred people in the animation department at the time, but the precise numbers vary in different sources.)

Banjo the Woodpile Cat was the first film from the newly-formed Don Bluth Productions; it would end up airing on television in the next couple of years. Their next project would be their first feature film, and that was an adaption of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, a book that Disney had previously passed on adapting.

They went in with a very specific and very public goal: to make an animated film in the classic Disney style, because Disney wasn’t making movies like that anymore. Disney was still making animated films—for example, The Fox and the Hound (1981), which was in production at the time and delayed by the animator exodus—but the feeling both within Disney and among movie critics was that they were mostly retreading old ground both thematically and artistically. The animators who joined Don Bluth in his garage (they did get proper offices eventually) wanted to prove that animated films could still be beautiful, heartfelt, and magical.

So they made some changes to the story when they adapted it, as a sci fi story about hyper-intelligent rats discovering literacy and self-sufficiency was not quite what they found appealing about the book. O’Brien’s novel is more focused on the rats themselves, whereas the movie shifts the focus entirely to the mouse protagonist, called Mrs. Brisby in the movie (voiced by Elizabeth Hartman in her final role). They also added the magical elements that annoyed me so much as a child, such as the glowing amulet and the implication that Nicodemus (voiced by Derek Jacobi) is some sort of wizard. They added a rat antagonist in the form of Jenner (voiced by Paul Shenar), who is mentioned in the book but never appears on page, and gave the crow Jeremy (Dom DeLuise) a greater role as very Disney-typical comic relief. The film never really details what happens to the rats, whereas the book is quite clear about how they avoid the humans looking for them (exterminators in the book, scientists in the film) and finally leave to start their self-sufficient rat colony somewhere in the wilderness.

Again, I still think the book is better, but knowing the motivations for making the movie and exactly what the people behind it were trying to prove, I understand why they changed what they did. The magic, the humor, the simplified plot about a mother’s courage saving her children—all of that is intended to inspire a particular emotional attachment in the audience, one that Bluth and others felt had become less important in Disney films.

It also serves as the showcase for the art, because the animators who’d left Disney along with Bluth did so in part to prove that there was still plenty of room for artistry and craftsmanship in the increasingly technical animation industry. In that, I think, they succeeded marvelously, because The Secret of NIMH is a stunning work of animation.

It’s beautiful, vibrant, and surprisingly complex. Basically, the entire movie takes place in settings with ridiculously complicated lighting situations: in the shade of crops and trees in both full daylight and at night, in the spooky darkness of the Great Owl’s (John Carradine) lair, in the artificially and magically illuminated rats’ den, at night during a thunderstorm, and so on. Each of these settings required the artists come up with suitable color palettes for each character, even a character like Mrs. Brisby, who has plain brown fur and no clothes except for a red cloak. They also built and filmed models of certain elements—such as the bird cage from which Mrs. Brisby escapes in the farmer’s kitchen—to achieve a sharp, moving setting into which the animated character could be added.

The abundant shadows and constantly shifting light also make great use of all that gorgeous backlight animation, which I talked about briefly back when I wrote about Tron (1982). In backlight animation, the glowing effect is achieved by filming the scene normally with the glowing area blacked out, then filming it again with everything except the glowing area blacked out, and lights and filters placed where the glow is needed. In The Secret of NIMH, backlight animation is used to add contrast and warmth to all those darker scenes and complex shadows. In spite of how much of the film takes place at night or underground, it’s not a visually dark movie at all. (Even if I did find the Great Owl’s lair to be terrifying when I was a child. In my defense, it’s supposed to be scary! That is the purpose of the scene!)

The Secret of NIMH was not a huge financial success. For one thing, it was yet another film released during the absolutely jam-packed American movie summer of 1982. (It’s the fifth Summer of ‘82 movie we’ve watched for this film club, and it probably won’t be the last.) But it did make people pay attention to what Bluth and his fellow animators were doing. It’s clear from contemporary reviews that everybody knew they were trying to capture the Disney magic that Disney wasn’t using; that’s directly referenced in many mainstream reviews. Opinions were mixed on just how well the film succeeded in doing that, but people did notice. According to Gary Goldman, several Disney animators attended the film’s premiere. The industry and the critics were watching to see what Bluth Productions would do next.

What they did next was, alas, go bankrupt, then come back to life with the help of Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, with whom they would make An American Tail (1986)—which was a massive success—and The Land Before Time (1988). Then, with the help of the British studio Goldcrest, they would make All Dogs Go to Heaven for release in 1989, which was not at all coincidentally also exactly when Disney’s animation department finally got its shit back together.

Disney threw a massive amount of time, talent, and money at The Little Mermaid (1989), and it’s not mere Hollywood rumor or speculation to say they did that precisely because Bluth, Goldman, and the others had proved that they could do Disney’s thing better than Disney had been doing it for some time. In a 2022 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Bluth said that Roy E. Disney tried to draw him and the others back to work for Disney again. When Bluth declined, Roy Disney apparently said, “You can’t win this, Don. We’ll crush you.”

Don Bluth, for his part, always comes across as pretty philosophical about how Disney reacted to its own animators becoming competition. I don’t get the sense that he or any of the others were surprised when Disney realized that people still wanted beautiful animated films with strong stories. Disney was always the giant of the animation industry—but in the ’80s, it was a giant that might have kept on slumbering for a while longer if Bluth and the others hadn’t quit their jobs to make a lovely little movie about a mouse who needs a bit of help from some friends.

What do you think of The Secret of NIMH? Any other lifelong fans of the book out there?[end-mark]

Next week: I’m not joking when I say I remember absolutely nothing about The Last Starfighter except that I’ve seen it and it involves a video game. Watch it on Apple, Amazon, Fandango.

The post <i>The Secret of NIMH</i>: The Unlikely Film That Revived American Animation appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Escape to Witch Mountain: An Otherworldly Glimpse Into the Weirdness of 1970s Disney

Starring a flying Winnebago, kids with psychic powers, and helpful animal friends!

By Kali Wallace

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Published on October 15, 2025

Credit: Disney

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Credit: Disney

Escape to Witch Mountain (1975). Directed by John Hough. Written by Robert Malcolm Young, based on the novel of the same name by Alexander H. Key. Starring Kim Richards, Ike Eisenmann, Eddie Albert, Ray Milland, and Donald Pleasence.

I am about the farthest it is possible to be from being a Disney adult. I’ve been to Disneyland once, when I was a teenager, and have never felt the urge to go back. I think the last Disney movie I saw in theaters was Big Hero 6 (2014). I never watched any Disney Channel shows and am not even sure I can confidently name any of them. I don’t have any particular antipathy toward anybody who loves Disney and its media empire. I just don’t get it, but that’s fine. We don’t all have to understand each other’s pop culture obsessions.

I am, however, interested in the role the Walt Disney Company has played in the entertainment industry since its founding in 1923. Like the other major studios that have survived since the early days of the movie business, Disney has been through its share of ups and downs over the past century.

One of the most prominent of the “downs” was the twenty or so years that followed the death of founder Walt Disney in 1966. The company had already slashed its animation staff from around 500 people down to just over a hundred, and while Disney continued making animated films, including some quite good ones, the animators and everybody else at the company knew the focus was shifting away from animation and toward live action. They didn’t want to be the kiddie studio anymore; they specifically wanted to appeal to older audiences. In the late 1970s, this would eventually lead to a large number of their remaining animators leaving in an exodus lead by Don Bluth, whose post-Disney work we will be watching next week.

The problem, of course, was that pivoting to focus on live action films really only works if the live action films are good and successful, but a lot of the movies Disney made in the ’70s and ’80s are perhaps generously described as interesting and more accurately described as weird.

Escape to Witch Mountain sits right at the cusp of that peculiar era in Disney filmmaking. It’s very much a children’s movie aimed at a young audience, and it would be another few years before Disney even ventured into its first PG-rated film with The Black Hole (1979). But it is also oddball live action sci fi that strays pretty far from the cute, classic animal-centric stories coming out of the animation studio, such as The Aristocats (1970), Robin Hood (1973), The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977), The Rescuers (1977), and so on. Disney was out of its initial fairy tale era and not yet into its princess-obsessed revival era. Everything was filled with talking animals in those days.

It made sense to add some psychic aliens, I guess. Escape to Witch Mountain is based on the novel of the same name by American sci fi writer Alexander Key. I have not read the novel; I’m not sure I’ve read any of Key’s work. (Speak up in the comments if you have! I’m curious about it.) He wrote several books and stories, mostly for young readers. That includes the post-apocalyptic novel The Incredible Tide, which was published in 1970 and adapted into the anime Future Boy Conan by Hayao Miyazaki in 1978.

From what I can tell, the movie Escape to Witch Mountain follows the same rough plot points of the book, albeit with some changes that are, honestly, quite typical of Disneyfication. The film’s main characters are younger, the references to Cold War politics are removed, and the antagonists are presented as more bumbling and comical than truly dangerous.

The psychic and telekinetic powers are all there, however, although the movie does not treat them as a reason the children are ostracized. Also, I just want to take a moment for us to collectively remember the time, not so very long ago, when everybody just kind of assumed that scientific advancement would inevitably lead to psychic powers. That was pretty wild, right? I think that was pretty wild. These days people tend to group things like psychic powers under the supernatural or paranormal umbrella, but back in the ’60s and ’70s they were more often considered to be scientific in nature. We obviously still have remnants of it in the stories that have persisted—it’s part of the fabric of Star Trek and Star Wars, for example—but in general most sci fi seems to have shifted away from the psychic powers heyday of the ’60s and ’70s.

I took a brief field trip down a research rabbit hole trying to untangle why parapsychology was so popular in mid-century sci fi, and why it largely fell out of fashion, but I quickly came to the conclusion that while it’s fascinating, it’s also a much bigger topic than I can deal with here. I will just leave you with the fact that Princeton University didn’t shutter their parapsychology research program until 2007, and there are still a handful of universities in the US, UK, and elsewhere in the world that study parapsychology, in spite of the fact that nobody has ever produced replicable results about anything, so take that as you will.

In any case, the distinction between scientific and supernatural is irrelevant in Escape to Witch Mountain, because this is a movie where hijinks are more important than any such fiddly details. Which is, I think, exactly as it should be in a movie about a couple of kids having a fun time outsmarting adults and finding their way home.

We meet siblings Tony (Ike Eisenmann) and Tia (Kim Richards) as they are brought to a children’s home after the death of their foster parents. They don’t remember their birth parents or much of anything from their early childhood, and they don’t think they have any other family around. While at the home, Tia and Tony use their psychic, telekinetic, and prognostication powers to deter a bully (Dermott Downs), befriend a black cat (played by a black cat), and save a wealthy lawyer named Mr. Deranian (a pre-Halloween Donald Pleasance) from a car accident.

Because talking about children’s movies always makes me curious what happened to the child actors, here is a quick summary: After a long career in television and film, Richards is recently better known for being a troubled cast member on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, but I have never watched that show, will never watch that show, and honestly only know about it against my will. Eisenmann also kept working in show business, mostly in production and voice acting. Both of them had small parts in the 2009 Escape to Witch Mountain remake. Downs, the kid who plays the red-haired bully, is an active television director; among other things, he recently directed the musical “Subspace Rhapsody” episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. But, much more importantly (to me), he was the cinematographer of the coolest music video of all time: OK Go’s Rube Goldberg machine variation of “This Too Shall Pass.”

I’ll pause for four minutes while we all stop to rewatch that video, as is natural and necessary every time somebody links to it.

Done? Okay, back to the movie.

The mild-mannered Mr. Deranian works for a rich man named Aristotle Bolt (Ray Milland). Bolt is the sort of rich man who brings psychics and seers to his Carmel mansion in order to expand his fortune, so when Deranian tells him about Tia and Tony, he immediately hatches a plan to get the kids under his control. It’s not entirely clear what he expects them to do—Tony’s skill of moving things telekinesis with harmonica music does not seem like an obvious boon to a businessman—but I suppose he intends to figure that out later.

That plan works for about a day before the kids realize that two adult men conspiring to imprison them in a seaside mansion is actually really creepy, and they escape with the help of a horse named Thunderhead (played by movie star horse Ott, who had a respectable resume).

Tia and Tony sneak into the Winnebago of grumpy curmudgeon Jason O’Day (Eddie Albert), who reluctantly agrees to help them and their cat evade capture. What follows is a series of shenanigans, hijinks, and near misses as O’Day and the kids try to make their way to where they hope they will find Tia and Tony’s people. There are incompetent bodyguards, bumbling cops, small-town rednecks, and a bear (played by movie star bear Bruno, who also had a respectable resume). (The cat actor who plays Winky is not credited, but I am not surprised. Cats are not known for their willingness to join labor unions, work with managers, or sign contracts.)

Cats and bears and horses aside, the casting of the adult characters in Escape to Witch Mountain is clearly aimed at impressing parents. Milland was one of those classic studio-era actors with one million credits to his name. He started acting in the ’20s and didn’t stop until his death in the ’80s, and his long career included just about every type of project and role, as well as an Academy Award (for Billy Wilder’s noir film The Lost Weekend [1944]) and a directing credit on the atomic-era sci fi film Panic in Year Zero! (1962), which we will probably watch in the future. Similarly, Albert had a long, long career that included parts in the films Roman Holiday (1953) and Oklahoma! (1955), starring roles in numerous Broadway productions, and playing the lead opposite Eva Gabor in the television show Green Acres. This has always been part of Disney’s approach to getting parents to bring their kids to the movies: cast actors the adults will recognize from their favorite movies and shows.

It’s a bit hard to dig into things too deeply, because most interviews about the film are filtered through the Disney brand, but according to director John Hough, he was brought on to the project after the producers saw his film The Legend of Hell House (1973). Which is, as you can guess, a very different kind of movie. It’s Gothic, supernatural horror, with a screenplay by Richard Matheson based on his horror novel Hell House. That’s the sort of film Hough was known for when Disney approached him; this was a guy used to working on Hammer horror films like Twins of Evil (1971), not Disney movies.

But maybe Disney was thinking ahead, because after Escape to Witch Mountain, they kept Hough on to direct The Watcher in the Woods (1980), a Gothic horror film that was the second of the studio’s attempted swings toward weird and dark, following The Black Hole (1979). Neither movie did well at all, and it seems like that’s mostly because both were produced and rushed to release to capitalize on other films. The Black Hole was supposed to be Disney’s Star Wars­—probably because they were kicking themselves for passing on George Lucas’ actual Star Wars pitch—while The Watcher in the Woods was supposed to be Disney’s The Exorcist (1973).

I can’t quite figure out why I remember this moving being scary to me as a child. It’s not scary or dark. Everything simply looks and feels too Sunny California for that. It does tug at the heartstrings, however, because Tia and Tony are nice kids who just want to find a new home after losing their old one, and greedy adults keep getting in their way. The idea of young people being pursued for their psychic powers by somebody who wants to use them for nefarious purposes could go the scary route, but it doesn’t play out that way here. Tia and Tony are never in real danger. They are always quick enough, clever enough, and powerful enough to get out of the many binds they get into, although sometimes they require animals to help them. They escape from a jail by making the sheriff fight a broomstick in a hat. The climactic scenes involve a flying Winnebago (which brings our total flying Winnebago film tally to two so far, for those keeping count). It’s all very fun and charming.

Escape to Witch Mountain remains a curious oddball in the Disney canon. In the mid-’70s Disney was struggling, trying to find a new identity, veering away from animation full of talking animals but not quite sure what they were veering toward instead. In tone and style, Escape to Witch Mountain doesn’t stray too far from what had come before, but it’s based on unique source material and just weird enough to stand out. I think that’s probably why many people remember it so fondly, including people who don’t think of themselves as Disney lovers.

What do you think of Escape to Witch Mountain? Has anybody read the book it’s based on? I haven’t seen the 2009 remake with Dwayne Johnson (retitled Race to Witch Mountain) and so I shall not venture to form an opinion on that.[end-mark]

Next week: Is this a good time to admit that while other people were developing crushes on an animated fox in Robin Hood, I was developing a crush on an animated rat? Is there ever a good time to admit that? Watch The Secret of NIMH on Amazon, Apple, Roku, and more.

The post <i>Escape to Witch Mountain</i>: An Otherworldly Glimpse Into the Weirdness of 1970s Disney appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial: You’ve Got a Friend in Outer Space

The wholesome, uncynical story about a friendship that changed movies forever.

By Kali Wallace

|

Published on October 8, 2025

Credit: Universal Pictures

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Credit: Universal Pictures

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982). Directed by Steven Spielberg. Written by Melissa Mathison. Starring Henry Thomas, Dee Wallace, Robert MacNaughton, and Drew Barrymore.

When I mentioned that I was watching E.T. this week, my older sister sent me laughing emojis and said, “Just don’t freak out and burst into tears like you did when we saw it in the theater!”

Thanks for the warning, Sarah, but I did not burst into tears this time. I made it through the whole movie without ever getting so frightened I had to be taken out to the lobby to calm down. What a difference forty-some years can make.

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is one of the most mythologized films in American cinema, from one of the most mythologized directors, and the story of how it came about has been told so often it’s not entirely clear where fact ends and biographical embellishment begins. Most articles point back to the same sources, such as Martin McBridge’s 1997 book Steven Spielberg: A Biography. It’s not that I think people are going around lying about E.T. to hide some dark Hollywood secrets, as the information relayed later pretty much matches what was reported at the time. It just means that the story of the movie is pretty well-known.

It happened like this: In 1980, Steven Spielberg was still rather new in his role as Hollywood’s wildly successful wunderkind, and he was filming Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) in Tunisia. As Spielberg would later explain in a 1982 interview with People, “I was kind of lonely at the time… I remember saying to myself, ‘What I really need is a friend I can talk to—somebody who can give me all the answers.’” This reminded Spielberg of his youthful obsession with aliens—one he had already put to film in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and was at the time still trying to make work in the unproduced project Night Skies.

That led to Spielberg and Raiders of the Lost Ark star Harrison Ford talking Ford’s girlfriend (and later wife), screenwriter Melissa Mathison, into writing a screenplay about a friendly alien visitor. Mathison had a single screenplay on her resume but it was an impressive one: The Black Stallion (1979). (That is another movie that caused me to have a theater meltdown as a child, but in my defense opening a family movie with a deadly fire and panicking horse on a boat during a storm is certainly a choice.) The Black Stallion had been a box office success and a critical darling, so it wasn’t much of a risk for Mathison to take on writing Spielberg’s friendly alien film.

The premise for the movie was lifted from the unproduced film Night Skies, which was intended to be a horror film written by John Sayles, with Tobe Hooper named as a possible director. That movie would have been awesome but, alas, it was not meant to be. The story behind Night Skies was ripped from the headlines about alien encounter now known as the 1955 Kelly–Hopkinsville event in Kentucky, in which several people claimed to have been terrorized in a farmhouse by a group of hostile aliens. I don’t know what was going on in Kentucky in 1955, but the resulting news reports played a big role in the developing American lore about big-eyed visitors from outer space.

While Spielberg was filming Raiders of the Lost Ark, Sayles was developing the screenplay for Night Skies, which focused largely on young human characters, including a ten-year-old autistic boy who befriended the one friendly alien. At the same time, special effects designer Rick Baker was creating concept art and models for the Night Skies aliens. (You have seen Baker’s work, because it is everywhere. Literally everywhere.)

But over in Tunisia, Spielberg was starting to have doubts. He wasn’t sure he wanted to make a horror movie after all. He wanted to make something more optimistic, more wholesome. That’s how he came around to convincing Mathison to pluck the one wholesome part out of Night Skies—the child’s friendship with the friendly alien left behind when the others leave Earth—and create a whole different movie out of it.

Columbia Pictures, the studio that had produced Close Encounters of the Third Kind and was developing Night Skies as a quasi-sequel to it, was not happy about Spielberg’s change of heart. Columbia’s reasoning was that a wholesome kid-centric family movie simply had no chance of making very much money. Which, of course, sounds completely insane to us now, but this was in 1981. There were wholesome family movies with kid main characters, but they weren’t the big moneymakers they tend to be today. This was before the Disney revival era when animated children’s films became a major cinematic juggernaut. There have always been films purposefully aimed at being a big, splashy success, but during the Hollywood studio era they tended to be historical epics (like Ben-Hur [1959] or Cleopatra [1963]), and in the so-called New American Cinema of the ’70s those big movies came to be defined by films like Spielberg’s own Jaws (1975) and George Lucas’ Star Wars films. That level of success was not what people expected of kid-friendly movies.

Not until E.T. After E.T., everything changed, to the point where it’s not an exaggeration to divide the whole genre of “family films” into a pre-E.T. era and a post-E.T. era.

Spielberg and Columbia came to an agreement to end development of Night Skies; it involved Spielberg or his investors paying the studio back for the $1 million they had spent developing Night Skies and Columbia getting a cut of the E.T. profits even when the project moved to Universal. That turned out to be good deal, because E.T. made a stupendous fuckton of money when it was released.

Before it could get to that point, however, they had to make the movie, and before they could make the movie they had to make the little dude at its center. The alien is designed by Italian artist Carlo Rambaldi, whose work we see all over sci fi cinema, including in Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires (1965), Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and of course Alien (1979), where Rambaldi was the one who built the moveable head and pharyngeal jaw based on H.R. Giger’s xenomorph design. This was a guy who knew a thing or two about crafting aliens, in other words, and the design of E.T. was cobbled together from several different ideas and influences. Those included, but are not limited to: Albert Einstein’s face, Rambaldi’s Himalayan pet cat, Donald Duck’s posture and walk, and a painting Rambaldi had done years before. That painting is Donne del Delta (Women of the Delta) (1952), and if you’re thinking it’s kind of weird that he would base his idea of an extraterrestrial on his own painting of human women, well, it’s because you haven’t seen the painting yet, but that’s not your fault, because as far as I can tell only one poor-quality image exists of it online.

Rambaldi built E.T. in several parts: four heads that were controlled mechanically by a huge team of puppeteers, three torso costumes that were worn by different actors (little people Tamara De Treaux and Pat Bilon, and twelve-year-old Matthew DeMeritt, who was born without legs and walked on his hands), and hands that were controlled by mime Caprice Roth. E.T. was famously voiced by Pat Welsh, a homemaker living in Marin County; sound designer Ben Burtt overheard her raspy, two-pack-a-day voice at a store and immediately wanted her to audition.

Here’s the thing about E.T.: he was made and operated by a small village of cast and crew, and it shows. All of that shows. We can tell he’s made up of several costumes and puppets. There are a few moments where it’s especially noticeable because the camera angles of face and body shots don’t quite line up. His clumsiness looks like the clumsiness of a puppet or somebody in an awkward costume.

We can tell, but it doesn’t really matter, because watching this movie means going along with this game of make-believe. It’s so relentlessly earnest that pointing out that E.T. is just a puppet feels a bit like telling a child that her mud pie is certainly not a delicious chocolate cake. Yes, yes, we know it’s pretend, but we’re playing along for a couple of hours, okay?

I think there are two reasons it works. The first is that the facial puppets are good facial puppets. Rambaldi and the crew put a lot of work into giving E.T. a face that’s a little bit alien, a little bit cute, very expressive, and just familiar enough to not make turn us away. (The fact that he was modeled on Einstein and a squashy-faced cat explains a lot.) Producer Kathleen Kennedy insisted that E.T.’s eyes look as lifelike as possible, because she knew that all of the animatronics and sculpting and puppeteering would mean nothing if the alien’s face wasn’t convincing. (E.T. was the first movie that Kennedy produced. It would not be the last.)

The other reason it works is that the child actors are great. Sure, there are some adults in the movie, with Dee Wallace as the mom and Peter Coyote as the shadowy government agent who turns out to be not so bad after all, but they’re not very important. This story is about the kids: Elliott (Henry Thomas) and his older brother Michael (Robert MacNaughton) and younger sister Gertie (Drew Barrymore). All three are very good in their roles and believable as siblings, and Thomas is especially fantastic as he shows the different facets of Elliot’s loneliness, fear, curiosity, and wonder. E.T. is, at its (red, glowing) heart, a story about a little boy who makes a friend, and the strength of that story relies on the audience’s fondness for both the boy and the friend.

As I was watching, I kept thinking about how the movie never quite sheds the feeling of obvious make-believe. It’s not because E.T. is so obviously a puppet, and it’s not because there are no coastal redwood forests bordering the San Fernando Valley. It’s not even because of the too-sappy John Williams score. (I am usually neutral-to-positive on John Williams, but this one just doesn’t work for me.) In fact, I’m not sure my feeling of detachment from the movie has anything to do with the movie itself.

I think it might be due to my inability to separate E.T. from its legacy. It’s very difficult to watch it now, in 2025, without seeing echoes of everything that has borrowed, adopted, parodied, or outright stole (we’re looking at you, Stranger Things) elements of the movie in the past few decades. I enjoyed rewatching it after all this time. Maybe it’s never going to be a favorite of mine, but it’s an enjoyable movie to watch on a quiet autumn afternoon.

But I keep coming back to the fact that what I find truly interesting about E.T. is not the movie itself, but the cinematic perspective it provides on how America viewed itself in the early ’80s.

Science fiction films have always been a way for people to comment on the culture that surrounds them, and in American sci fi cinema of the late ’70s and early ’80s there was an abundance of movies scattered along a spectrum with earnest optimism at one end and weary cynicism at the other. We’ve already watched a number of films that represent that cynical, more critical viewpoint of American life in the 1980s: Escape from New York (1981), Blade Runner (1982), Repo Man (1984), The Brother from Another Planet (1984).

E.T. is the far opposite end of that spectrum, the prime example of earnest, optimistic self-representation in American cinema. That doesn’t mean it’s completely artificial. For all that people roll their eyes at the wholesomeness of Spielberg’s ’80s films, audiences loved them for a reason. Like Close Encounters of the Third Kind before it, E.T. offers a look at ’80s suburban American family life that seems quaint now, but it did resonate with people for genuine reasons.

Articles about E.T. consistently report that Ronald and Nancy Reagan loved the movie and Princess Diana cried when she watched it. What any particular individuals thought about E.T. isn’t necessarily significant, but what’s fascinating is the way the opinions of people in positions of power and prominence are reported as heartfelt approval for what E.T. is showing us about ourselves. Strained marriages or single parents, working moms, messy but secure homes, noisy and sassy children running around without supervision, all of this offered a comforting view of imperfect but fundamentally good family life during that time, and E.T., for better or worse, came to stand as the most prominent example of it.

What do you think about E.T.? Have your thoughts on it changed over the years? Did anybody who did a science class frog dissection in the ’80s actually have to euthanize the frogs themselves, right there in the classroom? Our science class frogs always came to us fully dead, in buckets of preservative.[end-mark]

Next week: We’re leaving the verdant coastal redwood forests of the greater Los Angeles area and escaping to the mountain. Which mountain, you ask? Yes, that one. Watch Escape to Witch Mountain on Disney, Amazon, or Apple.

The post <i>E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial</i>: You’ve Got a Friend in Outer Space appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Flight of the Navigator: It’s Exactly as Great as You Remember From Childhood

A warm, wonderful story about a kid and his spaceship—what could be better?

By Kali Wallace

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Published on October 1, 2025

Credit: PSO Production/Viking Film AS

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Credit: PSO Production/Viking Film AS

Flight of the Navigator (1986). Directed by Randal Kleiser. Written by Michael Burton and Phil Joanou, based on a story by Mark H. Baker. Starring Joey Cramer, Veronica Cartwright, Cliff DeYoung, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Paul Reubens.

If, like me, you haven’t watched Flight of the Navigator in thirty-some years and aren’t sure if watching as an adult will tarnish your youthful memories, let me assure you: You have nothing to worry about.

This movie is wonderful. We all remember it being wonderful when we were kids, and it’s every bit as wonderful now. It’s warm, funny, charming, and playful—overall a truly great example of a wholesome sci fi movie for kids.

That being said, I maintain that I was absolutely justified in being frightened by this movie as a child, because it is also often quite upsetting, especially in the beginning! In fact, I would argue that’s what makes the film work so well. The plot has relatively low stakes for a sci fi film and there is no real villain to speak of; it’s not the kind of movie where we believe the main character is ever really in danger. But he is still a scared kid going through an ordeal, and the emotional impact of that ordeal is effective even if we aren’t ever truly worried about him.

The story behind the film came from Mark H. Baker, who at the time was a film student at UCLA. According to Baker, the story idea came to him in a dream, and it was originally a darker, more serious tale. His idea found its way into the hands of a producers Dimitri Villard and Robert Wald, who first pitched it to Walt Disney Pictures around about 1984. Walt Disney Pictures was Disney’s newly-established live-action production division, carved out separately from the animation studio and theme parks for the purpose of attracting new audiences and hopefully drawing the company’s movie business out of the long slump it had been in since found Walt Disney had died in 1966.

Disney wasn’t sure about the film, however, so the producers took it to a company called Producers Sales Organization (PSO), which was largely a distribution company that only got into co-producing films for a handful of years in the mid ’80s. (Random trivia: This has nothing to do with this film, but PSO was in its early years a subsidiary of Arthur Guinness Son & Company, prior to Guiness’ merger with another company to form the multinational booze giant Diageo. Guinness does not fund movies anymore, but they could. If they wanted to.) The last of those movies was Flight of the Navigator, which PSO brought right back to Disney to make a co-production and distribution deal. The film industry is often very silly.

This led to a bit of push and pull between the two studios. When Disney brought director Randal Kleiser onto the project, Kleiser was given two sets of notes: those from PSO pushing the movie more toward an action film, and those from Disney pushing it more toward a family film. The House of Mouse always wins, so we got a family movie with a little bit of action, instead of an action movie with a little bit of family. I think it works out for the best in the long run, even though at the time Kleiser was perhaps not an obvious choice for a wholesome family film. His previous films included Grease (1978) and The Blue Lagoon (1980). (Is Grease a family film? I am a lifelong Grease hater, so I’m the wrong person to ask. The Blue Lagoon is definitely not a family film; Brooke Shields is the person to ask and she has quite a lot to say about it.)

Flight of the Navigator begins in 1978, when main character David (Joey Cramer) is twelve years old. He is living what appears to be a very comfortable and undramatic American life in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He has loving parents (played by Veronica Cartwright and Cliff DeYoung), an annoying younger brother named Jeff (Albie Whitaker at age eight, Matt Adler at age sixteen), and a cute dog named Bruiser (who is played by an uncredited cute dog). This brings our film club’s Veronica Cartwright sci fi movie count to three, for those keeping track at home.

Because the movie’s first scenes take place in 1978, and the Stranger Danger hysteria of the ’80s was still a few years in the future, David’s mom thinks nothing of sending him into the dark woods to meet Jeff, who is walking home from a friend’s house. David finds his little brother, but instead of going home he checks out a strange noise in the woods and falls into a ditch.

David wakes up thinking he was only unconscious for a few moments, but soon enough he finds strangers living in his house instead of his family and learns from the police that he has been missing for several years. His parents, of course, welcome him back with tearful relief, but the adults don’t know what’s going on and refuse to explain much. It’s up to his brother, now sixteen, to fill David in on what happened when he went missing.

Rewatching this part of the movie as an adult I have decided: I was right. As a kid, I was right to find this distressing. This is a genuinely terrifying situation for David to be in!

Even more, the movie wisely never shies away from that. David is scared, confused, and lost. He just wants his parents to explain what’s going on. He panics, he cries, and he wants the adults to take control. But they can’t fix things, they can’t explain it, because they don’t understand it any more than he does, which leaves everybody feeling frightened even though they are reunited. This part of the movie isn’t rushed, and while there is some humor, it isn’t defined by jokes or gags. There’s a sincerity to David’s experience that has real weight to it, and I think that is one reason why Flight of the Navigator holds up so well.

It helps that Joey Cramer does a great job in the role. Cramer went on to become an infamous cautionary tale about ’80s child stars—years of drug problems and homelessness, leading to a conviction for robbing a bank in 2016—but he seems to have gotten his life together more recently. And his troubled adult life does not take away from the fact that he really is fantastic in this movie.

Of course, David’s return happens at the same time a UFO crashes into some power lines nearby. It’s so silly, but I do love the extremely ’80s sci fi trope of presenting NASA as some shadowy government agency with infinite resources. I wish NASA had that kind of pull. In Flight of the Navigator that powerful version of NASA is represented by Dr. Faraday (Howard Hesseman), who is in charge of investigating the crashed UFO. He doesn’t make any headway until he somehow learns about the odd results of David’s brain scans. (The movie just sort of skips over how that happens.) While David is in NASA’s care, they do some more brain experiments that reveal he has information in his mind that he isn’t aware of, including spacecraft schematics and star charts.

This is, naturally, very frightening to David, even more so when he realizes Faraday isn’t going to let him go home to his family. David enlists the help of NASA employee Carolyn (Sarah Jessica Parker, in one of her earliest film roles) and a clunky robot to evade security and make his way to where the spaceship is waiting.

And what a spaceship it is! Let’s take a moment to appreciate that snarky, sentient Trimaxion Drone Ship, also known as Max. In terms of production and design, Max soars right through that marvelous sweet spot of sci fi visual effects that combine clever models, old school camera trickery, and newfangled-at-the-time computer animation. There is a lot of cool information out there about the visual effects in Flight of the Navigator. If you are interested, I recommend the forty-minute video on Captain Disillusion’s YouTube channel about all the different techniques as one place to learn more.

There were two life-size models of the ship, one with an open door and one without, both of which had to be hauled around or suspended by a special crane. Those flowing, floating steps are classic stop-motion animation, with good old fashioned hidden struts to let David climb up and down them. There were also small-scale models, both of the rounder version and the more pointed fast version. The ship’s roving eyeball was controlled by puppeteer Tony Urbano. On the set, Urbano also provide the on-set dialogue, because at the time of filming Kleiser hadn’t yet cast anybody for Max’s actual voice (you may have noticed that a different voice is also used in the theatrical trailer above).

Which, yes, seems a bit strange now, as Max ends up being voiced by Paul Reubens, also know as Pee-wee Herman, who even at the time was rapidly becoming one of the most famous and recognizable voices of the ’80s. Reubens didn’t want to be credited for his role in Flight of the Navigator; he is listed in the credits as Paul Mall. But everybody knew who it was anyway. How could we not?

The models and puppets were great for filming on set, but getting Max to fly around Florida and the world was another matter entirely. Luckily, director Randal Kleiser happened to personally know an up-and-coming CGI guy: his younger brother, Jeff Kleiser. The younger Kleiser was one of the founders of the early computer animation studio Digital Effects, Inc, which contributed some of the animation in Tron (1982). By the time Flight of the Navigator went into production, Kleiser and another programmer, Bob Hoffman, had left for a company called Omnibus Computer Graphics.

Omnibus mostly made animations for commercials, but they had the willingness and knowledge to figure out how to do what Randal Kleiser wanted for his film: a shape-shifting, reflective spaceship. They did that using reflection mapping, a method by which the image of the surroundings is projected onto the digital object. It’s much easier to do nowadays, but in the mid ’80s computer graphics for the dramatic flight sequences in Flight of the Navigator were a much more complicated task. The effects crew were working with a computer (the Foonly F1) that had roughly the processing power and disk storage capabilities of a potato; using three 50 mb disk drives, each the size of a cabinet, they could calculate and print exactly one frame at a time. Every frame took twenty minutes to render, so a clip 30 seconds long would take ten days to complete.

That’s a lot of work going into just giving a spaceship a shiny reflective surface, but it’s worth it. Because Max has a truly iconic design, and the scenes of it soaring around the world, over different landscapes and out to space and under the ocean, are wonderful.

There’s also a tonal shift in the movie at this point. It’s elegantly done, because David’s goal of wanting to go home to his family never changes, but having control of a chatty, superpowered spaceship does let him have some fun in the process. We learn that Max abducted David from Earth not for any nefarious reason, but because Max is tasked with collecting samples from planets everywhere, the cosmic equivalent of an entomologist wandering through the forest with a butterfly net. David was supposed to be returned to the moment when he was abducted, but Max is worried time travel would harm him.

The revelation that there is no ill-intent relaxes David, and it relaxes the audience too. For all the fear and uncertainty of the build-up, this becomes a film about a boy who gets to spend a day having a grand old time.

We fly along with David—and with the Beach Boys briefly interrupting Alan Silvestri’s electronic score—and figure that at some point, before long, he is going to get home. There is some lip service paid to the idea that militaries and governments notice the UFO flying around, but they never present any real danger. It’s a curious case of a film that largely deescalates the stakes in the latter half rather than raising them, and it works. David is never asked to save the world. He doesn’t have to face down nefarious villains. This isn’t the kind of children’s story where a kid has to step up and do a dangerous job because adults have failed. It’s not even really a coming-of-age story, because David’s ultimate goal is to go back to 1978. He doesn’t want to skip over his childhood in favor of something grander. He wants to go back to being a kid.

I think that’s a big part of why this film has such staying power and is remembered so fondly by those who saw it in childhood. It’s quite rare for a kid-focused movie to emphasize that a kid’s only job should be, well, being a kid. Sometimes it feels like the Disney Renaissance era that would come along a few years later, starting with The Little Mermaid (1989), has obscured the fact that children’s movies don’t have to be about growing up, and they certainly don’t have to be about defeating a terrible evil, or saving the world, or finding true (hetero) love.

Children’s films can be about a kid having a really scary time that turns into a really fun time, seeing exciting new things, making a new friend, adopting a pet, and getting home in time to have dinner with his family. That’s enough for a lovely movie that has remained a favorite for nearly forty years.

When did you first see Flight of the Navigator? How do you think it holds up now? Doesn’t flying Max around the world seem like the most fun ever?[end-mark]

Next week: When it comes to kids and visitors from outer space, there is one short little dude who soars on a bicycle above all the rest. Watch Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial on Netflix, Amazon, Apple, or Fandango.

The post <i>Flight of the Navigator</i>: It’s Exactly as Great as You Remember From Childhood appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Aniara: The Existential Despair of Waiting for the End

A movie about people set permanently adrift in the vast darkness of space.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on September 24, 2025

Credit: SF Studios

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Credit: SF Studios

Aniara (2018). Written and directed by Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, based on the epic poem of the same name by Harry Martinson. Starring Emelie Jonsson, Bianca Cruzeiro, Anneli Martini, and Arvin Kananian.

One night in late 1953, Swedish writer Harry Martinson took his telescope outside to look into the night sky. He found the Andromeda galaxy, which looked so beautiful and bright that night that he went to wake up his wife so she could see it as well.

The Andromeda galaxy was getting significant attention in the early 1950s, at least among those who followed developments in physics and astronomy. A few decades before, in the ’20s, Edwin Hubble had used the presence of Cepheid variable stars—using the method developed by Henrietta Leavitt—to estimate Andromeda to be 800,000 light-years away, an estimate that played a significant role in settling the so-called “Great Debate” regarding whether the Milky Way encompassed the whole of the universe or was only one among many galaxies. (It’s worth noting that Harlow Shapley, the astronomer who had so famously argued that Andromeda and other observed “nebulae” had to be within the Milky Way, changed his mind completely when he was presented with Hubble’s research, and he would go on to make significant contributions to the mapping and study of other galaxies.)

It would turn out Hubble had vastly underestimated the distance. That discovery came thanks to Walter Baade, a German astronomer who had spent World War II working at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Southern California. Because Baade was German and therefore suspicious to the U.S. government, he was registered, monitored, and subjected to a strict curfew—which is not, as one might imagine, a workable situation for a scientist whose work required him to be out and about in the middle of the night. Fellow astronomer Milton Humason argued with the authorities on his behalf, and Baade was permitted to travel to and from the observatory under supervision. For a time during WWII, California’s defense authorities also imposed partial blackout orders across Southern California. Civilians might not like blackout orders, but the uncharacteristically dark night skies around Los Angeles helped Baade identify a second, previously unknown type of Cepheid variable star, one that prompted a complete reassessment of the size of the universe—including the size and distance of the Andromeda galaxy.

That’s what was in the news in the early ’50s: new calculations showed that Andromeda, our nearest galactic neighbor, was about twice as far away and twice as large as previously thought.

However, this was the 1950s, and we already know that there was another type of scientific news capturing the world’s attention at that time, and it was news significantly more grim than revelations about distant galaxies. In 1950, U.S. president Harry Truman directed American scientists to begin developing thermonuclear weapons, or hydrogen bombs, and the first tests were conducted a little over a year later. The Soviet Union was doing the same thing in parallel; they detonated their first test bomb in autumn of 1953. As we learned when we watched Godzilla (1954), the United States would test an even bigger bomb in 1954. The Cold War nuclear arms race was escalating and intensifying, and it would keep on that path until the nations of the world began pumping the brakes with negotiations toward the Non-Proliferation Treaty in the late ’60s.

That was well into the future that night in 1953 when Harry Martinson gazed into the night sky to admire the Andromeda galaxy. Martinson would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1974 (a prize he shared with Eyvind Johnson), just a few years before his death in 1978, and in 1953 he was well into a successful and respected literary career. He’d had quite an interesting life before he became a writer. He and his siblings were abandoned to foster care when they were children, and at sixteen he ran away; he spent some time homeless before traveling the world as a seaman. Years spent working among the engines of steamships gave him black lung disease, so he eventually returned to Sweden. He started writing and publishing poems in 1927, at the age of twenty-three, and became acquainted with other writers and poets in the literary circles of the time. He wrote poems, novels, stories, and essays, mostly drawn from his tumultuous childhood, his travels, and his love of the natural world. During WWII he spent some time on the front line of the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union, and he wrote about that too. He won piles of literary awards, was widely respected in literary circles, and was elected as a member of the Swedish Academy in 1949.

What Martinson did not write was science fiction—at least not until 1953, when he read about doomsday bombs in the news, and gazed through his telescope at another galaxy, and began thinking about drifting out into the unknown darkness. That’s when he began writing the poems of Aniara.

Aniara is made up of 103 cantos that Martinson wrote over the course of the next few years, with the complete work being published to great acclaim in 1956. You can read Stephen Klass and Leif Sjöberg’s 1999 English translation on the Internet Archive; that’s the second of two published English translations, neither of which is currently in print. You can also listen to the opera adaptation by Karl-Birger Blomdahl, or perhaps catch a planetarium show that adapts the story, or listen to the 30-minute song adaptation “The Great Escape” by Swedish prog metal band Seventh Wonder, or contemplate Fia Backström’s “A Vaudeville on Mankind in Time and Space” mixed-media art installation. There’s even a death metal album adaptation, if that’s more your speed. There are countless readings, reimaginings, songs, and artworks based on or inspired by Aniara.

But there’s only one movie, and that’s the 2018 film written and directed by Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja. Aniara was their first feature, although they had worked together on short films before. The film is a pretty faithful adaptation of Martinson’s epic poem, with some changes to things like characters’ genders and some contextual worldbuilding to modernize it, but the heart of the story remains the same.

When Aniara opens, we meet a character who is never given a name; she is only ever known as Mimarobe, or MR, which is her job description. MR (played by Emelie Jonsson) works aboard the spaceship Aniara, which is a sort of futuristic cruise ship that transports people on a three-week journey between Earth and Mars, complete with luxury shops, numerous bars and restaurants, casinos, arcades, theaters, and all other manner of distractions. One entertainment on offer is the Mima, an artificial intelligence that plucks memories from a person’s mind to create a soothing virtual reality experience. Managing the Mima is MR’s job, and when she tests it, we see her enjoying a lush natural sojourn in a forest on Earth—the kind of forest that in her world does not exist anymore.

The ship clearly makes the journey in both directions—MR and the shipboard astronomer (played by Anneli Martini) have both made the journey before and discuss bunking arrangements on the return trip—but it’s also implied that many of the passengers are making a Titanic-like migration away from a dying Earth toward what they hope will be a better life on Mars. (From what I understand, in the book the ship is a one-way transport for people fleeing Earth.)

None of them will ever make it. Only a few days after they leave Earth, Aniara encounters some space debris and makes a sudden course correction to avoid a collision. Some of the debris strikes the ship anyway, puncturing the nuclear reactor and triggering a meltdown. Captain Chefone (Arvin Kananian) orders the reactor and fuel to be ejected, which leaves the ship without any way to steer back on course. The captain at first lies to the passengers and tells them they’ll be able to course correct in about two years, but the truth gets out and soon everybody on board knows there is no turning back.

This is all established so plainly and addressed so rationally that it is tempting to interrogate the premise: Why can’t they communicate with Earth? If this journey is commonplace, why is there never even a possibility of help? If they have the kind of power necessary for artificial gravity, why can’t they get power for steering? Or properly shield their reactor in the first place? Why was all the propulsion and fuel in one vulnerable location anyway? Do they even try to fix it?

But it quickly becomes apparent that this is not that kind of story. This is old school sci fi, not in the classic “give humans a technical problem and they solve it” vein, but rather in the “put humans in a situation and watched them fuck it up” vein. This is a film where time is marked by the passage of years, not days or weeks. For all that it wears the clothing of hard sci fi, the core of the story presents an existential conundrum, not a technical one.

The Mima, which had been of little interest when everybody aboard had better places to be, soon becomes a rare source of solace for the passengers and crew, as they constantly seek to escape into constructed virtual experiences of a thriving, long-lost Earth. Three years into the journey, the Mima becomes overwhelmed by all of the painful memories and ongoing misery it picks up from the humans, and it destroys itself in despair.

This is, interestingly, a change from the original story, in which the Mima is a rather more expansive, almost mystical entity that absorbs information from all the cosmos. The film’s Mima is as isolated from the rest of the universe as the humans aboard; the onslaught of misery that it absorbs comes entirely from within their minds.

After the Mima destroys itself, the situation aboard Aniara deteriorates dramatically. It takes four years for the mass suicides and sex cults to start, the latter of which seems like an overestimate to me. (If there’s one thing we know about humanity, it’s that people will start a sex cult for any old reason.) At five years, MR and the pilot Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro) are playing at domesticity and raising a child together, and hope of rescue appears in the form of a space probe that is approaching Aniara from the direction of Earth. In the sixth year, however, the probe finally arrives and turns out to be unusable, and Isagel takes her own life and that of their child. At ten years, the remaining people aboard are barely pretending to maintain a functional society anymore. At twenty-four years, MR is one of only a handful of people left, and they are sitting in the shadowy remains of Mima, waiting for their last light to fade away.

The last we see of Aniara, we are nearly six million years into the future, and the ship is dark and lifeless, drifting past a beautiful, Earth-like planet.

A piece on Martinson’s poem and its various adaptations in The New York Review of Books compares the tone of Aniara to Stanley Kramer’s classic Cold War film On the Beach (1959, and based on Nevil Shute’s novel of the same name). I can see where the comparison comes from, as this is not a story about people trying to prevent or reverse their apocalypse, but rather one about people left adrift and lost while waiting for an inevitable end. The atomic-age themes of Martinson’s poem have been updated in the film to comment on the era of global warming; the passengers have both scars and memories from massive fires, and the images Mima immerses them in are of verdant natural landscapes. The only green aboard Aniara is the factory-grown algae that provides both their oxygen and their food source—and which eventually becomes contaminated and rots away.

Aniara is a skillfully made movie. The claustrophobic cinematography by Sophie Winqvist makes good use of a familiar setting crumbling over years of neglect. The cast is quite good, especially Jonsson and Cruzeiro, who portray MR’s helplessness in the face of Cruzeiro’s despair so very well.

It’s such a bleak story that I’m not sure I enjoyed the movie, but I find it thought-provoking and fascinating. I think this is a film best appreciated not in terms of how convincing or entertaining it is, but in how powerful it is in forcing us to sit with and understand our own reactions to it. Is it frustrating that they declare their problem unsolvable? That only half-hearted attempts are made to improve their situation? That the characters will speak vaguely of a future without believing in it? That the society as a whole embraces escaping into nostalgia and hedonism rather than any sense of exploration or creativity?

Of course it is! It’s incredibly frustrating, especially because in the last few years it has become very trendy for sci fi to insist upon offering hope and solutions, to the point where a lot of sci fi authors will even claim the genre has an obligation to do that. (I strongly don’t agree with that implied obligation, but I also understand why it’s so popular and strongly felt—but that’s a topic well outside the scope of this piece.)

What’s relevant here is that it’s truly not an easy thing to invite moviegoers to empathize with characters who don’t have either hope or solutions, or to go along with them as the darkness and emptiness of space slowly suffocates their interest in living. We like to tell ourselves that humans have a uniquely strong will to survive, but Aniara is the kind of science fiction that asks what that actually means. How strong? In what circumstances? In the absence of any other goal? What if the society around us does not share it?

These are big, heady things to think about. It’s not a comfortable movie, and it certainly doesn’t offer any clean themes or easy answers, but I’m glad that sci fi like this exists.

What do you think of Aniara? Who has read Martinson’s poem? I would love to hear your thoughts about the film as an adaptation.[end-mark]

Wholesome Family Films That Inexplicably Gave Me Nightmares as a Child

Spooky season is here, and I’m going to take a break from talking about horrible deaths in space for now, so we’re going back to childhood to rewatch some movies. Specifically, we’re watching a bunch of films that upset me terribly when I was a child, but I haven’t seen since then.

It is important to note that, unlike the genuinely horrifying Return to Oz (1985) (which Tyler Dean recently wrote about), I doubt any of these movies is actually scary. I was just a very sensitive child with an overactive imagination and an undiagnosed anxiety disorder. But it’s been many, many years since I’ve watched these films, and children’s films of the era had some wild stuff going on, so we shall see…

October 1 — Flight of the Navigator (1986), directed by Randal Kleiser

One of the most vivid recurring nightmares I had as a child was about being abducted by aliens and transported into the future.

Watch: Hulu, Apple, Disney, Fandango.

View the trailer.

October 8 — E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982), directed by Stephen Spielberg

To this day I remain highly suspicious of what visitors could be hiding in large piles of toy plushies.

Watch: Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Fandango.

View the trailer.

October 15 — Escape to Witch Mountain (1975), directed by John Hough

There are aliens, but mostly what I recall is that it made me very suspicious of rich men, a suspicion that has served me well in life.

Watch: Disney, Amazon, Apple.

View the trailer.

October 22 — The Secret of NIMH (1982), directed by Don Bluth

I read the book dozens of times as a child and gained only appreciation for laboratory rats with enhanced intelligence, but the movie caused me to have concerns about my house getting destroyed by a giant plow.

Watch: Amazon, Apple, Roku, and more.

View the trailer.

October 29 — The Last Starfighter (1984), directed by Nick Castle

I remember absolutely nothing about this film except that it made me worry intensely about being bad at video games.

Watch: Apple, Amazon, Fandango.

View the trailer.

The post <i>Aniara</i>: The Existential Despair of Waiting for the End appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Sunshine: Let’s Contemplate the Flaming Metaphor in the Sky

Underrated masterpiece or frustrating near-miss?

By Kali Wallace

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Published on September 17, 2025

Credit: Fox Searchlight Pictures

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Credit: Fox Searchlight Pictures

Sunshine (2007). Directed by Danny Boyle. Written by Alex Garland. Starring Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Rose Byrne, and Michelle Yeoh.

Regular readers of this column know that I tend to be forgiving when it comes to silly science in sci fi films. I don’t mind movies that have bad science or impossible plots or outlandish premises. Sometimes I seek such movies out! I went to see The Core (2003) in theaters, on purpose, when I was a geophysics graduate student. It’s a terrible movie. I laughed a lot.

Also, as somebody who is both fairly scientifically literate and a sci fi writer, I love the challenge of thinking about ways to make ridiculous ideas plausible. That sort of creative problem-solving is fun, even though sometimes the best solution is just to handwave it and decide not to explain.

All of which is to say: I really, truly, genuinely do not mind that the premise of Sunshine is “the Sun is going out.”

It’s ridiculous, yes. You don’t have to be a solar physicist to know that. It turns out there is some backstory to the setup that never made it into the movie. The explanation comes from some of the weirder corners of quantum physics: the Sun’s death can be blamed on a Q-ball, a theoretical “lump” of bosons formed during the Big Bang that could “eat” the Sun from the inside.

Just so we’re clear, this is not something that would happen, even if Q-balls are ever proven to be real, but there’s scientific handwaving, then there’s quantum scientific handwaving, so it’s really not important. We’ve all gone along with far sillier things in sci fi films.

The Sun is going out, and people have to throw a bomb at it to fix it. That’s the premise of Sunshine.

We join eight astronauts aboard Icarus II, the second mission to attempt jump-starting the Sun with an enormous bomb, after Icarus I fell mysteriously silent. This second mission carries a “stellar bomb” designed by physicist Robert Capa (played by Cillian Murphy, years before he win an Oscar for playing another bomb designer in another movie), who is also along for the ride. When the crew pick up a distress signal from Icarus I, they decide to go and check it out, mostly in hopes of acquiring a second enormous bomb in case the one they are carrying doesn’t work.

Of course, things start to go wrong. The captain (played by Hiroyuki Sanada) dies, their garden—and therefore their oxygen supply—is imperiled, and when they finally reach Icarus I they learn its crew is dead and they can’t use its bomb as a backup anyway.

When the crew is down to its last four members and determined to finish the mission, they get a surprise visitor in the form of the captain of the first Icarus, Pinbacker (played by Mark Strong beneath so much burn makeup), who tries to sabotage the mission, as he sabotaged his own, because he thinks the Sun is a god and it’s better to let humanity die than throw bombs at god. Or something like that; the details are a bit muddled. The character is explicitly a representation of a specific type of extremist that really only exists in fiction. (Real extremists mostly don’t become raving Sun-worshipping space lunatics; they just get elected to Congress and systematically strip people’s rights away.)

But Pinbacker fails, and the mission of Icarus II succeeds, with Capa surviving just long enough to set off his bomb. There is a brief tag at the very end to show the sun growing brighter in apocalyptically-snowbound Sydney, Australia, so we know humanity will be all right.

I know this movie has many ardent fans and defenders, so we’ll just get this out of the way: I wanted to like Sunshine a lot more than I did. Even typing up that brief summary, I kept thinking, “Man, there is so much fun stuff in here, but…”

I don’t hate it! I like a lot of it, loved some parts of it. It has a lot going for it. The production design by Mark Tildesley and cinematography by Alwin Küchler are gorgeous; there are many scenes and images that are downright breathtaking. The cast is fantastic across the board, which should not be a surprise with that roster; a pre-Captain America Chris Evans is a particular standout as the guy everybody should listen to even when he’s being an asshole. There are some wonderfully tense moments and events, from rational moral quandaries to good old-fashioned jump scares. A lot of people have trouble with the tonal shift of the ending, but it really doesn’t bother me. I gasped with delight when Icarus (voiced by Chipo Chung) told Capa there was an extra person on board.

There’s so much in this movie that’s incredibly well done, but it doesn’t quite come together into something truly great. It gets in its own way and ends up missing the mark. That’s so much more frustrating than a film that never comes close at all. I can easily enjoy and move on from a mediocre movie that was only ever going to be mediocre, but a movie with moments of brilliance that don’t quite gel is going to bother me forever.

After I watched Sunshine and started reading about it, I learned a curious thing: Based on things they’ve said in interviews over the years, it sure seems like director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland carry the same frustration.

Before we get into that, I’m going to cast us all back to my own teenage years in the mid-1990s, when I was a not-sheltered-but-certainly-not-worldly teenager living in a hotbed of white Middle American conservative evangelicalism. I did not come from a strict family, but my best friend did. Even so, this was the ’90s, and we were good kids, so her parents didn’t ask too many questions when we went to see a movie at the mall one weekend. Before the internet, the only information we had for choosing a movie was newspaper reviews and scattered word-of-mouth. Which is how we ended up watching Trainspotting (1996) without having any idea what it was about except, maybe, something about Scotland?  

A little ways into the film—you all know exactly when this happened—my friend leaned over and asked if we should leave. I think she wanted to, but I wasn’t about to go anywhere, so we didn’t. We stayed for the whole movie and walked out of the theater raving, with absolutely no regrets, because Trainspotting is awesome. (I’m pretty sure my friend lied to her parents about what we saw that day.)

Like a lot of people, Trainspotting was my introduction to the works of Danny Boyle. It might be kind of hard to remember now, as the context of what people find shocking in pop culture has evolved since 1996, but everybody had something to say about Trainspotting when it came out, from the pearl-clutching moral scolds to the exultant cinephiles. It was Boyle’s second movie, following the 1994 crime film Shallow Grave, and it launched him into the ranks of directors people would pay attention to.

Among those paying attention were the producers of the fourth film in the Alien franchise, Alien: Resurrection (1997), who approached Boyle as a possible director. Boyle was very interested, but he has since said he didn’t feel ready to take on a project that would require so much visual effects work. In retrospect, one can see how going from The Worst Toilet in Scotland to the Alien franchise might be a bit daunting, so we are forever left wondering what a Danny Boyle Alien movie might have looked like. (After a few other big-name directors turned it down, Alien: Resurrection was taken on by Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children co-director Jean-Pierre Jeunet.)

Boyle instead made A Life Less Ordinary (1997), which nobody saw, but it earned him and producer Andrew Macdonald enough for them to buy the rights to The Beach, the 1996 debut novel of twenty-six-year-old English writer Alex Garland. (I’ve never read The Beach, nor have I seen the film based on it, because I had a college roommate who was obsessed with Titanic and I refused to watch anything with Leonardo DiCaprio on principle.) Garland didn’t write the screenplay for The Beach, but it did serve as his introduction to Boyle, and he went on to write the screenplay for the first of the three movies they would make together.

That film was, of course, the much-beloved 28 Days Later (2002), which is largely credited with having revitalized the zombie horror genre—although Garland himself has given that credit to the 1996 video game Resident Evil (which was also adapted into a film in 2002). He also cites John Wyndham’s 1951 novel Day of the Triffids as inspiration, and I was going to make a joke about how much I want Garland to make a movie about terrifying plants, then I remembered that he’s already done so because Annihilation (2018) exists.

(Confession! I’ve also never seen 28 Days Later, or Weeks, or Years. We’ll probably do a zombie month in this film club at some point, and I will have to watch all the zombie movies I’ve been avoiding for most of my life.)

Nobody was really expecting a depressing zombie movie-slash-political allegory to hit it big, which in retrospect seems like a big miss on the part of people who thought they had their fingers on the pulse of pop culture. But 28 Days Later was a huge success, and Boyle and Garland got to work on their second film. (The third wouldn’t come until many years later, with this year’s 28 Years Later.)

Garland has described a few sources of inspiration for the ideas behind Sunshine. He was fascinated by the idea of the heat death of the universe, which I find extremely relatable. Who among us has not sat around contemplating the heat death of the universe? It’s one of my favorite things to do. He’s been quoted in some articles as saying he was also intrigued by “an article projecting the future of mankind from a physics-based, atheist perspective,” although I can’t find the original context of that statement. It’s probably out there somewhere, but Garland talks about his ideas and his work frequently and in-depth, and ain’t nobody got time to sift through all that on a weekly column deadline. So I don’t know what article he was talking about or what specific perspective he was drawing from, although I do think it’s clear from other interviews and his full body of work that he is, and always has been, interested in putting his characters up against science-derived challenges that don’t care about them or their survival.

Garland and Boyle spent a year or so revising and rewriting the script, and that’s where things get interesting. According to things they have said, they never quite got the writing to where they wanted it to be. In an interview in 2015, Garland spoke rather plainly about his disappointment with the film: “But what I really want to underscore strongly, is the most significant failings in Sunshine, from my point of view, were not in Danny’s direction, they were in the script.” He also said, “The difficulty was more in agreeing on what the problem was, but disagreeing on the solution.”

They both very strongly wanted the movie to say something, and they both came into it knowing they could make tense, disturbing sci fi horror that says something, because that’s what they had done in 28 Days Later. But it proved more difficult with Sunshine. Garland wanted a more ambiguous and less optimistic ending, while Boyle wanted to provide some hope while still engaging with the sense of responsibility and obligation the characters feel. They both wanted the story to contain themes of religious allegory—the whole “the Sun is viewed as a god” thing is not subtle—but the handling of that facet ends up mostly shoehorned into the abrupt slasher-movie shift at the end, to the point where there are viewers who come away certain the ending takes a supernatural turn.

Their disagreements while making the film led to the two of them falling out for a while, although it seems to have been fairly low-drama falling out by movie business standards. They have since made up; Garland reached out to Boyle when he was making Ex Machina (2014) to get his opinion on the film, which eventually led to them realizing they did want to work together again. That’s how 28 Years Later happened.

I don’t know what Sunshine would be like if they had been able to agree on the story they wanted to tell and how to tell it, and then worked out all the writing tangles to get there. I don’t think it would have been hugely different, because it’s already skillfully made, beautiful to look at, and enjoyable to watch—but the storytelling still has cracks.

I don’t generally exert a lot of effort nitpicking films, because I don’t find it very enjoyable. But sometimes I catch on something that simply doesn’t fit into the framework of the movie, something that is so distracting it affects how I watch the rest of it, and that’s what happened here. Some people might be surprised to know that it has nothing to do with Pinbacker’s surprise appearance at the end. I actually love a surprise interloper on a spaceship! I think that could have worked just fine, slasher-flick stabbings and all, with some changes to what leads up to it.

No, the cracks that bothered me came much earlier, right when Icarus II began having all of their problems.

The film mostly puts a great deal of effort into plausibility, even while fully aware it was stretching the boundaries of science. The actors were required to read about physics and learn about living in space, NASA engineers and psychologists were brought on, and particle physicist Brian Cox was consulted about the more esoteric aspects of the physics.

And the thing that bugs me in that context is that I simply didn’t believe that changing course would be done by the navigator (Benedict Wong’s character Trey) alone. In the middle of the night. While everybody else was asleep. Without anybody or the ship’s computer checking his work. Without following a checklist of steps, even though we all know astronauts have technical checklists even for using the toilet. Without the captain or pilot (Rose Byrne’s Cassie) present. Without the entire crew watching tensely to make sure things go smoothly, because they are all aware of the import of this choice after they discussed it in depth.

I just don’t buy it, and from the dialogue used to justify the scene it feels like the filmmakers don’t buy it either, and that annoys me. It annoys me because that meant I spent the rest of the movie unwillingly conscious of the puppet masters pulling the strings to maneuver the characters into danger. I am well aware that this is an ungenerous way to watch a movie. Characters are storytelling devices maneuvered by the writer for specific reasons. But I really wanted Sunshine to be better about setting up those reasons.

I will say, however, that learning about how and why Garland and Boyle struggled with the story made me appreciate it more. Every story has a puppet master, and movies have several, but usually when we see evidence of the string-pulling it’s down to mundane movie business stuff, such as making more money or satisfying a studio or fitting mainstream audience expectations. It’s a lot more interesting, and a lot more illuminating, when the strings are visible because two very skilled and thoughtful artists are pulling in slightly different directions, with goals that don’t quite overlap, and both know that attempts at compromise are weakening what they are trying to say.

What do you think about Sunshine? It’s a film that still generates strong reactions, even nearly twenty years later, and I understand why! What do you think about that much-debated ending?

Next week: We’re almost finished with our cinematic tour of Bad Things Happening in Space, but we’ve got one more to go with the Swedish-Danish film Aniara. Watch it on Kanopy, Hoopla, Roku, and more.

The post <i>Sunshine</i>: Let’s Contemplate the Flaming Metaphor in the Sky appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

High Life: You Can’t Go Home Again

A bleak, wonderfully strange film with an ambiguous ending…or is it? No one can seem to agree.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on September 10, 2025

Credit: A24

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Credit: A24

High Life (2018). Directed by Claire Denis. Written by Claire Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau, with Geoff Cox. Starring Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, André Benjamin, and Mia Goth.

On April 10, 2019, the researchers behind the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) announced that they had captured the first-ever images of a black hole. The EHT is not a singular telescope but a radio telescope array, which means it combines data from radio telescopes around the world using a technique called Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), which allows astronomers to make observations that would otherwise only be possible by building an impossibly large telescope. We can’t build a telescope with the diameter of Earth, but we can combine data from telescopes on opposite sides of the Earth to form high-resolution images of very distant astronomical objects.

The image the EHT shared with the world in 2019 is of the supermassive black hole at the center of Messier 87 (M87), a galaxy about 55 million light-years away. Scientists were delighted, of course, because the image provided support for the models of black holes derived from Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Far outside the world of research science and academia, news of the image reached French filmmaker Claire Denis in a flurry of texts and a phone call from actor Robert Pattinson, all eager to point out that the real black hole looked very much like the black hole in High Life, which had been released the year before. Denis in turn called physicist Aurélien Barrau, who had consulted on the scientific aspects of the film, to talk about the news.

That black hole, the one in the movie, is the work of artist Olafur Eliasson. Eliasson is primarily a large-scale and installation artist known for works like “The weather project” (2003) at the Tate Modern and for introducing environmentally-safe dyes into rivers in major cities without warning. In 2014, Eliasson and Denis met and began discussing a mutual fascination with using art to represent black holes and other mysterious scientific phenomena. Denis was already working on High Life and was interested in Eliasson’s way of playing with light and shadow, and together they made the short film Contact as a test-run for their shared fascination. Contact is just over three minutes long and pretty much does look like a test of many of the stylistic choices that later appear in High Life: the arcs of orange light, the half-lit faces viewed in shadowy profile; everything is intense and nothing is explained.

Film critic Matt Zoller Seitz wrote that High Life is “tailor-made for viewers who like science fiction in a cryptic 1970s art-house mode.” That’s such a perfect introduction to the film that I’m not going to try to improve on it. Yes, in fact, that’s exactly what it is. Whether that type of movie is for you or not is a matter of personal preference. I happen to love my science fiction in cryptic 1970s art-house mode, so I am the target audience for this movie.

There are very few female directors in the history of film who sit comfortably in the boys’ club of so-called auteur directors, but Claire Denis is one of them. After finishing film school in the early ’70s, she got her start working as an assistant or unit director on several films, but her big break came when she worked as assistant director to Wim Wenders on his films Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (1987) and to Jim Jarmusch on Down by Law (1986). Wenders told her she ought to go direct her own films—which she did. Denis’ first film, Chocolat (1988), which calls upon her own childhood in French-colonized West Africa, was well received, and she’s been making movies ever since.

High Life is both her first English-language film and her first science fiction film. But the idea had been with her for a decade or longer. Like so many of us have done at some in our lives, Denis was reading the work of Stephen Hawking and thinking about how the physics of traveling through space and time would impact human life. The initial kernel of the story was very simple, as she explained in a 2019 interview with The Hollywood Reporter: “I had this idea in mind of a man alone in space in a ship far away from the solar system so there is no hope to return and the crew is dead.” She spent about a decade researching, developing, and writing the story with her frequent screenwriting partner Jean-Pol Fargeau. A producer suggested the film be in English rather than French, so Denis and Fargeau brought on Geoff Cox to translate.

There were other writers involved along the way, some of whom might have resulted in the film having a very different ending if they’d had their way. Novelists and married couple Nick Laird and Zadie Smith worked on the screenplay for a time; the announcement of this collaboration was big news among literary types, thanks to Smith’s stature in the community. But Smith and Laird eventually left the project due to creative differences—apparently genuine creative differences, not the euphemistic “creative differences” that imply any other sort of problem. According to Denis, they couldn’t agree on how the story should go, and particularly on how it should end. Smith wanted the ship and characters to return to Earth at the end, whereas Denis never even considered that to be a possibility. Smith, for her part, hasn’t said much about the time she spent working on the screenplay, but what little she has said suggests she envisioned a significantly less bleak story than the one Denis had in mind.

I don’t know what a sci fi movie written by Zadie Smith would look like. (I’ll happily watch if she ever pens one!) But one has to admit that just about anything would be less bleak than High Life.

The nonlinear story begins with Monte (Robert Pattinson) living on a spaceship with nobody but a baby girl, Willow (portrayed by Scarlett Lindsey as a baby, Jessie Ross when she’s older), for company. Monte spends his time repairing the ship, tending the garden, and taking care of the baby. Those garden scenes in the opening sequence remind me a lot of both the slow, earthbound opening of Solaris (1972) and the habitats of Silent Running (1972), and I think such visual references are deliberate. There’s a stark contrast between the small pocket of life represented by a man, his daughter, and what keeps them alive, and the cold lifelessness of everything around them.

The science in the film is straightforward, presented without embellishment. The ship looks like a box from the outside, and the inside is largely utilitarian, like the prison-laboratory it is—except for the garden, which is overwhelmingly lush. There are bunks, locker rooms, corridors. The spacesuits are clunky, the uniforms bland. Denis took herself and some of the cast and crew to the European Astronaut Centre in Cologne to learn about the dull, unglamorous details of living in space, so that all of that could be handled without fanfare.

Before the film’s title even appears on screen, we learn that the ship (which has no name, only the number 7) receives only random, automated transmissions from Earth, many in the form of old movies or tv shows. We also learn that the ship is designed to turn off life support unless somebody on board provides proof of life every day, so every day Monte sits down to make a report and convince the ship that the “crew” is still alive and the “mission” is still ongoing.

That is, at best, a generous interpretation of events. The rest of the crew is dead; we watch Monte bring their bodies out of freezer storage and dump them into space. The title card image of the corpses floating—or falling—in darkness is hauntingly beautiful and one of the most striking images I’ve seen in a sci fi film.

From there, we flash back in time to learn how man and child came to be alone in space: Monte was one of several condemned prisoners who volunteered for a space mission to avoid execution. The official stated purpose of the mission is to travel to a black hole and test the Penrose process, a theoretical mechanism by which it would be possible to extract energy from a black hole, first proposed by Roger Penrose in 1971. The second, more genuine purpose is to use a bunch of condemned prisoners to study how humans live and die in space.

It is understood to be a one-way trip for criminals who have no other options—or, in the case of Tcherny (André Benjamin, aka André 3000), seeking some vague sense of pride about going where no one has gone before. There are no guards aboard the unnamed #7 ship, no scientists or crew; there are only prisoners. Even the ship’s captain (played by Lars Eidinger) and pilot (Agata Buzek) are prisoners, living right alongside the others and subject to the same indignities, most of which come courtesy of Dr. Dibs (Juliette Binoche), who is conducting fertility experiments on the others in an attempt to achieve human procreation in the radiation of space.

This situation unsurprisingly creates a toxic stew of repression (the only sex is solitary and happens in an isolating “fuckbox”), violence, sexual assault, and nonconsensual medical experimentation. Juliette Binoche is here doing what Juliette Binoche does best, being intense and alluring and weirdly charming, even as she’s doing horrific things in the name of her twisted idea of science, or telling the story about how back on Earth she murdered her children and husband.

One by one the prisoners die: by Dibs’ experiments, by euthanasia, by suicide, by violence, and by one gruesome instance of spaghettification. Only Monte and the infant Willow are left.

We eventually skip forward in time, beyond where the film begins, and we learn that even years later, Monte is keeping himself and Willow alive. She’s reaching puberty now, and they are still traveling through space, because there is nowhere else for them to go. They still convince the ship to keep them alive every day, although the ship is definitely showing some wear and tear. They still receive transmissions from Earth, but they have been traveling far enough and fast enough that they know much more time has passed on Earth.

While watching this movie, I couldn’t quite figure out how I felt about it. It’s extremely well-made and visually stunning, and the acting is fantastic even if the dialogue is sometimes rather flat. It’s brutal and upsetting, but there are times when the brutality feels a bit cold and removed, particularly in contrast to the sweet, sad moments with Monte and his daughter. There is a lot of really intriguing and powerful stuff in here about human behavior in confined environments, about incarceration and medical experimentation on prisoners, about the people a society views as disposable, about the choices people have to make every day to keep living.

Because of all that, I felt as I was watching that I was mostly enjoying it because I found it fascinating, not because it was really getting its hooks into me.

Then they find the dog ship, and I decide that I love this movie.

Not because of the dogs—I mean, not not because of the dogs. I’m not hating on the dogs! Don’t come at me for being a dog hater! It’s just that it’s not really about the dogs.

Let me explain.

Monte and Willow come across another ship after years of isolation. The ship is nearly identical to theirs: a big, unglamorous box with no name except for a number. When I watched, I made a note that the number was 6, but I’ve found reviews that interpret it as 6, and some that interpret it as 9, and all of them seem to draw some importance from whether that ship was launched before or after 7. I’m not sure that actually matters; I took it to mean there were at least 7 ships tossed into space as part of these experiments, and probably many more.

Monte heads over to the ship to see if there is anybody left on it, but instead of human prisoners or crew he finds a pack of feral dogs. Living dogs, dead dogs, puppies. Just a lot of dogs.

It’s unexpected and creepy and so freaking weird. The film never explains it. Yes, it’s understood that this ship was also part of the experiment, but how the dogs survive and reproduce in space, who is flying the dog ship and keeping it going, what happened to the humans, none of that is ever explained.

I love that. I don’t want something so weird to be explained. A lot of other sci fi writers and filmmakers would try to explain it, because of the inevitable questions it raises, but I’m so happy Denis resisted the impulse. I love that it’s inexplicable and sad and unsettling and it does nothing to materially change Monte and Willow’s lives, but it changes something in how they think about their situation.

I’m not entirely sure why that one scene makes the whole movie click for me, but it does, and I’m glad for it.

The ending is also ambiguous—or at least, I thought it was ambiguous, but just like the question 6 or 9, reviews and write-ups seem to disagree on that as well. I feel like if critics can’t even agree on whether or not an ending is ambiguous, that makes it ambiguous, but what do I know?

The way I understood the ending is that Monte and Willow have spent the past dozen years or so looking for different black holes, until they find one they can try to travel through. Willow makes a comment at one point that the black hole they are approaching is “less dense” and therefore more suitable.

And they take a smaller ship into a black hole at the end. That’s how the film ends, in a scene of light and darkness very reminiscent of Denis’ short film Contact. We don’t know what happens to them. Whether they live or die, whether they pass to another universe or not, they’re out of our reach. That’s the ending I saw.

Then I went online a read write-ups from professional film critics who very confidently state that the black hole at the end is the same one as before, they’ve just been hanging out nearby for Willow’s entire life, and the dog ship shows up to make them realize survival is pointless, and they fly into the black hole knowing they will die a horrible spaghettifying death.

People have, of course, asked Denis about the ending. At one film event she said, “Let’s say you could enter a black hole. Some people believe you might reach another universe, or something. If you reach this limit called the singularity, where time and space become zero. I thought that was the perfect image for infinity.”

Perhaps some people who write about this film crave clarity that it does not provide, so they cling to an interpretation that sounds suitably depressing, even though the film actually ends on a solemn but hopeful note. A lot of moviegoers, even those who love sci fi with that ’70s arthouse vibe, want certainty in stories uninterested in providing it. It’s been nearly 60 years and that’s still a complaint lodged against 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the case of High Life, it’s another kind of uncertainty, one that opens the question of whether humans are different from animals, or whether staying alive is different from choosing to live.

I love that about it. I like that Denis has been very clear that she also doesn’t know what that means. She doesn’t know what happens to the characters. She doesn’t know their fate. It’s not that I need the director to tell me what a movie means, but rather that I appreciate when a director almost laughs at the idea that there is not a secret puzzle to figure out to make all the meaning fall into place. The story is meant to be malleable, ambiguous, unknowable, because sometimes that makes more sense than solid answers.

What do you think about High Life? There is a lot to unpack in this delightfully weird movie, and I would love to hear your thoughts about the dogs, the deaths, and the ending.[end-mark]

Next week: Instead of heading out into deep space, we’re going to launch ourselves right into the heart of our solar system with Danny Boyle’s Sunshine. Watch it on Amazon, Apple, and Hulu.

The post <i>High Life</i>: You Can’t Go Home Again appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Europa Report: Stress and Sincerity in Space Exploration

The rare sci fi movie that’s not cynical about the risks we take in the name of science.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on September 3, 2025

Credit: Start Motion Pictures

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Credit: Start Motion Pictures

Europa Report (2013). Directed by Sebastián Cordero. Written by Philip Gelatt. Starring Christian Camargo, Anamaria Marinca, Michael Nyqvist, Daniel Wu, Karolina Wydra, and Sharlto Copley.

When I was in college, some twenty-five years ago, I took a geology class about Mars. On the first day of the class, the professor asked who in the class would go to Mars if they got the chance. Everybody raised their hands. He then asked who would go if they knew they wouldn’t be able to come back. All of the students put their hands down—but the professor kept his raised. With the amusement of somebody who had asked that question before and knew exactly what the answers would be, he went on to talk about the challenges of studying planetary bodies from a distance and the assumptions we make because we have such a limited data set.

I recall that professor’s question whenever I watch or read something about the possibility of manned missions to other planetary bodies in our solar system. There was no question in his mind—as somebody who spent his life studying planetary surfaces from afar—that it was worth it. Not for the glory, not to reinvent society, not to escape Earth, but to learn more about how the universe works. The knowledge gained would be worth it.

I think that’s a pretty common opinion among scientists actively studying our solar system. Beneath all the cyclic noise about research funding and billionaire egos and jingoistic pride, there are always people quietly working away in their labs, counting impact craters on high-res photos or staring at spectrographs until their eyes cross, and they are always going to want more accurate and more effective ways to figure out all the things we don’t know.

Where that opinion isn’t very common is in sci fi cinema.

The skepticism that sci fi movies have toward science is nothing new, and it’s a topic well beyond the scope of this column. The underlying theme of quite a lot of sci fi films can be summed up in Jeff Goldblum’s famous line from Jurassic Park: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

As an audience member who likes sci fi movies about terrible things happening and a writer who knows that terrible things happening make for exciting stories, I do very much understand where this comes from. But as a person who also knows that scientific discovery and knowledge are fundamentally important to humanity, I do often roll my eyes at movies that—intentionally or not—take on a scolding, puritanical tone toward science.

Europa Report is notable for being a movie that doesn’t share that skepticism. It’s a movie about terrible things happening to people who go out to explore space, yes, but the point isn’t that they shouldn’t have gone exploring. The possibility that humanity could just not try to explore space isn’t even entertained.

The film is instead saying: Exploring space is dangerous, and there will be times when the worst-case scenario happens, but we should do it anyway.

That was the goal of the film from its earliest conception. Screenwriter Philip Gelatt has spoken about how he set out to write hard science fiction that centers the science, and that meant getting as much of it right as possible. He did a lot of research into the science and technology of human space travel in general and exploring Europa in particular. He mentions using Mary Roach’s delightful book Packing For Mars as a starting point, but he went a lot farther than popular science writing about the topics. He talked to folks at NASA about keeping people alive and healthy on a long space journey; he talked to scientists at JPL about the current state of our knowledge about Europa; he talked to a marine biologist about looking for life in another world’s oceans; he talked to scientists about the radiation shielding necessary to protect astronauts that close to Jupiter.

There are a couple of details he mentions that I really like. One is that they were well aware in the production when what they put on-screen was not quite realistic, such as when the practical and budgetary requirements of simulating zero gravity—the eternal bugbear of all sci fi filmmakers!—meant they had to handwave some details of the spaceship design.

Another is that he asked experts in deep space travel about the psychological pressures of going into space, and they told him what everybody who looks into real-life space travel knows and everybody who writes science fiction cheerfully ignores: It’s not actually that bad. Astronauts are people doing a high-pressure job, so they have problems like anybody else, but they are well-trained professionals.

That’s an important element of how Europa Report plays out. The story is told non-linearly, but the premise is this: A private corporation sent a crew of six astronauts to Jupiter’s moon Europa to investigate the possibility of there being life elsewhere in the solar system. Six months into the mission, Earth lost contact with the ship, and they didn’t hear from the mission again until they received a final data transmission several months later. That data has been edited and compiled into a documentary, complete with commentary from three experts who worked on the mission (played by Embeth Davidtz, Dan Fogler, and Isiah Whitlock, Jr.).

We don’t learn immediately what happened six months into the mission, but eventually it’s revealed that a solar flare damaged the ship, knocking out their communications. While trying to repair the damage, crew member James (Sharlto Copley) died in a spacewalk accident. The rest of the crew continued the mission. They were struggling emotionally—especially Andrei (Michael Nyqvist)—in mourning and demoralized, but they didn’t stop doing what they set out to do.

Gelatt rightfully identifies this as one of Europa Report’s key characteristics: in places where characters in a different movie might lose their cool, or lash out emotionally, or begin acting irrationally, the Europa One astronauts just keep doing their jobs. It’s an interesting approach from a writing standpoint, because it requires asking, “What can go wrong even if they don’t make boneheaded mistakes?”

Sebastián Cordero and cinematographer Enrique Chediak came on to the project after Gelatt and producer Ben Browning had developed the story and script pretty thoroughly. Both Cordero and Chediak are Ecuadorian, and they had first worked together on Crónicas (2004), a crime thriller set in rural Ecuador. In a 2013 interview, Cordero talks about how he had always been a sci fi fan, but making movies in Ecuador meant he was always aware of the pressure to stick with gritty realism. Europa Report offered him a chance to do sci fi realism without the grit, and to do it in an American production (meaning: filmed in the U.S. with American money) with a multinational cast that deliberately echoes the multinational nature of modern space travel.

And it is indeed very free of grit, because the setting is designed to mimic the International Space Station. It’s a pointed contrast to so many other cinematic spacecraft, from those that are highly stylized (which I love) to those that are intensely industrial (which I also love). Europa One looks like what real spacecraft look like in the early 21^st century: strictly functional, crowded with equipment, but extremely clean and well-maintained. They mimicked those scenes of the astronauts hanging out in zero gravity with a little wire work (wire work is awkward, time-consuming, and actors hate it), opting instead to have the actors recline on yoga balls or be propped up by film crew members, with the various supports being removed in post-production.

Visual effects supervisor John Bair has talked about the kind of research that went into making the ship look right. For the outside shots, that included figuring out how much light there would be that far from the Sun and what Jupiter and Europa would look like as the ship approached. For the interiors, in addition to modeling the design on the ISS, they carefully worked out where cameras would plausibly be placed in a situation designed to document an historic human achievement.

Europa Report is described (even by the filmmakers themselves) as a found footage film, but it’s really more of a mockumentary. Toward the end of the film, when Andrei and Rosa (Anamaria Marinca) realize they aren’t getting off of Europa alive, they sacrifice a few extra minutes or hours of survival to transmit the data back to Earth. Because what they have discovered is the entire purpose of their mission! The characters know that what they have discovered is valuable data, because they set out knowing that anything they discovered would be valuable data. Earlier in the film, mission commander William (Daniel Wu) mentioned casually that even if they didn’t find life, that would be an important discovery too—and he’s right! It might be disappointing, but it would still be scientifically valuable. Either way, the mission would be obsessively documented, so the framing device doesn’t have to convince the audience there would be cameras on at all times.

I like that choice because it both makes sense in the story and guides the movie’s format. The movie was filmed in a relatively short amount of time (just under three weeks) in a studio in New York. The production crew built the spaceship interiors as accurately as possible on a relatively lean budget. (That is, lean for a modern, effects-heavy American sci fi movie, so we’re talking less than $10 million.) The crew then placed cameras where cameras would plausible be placed aboard an actual spaceship, setting them to record, and left the room.

I mean they literally left the room. The cameras were placed to cover nearly all angles of the set. Consider, for example, the camera coverage of the cockpit area where William and Rosa are often seated while flying the ship, which features close angles of both seats as well as a longer view down into the next chamber of the ship. Those weren’t set up separately with parts of the set being taken away to make room for the camera crew; they were all built into the set and recording at the same time. There were at times as many as eight cameras running simultaneously, and Cordero and the film crew were often not even in the room.

What they had at the end of filming was footage of different takes of the same scenes from numerous cameras, all of which had to be edited and cut together. Most films, even the biggest productions, have one primary editor; Europa Report had four (Aaron Yanes, Alexander Kopit, Craig McKay, and Livio Sanchez), and it took them several months to piece it all together.

The spaceship exteriors and the surface of Europa were all added digitally; according to Bair, they took photographs of rocks in Central Park, turned them into 3D models, and added textures to turn them into a landscape of icy spires. I love that interview with Bair because I think it’s the first visual effects interview I’ve read—and I’ve read many—where the guy in charge just straight-up says, “We did it in Photoshop.”

But they do use some physical models in the film! I was surprised to learn that, because I assumed it was all digital. Not because it looks bad—the movie looks quite good—but because I knew it was an indie film with a relatively limited budget. The models come in at the very end, when the ship is flooded. That’s done using one-third scale miniatures of the ship section and the reveal of the alien creature. The creature is exactly what it looks like: a hybrid of an octopus and a squid, with some bioluminescence for extra pizzazz.

I’m not sure how I feel about the creature reveal at the end. On the one hand, I understand the storytelling demands of having the movie build toward something, something that would give the narrative a complete arc and end on an impactful note. On the other hand, it’s the one moment in the film where it feels like the commitment to scientific realism was set aside for the drama. There are other moments that we can quibble about if we really want to be nitpicky, but none of those irk me as much as the glowy octopus guy there at the end.

It doesn’t ruin my enjoyment of the film, but it does make me think about how the discovery of life on Europa would be astonishing even if it were just bioluminescent ice plankton or whatever, and how the loss of life in a space mission is tragic even if a monster doesn’t get them.

In that same interview I linked above, Gelatt mentions asking scientists who study Europa if they would take a walk on the surface even if they knew they weren’t properly shielded from the radiation, and at least one of them replied that yes, of course he would. That answer clearly guided a lot of how the movie’s plot progresses. The crew argues, but they don’t fall out; they are struggling, but they don’t go crazy; they bicker and disagree, but they don’t sabotage their mission. They recognize that their new situation—down one man and out of contact with Earth—has wrecked their enthusiasm. But they don’t lose sight of what they have set out to do. They are still exploring.

Reading about that is what reminded me of my Mars professor from so many years ago, and it provides a fascinating perspective on one way to write about space exploration. I think the typical Hollywood-style approach to causing fictional problems in a sci fi setting is to spin those problems out of hubris or recklessness or greed or ego. Those elements can make for good stories, with heightened emotional hooks and lots of action! And people do often make questionable decisions with unforeseen consequences, so it’s not as though it’s hard to put them in situations where things go wrong.

But when we talk to scientists who spend their lives thinking about this stuff, we learn there are people willing to take risks to discover everything they can. They know the worst-case scenario is always a possibility, even if they do everything right, and they are willing to take that chance. That spirit is something Europa Report captures uniquely well, and it’s something I’d love to see more of in science fiction cinema.

What do you think of Europa Report? What do you think about realistic sci fi in general or the crew’s unique way of filming the movie? It was 99ºF when I sat down to watch this film, so when the characters are gazing out at the frozen surface of Europa, I kept thinking, “God, I wish that were me.”[end-mark]

Next week: We’re heading into deep space with Claire Denis’ High Life. Watch it on Amazon, Apple, or Fandango.

The post <i>Europa Report</i>: Stress and Sincerity in Space Exploration appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Pandorum: These Long Trips Can Really Mess With Your Mind

…Of course, the hordes of cannibalistic mutants don’t help, either.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on August 27, 2025

Credit: Constantin Film / Impact Pictures

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Credit: Constantin Film / Impact Pictures

Pandorum (2019). Directed by Christian Alvart. Written by Travis Milloy. Starring Dennis Quaid, Ben Foster, Antje Traue, Cung Le, and Cam Gigandet.

I read a lot of movie reviews as part of my research for this column. Sometimes I want some perspective on how a movie was perceived at the time of its release, or what cultural touchstones were in people’s minds as they were watching. Sometimes I want some insight into how critics reacted to a film that has since been assessed differently, or even reached beloved cult film status. There is also the fact that I find movie reviews interesting, because I find the way we talk about movies interesting, which is why I am here talking about movies.

Pandorum has not achieved any sort of cult status, although it seems to be fairly well-liked among sci fi horror fans. I can see why. It’s not a great movie, but it’s spooky and entertaining and has some fun sci fi horror stuff going on. I don’t love it, but I didn’t hate it. I don’t regret spending my time watching it and having a chance to talk about it.

And that makes the movie’s reviews fascinating—by which I mean sometimes I want to study pop culture criticism and commentary like a bug under a microscope. That kind of fascinating. Pandorum, like a lot of sci fi horror films, was completely trounced by critics. I’m not convinced all of those critics actually watched the whole movie or paid attention—or if they did, their desire to participate in clever snark masquerading as criticism was more important than getting any details right.

That puts me in the awkward position of wanting to defend a movie that I found to be mostly… fine. Yes, it is a horror movie that takes place in space, but no, it does not have the same plot as Alien (1979). Multiple reviews state that as simple fact, and I can’t tell if it’s because they didn’t watch this movie or they never watched Alien, but I guess it doesn’t matter. Yes, there are some confusing parts, but the pieces of the story are all in the film; they’re just revealed in a sort of inside-out way because the characters start out with amnesia. Yes, the title is a made-up word, but the film does in fact define that word many, many times—so many times that eventually I was impatiently thinking, “Yes, we know, you explained that already, we get it.” But apparently we do not all get it, because more than one reviewer states they have no idea what “Pandorum” refers to and are not interested in finding out. One reviewer suggested staring at the female actor’s cleavage instead of paying attention to the action, which should not surprise me at this point, but it still kind of surprised me.

I’m not here to do a dissection of the trends and assumptions that guide bad-faith film criticism in the internet brainrot era. I bring it up because it’s a very stark reminder of something that sci fi fans, horror fans, and especially sci fi horror fans have known for a long time, which is that sometimes movie reviews tell us a lot about what’s going on inside the reviewer’s head but very little about the film itself.

So let’s talk about the film itself!

In the not-so-distant future, the Earth is polluted and overpopulated, so people build a massive ark ship to make a 123-year journey to a habitable planet called Tanis. The ship is named Elysium; this movie came out four years before Elysium (2013), but in both cases I wonder about the wisdom of naming spacecraft after a conception of the afterlife. During the brief prologue, we see that a mere eight years into the mission, the few crew members who are still awake receive a cryptic message from Earth telling them that Elysium is carrying the last of humanity.

Then we skip forward some unspecific amount of time. Two crew members, Bower (Ben Foster) and Payton (Dennis Quaid), wake from their space hibernation. They don’t remember anything, but they quickly realize that they are trapped in the room where they woke up and the ship seems to be suffering from some serious power problems. They need to learn if anybody else is awake on board, reach the ship’s bridge, and fix the power problems. Bower crawls through the ventilation system to do that—does it even count as a spaceship story if nobody is crawling through the ventilation?—while Payton remains behind on the computers to guide him.

It’s not exactly surprising, as a person who has seen a movie or two before, that Bower is not going to be able to slip over to the ship’s bridge and start the engines easily. Still, the film sets up the inevitable quite nicely. The setting of a huge, dark, industrial spaceship bigger than we can really comprehend is effectively creepy, as are the moments of tension where we know Bower is walking into a horror movie but he still thinks he’s just going to fix a spaceship. There are, of course, people in the darkness: some of them dead, some alive, and a great many of them changed.

Bower eventually joins up with Nadia (Antje Traue) and Manh (Cung Le), and their small group makes their way through the ship, trying to avoid hordes of pale, spear-wielding, cannibalistic hunters while piecing together what went wrong on humanity’s last grand journey. Meanwhile, a crew member named Gallo (Cam Gigandet) joins Payton and reveals what he knows; the story Gallo tells involves the ship’s awake flight crew succumbing to the mental affliction known as “pandorum,” which is their name for what happens when space travel drives people insane.

There is a lot of familiar stuff in here—some of it remixed in interesting ways, some of it more predictable, especially to somebody who has read a lot of sci fi books about sleeper ships or generation ships. There is, indeed, an awful lot of creeping around in very dark spaces while trying not to attract the attention of the cannibal creature-people, which I assume is why some reviews and reactions call Pandorum “The Descent (2005) in space.” I haven’t seen The Descent (I am a huge scaredy-cat, okay?) so I’ll let others chime in about how accurate a comparison that is.

The screenplay for Pandorum came about when director Christian Alvart and screenwriter Travis Milloy mashed together two stories they had come up with separately. Milloy had a written a screenplay about a prison spaceship on which some inmates become cannibals and begin hunting other people aboard. He wrote the first version of this story in the 1990s—that is, well before the release of the Dead Space video games people still assume inspired Pandorum. Milloy names two movies that did inspire the story: Escape from New York (1981) and The Poseidon Adventure (1972). As someone who got nightmares from watching The Poseidon Adventure at a middle school slumber party, I understand that perfectly.

(And as someone who is also often asked about being inspired by the Dead Space video games, I will just reiterate what I wrote last week: What’s really going on here is that those of us who like to write about spaceships full o’ death just like a lot of the same things. I will add some wholly unrelated advice: Don’t listen when your publisher asks you to change your novel title and promises that nobody will be confused if it shares a name with a popular video game franchise. They are wrong. People will be confused. I’ve never played any Dead Space game. I’ve already told you I’m a huge scaredy-cat.)

Milloy had worked on some movies before, but he wasn’t really in Hollywood or part of the Hollywood machine, so he figured he would just make the movie himself with an ultra low budget and a small cast. He planned to film it in an abandoned paper mill. But his agent let him know that there was a British indie film studio interested: Impact Pictures, the studio founded by Jeremy Bolt and Paul W.S. Anderson, which had co-produced Event Horizon (1997) and the Resident Evil films. German director Christian Alvart was interested in Milloy’s Pandorum, and he brought in some of his own story elements, including changing the setting from a prison ship to an ark ship traveling to a new planet.

That change is central to how the movie’s story plays out. Humans have been imagining what realistically long space journeys might be like for about as long as humans have been seriously thinking about space travel. Most sources agree that rocketry pioneer Robert H. Goddard was the first to describe a proper long-haul spaceship. In some notes he wrote in 1918 (sometimes inaccurately referred to as an essay), he laid out the basic premise of what we now call a generation ship or ark ship. These include ideas like the possibility of humans evolving over the time it takes to travel through space, the practicalities of waking up the pilot at intervals throughout the trip, seeking out destinations likely to have habitable planets, and bringing along as much human culture as possible to start a new civilization.

(Note: I can’t verify the text in that above link because it is not easy to find the full text of Goddard’s notes online, although there are excerpts everywhere. Alas, I can’t tell if it’s because the text isn’t available in other places or because recent “improvements” have completely ruined online search tools.)

All sci fi fans are familiar with these ideas, and all sci fi fans are familiar with the sci fi writer’s urge to take those ideas and ask, “But what if it all goes terribly wrong?”

Long, lonely space journeys on enormous ships are excellent settings for stories in which things go terribly wrong, and I think Pandorum does a lot of those things really well. The setting allows for a curious combination of both claustrophobia and agoraphobia, because their environment is strictly confined but they don’t know what dangers are lurking in that environment. We know, in the real world, that space travel is bad for the human body and prolonged isolation is bad for the human mind, and there are many different ways that can evolve, or devolve, to shape individuals and communities into something unrecognizable.

I will admit to being disappointed that Pandorum pulled its punches a bit at the end, but I was not at all surprised. I’ve seen the “actually we were at the destination all along” ending before for ark ship stories, and I will no doubt see it again, because sci fi writers love it. But before we get there, so much is winnowed down to mere survival, but even that can feel wrong. That’s driven home when Bower and the others meet Leland (Eddie Rouse), who admits that he doesn’t even know why he’s trying so hard and resorting to such terrible tactics to survive.

There is also a sense of terrible helplessness that shapes how the characters act in space horror that I really love. Even with a very specific goal—restart the reactor—there is a feeling that every step will lead to another “And now what?” moment if despair. They can’t call for help. They can’t go home. They can’t even alter course. Their options are limited, but they want to survive. Pandorum isn’t a great movie, but it plays with some of these space horror elements in an entertaining way aboard a creepy spaceship full of corpses, and I enjoyed it perfectly well for what it is.

What do you think of Pandorum? Deserving of its scathing reviews or not? Where does it sit in your personal ranking of movies feature roving hordes of cannibals?[end-mark]

Our Space Journey Keeps Getting Worse…

I’m having a lot of fun watching terrible things happen to people in space, so we’re going keep working down my list of films about exactly that.

September 3 — Europa Report (2013), directed by Sebastián Cordero

The first manned mission to Europa does not go smoothly.

Watch: Kanopy, Hoopla, Amazon, and so many more.

View the trailer.

September 10 — High Life (2018), directed by Claire Denis

Sure, why not send a bunch of prisoners to a black hole with a mad scientist? Seems like a good idea.

Watch: Amazon, Apple, Fandango.

View the trailer.

September 17 — Sunshine (2007), directed by Danny Boyle

The Sun is dying and the mission to fix it has some problems.

Watch: Amazon, Hulu, Apple.

View the trailer.

September 24 — Aniara (2018), directed by Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja

A ship goes off course on the way to Mars and people handle it poorly.

Watch: Kanopy, Hoopla, Roku, and more.

View the trailer.

The post <i>Pandorum</i>: These Long Trips Can Really Mess With Your Mind appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Event Horizon: Bring All Your Bad Memories to the Blood Orgy

Box-office bomb? Yes. But is this movie a pretty good sci fi horror movie? Also yes.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on August 20, 2025

Credit: Paramount Pictures

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Credit: Paramount Pictures

Event Horizon (1997). Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. Written by Philip Eisner. Starring Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan, and Joely Richardson.

First, a personal disclaimer: I had never seen this movie before I watched it to write this column.

You may be thinking, “Why does that warrant a disclaimer? You haven’t seen a lot of these movies before.” That is true. But it is also true that I wrote a book about a group of people going into a mysteriously derelict research spaceship where everybody aboard has died in a horribly violent manner. There is a scene near the beginning of Event Horizon that was so uncannily familiar I texted a friend, “How did I rip off this movie without even watching it???” My friend laughed at me. But they were also surprised I had never seen it.

Because I really had never seen it before—I considered that maybe I had forgotten watching it, as it came out when I was in college and many things are possible during such a time period, but nothing about it was familiar. I went in with some general impressions about the premise (some of which were very wrong) and a spoiler about the ending (which was accurate). In the end, I must conclude the similarities exist because those of us who like stories about creepy spaceships of death just happen to like a lot of the same things.

I always want to know where the idea for a movie originated, and in this case we have a very illustrative answer in a 2022 Inverse oral history interview with cast and crew. The whole article is full of fun tidbits; I recommend reading if it you enjoy actors and filmmakers telling stories about making a movie they all seem to think of pretty fondly.

Regarding the origin of the idea, screenwriter Philip Eisner says, “I love reading physics books. I used to smoke medical marijuana and my idea of falling asleep was, I’d smoke and then I’d read a physics book because being high gave me the illusion that I understood what I was reading. I wanted to do a haunted house in space.” He goes on to add a bit more specificity and describes the idea for Event Horizon as “The Shining in space.”

Right. He got high and imagined The Shining in space. That explains almost everything we need to know.

Event Horizon has a very typical Hollywood production story, in both good and bad ways. After the success of his 1995 film Mortal Kombat, director Paul W.S. Anderson had a lot of options for what to do next. He turned down a chance to direct X-Men (2000) because he wanted to make a horror movie. Paramount offered him Eisner’s script for Event Horizon, along with a respectable budget. Anderson made good use of that budget, for the most part. Event Horizon has problems, but for the most part they aren’t problems that come from anybody half-assing the filmmaking.

Anderson wanted the titular spaceship Event Horizon to look grand and gothic, so he went to the iconic source of gothic grandeur: Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. That is, he literally went there, and he took some people from the production along; they scanned the interior of the cathedral and rearranged its structure into the spaceship that appears on screen. The result isn’t a ship that looks churchy, exactly, but it does look huge and intimidating and ominously cavernous, which is exactly what it should be.

Anderson also name-checks Dutch painters Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch as particular inspirations for aspects of the film’s visual design. Early Northern Renaissance art might seem like a slightly odd inspiration for a film that features a frozen corpse shattering across the floor of a spaceship, but if you look at Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights or Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death, it actually makes perfect sense for a film about opening a wormhole to Hell. Also notable is that Bruegel’s work features prominently in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), a movie that very obviously inspired some aspects of Event Horizon, particularly in the guilt-driven hallucinations the ship plucks out of the characters’ minds: Miller’s (Laurence Fishburne) former shipmate, Peters’ (Kathleen Quinlan) son, and most especially Dr. Weir’s (Sam Neill) tragic dead wife. Filmmakers do love a space man with a tragic dead wife backstory.

You might be thinking, hey, wait a second, the movie doesn’t actually seem to have a lot of visual material inspired by the Dutch masters? You are right, but we’ll get to that in a moment.

So we’ve got Gothic architecture, Renaissance art, The Shining, and Solaris, but there are a couple of other ingredients mixed in there as well. One is the work of American photographer Joel-Peter Witkin, whose photos showcase human bodies in a range of strange, unsettling, and often macabre situations. And there is inspiration from Alien (1979), of course, because making a space-based sci fi horror movie in the ’90s was always going to mean following in the footsteps of Alien. But while Anderson is known these days for his own Resident Evil horror franchise, at the time he had never made a horror movie before, and he didn’t want Alien to be the only thing on people’s minds. So also looked to Robert Wise’s classic horror film The Haunting (1963), which is based on Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, because that’s where you look for inspiration if you want to build a setting that’s kinda alive and definitely evil and very much kills people.

They also actually built it, or at least as much of it as they could. The effects work was supervised by Richard Yuricich and Neil Corbould. We’ve seen and loved work from both of them before: Yuricich on Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Blade Runner (1982), Corbould on The Fifth Element (1997) (as well as non-sci fi films likes Gladiator [2000] and Saving Private Ryan [1998]). Most of the effects in the film are practical or in-camera, and I think that is part of the reason they still look so good. They built both the huge, ornate gyroscope of the gravity drive and the spiky meat grinder tunnel. They lit things on fire and set off a lot of explosions. And everybody admits they only limited the amount of zero-gravity wirework they made the cast do because of budget constraints. They also built a full-body facsimile of Jason Isaacs, which he wanted to take home with him, but both his wife and the studio said no.

They were doing just about everything right in order to end up with at least a moderately successful horror movie. Horror audiences are often quite forgiving, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean that horror film lovers don’t always go into films looking for the same things as critics and non-horror audiences, so critical response and broad appeal are not reliable measures of successful horror. As I was researching this piece, I went down an illuminating rabbit hole about the tension between traditional film critics and horror film aficionados regarding the Resident Evil films. There is a lot to unpack there and I am not the right person to unpack it, but it’s a good reminder that not everybody wants the same thing from all movies at all times.

But Event Horizon didn’t end up as a moderately successful horror movie upon release. It bombed. It bombed badly. It was savaged by critics and didn’t make back even half of its budget. It took years—and a very successful DVD release—for the movie to gain a cult following and the favorable regard of sci fi horror fans. We’ve seen this before—it was the same with John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), for example—so we know it’s not an uncommon life cycle for a horror film. In fact, Anderson likes to tell a story about how after Event Horizon’s release, The Thing star Kurt Russell told him that even if people initially hated it, he would one day be glad he made the movie. Russell seems to have been right, but then Anderson comes across as a guy pretty satisfied with his career in general, for all that film critics and cinephiles keep insisting he shouldn’t be.

But I still think there is something weird about how strongly Event Horizon was hated upon initial release. It’s less of a mystery why it’s been so aggressively reassessed in the subsequent years, because it’s not a bad movie. Sure, there are some parts that make me roll my eyes, such the scene early on where Weir has to explain how physics and black holes work to a bunch of actual professional space travelers, but that’s the sort of thing where you can practically hear the studio execs demanding audience hand-holding. It’s very common in sci fi films. Watch enough of them (which is what we do around here!) and it’s easy to identify. It’s not a perfect movie, but it’s not bad, and many aspects of it are in fact pretty great.

It doesn’t help that Event Horizon suffered because the studio rushed it to release, and it shows. Paramount was panicking because James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) was running way over schedule, leaving the studio without a big summer film that year. So they asked Anderson to drastically shorten the post-production timeline of Event Horizon; he was supposed to have ten weeks but ended up having only four. Anderson is open about the fact that his first cut of the film was too long and very rough. In a 2020 interview he says, “I think when we trimmed it, we made some good decisions but we made some bad decisions as well.”

It’s also clear the studio was pushing for a flashy summer sci fi film without actually paying attention to the specific movie they were pushing. By many accounts, the studio execs were shocked that the horror movie that had been pitched as “The Shining in space” was in fact very gory. They screened an early cut of the film, and the audience was also shocked by how gory it was, which only contributed to the studio seeming to resist the idea that they were dealing with a horror movie at all. Anderson cut out the worst of the gore, including most of the scenes that would have given a look at the hell dimension—scenes that were inspired by and in reference to the aforementioned Renaissance depictions of Hell. With no actual scenes of the cosmic hell dimension left, the film’s horror focuses on the crew members’ hallucinations drawn from their guilt and their resulting reactions. That’s still scary and gory, but it does tilt the overall story in a slightly different direction.

Paramount also approached marketing the film as a serious, action-packed sci fi from the studio that brought us Star Trek, rather than the kind of horror movie where a main character gouges his own eyes out on screen. It’s also a movie with a pretty grim ending, even though three of the crew survive, and that is not generally what people want out of a summer blockbuster.

I don’t know what Event Horizon would have looked like without the accelerated timeline or the studio pressure. We’ll never have a chance to find out; while Anderson has said he would love to do a director’s cut, most of the excised footage seems to have been lost or degraded beyond use while it was in a storage facility in a salt mine. Horror fans still hold out hope somebody might stumble across a box of lost footage someday, because that’s how horror movie fans are, but it seems unlikely.

And I don’t know if what Event Horizon needed was more gore. A gorier movie would appeal to me less, because I’m a squeamish scaredy-cat, but my personal preferences are irrelevant to a movie’s overall quality. It’s a movie about opening a wormhole to a hell dimension, and we never really get to see that hell dimension, so it’s hard not to wonder what might have been.

I think that’s my main takeaway from Event Horizon: It’s a good movie that’s spooky and creepy and enjoyable, but it sits right on a cusp where I can’t help but think about all the ways it could have been better.

The pieces are there! The cast is fantastic, the premise is interesting, and the atmosphere is delightfully unsettling. The visual and sound effects are top-notch. Many of the individual scenes are beautiful in a macabre and uncomfortable way, which is what horror films need to be memorable. The gradual realization that the ship is actively trying to drive them all insane is delicious. I love a homicidal spaceship! And many of the gross or scary parts are quite effective. The movie is good and certainly deserved its critical reassessment over the years. But it could have been great, and that’s always going to be a little frustrating.

I know that at the time of its release, and even now, there was some eye-rolling about the “wormhole to Hell!” reveal, but as Dr. Weir says, “Hell is only a word.” It doesn’t change the central premise, the idea that we might encounter something out in space that is so horrifying that it infects our machines and breaks our minds completely. There are lots of potential horrors in space, but that one is always going to fascinate me, even in an imperfect movie.

What do you think of Event Horizon? Which of those memorable set pieces have stuck with you? I’m a particular fan of the early scene where Peters is first exploring the ship’s bridge and the limited light gives us only fleeting glimpses of the gore splattered on the walls. It’s absolutely a familiar horror movie trope, but it works and I love it.

Next week: We’re heading into interstellar space with another critically thrashed box office flop that nonetheless maintains a fanbase among sci fi horror fans. Watch Pandorum on Roku, Hoopla, Amazon, and others.[end-mark]

The post <i>Event Horizon</i>: Bring All Your Bad Memories to the Blood Orgy appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Planet of the Vampires: Spooky Gothic Horror Goes to Space

No actual vampires, but plenty of dread, death, and creepy abandoned spaceships!

By Kali Wallace

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Published on August 13, 2025

Credit: Italian International Film / AIP

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Credit: Italian International Film / AIP

Planet of the Vampires (1965). Italian title: Terrore nello spazio. Directed by Mario Bava. English screenplay written by Ib Melchior and Louis M. Heyward, based on the short story “One Night of 21 Hours” by Renato Pestriniero. Starring Barry Sullivan, Norma Bengell, Ángel Aranda, and Evi Marandi.

I love a spooky atmosphere. In fact, a spooky atmosphere might be one of my favorite things in the world, both in fiction and in real life. On the one hand, this means I am always up for a walk in a fog-shrouded cemetery. On the other hand, this also means readers of my early drafts are always telling me, “It’s got a great spooky atmosphere! But it needs… the rest of the story.” My approach to writing is a lot like planning a seven-course meal entirely around dessert: I love the rising tension and building dread that comes along with a creepy, spooky, eerie atmosphere, so I start there and figure out everything else later.

It’s certainly not impossible to find properly spooky space-based science fiction. Atmospheric sci fi horror is a small but healthy genre niche across storytelling media. When it comes to movies, I have mentioned once or twice or one million times that Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) is one of my favorites. It’s also a movie made up of a bunch of components sourced from previous sci fi and monster movies, as they weren’t trying to reinvent the wheel so much as build a scarier, gorier vehicle from familiar parts.

Along with It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), Mario Bava’s 1965 Planet of Vampires is one of those components. An amusingly dismissive Cinefantastique review of Alien from 1979 is even titled “ALIEN: It! the Terror from Beyond the Planet of the Vampires.” Which is both fair and pretty funny, because while Alien’s similarities to It! The Terror From Beyond Space are notable, its similarities to Planet of the Vampires are much stronger, and it’s only partly because of that spooky, spiky, foggy, ominous space-Gothic atmosphere.

That atmosphere is a hallmark of director Mario Bava’s films. Bava got his start in film working on special effects and cinematography in the 1950s, when American and other international film studios were sending their productions to Italy, mostly for economic reasons. These international co-productions started with the sword-and-sandal historical epics that were briefly very popular, then it evolved to include the Spaghetti Westerns of the ’60s. Bava worked in various capacities on films in both of those genres.

He also worked on what is generally regarded as Italy’s first sci fi film: The Day the Sky Exploded (1958), which stars Paul Hubschmid, familiar to readers of this column as lead actor “Paul Christian” in The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953). I haven’t dug too much into The Day the Sky Exploded, but most modern sources take it as fact that while Paolo Heusch is the credited director and Bava is the cinematographer, Bava actually did a lot of the on-set directing.

But it was in gothic horror that Bava truly established his name and made his mark. His first official film as director was Black Sunday (1960). Even if you just watch the gloriously melodramatic and brutal opening scene of Black Sunday, you can already see the dark, moody, violent, and thoroughly spooktastic style that Bava would become known for. It’s all shadows and fog and hooded figures with torches amongst leafless trees and creepy masks and ominous drums, and it’s great. It’s so great! There is no point is doing gothic horror if you aren’t going to go way, way over the top.

Bava continued in that vein for several more movies through the early ’60s. His horror films were primarily Italian productions, although some were European co-productions, but they were often aimed at an international audience. This was pretty common in the ’60s, when the Hollywood studio system was failing and television was growing in popularity, but the surge of the “New American Cinema” of the ’70s had yet to take hold. Companies focused on funding and distributing international co-productions stepped in to take advantage of Hollywood’s floundering. One such company was American International Pictures (AIP). AIP distributed and financed a vast number of genre films through the ’50s, ’60s, and into the early ’70s. Their entire business model was to churn out a steady supply of movies with the specific goal of getting young people into movie theaters while their parents were home watching TV. Anything was fair game, as long as it was relatively cheap to make and would draw teenagers and young adults into theaters: comedies, spy flicks, thrillers, a bunch of very-of-their-time “beach party” and biker films—and of course, piles of sci fi and horror.

Combine those last two and that’s how we get Planet of the Vampires, which was one of the many low-budget films AIP co-produced with Italian International Film and some funding from a Spanish production company. Upon release in the United States, it was paired second in a double feature with a movie called Die, Monster, Die!, an adaptation of H.P Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space” that stars Boris Karloff. Die, Monster, Die! sounds completely awesome, and I am putting it on my to-watch list right away. (We could do an entire month watching only “The Colour Out of Space” film adaptations. We probably won’t, because the psychological and emotional repercussions would be alarming, but we could.)

Planet of the Vampires is based on a sci fi short story “One Night of 21 Hours” by Italian writer Renato Pestriniero, first published in 1960. I can’t read Italian and can’t vouch for the English translation, but the story is an interesting read, and it has some nice passages about the inherent fears and dangers of exploring space. There are no actual aliens or monsters in this story; as is the case with too many sci fi stories from that time period, the real monster is the Freudian depths of the human psyche.

Bava wrote the screenplay adaptation of the story with several cowriters, while Ib Melchior wrote the script for the English dubbing. From what I can tell, however, the Italian version of the movie was also dubbed. Many Italian films made during that time period for international distribution were in fact filmed silently, and all of the sound, including the dialogue, was added afterward. Here’s an example: an iconic scene from Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966). It’s not entirely clear to me if that’s exactly how Planet of the Vampires was filmed, but it seems likely. The cast is multinational—American, Brazilian, Spanish, Italian—and according to at least one source (a biography of Melchior), they spoke their lines in their own languages on set. In any case, it doesn’t seem like the Italian and English versions of the film are meaningfully different.

(Aside: Universal dubbing to overcome language and production is less common these days—except in the Chinese television industry, where it is still very much standard practice. If you’ve ever watched a Chinese drama, you’ve almost certainly watched a show that has been dubbed post-filming in the same manner, often by different actors than those on screen. The dubbing happens due to both production demands and the desire for uniform accents and dialects regardless of the cast.)

When the film opens, we meet Captain Mark Markary (Barry Sullivan), commander of the starship Argos. (Even though this movie came out years before the invention of D&D, I choose to believe “Mark Markary” was chosen because a DM had to invent an NPC name on the fly.) Argos and its fellow ship Galliot are approaching the mysterious planet Aura. They have followed a signal to Aura, but from above they can’t see anything of planet’s surface thanks to a thick fog. As they land, the ships are seized by some unknown force and drawn down to the planet at such high acceleration that nobody should have survived it. The crew falls unconscious, but the Argos lands safely.

As soon as they land, the unconscious crew members wake up and immediately try to kill each other. I love it! I love inexplicable homicidal impulses in space! Gotta be one of my favorite ways to introduce characters to a new planet.

Eventually they snap out of it, but their day does not get any better. When they locate Galliot, they trek across the foggy, volcanic surface of Aura to investigate. In a 1985 article in Fangoria, Bava is quoted gleefully explaining that the planet’s eerie landscape was made up two leftover prop rocks from a sword-and-sandal film and a whole lot of smoke to obscure the rest of the set. He may have been exaggerating a bit—a lot of his well-earned reputation as a filmmaker came from being able to do a lot with very little—but it is certainly apparent that the planet’s surface is made up of miniatures, mirrors, forced perspective, and a whole lot of “fog.” The model shots of the ships in flight are extremely silly. The landing struts of the spaceship exteriors look like… large planter pots, maybe? Like the kind you might find holding anemic under-watered flowers near the entrance to a bland corporate office park?

Whatever props the production crew scrabbled together, the result is visibly low-budget, but with a willing suspension of disbelief, it still works. The planet’s surface sets an unsettling tone. We are assured that this is a creepy, unpleasant place to die.

And, boy, do these unlucky space travelers die. The crew of the Argos discover that the crew of the Galliot succeeded in their mass murder frenzy and have all beaten each other to death. Crew member Tiona (Evi Marandi) is pretty sure she sees them up and walking around later, but because the rest of the characters still think they are in a sci fi movie and not a gothic horror, they don’t know that they are supposed to believe it when a beautiful woman says she sees the dead wandering around. She’s right, of course, but it’s a while before anybody else catches on.

One by one, the crew of the Argos are picked off and killed, which is exactly what should happen in a sci fi horror movie about being stuck on a spiky planet inhabited by a hostile presence. As they are being winnowed down, Captain Mark “Marky Mark” Markary and crew member Sanya (Norma Bengell) do some exploring on the planet’s surface, which leads to my favorite sequence in the film.

Mark and Sanya discover the wreckage of an alien spaceship and a couple of giant skeletons. The scenes are eerie and a bit odd, with the camera following the characters through the wrecked ship sometimes from a distance and sometimes at odd angles. (There is also some unintentional humor when Mark immediately touches something that’s just delivered a nasty electric shock to Sanya and is surprised to be shocked himself.) It will familiar to anybody who has seen Alien, of course, because it was more or less lifted wholesale from this movie into that one, and pretty much into Prometheus (2012) as well.

That’s not why I like it so much. Or perhaps I should say: I like it in different movies for the same reason, and I don’t mind if lots of sci fi horror movies keep having people stumble across gruesome things in wrecked spaceships. I suspect it’s the same reason Ridley Scott (and many other filmmakers) like it as well, and that comes down to the nature of potential dangers in space-based sci fi horror.

We know space is dangerous. It’s big and dark and unknown, which makes it perilous even if it’s completely empty. But in a horror story, what’s big and dark and unknown is almost never completely empty, and that’s where the real scares come in. A dusty old house isn’t scary when it’s empty; it’s scary when we suspect it’s not empty but can’t see what’s hiding in the shadows. And what’s true of haunted houses is true of any horror setting, whether that’s a castle, a cave, the woods, or the farthest reaches of space.

The possibilities of there being something in that darkness is a key part of how many horror stories build dread. Stalwart human explorers stumbling across wrecks, ruins, and corpses are a delightful way of ratcheting up that dread in sci fi horror. Now we know that even what’s lurking in the darkness is vulnerable to something else. We know that something else has fallen into the same trap the characters have just fallen into. We know that something else—as big and alien and strange as it was—never escaped.

This is where Planet of the Vampires really shines. The combination of that heavy, shadowy atmosphere pulled right from gothic fiction with the modernist aesthetics of ’60s space travel fiction means that the film is stylish enough to look at that I don’t really mind the clunky dialogue and sometimes inexplicable choices of crew members constantly wandering off alone.

It helps that the film doesn’t pull its punches. The crew gets killed off and reanimated by the disembodied aliens one by one, until we’re left with a small group, then just three, then only one. Crew member Wes (Ángel Aranda) tries his best to stop the aliens from leaving the planet, but there is to be no last man standing in this film. He dies as well. None of the crew’s efforts help in the end. The aliens escape Aura and head to Earth.

What I really enjoy about Planet of the Vampires is how even with the low budget, even with the two-rocks-and-some-mirrors visual effects, even with a cast of people speaking their lines in four different languages and rocking Star Trek-style fight choreography, it still manages to create a layered, immersive atmosphere of fear. It’s far from a perfect movie (it’s even quite silly in places), but I don’t care, because it showcases perfectly why space exploration is such a superior premise for horror stories: out there in the darkness, we don’t know what we’re going to find, and we don’t know if we’re going to be able to run away when we do find it.

What do you think of Planet of the Vampires, which has no vampires? Do you know where your Meteor Rejector is? You better locate it before it’s too late.

Next week: We’re jumping ahead to the late ’90s and a film that was critically panned upon release but has since earned itself an ongoing reevaluation, which seems to be part of the natural life cycle of a horror film. Watch Event Horizon on Amazon, Apple, Plex, and others.[end-mark]

The post <i>Planet of the Vampires</i>: Spooky Gothic Horror Goes to Space appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

It! The Terror From Beyond Space: This Is Why Astronauts Need Biological Contamination Procedures

“Another word for Mars is DEATH.”

By Kali Wallace

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Published on August 6, 2025

Credit: United Artists

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Credit: United Artists

It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958). Directed by Edward L. Cahn. Written by Jerome Bixby. Starring Marshall Thompson, Shirley Patterson, Kim Spalding, and Ray “Crash” Corrigan.

The one thing most sci fi fans know about this movie is that it’s considered one of the many films that inspired Alien (1979).

In a 1979 Cinefantastique interview, Alien producers Walter Hill and David Giler name-check It! The Terror from Beyond Space several times; they say they became aware of the similarities late in the production and pretty firmly place any responsibility for that on screenwriter Dan O’Bannon. I haven’t been able to find much about what O’Bannon has said about it, and he tends to change his stories and contradict himself a lot anyway, so we’ll leave it at that. O’Bannon’s Alien screenplay borrowed a lot of ideas from a lot of movies, but it’s not that important for our purposes here today.

Today, we’re here to talk about this movie and its place in the schlocky, low-budget, rubber-suited halls of 1950s B-movie fame.

Let us all cast ourselves back to the bad old days of the United States in the ’50s. World War II was over, the Cold War had begun, and the world had fully entered the Atomic Era. As we’ve seen when we watched The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Godzilla (1954), a lot of sci fi in the ’50s was a vehicle for exploring anxieties about terrifying new atomic science that most people didn’t understand, but everybody knew was potentially destructive on an unprecedented scale. Add those cautionary atomic tales to the prevalent post-war stories about invasion (see: War of the Worlds [1953], Invasion of the Body Snatchers [1956], The Mysterians [1957], Village of the Damned [1960], etc.) and we’re starting to get a pretty good idea of what cinematic sci fi looked like at the time.

All we need to complete the picture are the creatures.

Sure, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and Godzilla are monster movies, but big, stompy, city-destroying, war-metaphor monsters weren’t the only kind of sci fi monsters around. There were also a lot of smaller-scale monsters sneaking, sliming, slashing, and skittering through sci fi movies in the ’50s, particularly in the very low-budget B-movies that were often shown as double features. Then, as now, horror movies were a way to sell a lot of movie tickets to audiences who just wanted some Friday night screams and scares at the drive-in. This was important to filmmakers in the ’50s, as the expansion of television into American homes and the faltering of the Hollywood studio era left production houses scrambling for a way to get people into theaters.

So they turned to monster movies. Movies that were full of swarms of giant insects and mind-controlling parasites and things with tentacles and pincers. There were also mutating blobs and lobster people and disembodied brains and man-eating trees. There were monsters made out of sludge and monsters made out of rock and a whole lot of monsters that want to steal your women. There were even more giant insects. There were so many giant insects.

A lot of these monsters were, of course, aliens. There was The Thing From Another World (1951) and Invaders from Mars (1953) and It Came From Outer Space (1953) and many more. The vast majority of these movies involved alien creatures coming from outer space to wreak havoc on Earth, because there wasn’t actually a whole lot of space-based sci fi at the time. Kurt Neumann’s Rocketship X-M (1950) was the first post-war movie to head into space; its human astronauts encounter the remains of a Martian civilization that has descended into barbarism. And, of course, there was Forbidden Planet (1956) with its invisible Freudian monster. But for the most part, space was still coming down to Earth instead of the other way around.

While movies were a bit slow to head into space, sci fi authors had been blasting off and exploring the stars in countless magazines and anthologies and paperbacks all along. Among them was writer Jerome Bixby. By the time he wrote the screenplay for It! The Terror from Beyond Space, Bixby had already written and published the short stories that would eventually secure his place among the legends of sci fi writers: “It’s a Good Life,” which in 1961 would be adapted into an amazingly creepy episode of The Twilight Zone; and “One Way Street,” which in 1967 he would adapt in the truly legendary Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror.”

Bixby had numerous short stories to his name when he wrote two screenplays for producer Robert Kent and director Edward L. Cahn. One of them was The Curse of the Faceless Man (1958), which according to Wikipedia “…concerns a Roman gladiator, buried alive in Pompeii during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79, who returns to life in modern times to find the reincarnation of the woman he loves.” I asked my archaeologist sister, who did her PhD research at Pompeii, if she ever found a cursed and reanimated undead gladiator during her excavations. She replied, and I quote, “I wish I did,” so draw your own conclusions about the verisimilitude of that film’s premise.

Bixby’s other screenplay was It! The Terror from Beyond Space. The two movies were produced outside of a major studio but distributed by United Artists as a double feature, which was very common for low-budget horror films in the ’50s, especially those that are just over an hour long. Additionally, both were filmed by cinematographer Kenneth Peach. His name might not mean anything to you, but if you’re thinking that some of the high-contrast, shadow-driven visual style of It! The Terror from Beyond Space looks familiar, it might be because he was the man behind the camera for a good half of the episodes of the original The Outer Limits, which aired from 1963 to 1965.

So here’s the thing: It! The Terror from Beyond Space is not a good movie.

It was never going to be a good movie. That wasn’t really the goal of the low-budget creature features shown at late night drive-ins in the ’50s. They were made quickly and cheaply to sell a lot of movie tickets in a short period of time. But I can still see why it’s so often cited as an inspiration to many much better movies that followed.

It was filmed over the course of about a week, with a shoestring budget and a cast that was pretty much only there for the paycheck. Stuntman Ray “Crash” Corrigan refused to drive out to the effects artist Paul Blaisdell’s workshop to make sure the monster suit fit, so it doesn’t fit, and there are scenes where we can see Corrigan’s chin sticking out of the creature’s mouth. Blaisdell was the artist responsible for a great many rubber suits in ’50s monster movies; in 2011 artist Vincent Di Fate wrote a deep dive into his career on this very site: “The Strange Creature of Topanga Canyon: Paul Blaisdell, His Life and Times.”

Corrigan was also drunk most of the time on set, which is one reason the monster stumbles around like it does. The other reason might be that those enormous lizard feet—which look like something a couple of Florida men might have used to hoax an entire town for decades—were probably not easy to walk around in.

The film shows us the monster before we even know there’s a monster to be afraid of, and we learn that it got on board because somebody forgot to close a hatch. The spaceship’s crew let a man they believe to be a mass murderer wander around freely. The two female characters, who are canonically a doctor and a scientist, still serve food and coffee for the menfolk. A large portion of the plot involves firing guns and setting off grenades aboard a spaceship. They also flood at least part of the ship with radiation, and it doesn’t kill anybody. Nobody ever suggests trying to toss the monster into space, even though there is a sequence where the human characters pass through the airlocks to maneuver outside the ship, and another sequence when they a depressurize a portion of the ship.

Even so, there is just enough in the film to make it interesting. Because the premise is fantastic!

We’re in the far-flung future year of 1973 (ha), and humanity is venturing out to explore other planets. But it’s not all going well. The first manned mission to Mars lost contact with Earth upon landing. When the rescue ship arrives, they discover a lone survivor: Colonel Edward Carruthers (Marshall Thompson), who claims that the rest of his crew was attacked and stolen away by a mysterious creature during a sandstorm. The rescue mission commander, Colonel Van Heusen (Kim Spalding), is extremely skeptical of Carruthers’ tale. He thinks it’s far more likely that Carruthers killed the rest of his crew in order to preserve resources for his own survival.

Unfortunately, nobody actually treats Carruthers like a suspected mass murderer, so that conflict never really develops. There are some nicely spooky moments before the crew discovers the monster, and some nicely tense moments when they aren’t sure what to do because all their plans keep failing. I enjoyed the whole sequence from when Kienholz (Thom Carney) goes to investigate the mysterious sounds up until his body tumbles out of a ventilation shaft. But, again, that mystery never really develops either, because we already know there is a monster. It doesn’t even work up a proper Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None scenario, because most of the crew survives.

It’s so easy to see how this movie’s unfulfilled potential could inspire future sci fi writers. In fact, I’ll go even further than that: I understand the appeal completely, because while I was watching I kept thinking of all the ways the story could have twisted and turned to be so much scarier.

One thing I find interesting about this movie is just how committed it is to the idea that humankind going into space means going out and looking for trouble. “Another word for Mars is Death!” is an unintentionally funny ending line that surely somebody has already stolen as a story title (if not, I call dibs)—but it’s also an example of where the genres of sci fi and horror start to diverge. This movie was made just a few months after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 and kickstarted the Space Race, so people were very much thinking about and talking about going into space. By that time there were already sci fi movies that portrayed space travel with a focus not solely on the alarming space dangers but on relatively serious practicality, such as Rocketship X-M and Destination Moon (1950).

It! The Terror from Beyond Space tries to do a bit of both, but in the end it comes down firmly on the side of horror. Whereas a film like Forbidden Planet is saying, “Exploring space is dangerous, so we should be careful out there and learn from past mistakes,” this movie is saying, “Exploring space is dangerous and when we go out there we’re all going to die!”

To be clear, I don’t think this is any sort of representation of what Bixby or Cahn or anybody else involved actually thought about space travel, and there are some limits to drawing conclusions about what society fears from the horror movies it produces and watches. The U.S. in the 1950s was in fact overflowing with paranoia and fear, quite a lot of it related to science and technology, and a lot of the horror films in theaters portrayed this with endless variations of “the unknown is scary and gross and also wants to steal your women.”

At the same time, the public perception of space travel was evolving into something that is dangerous, yes, but also inevitable and exciting. I think that conflict is one of the reasons I love space-based sci fi horror so much. We don’t have to go into space. But we want to, so we do. Bad things can and do happen. But we’re going to keep going out there anyway.

What do you think of It! The Terror from Beyond Space? Would you go to Mars even if you knew there was a grenade-proof moisture-wicking lizard monster waiting for you? I probably would. Think of what we could learn about exobiology!

Next week: Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires is another movie cited as inspiration for Alien. It contains no vampires, but its title in Italian is Terrore nello spazio (Terror in Space), which is much more accurate. There is, indeed, terror in space. Watch it on Amazon, Apple, Hoopla, and a handful of other places.[end-mark]

The post <i>It! The Terror From Beyond Space</i>: This Is Why Astronauts Need Biological Contamination Procedures appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Spaceballs: In Space, No One Can Hear You Smashing the Fourth Wall

“Now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.”

By Kali Wallace

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Published on July 30, 2025

Credit: MGM

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Credit: MGM

Spaceballs (1987). Directed by Mel Brooks. Written by Mel Brooks, Ronny Graham, and Thomas Meehan. Starring Bill Pullman, John Candy, Daphne Zuniga, Rick Moranis, Lorene Yarnell and Joan Rivers, and Mel Brooks.

Historians like to say that the ancient Greeks invented parody, but I think it’s probably better to assume it has existed for as long as humans have been able to communicate. Humans like to make art, and we like to make each other laugh, and making art to poke fun at somebody else’s art is one of our favorite ways to do both of those things.

Maybe it’s just because I grew up during The Far Side era, but I like to imagine Paleolithic hunter-gatherers mocking each other’s heroic hunting tales around the campfire. It makes the most distant reaches of humankind’s past feel more real.

But even if the ancient Greeks didn’t actually invent parody, they did give its name. That name (παρῳδία, or paradoia) was first used to refer to humorous poems that mimicked the style and form of serious epics. Greek epic poems were written to be performed, and works written and performances designed to specifically mock other writings and performances became popular around the end of the 5^th century BCE. A famous early example is Aristophanes’ play The Frogs, which was first performed in 405 BCE; it tells the story of Dionysus, the god of theater, becoming so dissatisfied with the state of theater in Athens that he travels to the underworld to revive the playwright Euripides. Euripides had literally just died the previous year when this play was written and performed, so in terms of timing this was the equivalent of all those memes from a few years ago about God forming a supergroup with David Bowie, Prince, and any number of other musicians who’d recently passed.

We’re not here to discuss ancient Greek theater, but the art of parody hasn’t really changed all that much over the centuries. People are always inclined to mock popularity, satirize people and systems in positions of power, and find humor in what others treat very seriously. And, more specifically, theater kids are always going to make fun of other theater kids.

When it comes to parody in American cinema, there is nobody with the status and reach of Mel Brooks. Anybody who has paid attention to American movies at any point in the past sixty-some years knows who he is. You know his work. You know the jokes. You’ve probably quoted those jokes. It doesn’t matter if you’re one of those people who is even now pulling up the comment box to insist you don’t find his movies funny. You still know them.

Brooks was born in New York in 1926, a few years before the start of the Great Depression. In his own telling, he saw the musical Anything Goes when he was nine years old, and that’s when he decided he wanted to go into show business to make people laugh. It took a little while for him to get there. He graduated high school in 1944 and was immediately drafted into the U.S. Army, and after the war he went to work as first a musician, then as a stand-up comic, at nightclubs in the so-called “Borscht Belt,” or the resorts in the Catskills Mountains that catered specifically to Jewish New Yorkers on vacation. (Yes, 1987’s Dirty Dancing takes place at one such resort.)

Brooks also began performing sketch comedy and writing for television during that time. He and Carl Reiner created the comedy sketch “The 2,000 Year Old Man” in the 1950s, which brought them tremendous success in the early ’60s. Brooks then co-created the television show Get Smart (1965-1969) with comedy writer Buck Henry; Get Smart is a wacky, hijinks-filled, over-the-top parody of the James Bond franchise and similar spy films. If you’ve ever joked about a needing a “Cone of Silence” for secrecy, you have referenced Get Smart.

But, of course, Brooks’ major breakthrough to everlasting fame came along in 1967 with his musical theater satire The Producers. The movie, which stars Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder (in his second-ever film role!), earned a starkly mixed reception upon release. Some critics and audiences love it, others absolutely hated it—but everybody noticed it, and in cinema that’s really what matters.

After The Producers, Brooks would go on to write, direct, and produce several more parodies of beloved American genres: the Western in Blazing Saddles (1974), classic pre-Hays’ Code monster movies in Young Frankenstein (1974), Hitchcockian thrillers in High Anxiety (1977), historical epics in History of the World, Part I (1981). From Blazing Saddles onward that was Brooks’ territory in film, that was what he was known for and what brought him widespread acclaim and success.

So it’s not really a surprise that when blockbuster sci fi films arrived in American cinema at the end of the 1970s, a Mel Brooks parody of the genre was soon to follow.

Quick aside: Brooks has also produced a number of films he didn’t direct. He does so under the name of his production company Brooksfilm. He set up of the company because one of the first films he took on as a non-directing producer was one he knew was better presented without being tied to his comedy and his name. That movie is David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980). Another film Brooks produced but was wary of tying his name to, lest people get the wrong idea about it, is David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986). Please imagine “Mel Brooks Presents David Cronenberg’s The Fly” on a movie poster and you will understand the need for some name separation.

Brooks knew early on that he wanted Spaceballs to be as close to Stars Wars as he could make it. Spaceballs contains a lot of references to different movies and television shows, with nods to everything from The Wizard of Oz (1939) to Star Trek to Alien (1979) to Max Headroom. (Remember Max Headroom? Man, the ’80s were strange.) But it isn’t a parody of an entire genre; it is a direct, deliberate parody of Star Wars, which in the mid ’80s was about as ubiquitous as it’s possible for any pop culture to be. In Brooks’ own words: “Fox and Lucas were making a fortune, and this really, you know, was stealing. I stole a lot, and I satirize it, but the script was different.”

It might be theft, but it was theft carried out with George Lucas’ permission. The one restriction Lucas and 20^th Century Fox put on Brooks’ film was to forbid any Spaceballs merchandizing—an element that Brooks pokes fun at in the film, with Yogurt’s (played by Brooks himself) shop full of Spaceballs merch. These days the moment reads as a fun joke about all of Hollywood, but in 1987 it was very specifically a joke about Star Wars and Lucas, because Star Wars was the film that made movie tie-in merchandise and advertising into a billion-dollar business, which completely transformed the way big movies make money.

Aside from the merchandising restriction, it doesn’t seem like Lucas had any objections to Spaceballs. Brooks sent him the script ahead of time, and Lucas quite liked it. He loved the finished movie as well and made a point of letting Brooks know that he found it hilarious. It’s hard to tell how much of this is fact and how much of it is Brooks exaggerating for effect, but he also suggests another way he eased the way to Lucas’ approval: “I called Lucas and I said, ‘I want you guys up in San Francisco—at the ranch or whatever—to do all the post-production of the movie.’ And he said, ‘Oh, great, great.’”

The guys “at the ranch” refers to Lucas’ visual effects company Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), which is now based in San Francisco but at the time was north of the city in Marin County. Visual effects supervisor Peter Donen went into the film determined to make convincing knock-offs of the much higher-budget movies Spaceballs would be referencing. For example, while most of the movie was filmed on sound stages and locations around Los Angeles, they did haul themselves out to some sand dunes near Yuma, Arizona for the scenes set on the desert moon of Vega.

In the end, it wasn’t the folks at ILM who did most of the effects work on Spaceballs, although they did some of it. The 17-foot-long model of the starship Spaceball One and its “Megamaid” form, as well as Lone Starr’s space Winnebago Eagle 5, were actually built by a company called Apogee, which former ILM employee and Star Wars effects artist John Dykstra had spun off from ILM in 1978. The Spaceballs sequence that ILM did work on was very different: the diner chestburster scene in which John Hurt should not have ordered the special.

Like George Lucas, I find Spaceballs quite funny. I acknowledge that some of that is probably due to having first watched it when it came out, when I was eight or nine years old, which was precisely the right age and the right ’80s American cultural context to find things like Pizza the Hutt and “I see your Shwartz is as big as mine” hilarious. We can’t help the movies that impact us at an impressionable age. But I’m still fond of it. I think it strikes a pretty good balance between ruthless mockery and good-natured fun.

And I think it demonstrates pretty well the secret to Brooks’ success: In order to parody a certain type of movie, you have to commit to making that type of movie. It’s not just a film that makes fun of heroic sci fi movies; it has a proper heroic sci fi plot and everything. Sure, it’s a bit silly for the evil plan to be vacuuming up a planet’s atmosphere with a giant Transformer, but “evil civilization squanders its resources, steals from peaceful civilization” is a sci fi tale as old as time. (And, honestly, I’ve read “serious” sci fi with plans just as silly.) Parody always involves deciding what to keep and what to set aside, and amidst all the silliness, Spaceballs keeps the warmhearted story about good triumphing over evil… or at least slightly-less-stupid triumphing over slightly-more-stupid.

What Spaceballs does not keep is the fourth wall.

We can’t even say the movie breaks the fourth wall, because there is no fourth wall there to begin with. Barf (John Candy) and Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) address the audience directly more than once. Spaceballs exists as a movie within the movie Spaceballs, including that iconic scene where Dark Helmet and Colonel Sandurz (George Wyner) watch the movie to find out what the other characters are doing. Brooks himself plays both the wise mentor Yogurt and the incompetently evil President Skroob (whose name an anagram of “Brooks”). Pretty much all of the extras are actors or comics who would have been recognizable to somebody well-versed in ’80s American show business. You don’t hire Joan Rivers to voice a character if you want your audience to be able to suspend their disbelief. (Rivers provided the voice, while the person in the Dot Matrix costume was actor and mime Lorene Yarnell.) (It just now occurred to me that there is probably a certain age below which people watching the movie will have no idea that her name refers to a type of printer…)

Last week I wrote about a very different film, the absurdist Soviet sci fi satire Kin-dza-dza! (1986), and one thing I noted is that it takes a completely deadpan approach to its outrageous events. That works for a film that is critiquing the society the filmmakers and audience live in, as part of the connection with the audience comes from the movie saying, “Isn’t it insane that we all live like this? And just accept it? Like it’s normal?”

Spaceballs, on the other hand, sits at the far end of the parody spectrum, where the film’s connection with the audience comes from the on-screen acknowledgement that we are all watching a movie born of a commercial movie-making culture. The constant mugging for the camera, the nonstop meta-commentary on characters existing in a movie, the complete erasure of the line between actor and audience—those are all part of Brooks’ signature filmmaking style.

Some people find them very annoying, some find them very funny, but all of them serve to create a movie-watching experience where it feels like the film itself is sitting next to us in the theater, leaning over and whispering quips and jabs all throughout.

It’s not trying to critique any larger power structures. It is making fun of Hollywood: the genres, the tropes, the writing, the acting, the business model, all of it. There is cynicism involved, but for the most part the mockery comes from a place of love, which is why I think it’s most fun to watch it in the same spirit.

Yes, Hollywood is ridiculous. Yes, big sci fi blockbusters are often quite silly. Yes, we are collectively pretending that a model some guys in California built in a workshop is in fact a spaceship. Yes, some of those jokes are really incredibly stupid. Who cares? Laugh anyway, and enjoy the ride. It’s wonderful that we get to do that.

What do you think about Spaceballs and its approach to sci fi humor? I was young enough when it came out that I can’t really separate watching it from my memories of watching Star Wars, so I’m curious to hear what people who were older thought at the time. It’s okay if you judge me for still laughing at Pizza the Hutt, all these years later. I am immune to your mockery.

Note: I haven’t looked into Spaceballs 2: The Search For More Money so I don’t have anything to say about that. All I have is suffocating ennui about Hollywood’s relentless nostalgia-crushing machine.[end-mark]

Welcome to the Summer of Scares

July was for the Summer of Silliness, so August is going to be for something else entirely. We’ll be looking at four space-based sci fi horror films. My current list of space-based sci fi horror movies to watch is much, much longer than four, but this is a creepy, claustrophobic start.

August 6 — It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958), directed by Edward L. Cahn

A group of space travelers pick up a monstrous passenger on Mars in this extremely low-budget ’50s monster movie, from a time when there was very little cinematic separation between sci fi and horror.

Watch: Apple, Amazon, Fandango.

View the trailer, which shows the monster in the first shot.

August 13 — Planet of the Vampires (Italian title: Terrore nello spazio) (1965), directed by Mario Bava

A tale about explorers who encounter unfriendly inhabitants on a strange planet, from one of Italy’s legendary horror filmmakers.

Watch: Amazon, Apple, Hoopla, and a handful of other places.

View the trailer.

August 20 — Event Horizon (1997), directed by Paul Anderson

Astronauts on a rescue mission encounter something very bad in space. That’s pretty much the summary of every space-based sci fi horror film, but I’ll just leave it at that.

Watch: Amazon, Apple, Plex, and others.

View the trailer.

August 27 — Pandorum (2009), directed by Christian Alvart

Bad things begin happening on an ark ship traveling through space. I fully admit I’m including this one in part because I’m curious about why people either absolutely hate it or absolutely love it, with seemingly no middle ground.

Watch: Roku, Hoopla, Amazon, and others.

View the trailer.

The post <em>Spaceballs</em>: In Space, No One Can Hear You Smashing the Fourth Wall appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Kin-dza-dza! Let’s Trade a Box of Matches for Two Hours of Absurdist Social Commentary

The weirdest Soviet satire sci fi/comedy film you’ll see today… or possibly ever.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on July 23, 2025

Credit: Roskino

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Credit: Roskino

Kin-dza-dza! (Russian: Кин-дза-дза!) (1986). Directed by Georgiy Daneliya. Written by Georgiy Daneliya and Revaz Gabriadze. Starring Stanislav Lyubshin, Yevgeni Leonov, Yury Yakovlev, and Levan Gabriadze.

Mad Max meets Monty Python. Brazil meets The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Samuel Beckett meets Jodorowsky’s never-made Dune. All of those things as directed by Tarkovsky.

Those descriptions and more are what people have had to say about Kin-dza-dza! over the years. You will be forgiven if you have trouble figuring out what any of them mean. I happen to love it when the very earnest, very serious attempts film critics and scholars make to briefly summarize a movie end up revealing almost nothing about what the movie is actually like.

To be fair, I wouldn’t know how to elevator-pitch Kin-dza-dza! either. It’s a film about two men who accidentally get transported across the universe to a desolate desert planet where they have to learn the local customs and become traveling musicians to barter for the materials they need to return to Earth. That is an accurate summary that tells you nothing about the movie.

It’s difficult to find much English-language information about where this film came from, but we can put together a little bit of context. The 1980s were a strange time in Soviet cinema, because the 1980s were a strange time in the Soviet Union. In my previous article about The Mystery of the Third Planet (1981) and Soviet animation, I wrote a bit about the ebb and flow of oppression and censorship during the decades following World War II. Following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, the “Kruschev Thaw” led to a brief period of more relaxed government control, but that ended in the mid ’60s. The decades that followed were characterized by a return to repressive conservative policies. That in turn led to a long period of what Mikhail Gorbachev would later call the “Era of Stagnation,” during which an aging, corrupt, and increasingly out of touch political class would obsess over censoring critics, stamping out any vaguely permissive social ideas, and throwing vast amounts of money at the military for the purposes of asserting dominance. (Let’s all pause here to turn and stare directly and knowingly at the camera.) The result was an inevitable and entirely predictable situation in which a great many people were deeply dissatisfied with life in the Soviet Union in the years leading up to its dissolution.

In Soviet cinema, the government censorship of films didn’t really begin to ease until the mid ’80s; Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and instituted a policy of glasnost, or openness, which by 1987 would lead to a couple hundred previously censored films being released.

That puts this Kin-dza-dza! in the peculiar position of being a fairly obviously political film that was made and released right on the cusp of when growing dissatisfaction tipped over into monumental changes. Director Georgiy Daneliya was no stranger to making films with political themes, although it wasn’t what he was known for—nor was science fiction.

By the ’80s Daneliya had been making movies for more than twenty years. He first gained significant attention with his third film, the lighthearted romantic comedy Walking the Streets of Moscow (1963), which was inspired by the films of the French New Wave and therefore a marked contrast to the fashionable Soviet realism of the time.

But his follow-up film, the comedy Thirty-Three (1965), was immediately banned for being too obvious a satire on the social politics of the era. Digging just a tiny bit into what was so objectionable about Thirty-Three is a pointed lesson in the ridiculousness and fragility behind government censorship. The movie is about a man who is catapulted to national fame when it’s discovered that he has 33 teeth rather than 32. Hijinks ensue, including a scene in which a motorcade escorts the man into Moscow. This annoyed Mikhail Suslov, the “unofficial chief idealogue” of the Community Party, who saw that scene as a disrespectful parody of a recent public event in which cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Alexei Leonov were escorted by motorcade. Some sources suggest that Gagarin and Leonov were personally offended by the scenes, while others suggest that it all came from Suslov. Either way, Suslov asked Daneliya to remove the scene, Daneliya refused, and Suslov had the film removed from theaters two weeks after its release. Just to reiterate: this is a movie about the experiences of a man who becomes famous for having an extra tooth. However, Suslov didn’t succeed in vanishing the film; Daneliya would later say that a great many people managed to watch his “banned” film even before it was released in the ’80s as part of the glasnost reforms.

It also didn’t harm his career. Daneliya would go on to make a number of well-received films. He was known for his “sad comedies,” or films that mix comedy with emotional stories, many of which were pretty successful. So it’s not entirely clear why Daneliya made the sharp left turn into absurdist sci fi satire with Kin-dza-dza! According to at least one article, Daneliya said in interviews and in his autobiography that the idea came from a conversation with Italian screenwriter Tonino Guerra (known for his work with filmmakers like Federico Fellini and Andrei Tarkovsky) in which Guerra suggested that if Daneliya wanted to appeal to a younger audience, he ought to make a sci fi film with a lot of sunshine to contrast the cold Russian winters.

I haven’t read the autobiography or the referenced interviews, but I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that is either a joke or only a small part of the real story. There are quite a lot of steps missing between “young people like sci fi and summertime” to, well, all of Kin-dza-dza!

The film opens with a long, slow aerial pan across a desolate desert landscape. At this point any former geologists in the audience (i.e., me) will immediately pause the movie to look up where it was filmed, although I would have learned it from the movie itself with a bit of patience. That’s the Karakum Desert that makes up more than two-thirds of the land area of Turkmenistan, which gained independence following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. If any former geologists in the audience go on to further indulge their curiosity about the Karakum Desert, they will immediately learn about the infamous Darvaza gas crater. Sometime in the ’60s or ’70s, a natural gas reservoir collapsed on itself, and in a questionable attempt to clean up the gas before it escaped, Soviet geologists set the gas in the crater on fire. (Local sources and international sources don’t agree on the details of the crater’s formation or the fire’s origin.) It has been burning ever since, although in the past few years there have been attempts to put the fire out, in spite of it being—from what I can tell—basically the only internationally-acknowledged tourist attraction in the entire country.

That has absolutely nothing to do with the movie we’re talking about. It’s not mentioned in the film. I am only sharing it because it is a giant flaming hole in the ground, and I think we can all appreciate that.

We’ll get back to the movie now. (But in the backs of our minds we will still be contemplating the giant flaming hole in the ground.)

After the stark desert scenery of the credits sequence, we shift very briefly to ’80s Moscow. A construction foreman by the name of Vladimir Nikolayevitch Mashkov (played by Stanislav Lyubshin) returns home from work, only to have his wife (played by the film’s assistant director Galina Daneliya-Yurkova, who was also the director Daneliya’s wife) send him out to the store for some bread and macaroni. While he’s out, he is approached by a young Georgian student, Gedevan Alexandrovitch Alexidze (Levan Gabriadze, who was 17 when he was cast), who draws his attention to a scruffy and seemingly lost man in need of help.

Note: In the film the two main characters are often referred to by each other and strangers as “Uncle Vova” and “Skripach,” the latter of which means “violinist” as part of a prolonged joke that Gedevan cannot play the violin he’s carrying. For simplicity’s sake I’m going to call them Vova and Gedevan.

That stranger claims to be an alien from outer space who needs to know where he’s at in order to return home. Naturally, neither Vova nor Gedevan believe him. To humor him before fetching some authorities, Vova pushes a button on the stranger’s handheld device. That’s how Vova and Gedevan find themselves transported across the universe to the desert planet of Pluke in the Kin-dza-dza galaxy.

What follows is a series of bizarre, humorous, and ridiculous misadventures as Vova and Gedevan try to figure out a way to get back home. The first people they meet on Pluke are Bi (Yury Yakovlev) and Uef (Yevgeny Leonov), a pair of wandering musicians, although one might be forgiven for not recognizing them as musicians at first, as what they perform bears very little resemblance to what we think of as music. Miscommunications abound until Bi and Uef somehow adapt (there is telepathy involved) to speaking Russian and Georgian, but being able to understand each other doesn’t really help the characters much. The pair are uninterested in helping Vova and Gedevan until they learn that Vova has something they want: ordinary matches, which in Pluke’s barter culture are incredibly valuable.

But, honestly, the details of the plot are not what matters here. “Some lost guys want to go home” is a classic sci fi premise for a reason, and that’s because it allows for all manner of embellishment and worldbuilding along the way. The real core of the story is in what Vova and Gedevan learn about Pluke culture and how they react to it. When first being asked to barter with Bi and Uef, Vova scornfully dismisses their capitalistic tendencies, but the sharpest edge of the film’s satire is aimed directly at Soviet society.

When introduced to the hierarchy between the lower-class Patsaks and the higher class Chatlanians, the Earthlings point out that the Pluke form of racism is based on nothing except a device that shows lights of a different color when pointed at an individual. The “Ecilopps” (from “police” spelled backwards) are a form of law enforcement, but they are entirely useless, as they only show up to demand bribes, throw their authority around, and shoot people. The people of Pluke have used all of the planet’s water to make fuel, so now they need to extract water from fuel to survive.

It’s important to note that Daneliya was born in Tbilisi to a Georgian family. He wasn’t trying to be subtle when he put a Russian character and a Georgian character next to each other on screen and had them discuss the absurdity of the social hierarchy on Pluke. Nor was he trying to be subtle in parodying the ineffectiveness of corrupt authorities and the callousness of open commerce in which everything is up for sale. The corruption of the authorities, the prevalence of black-market trade, long-harbored resentments between people of different cultural groups and classes…those are all things that characterized everyday life during the waning days of the Soviet Union. In this film, on screen, they are drawn in broad strokes, with every encounter, every nose-bell, every utterance of the all-purpose “koo” and vulgar “kyu” included for maximum outrageousness.

And it’s all played with no indication whatsoever that the characters are aware of the dramatic irony. The film maintains a marvelous deadpan tone all throughout, even during its most outlandish moments, such as when the Vova and Gedevan team up with Bi and Uef to form a musical troupe that performs an ear-splittingly discordant folk song for a group of desert-dwellers who live in a crumbling Ferris wheel.

That tone is key to making the film work; the sharpness of the satire wouldn’t land quite the same way if it were accompanied by wink-wink-nudge-nudge mugging from the actors. The tone serves the same purpose as the desert setting and the limited alien language, in that everything unnecessary is stripped away, which forces us to visit Pluke with only with this collection of too-familiar customs and illogical rules, without leaving enough space for us to squirm away and reassure ourselves that our cultural norms aren’t anything like that. Sci fi is often used to comment on social issues, but Kin-dza-dza! takes it a step further by also parodying that aspect of sci fi while doing the exact same thing.

The movie is very funny, but it’s uncomfortably funny. That’s what happens when you strip humanity and human cultures down to their barest bones to get a look at what’s inside. Quite a lot of what’s in there isn’t pretty—but it’s not all ugly. Even after being cheated and scammed countless times, Vova and Gedevan still do what they can to help Bi and Uef avoid various terrible fates. A more cynical movie would have the Earthlings adopt the Pluke attitudes completely, while a more wishy-washy movie would have them effect some manner of positive change on the planet.

In the end, I’m still puzzling over how I feel about this movie. It’s one of those odd films where I’m very glad to have found it and watched it, and also glad to be able to encourage other people to watch it, but I think the viewing experience was more interesting than enjoyable. I don’t mind that, however, because I love an unexpected venture into cinematic ambivalence.

What do you think about Kin-dza-dza!, and how it goes about using sci fi settings to satirize elements of human society? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Next week: To this day members of my family will spontaneously start singing “Hello! Ma Baby” if somebody orders the special in a restaurant. That’s the kind of impact Spaceballs has had on people of a certain generation. Watch it on MAX, Amazon, and more.[end-mark]

The post <i>Kin-dza-dza!</i> Let’s Trade a Box of Matches for Two Hours of Absurdist Social Commentary appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Delicatessen: A Surreal Apocalyptic Romp About Madness, Morality, and Locally-Sourced Meat

Striking visuals, absurd charm, cynicism, and warmth fuel this oddly loveable dark comedy.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on July 16, 2025

Credit: UGC

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Credit: UGC

Delicatessen (1991). Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro. Written by Gilles Adrien, Marc Caro, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Starring Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac, and Jean-Claude Dreyfus.

I had revealed embarrassing gaps in my cinema knowledge in this column before, so I might as well get another confession out of the way: I had no idea that the guy who made Amélie (2001) was the same guy who made Alien: Resurrection (1997). I’ve never seen Alien: Resurrection, nor do I have any particular desire to watch it, but I’m pretty sure that even if I had, I would not have come out of it expecting the director’s next project to be a wildly successful, broadly beloved romantic comedy full of warmth, quirkiness, and charm.

But of course, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s filmmaking career did not start with either quirky romcoms or blockbuster Hollywood sci fi. He started in a much weirder place with the pair of films he co-directed with Marc Caro: Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children (1995).

We’re going to watch The City of Lost Children in some future month, but it is part of the story of how Delicatessen came to be. That story starts back in the ’70s, when budding filmmaker Jeunet met artist Caro at an animation festival. Caro comes from a French art tradition that will be familiar to regular readers of this column; he spent several years working as an editor on Métal Hurlant, the sci fi comics anthology that counts among its creators Jean Giraud (aka Mœbius), the artist whose work contributed to or inspired the look of so many sci fi films.

The first films Jeunet and Caro made together were stop-motion animated short films. I don’t know if it’s possible to watch the L’évasion (The Escape, 1978) anywhere, but there are stills of it on Jeunet’s website. Their second film, Le manège (The Carousel, 1980), is unofficially uploaded on YouTube. Even in a dialogue-free, ten-minute, stop-motion short, we can already see elements of both the themes and the visual style that show up in the their live-action films. The first of those would be the short film Le Bunker de la dernière rafale (The Bunker of the Last Gunshots) in 1981, a live-action experimental arthouse film that takes place in a grim futuristic setting.

Jeunet and Caro wanted to make feature films next. In a 2016 interview, Jeunet says they wrote the screenplay for The City of Lost Children (La Cité des enfants perdus) first but couldn’t get the funding necessary to make a retro-futurist science fantasy with a ton of visual effects. So they came up with another idea—one that wouldn’t cost quite so much. Jeunet was living above a butcher shop at the time, so when his girlfriend suggested making a film set entirely in a single building, Delicatessen was born.

Delicatessen takes place in an undefined post-apocalyptic time that sort of suggests a futuristic war but also recalls eras of the past. This is by design, as Jeunet and Caro treated the film as a way of tossing together a hodgepodge of inspirations, which include, but are not limited to the work of Looney Tunes artist Tex Avery, the films of Buster Keaton, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985), and the work of photojournalist Robert Doisneau.

We never see the larger world in which this story takes place; we rarely travel far outside one crumbling apartment building. (That grim exterior was built as a model.) What we know is that there was some sort of cataclysmic war, and nothing will grow anymore, and people are so hungry that many have become cannibals. But society has not completely broken down, as there are still newspapers with want ads, taxis ferrying passengers around the city, postmen delivering packages, and televisions showing entertainment.

A former circus clown by the name of Louison (Dominique Pinon), who is mourning the violent death of his chimpanzee partner (played by Clara the chimpanzee), answers an advertisement for a job as a handyman at a half-collapsed apartment building located about Clapet’s (Jean-Claude Dreyfus) butcher shop. Clapet doesn’t actually want to hire a handyman. He just places the ads to lure unsuspecting strangers to the building so he can kill them and sell their flesh to the hungry apartment residents. He doesn’t kill Louison right away, and Louison strikes up a sweet, awkward romance with Clapet’s daughter, Julie (Marie-Laure Dougnac). Julie wants her father to spare Lousion, the building’s other residents are getting hungry, and everything very quickly spirals out of control in ways that are difficult to explain but utterly captivating to watch.

We’re operating under the flexible rules of dream-like absurdist surrealism flavored with the bleakest black comedy here, not the logical rules of rigorous science fiction, and that’s a vital aspect of what makes the film work. This is a movie that invites the audience along for a funhouse ride through the lives and eccentricities of people who can only really exist in a world this askew: the snail-covered Frog Man (Howard Vernon) in his damp green lair, the old men who spend their time manufacturing toys that baa like lambs (Jacques Mathou and Rufus), the despondent Mrs. Interligator (Silvie Laguna), who keeps building increasingly complex Rube Goldberg devices to attempt suicide. All of the tenants eavesdrop on each other’s conversations through the building’s pipes. A secret force of anti-cannibal vegetarians lives in the sewers. There is a slapstick accidental dismemberment. They eat Grandma.

And it’s all great. I think the whole film is great. I don’t care to interrogate whether it makes sense, because it makes sense the way that the weirdest dreams make sense. The story exists entirely within its own bizarre microcosm, and that place is so vividly rendered that we know at once we wouldn’t ever want to live there, but we’re happy to visit for the length of a movie.

I want to talk for a bit about the look of Delicatessen, because the setting, the color scheme, and the visual style are so very stunning. I’ve already mentioned a few of the inspirations Jeunet and Caro brought to the project, but an equally important element is the work of cinematographer Darius Khondji. You’ve likely seen Khondji’s work before. David Fincher’s Seven (1995) was his Hollywood breakthrough, and he would go on to work as cinematographer on a great many more high-profile films, including Alan Parker’s Evita (1996), several Woody Allen films that I will never watch because I don’t watch Woody Allen films, Danny Boyle’s The Beach (2000), a few Michael Haneke films including Amour (2012), most recently Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 (2025), as well as Ari Aster’s upcoming Eddington. My point is, Khondji’s cinematography is everywhere and has been for more than thirty years; he’s one of the people who has played a major role in defining the look of modern cinema. Delicatessen was not his first feature film, but it was certainly the one that made people sit up and pay attention.

Khondji was born in Iran but grew up in France, where he became interested in films and filmmaking at a young age. He moved to the United States to study film at UCLA and NYU, where he realized that he was a great deal more interested in the look of the films than he was in the story. In spite of being encouraged to go into directing, Khondji stuck with cinematography and focused on studying visual arts, photography, editing, and lighting. He has spoken about how he will imagine the look of the film not from reading the script but from speaking to the director (or directors) to figure out what they want it to feel like.

That approach is apparent in Delicatessen. Jeunet and Caro went into their film with several strong visual ideas. For example, they liked the look of movies that use wide-angle lenses in close scenes to accentuate characters’ features, such as in the films of Sergio Leone and Orson Welles. Khondji incorporated this style into how Delicatessen was shot but added to it his own ideas about color and light and shadow, much of which was inspired by a handful of realist American painters, including Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper (a perennial favorite of filmmakers), and George Bellows.

His goal was to keep the colors rich and powerful while maintaining a high contrast between lights and darks. To do that, Khondji adopted a technique developed by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who worked as director of photography on films like Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1990). One of the techniques that Storaro pioneered in movies is using a method called “bleach bypass” or “silver retention,” which skips the part of color film processing that bleaches the silver from the film. When the silver is left behind instead of being removed, the result is a black and white image over a color image, which produces much darker blacks overall. It also tends to make the picture a bit more grainy, so it has often been used by filmmakers to achieve the look of old, archival footage. Storaro first used it on the Warren Beatty film Reds (1981) to mimic the look of period film footage, and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński used it on Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) for a similar effect.

Delicatessen isn’t trying to look like a historical news reel, although the costuming and set design are deliberately vintage, nor is it trying to wash out or desaturate the colors in favor of inky, impenetrable shadows. What Khondji wanted was a clean image with a combination of high contrast and vivid colors, so he overexposed the film slightly while using subtle color filters while filming. That gives the shadows a cool blue-green hue, which is what gives the entire film that unsettling greenish tinge. At the same time, all of the performers’ faces were lit with warm, soft light, so they stand out vibrantly in their many close-focus scenes.

I’m sharing all this nerdy detail (much of it from this very thorough blog post) because I adore the look of this movie, and that look is so important to the film’s impact.

The apartment building is surrounded by ruins and enshrouded in sickly fog, but the isolation is more than just physical. This starts right from the beginning, with that excellent credits sequence that has us sweeping over a pile of junk. The characters can and do go elsewhere, but it never matters what they do when they’re out.

What matters is what they do, and who they are, within the building, because that building is their world. The film uses a lot of tracking shots and traveling scenes to usher us through the building to move from character to character, and every stop is eerie in its own way. The greens of the Frog Man’s apartment, the sepia-tinged yellows, the mid-century olives, the occasional splashes of bright red—not in blood but in the women’s dresses or in home décor—it’s all part of the immersive, almost clingy, feeling of the setting. The overall effect is one of discomfort, even disgust, but more than that it’s fascinating, which contributes to the heightened tension that underscores the entire film.

All of these characters exist in a delicate balance where they are complicit in doing something terrible for their survival. The threat of hunger and precariousness of survival means that the act of killing and eating the new tenants occupies a significant part of their lives. They gossip about it, they speculate it about, they harbor petty grievances about it—but they don’t do anything to change it, not until Louison’s arrival disrupts that tense balance.

That’s all it takes. This is a quintessential “a stranger comes to town” movie plot, because one unexpected arrival is all it takes to topple the delicate balance in the apartment building. That balance requires everybody to be in agreement about what they are doing and why. They have a system, but Julie’s fondness for Louison disrupts it. They have rules about who is safe and who is food, but those rules break down when the grandmother of the Tapioca family becomes the butcher’s next target. The butcher keeps the tenants desperately hungry, but he hordes food in his cellar and has the resources to buy treats for Julie. There are breathless news articles about the feared Troglodytes terrorizing the city, but it turns out they are bumbling but well-meaning freedom fighters who really just want people to not eat each other.

Right there with the gallows humor and surrealism and weirdness of Delicatessen is that meaty (pun absolutely intended) thematic core: an exploration of all the ways in which morality gives out when people are desperate, and all the ways people will justify terrible choices to themselves. The micro-society within the apartment building was never truly stable or balanced or fair. They were all only pretending for as long as they could, because it was easier and safer than the alternatives. They live in a bizarro funhouse-distorted world, but their choices are just mundane enough to be both understandable and deeply uncomfortable.

The film isn’t really asking the audience to consider what we would do in such a situation. It’s making a statement instead, a wry and cynical statement about how a great many very ordinary people who believe themselves to be making rational and defensible choices can and will do shockingly cruel and dehumanizing things on a daily basis, just as long as all their neighbors are doing it too.

What do you think of Delicatessen? What’s your favorite part? I have a theory about an unintentional cinematic universe: I think Delicatessen and Eraserhead take place in the same surreal, unsettling, slightly-out-of-time urban world. I just made that theory up and have no support for it, but I am committed to it.

Next week: Let’s go to the waning days of the Soviet Union for Kin-dza-dza!, a parody about space travel and contact with extraterrestrial life. Watch it on Amazon, Hoopla, several streaming services I’ve never heard of, and the Mosfilm YouTube channel.  (A note about the online sources: I first watched it on Amazon and the subtitles were so out of sync with the picture that it was sometimes hard to follow, but that does not seem to be the case with the YouTube version. I don’t know about the other sources.)[end-mark]

The post <i>Delicatessen</i>: A Surreal Apocalyptic Romp About Madness, Morality, and Locally-Sourced Meat appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Mr. India: Feeding the Poor and Saving the Day With Superhero Hijinks

An exuberant Bollywood classic with a light touch and serious undertones…

By Kali Wallace

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Published on July 9, 2025

Credit: Narsimha Enterprises / Sujata Films

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Credit: Narsimha Enterprises / Sujata Films

Mr. India (1987). Directed by Shekhar Kapur. Written by Salim–Javed. Starring Anil Kapoor, Sridevi, and Amrish Puri.

Many film directors work in different careers before working their way into the movies, but Shekhar Kapur might be the only one I’ve read about who was an honest-to-goodness office-job-suit-and-tie accountant before he decided to get into filmmaking.

That’s a pretty staid early career path for a director who would come to be successful in both Indian and international film circles, but the movie business does run in the family. Kapur’s uncles on his mother’s side include legendary Bollywood actor Dev Anand and producers Chetan and Vijay Anand. (I’ve clarified this before when talking about Indian cinema, but in this case, I am using “Bollywood” precisely to refer to Hindi-language Indian films produced in Mumbai.) Perhaps because of the family’s deep involvement in show business, Kapur’s parents strongly discouraged him from following in his uncles’ footsteps, which led to his lengthy detour through a career in corporate number-crunching.

It didn’t last, and he got around to making movies anyway. Outside of India, Kapur is probably best known for his 1998 British period drama Elizabeth, which stars Cate Blanchett as a young Elizabeth I; that movie was nominated for (and won) a pile of awards, in spite raising eyebrows due to the many liberties it takes with history. But his reputation within India was well-established before that. Kapur took his first acting role in a film produced by one of his uncles in the mid ’70s. He acted in a few more movies, but in the early ’80s he turned to directing. His first film was the family drama Masoom (1983), which was well received and garnered some favorable attention.

Among those who liked it was Boney Kapoor, a fairly new Indian film producer who was on the lookout for his next project. Kapoor wanted to make a wholesome family movie about kids, while Kapur had a lifelong love of comics he wanted to bring to film, and that’s where Mr. India was born. They brought on Hindi-language screenwriters Salim Khan and Javed Akhtar, together known and credited as Salim-Javed, to write the film; the pair had written more than twenty films together, including the epic action film Sholay (1975), one of Indian cinema’s original blockbusters and most enduringly influential films. Khan and Akhtar were nearing the end of their extremely successful partnership by the time they wrote Mr. India, and it would be their last screenplay as a duo.

As I’m sure many of you remember, superhero movies weren’t really a big thing yet back in the ’80s. In the United States, the Superman films starring Christopher Reeve were popular and mostly successful, and in Japan some superhero storylines were making their way into tokusatsu films and television in the form of the Kamen Rider franchise, but it would be a while before movies about superheroes would become ubiquitous anywhere in the world. In India in the early ’80s there were maybe two superhero films, one of which was a remake of Superman (1978). It was simply not a genre that Indian cinema—even fully embracing its genre-blending “masala” style—had much interest in.

That would change after Mr. India, which was a box office hit and would go on to enjoy an enduring legacy as a beloved classic.

Mr. India tells the story of the good-hearted but perpetually broke Arun (Anil Kapoor). With the help of a cook named Calendar (Satish Kaushik), Arun spends all of the money he makes as a musician on providing a home for ten boisterous orphans. Problems arise when the landlord of their oceanfront home tries to evict them—not just because Arun has failed to pay the rent, but because the landlord works for nefarious supervillain Mogambo (Amrish Puri, who was haunted by fans demanding he say the villain’s catchphrase for the rest of his life).

In between his busy schedule of melting his henchmen in a vat of acid, Mogambo wants to either take over India as a king or destroy it entirely. (His ultimate plan is unclear.) His many schemes include running illegal gambling dens, acquiring weapons on the black market, and flooding the food markets with rice and lentils that have been contaminated with pebbles. I’m not a criminal mastermind, so I don’t know if rice and lentil contamination is the most efficient way to make the money required to take over a country, but I do think it is one of the more wicked schemes a cinematic supervillain could come up with.

To keep the landlord and the pebble-rice-selling shopkeeper off his back, Arun takes in a lodger to earn some extra money. The new tenant is a plucky crime journalist named Seema, who is played by the beloved and iconic Indian actor Sridevi. Surprisingly absolutely no one, a single journalist’s rent payment is not enough to put off a supervillain, so Arun also goes looking for an invention of his late father’s to see if he can patent it.

The invention turns out to be an invisibility device, so instead of selling it, Arun decides to use it to help people and thwart criminals. That’s how he becomes Mr. India, the invisible hero. His heroic antics inevitably catch the attention of Mogambo, who wants the invisibility device as much as he wants the mysterious Mr. India to stop ruining his business.

What follows are all the hijinks and shenanigans one might expect of such a scenario, most of which are pretty amusing in spite of being overly long. (I know this is mostly a matter of what we’re used to, but I do struggle with the length and pacing of many Indian movies.) The movie took almost a year to film, which Kapur has said is largely because of the technical challenges of the practical effects behind the invisibility—which do, to his credit, look quite good. There may be strings or other giveaways visible in places, but I wasn’t looking for them and didn’t notice any, because there was usually enough going on to keep the eyes occupied. There is also at least one turn in the story that I really wasn’t expecting, which made me look at it from a slightly different angle.

But first I want to talk about the absolute best part of the movie, which is Sridevi as the always curious, often silly, hijinks-prone reporter Seema. I love it when acting legends are legendary for a reason, and that is the case here. Sridevi was already a huge star in films across India at the time; she had gotten her start as a child in Telugu and Tamil language films from South India before moving into Hindi films during the Bollywood boom of the ’70s and ’80s. Kapoor and Kapur wanted her in the role from the start, and Kapoor was willing to pay to make it happen; apparently Sridevi’s mother—who was her manager—asked for ₹1 million, thinking the filmmakers would negotiate downward, but instead they offered ₹1.1 million. (That was equivalent to about $85,000 in the mid ’80s. Please don’t ask me to look up any more historical currency exchange rates. In other news, I now know more about the long-term devaluation of the Indian rupee than I knew yesterday.)

And it’s easy to see why! She’s marvelous. She’s charming and funny and captivating every moment she’s on screen. From what I’ve read, it seems like the dance performance of “Hawaa Hawaai” was a particular favorite among critics and audiences, but we’ll just glide right over that thanks to the deeply unfortunate blackface on the backup dancers. I’d rather focus on a scene I like a lot more, which is the entire comedic sequence when Seema, with the help of one of the children, infiltrates a gambling den dressed up as Charlie Chaplin, while an invisible Mr. India helps her cheat extravagantly.

Those scenes took a full month to film. It was meant to be a quick sequence of just a couple of scenes, but Sridevi was a longtime Chaplin fan, and Kapur loved her impersonation so much—and the cast and crew were apparently having so much fun—he kept expanding it to be a major setpiece in the film. It’s easy to see why. The whole thing is just an extremely fun, extremely silly sequence in the best vaudevillian slapstick tradition.

It’s a pretty severe contrast to what happens later in the film, when Mogambo decides to escalate his nefarious plans by placing bombs across India. I would say that I’m not entirely sure how killing random people helped his plans, but I’m an American living in 2025, so there is nothing that a megalomaniacal Bollywood supervillain can do that I will find too nonsensical or over-the-top. One of Arun’s kids, an adorable little girl named Tina, is badly injured when a bomb explodes on a playground. (According to IMDb, Tina was played by Huzaan Khodaiji, but the children are mostly not credited in the film itself.) I will admit I was absolutely not expecting Tina to actually die. I thought I knew the rules of this kind of movie, and those rules state that a precious little orphan moppet does not die in a senseless act of brutal violence.

But she does, and I was shocked. Nor was I the only one. In a 2012 interview, Kapur talked about how people still wrote to him upset about Tina’s death. His reasoning for the choice makes sense: he felt that Mogambo’s villainous deeds needed to have a more direct impact, because otherwise he was a villain who isn’t actually doing all that much. I’m not sure the abrupt tonal shift completely works, but I admit that it got my attention and made me think about the film’s context a little bit more.

Mr. India is not an overtly political film, no more than any earnestly well-meaning family-oriented superhero movie tends to be. It’s not that Indian cinema shies away from being political, as political and social realism are foundational themes in India’s film history. It’s more that this movie’s villain is not meant to be read realistically. Mogambo is basically an old-school Bond villain, with the secret island lair and a pit of acid and so on.

But there is still a bit of too-real sharpness when he monologues about how the people of India are too busy fighting amongst themselves to fight greedy and destructive forces in their midst. Indians watching the film in 1987 would have felt the weight of those words all too well. The 1970s had started with yet another war with Pakistan (the third of four officially declared wars), followed by the nearly two years of the so-called “Emergency,” when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government declared a state of emergency that allowed it to suspend civil rights, censor the press, imprison political opponents, criminalize unions and strikes, and cancel elections. The Emergency ended in 1977, but things didn’t have much chance to settle down.

After Gandhi was re-elected in 1980, she was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984, in retaliation for ordering military strikes against Sikhs and Sikh temples in the state of Punjab. In the aftermath, riots broke out targeting Sikhs, and several thousand people were killed. As if that weren’t bad enough, 1984 was also the year of the horrific industrial chemical disaster at the American-owned Union Carbide pesticide plant in the city of Bhopal; during a single night in December, more than half a million people were exposed to the toxic gas methyl isocyanate. The death toll from the gas leak depends on who you ask and how they counted, but by any measure it is well into the thousands.

None of this is mentioned or even suggested in Mr. India, but it wouldn’t have needed to be for audiences in 1987. The movie doesn’t need to explain that an unemployed musician takes in orphans because there’s nowhere else for them to go, or that organized crime is rampant, or that foreign businessmen are making money in India without caring for who gets hurt. The movie has a fairly light tone throughout, but that tone is nestled in with the overarching idea that for a lot of people who crave wealth and power, a human life—such as that of an innocent little girl playing on a playground—is very cheap.

Just as significant, I think, are the kind of heroic actions Arun takes when he’s acting as Mr. India. He starts out protecting Seema, and in truth he never pursues a higher level of crime-fighting. He uses his invisibility to take food from a wealthy criminal and give it to a poor family, and to recover money stolen from a family to help pay for their daughter’s wedding. He never goes looking for Mogambo; the eventual confrontation only happens because Mogambo abducts the whole lot of them in order to get the invisibility device.

That makes Mr. India a superhero in a rather “friendly neighborhood Spider-man” kind of tradition, as it’s clear he really would rather be helping people around town than dealing with a supervillain. All the rest of it—the henchmen and bombs and plans for domination—that’s all the schemes of a violent madman.

But Mr. India is just a guy who wants to feed his kids and help his neighbors, and I think that’s part of why the movie remains so beloved decades later. It’s in the nature of superhero movies for the heroics to escalate as the threats escalate, and that often inadvertently comes with a sense of the hero not caring as much about small problems anymore. There is something comforting about a story that doesn’t take that turn. Because, after all, when everything is chaotic and violent, and powerful and wealthy people wreak havoc without consequences, the world still needs the guy who will feed a starving family on the street.

What do you think of Mr. India? How do we feel about adding songs and dances to all superhero movies? I’m prepared to make it a requirement.

Next week: Make yourself a nice meal and get ready for Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro’s Delicatessen. Watch it on Kanopy, Hoopla, Amazon, and many other places.[end-mark]

The post <i>Mr. India</i>: Feeding the Poor and Saving the Day With Superhero Hijinks appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Buckaroo Banzai: The Aliens Were in New Jersey All Along

We don’t have to be mean, ’cause remember: No matter where you go, there you are.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on July 2, 2025

Credit: 20th Century Fox

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Credit: 20th Century Fox

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984). Directed by W.D. Richter. Written by Earl Mac Rauch. Starring just about everybody in the world but especially Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Clancy Brown, and Jeff Goldblum.

If you were to make a wry, tongue-in-cheek, film-within-a-film comedy about the making of some quintessential cult classic American sci fi film from the 1980s, you would end up with a story that looks pretty much exactly like the making of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

It was a passion project that nobody outside of the passionate filmmakers really understood before, during, or after its release. Everybody in the cast is recognizable, and very little about the plot is easily explainable. There are scenes the director put in just to confirm the studio wasn’t paying attention. Nobody knew how to market it. Critics were sharply divided and audiences stayed away—at least at first.

But people still love this movie today. People still ask about lost footage and deleted scenes and a possible sequel. Go to any major con and you’re likely to see cosplay of one or more characters. I don’t know quite how big the film’s cult fandom is these days, but I know it’s still out there. That’s impressive for a movie that could just as easily have faded into obscurity upon release.

The story of how Buckaroo Banzai came to be begins at Dartmouth College in 1968, when sophomore student Earl Mac Rauch wrote a novel called Dirty Pictures From the Prom. That novel was published by Doubleday the following year. I went looking for a description of the novel, not really sure what to expect, and found a summary in the December ’69 issue of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. The summary does not help me understand the book at all. It involves a child prodigy who dies young and is later elected to be God. But it’s also not important, because what matters is that a few years later, early-career screenwriter (and fellow Dartmouth alum) D.W. Richter read the book on his wife’s recommendation. He reached out to Rauch about potentially adapting the book into a film. That never happened, but the two struck up a friendship.

Rauch was also interested in writing for film, so Richter invited him to move out to California to get started. Richter was making a name for himself in Hollywood; among other things, he wrote the screenplay for Philip Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). Rauch also began making some headway writing for films, such as developing the story for and co-writing Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977). (Confession: Until writing this article I had no idea Scorsese had directed a musical rom com. There are shocking gaps in my film knowledge.)

But all the while, Rauch had a different story occupying his thoughts and filling dozens of notebooks. A story that was bigger and weirder. A story he tried to write dozens of times, in dozens of different ways, before finally finding an approach that worked.

The way Rauch talks about developing the idea that would eventually become Buckaroo Banzai reminds me a lot of the way Luc Besson talks about The Fifth Element (1997), in that the story existed as a messy, sprawling amalgam of characters, worldbuilding, trope-heavy plots, and whiz-bang excitement long before it cohered into anything resembling a filmable screenplay. Rauch had a main character—first called Buckaroo Bandy, later renamed to Banzai—and several hundred pages of ideas involving villains, worldbuilding, sci fi zaniness, humor, and action, including at least one version that featured an enormous mecha, but he struggled to finish a script.

In another life, Rauch might have embarked on a career as a comics writer, or some other medium suited to the kind of ideas he was generating. But he wanted to write a movie, so that’s when he did. With a lot of help from Richter, and a lot more writerly trial and error, Rauch finally came up with a finished script that could be pitched to studios. It was first picked up by United Artists, but after a writers’ strike, some shuffling of studio executives, and a couple of years, it ended up going into production at 20^th Century Fox.

Richter hadn’t directed a film before, and when he set out to woo the primary cast he had to do be pretty persuasive. Both Peter Weller (who plays the hero, Buckaroo Banzai) and John Lithgow (who plays the villain Dr. Lizardo, a.k.a. Lord Whorfin) were extremely skeptical at first. Weller, who was in the very early years of his film career, described it fairly politely, saying he “…wondered what the film’s point-of-view would be. Would it be campy? Would it be a cartoon?” Lithgow was a bit more blunt: “Rick [Richter] and Earl are completely deranged.”

But Richter was very persuasive, and both accepted the offered roles, and by extension accepted the task of diving headfirst into making what would become a very wacky movie.

To be more specific: a very wacky movie with a lot of serious talent behind it. That’s part of why it remains so beloved decades later, in spite of being about a rock star-neurosurgeon-particle physicist who drives his souped-up Ford F-350 through a mountain and encounters hostile aliens who have been imprisoned in an alternate dimension for decades.

I’m not going to get into every detail, but it’s worth touching on just how stacked the production roster was. For all its camp and craziness, Buckaroo Banzai was made by people who knew how to make movies. Production designer J. Michael Riva took some time in between working on award-winning dramatic films like Ordinary People (1980) and The Color Purple (1985) to create the world and the aliens of Buckaroo Banzai; his team included visual effects supervisor Michael Fink, who had previously worked on the effects teams on Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1982). To dress Buckaroo Banzai’s ragtag band of heroes, they brought on costume designer Aggie Guerard Rodgers, the woman responsible for the costuming in Return of the Jedi (1983) and who would later go on the design the absolutely iconic costumes in Beetlejuice (1988).

One of the most memorable of the Buckaroo Banzai costumes comes from a fun bit of fashion history. When Dr. Sidney “New Jersey” Zweibel (Jeff Goldblum) shows up to join the Hong Kong Cavaliers, he’s wearing a delightfully outrageous cowboy outfit. That suit came from the shop of legendary western wear designer Nudie Cohn, a Ukrainian-born tailor who made western wear for men. Cohn and his wife, Helen Kruger, got their start in fashion designing custom undergarments for burlesque showgirls in New York. After they moved to California in the ’40s they focused on western suits that would come to define the flashy, flamboyant “rhinestone cowboy” look that was so popular in ’50s and ’60s American pop culture. (Earworm: exactly what you expect. You’re welcome/I’m sorry.)

There was a lot of filmmaking skill behind the cameras as well. At first the film’s director of photography was Jordan Cronenweth, the cinematographer of Blade Runner (1982), but partway through producer David Begelman replaced him with Fred J. Koenekamp, the cinematographer of disaster film The Towering Inferno (1974). I’ve done some digging but I can’t find a real explanation for why Begelman made that call. That information may be out there somewhere—there are a lot of interviews and articles about this movie!—but what I did learn is that it didn’t make anybody on the film happy. Richter, Rauch, and Weller all argued against the change, as they preferred Cronenweth’s style to Koenekamp’s. Some of Cronenweth’s work remains in the film, most notably in the nightclub scene where Buckaroo and his band first encounter Penny Priddy (Ellen Barkin).

(Aside: Peter Weller is an accomplished musician who plays the trumpet, so the rock star part of his character’s resume is not that far-fetched. He also has a Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance Art History, which has nothing to do with this film but is so cool I wanted to share it anyway. He wrote his dissertation on Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura, a book about painting that impacted how Renaissance artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli understood perspective.)

(Second aside: Yes, of course we are going to watch Weller in Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop at some point in the future. I just need to find the emotional fortitude to dedicate a month to science fictional depictions of law enforcement, a topic that is likely to make everybody living through 2025 feel really super great about the state of the world.)

It sounds like Richter and Begelman clashed a lot during the film’s production. In a 2011 interview, Richter put it rather bluntly: “Begelman was crazy. He would sabotage the movie in any way.” They argued about a great many things, and Richter was constantly worried that Begelman was going to pull the plug on the production.

It got to the point where the crew began to suspect that Begelman wasn’t even watching the dailies anymore because he had apparently given up on arguing with them. One day the crew decided to test this theory. Production designer J. Michael Riva had picked up a watermelon from a roadside fruit stand on his way to work, and Richter came up with the idea of sticking it in one of the defunct machines in the factory. The dialogue was improvised, the mysterious watermelon was included in the dailies and the final cut, and as Richter suspected, nobody from the studio ever questioned it.

The watermelon scene has become something of a legend among Buckaroo Banzai fans, and I think it’s pretty emblematic of the film as a whole. This was a movie made by a very enthusiastic group of people who were cheerfully trying to get away with as much as possible. They tried to stuff as much of Rauch’s story and fictional world into the film as possible, even though most of it wouldn’t fit. They shoved in an enormous cast of characters, which actually works better than it should, in large part because so many of the actors have an easy camaraderie with each other.

There’s so much that is in the film simply for the gag: the president’s hospital setup, the duck hunters who find the Lectroid ship, the very silly Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds backstory to the alien presence, the dizzying array of absurdist Lectroid names that all begin with “John.” You don’t call one of your primary villains “John Bigbooté” and cast Christopher Lloyd to play him unless you’re trying to make people snicker. (Lloyd also appear in another sci fi film in the summer of ’84. That was Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, which also makes people snicker, but only because we get to see Spock go through accelerated Vulcan puberty.)

All of those things that make the film so fun to watch are, alas, the very same things that made it such a hard sell in 1984. 20^th Century Fox had no real idea how to market it. They targeted sci fi audiences but didn’t reach out any farther, so when the film came out most people had no idea what to expect.

But it didn’t fade away, because all of those same things are also the exact things that make it cinematic catnip to a certain type of sci fi movie fan. The wacky plot, the deadpan humor, the many nonsensical inclusions, the big cast of unlikely heroes, the hints of complexity and sprawling comics-style structure of the larger world, the anything-goes sensibility, this is all stuff that sci fi nerds absolutely love. (I say that with both affection and self-awareness.) It took some time and a home video release, but Buckaroo Banzai did eventually find its audience.

It never did get a filmed sequel, in spite of what is promised at the end of the film. Even after the film’s cult status grew to the point where there was both interest and money enough to make it happen, a legal battle regarding the rights stalled the most promising adaptation before it went anywhere. The rights situation had in fact been complicated for years before that, partly due to the lasting effects of Begelman’s shady business practices, and partly due to ownership disputes between the creators and MGM, which acquired the rights as part of a larger deal. A few years ago Rauch published a novel version of the sequel, Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League (Dark Horse, 2021), but I’m not entirely sure what the film rights situation is right now.

I’ve never been among those who have any sort of attachment to Buckaroo Banzai. Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s a fun movie with a great cast. I’ve just never wanted or needed to see the story continued. It’s not just that I don’t think there needs to be more, and it’s not really about a resistance to nostalgia either. It’s more that I think Buckaroo Banzai belongs so completely to a certain time and place that removing it from that context changes the film completely.

There was an odd trend during the few years between the earnest and epic mainstream blockbusters like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and the comedic and family-friendly mainstream hits of the latter half of the ’80s, such as Back to the Future (1985) or Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) or Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989). During those few years American sci fi films had a tendency to be a weird, sharp, and unexpected—a delight for sci fi fans but often a bit of a miss for mainstream movie-going audiences. This includes several other early ’80s American sci fi films that we’ve watched and discussed in this column: Repo Man (1984), Tron (1982), The Brother From Another Planet (1984), even Dune (1984). There are real gems in that period, but they are gems in part because they were playing around with things that didn’t fit either the save-the-galaxy cosmic-importance tone of what came before or the aggressively suburban normalization of what came after. They hit at the right time, in the right place, when American cinema needed a dose of off-beat oddity that wasn’t yet polished up for broader appeal.

Buckaroo Banzai fits right in among those films, and that’s why it’s still so much fun forty-some years later. It is such an ’80s movie—but I don’t mean that in a derogatory manner, the way people will sometimes describe media from the ’80s. I mean that it’s campy and weird, it’s shamelessly wacky, it’s politically clumsy but has its heart in the right place, it doesn’t bother to explain itself, and most of all, it was made by people having a grand old time filling the film with everything they loved.

What do you think about Buckaroo Banzai? Do you have any memories of watching it with other sci fi fans back in the ’80s or ’90s?

Next week: We’re watching India’s beloved superhero film Mr. India. Watch it on Amazon, several unofficial YouTube uploads, or anywhere else you can find it.[end-mark]

The post <i>Buckaroo Banzai</i>: The Aliens Were in New Jersey All Along appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

2046: The Past, the Future, and the Painful Impermanence of Human Connection

Exploring love, longing, and the purpose of science fiction in ’60s Hong Kong.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on June 25, 2025

Credit: 20th Century Fox

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Credit: 20th Century Fox

2046 (2004). Written and directed by Wong Kar-wai. Starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Gong Li, Faye Wong, and Zhang Ziyi.

Let’s start with some historical context. You know I love to start with a history lesson.

Cast yourselves back to the spring of 1966, when the Transport Advisory Committee of the British colonial government in Hong Kong approved a fare increase for the Star Ferry, which connected the island of Hong Kong with the Kowloon Peninsula. Elsie Elliot, a British-born colonial official, spoke out and arranged a petition against the fare increase. Two men, So Sau-chung and Lo Kei, began to protest in person at the Star Ferry terminal.

Exhibiting the dubious wisdom of all police forces around the world, the Hong Kong Police arrested So and swiftly sentenced him to two months in prison. This had the effect of turning a two-man protest into a much larger demonstration, which quickly escalated into violence. Protesters continued to gather for a few nights in spite of both the riot police and British soldiers enforcing a curfew. The unrest calmed down within a week, after hundreds of people were arrested and sentenced to jail time.

A fare increase on a single transportation line might not seem like a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it’s never just about the ticket prices. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Tensions were already high in Hong Kong, following years of economic upheaval that included rapid industrialization, the collapse of several banks, and growing public dissatisfaction with government corruption. Those four days in April of 1966 were the first time there were widespread public protests in Hong Kong—but they certainly weren’t the last.

There was a lot going on at this time, of course, but just to put a few pieces together: Over in mainland China, the Cultural Revolution began in 1966. Among the many, many impacts of the revolution were the late 1966 political protests in the Portuguese colony of Macau. After those protests, the Portuguese government more or less lost control of Macau to the People’s Republic of China, although it would be several decades before the official handover. The people of Hong Kong took notice, and in 1967 there were massive anti-colonial protests, which escalated to include riots and bombings throughout the year. By the end of 1967, at least 51 people had been killed and thousands had been arrested.

But Hong Kong remained a British colony. That wouldn’t start changing until the ’80s, when China and the United Kingdom began negotiations over Hong Kong’s governance. The matter wouldn’t be settled until 1997, when Hong Kong was officially handed over to China as an autonomous “special administrative region.”

According to the Chinese law enacted at the time, Hong Kong was supposed to be able to maintain its autonomous governance under the “one country, two systems” agreement for fifty years from the date of the handover. That would make the year 2046 the last year of Hong Kong’s autonomy within China. Now, even if you have only briefly skimmed news headlines, you know that the political situation in Hong Kong has been increasingly fraught since 1997, and it’s abundantly clear that agreement was basically a pinkie-promise made with fingers crossed behind the back rather than a statement of true intent.

Director Wong Kar-wai was a child in the ’60s. He was born in Shanghai but his family moved to Hong Kong just a few years later, as his parents, like many others, were wary of the growing agitation leading up to the Cultural Revolution. Wong and his parents successfully made the move, but his two older siblings were stuck in mainland China when the borders closed, separating the family for a full decade. He turned nine years old in 1967, old enough to be aware of the months of unrest and danger, but probably not quite old enough to fully grasp the larger political situation until later. Wong has spoken about how he struggled to learn Cantonese after the move, so he grew up a lonely child who spent much of his time watching martial arts movies with his mom.

And there were a lot of those. Hong Kong has historically had a huge and prolific film industry. For a long time, it benefited from the combination of being a British colony and a dense population center for the Chinese-speaking world, which made it the ideal place for filmmakers who wanted to make movies for Chinese audiences, both in Asia and in diaspora around the globe, without all the censorship concerns of mainland China. Things shifted during the ’90s when Hong Kong’s film industry went through some economic troubles and a lot of the biggest directors and stars—including Jackie Chan and John Woo—hopped over to make movies in Hollywood instead. Things have further changed significantly (and alarmingly) in recent years with China’s introduction and enforcement of censorship laws. It remains to be seen what the future holds for Hong Kong cinema, but it’s still a city that loves movies.

Wong Kar-wai has always occupied a bit of an oddball spot in Hong Kong cinema. His childhood love of martial arts movies led to him working in film and TV as an adult. He did start out in a mainstream, popular genre with the crime film As Tears Go By (1988). But he didn’t stay there long. In the ’90s, when the Hong Kong film industry was slumping and bleeding action-movie talent to Hollywood, Wong pivoted to making deliberately artsy, highly stylized emotional dramas that don’t care much about being accessible to audiences who want rapid-fire action and excitement. The first was Days of Being Wild (1990), which caught people’s attention. Then he followed it up with Chunking Express (1994), which critics worldwide noticed and loved, setting him firmly on the path to becoming one of Hong Kong’s most admired directors—the kind of arthouse auteur whose work cinephiles and critics love to discuss and dissect.

That finally brings us to 2046.

Which is, I’m sure you have already noted, not actually a science fiction movie.

Well, sort of. Maybe? It’s complicated.

2046 is also not not a sci fi film, because it all depends on where you draw the lines between fiction and meta-commentary, or between stories about a genre and the genre itself, or between the layers of storytelling connecting what a filmmaker is doing and what the characters are doing.

It’s a film about a man telling the story of how he processed the events of a period of his own life by imagining them as a sci fi story. Or maybe it’s about a filmmaker telling the story of how he processed the events of his nation’s past by telling a story of a period of a man’s life in which the man imagines it as a sci fi story.

Or maybe all of those layers are meaningless and it’s just a story about the failed relationships of sleazy womanizer who fantasizes about fucking androids.

Or all of the above.

I think it’s all of the above. I think it’s not completely one thing or another. In fact, it deliberately resists being one thing or another, and that makes it all the more interesting.

2046 is narrated by the character Chow Mo-wan (played by the always brilliant Tony Leung Chiu-wai), a journalist and writer who has just returned to Hong Kong after spending some time in Singapore. If you want to know why he went to Singapore in the first place, you have to watch In the Mood For Love (2000), which tells the story of his relationship with a woman named Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), which Chow references at the end of 2046. And if you want the story of Su Li-zhen’s younger days, that’s when you watch Days of Being Wild (1990). The three films are connected in a loose trilogy, and watching them all does provide additional depth to the stories. They also don’t all tell the same stories in the same ways, so the extra context only adds to the sense that events are a lot more malleable that we might wish them to be.

They are brilliant movies and you should watch them! But I don’t think they are necessary to understand 2046. We don’t need to know how Chow got to where he is at the start of 2046 to know that he’s adrift, disconnected, and deeply lonely in spite of being surrounded by hard-drinking friends and an endless parade of sex workers. We don’t need to know the details to know he’s wallowing in lost love, missed changes, and endless regrets.  

Upon parting ways with a second woman named Su Li-zhen (Gong Li) and returning to Hong Kong in 1966, Chow moves into a seedy and run-down hotel, which is where nearly all of the film takes place. The atmosphere of the hotel is claustrophobic and dense—and perfectly crafted for the story. The walls are a rich, suffocating, and mottled green. The sounds of whispered conversations and creaking beds carry easily through every flimsy wall. Even when the characters escape to the rooftop to smoke it still feels like they are trapped. Everybody is looking at everybody else around corners, through screens, from shadows. This is not a place where happy people end up; it’s a place where people either pass through quickly or become stuck for years.

The camera work was done by Wong’s longtime collaborator and frequent director of photography Christopher Doyle, along with cinematographers Kwan Pun Leung and Lai Yiu-fai. Every scene is a picture-perfect example of the gorgeous, distinctive, and often-imitated style Wong and Doyle are known for. In this case it leaves the viewer with the feeling that it’s always too late at night and we’ve had too much to drink, because we’re always chasing stimulating highs but stumbling into isolating lows when the party is over. There are scenes in the movie that take place in daytime, but never outside, never in the sunlight, never with more than filtered daylight glimpsed through the windows. Everything about the way 2046 is structured, framed, and filmed is a mood, the kind of mood that wraps around you and doesn’t let go.

The oppressive green weight of the interior is interrupted at times by flashes of brightness and color that make us want to grab and hold on—especially because so many of those flashes come in the form of human bodies, whether naked in bed or clad in the most beautiful clothing you’ve ever seen. Costume designer William Chang, another of Wong’s frequent collaborators, deserves so much credit for bringing those elements into the scenes, particularly with the stunning dresses worn by the female characters. It’s a reminder that for all its seedy darkness, there is vibrancy in this place, there is a love of beauty, and there are remnants of pride even for these struggling, drifting people.

That slow, melancholy atmosphere remains unchanged as Chow interacts with the hotel’s owner (played by Wang Sum) and his daughter, Wang Jing-wen (Faye Wong), who is yearning for the Japanese boyfriend (Takuya Kimura) her father forbids her from seeing. It remains unchanged as Chow becomes involved with Bai Ling (Zhang Ziyi), the sex worker who lives in room 2046 next door. It remains unchanged when characters pass in the corridors or meet at the shared telephone, when they venture out to the streets and nightclubs, when they fight and flirt and have sex. It remains unchanged even when Chow’s narration casually mentions riots in 1966 and in 1967. He makes no political commentary; the character is too self-involved for that. His newspaper work is described as being tawdry and exploitative rather than legitimate journalism. He uses the unstable time of the protests to hole up in his room and write a novel instead.

That’s where the futuristic sci fi imagery comes in, but even when the screen is filled with the kaleidoscope of movement and light representing the future, the languid feel of the film doesn’t change. The future that Chow imagines—the story into which he writes the people and events in his life—is one in which people travel continuously on a train in a potentially impossible attempt to reach a destination called 2046, which is undescribed but implied to be perfect in some way because nothing ever changes.

Chow, the fictional character writing in the last few years of the 1960s, is not making a statement with that choice of destination; for him, the destination represents an idealized time and place that he desperately wants to regain. But for Wong, the film director making a movie in the first few years of the 21^st century—after having lived through decades of rapid industrialization and technological advancements that turned Hong Kong into science fiction’s idea of a futuristic city, and after the 1997 handover that placed a time limit on that future—it certainly carries layers of meaning.

I love how the futuristic characters are styled: the clothes are messy cyberpunk clichés, and the wigs are terrible. Considering the absolutely impeccable hair and clothing of the characters in the ’60s, it’s obviously intentional. They aren’t meant to represent a serious attempt at visualizing a possible future. They are dolls for Chow to play with.

He realizes he’s putting people and events from his life into the story, but he doesn’t notice that he’s using this story to work through his own issues until the end. He figures it out eventually, however, and understands that he’s casting his mind into an imaginary future to deal with unresolved events from his past.

In the sci fi story it happens when it becomes clear that Wang Jing-wen (in both her android and the human versions) is not hiding, malfunctioning, or failing to react, but instead has a whole interior life, with desires and dreams of her own, that have absolutely nothing to do with the man in front of her. His failure to see that is not her fault and really has nothing to do with her. She’s known what she wants all along and has never hidden that. Chow may feel their bond differently—and it’s a real bond, because they are friends—but Jing-wen is not a replacement for any other women from his past. She gets her happy ending by going to Japan and finally marrying the man she has loved for years.

It’s almost a cliché, I suppose, but it’s still worth repeating: life only goes forward. No matter how much we wallow in the past, there is only ever the future before us. It doesn’t matter if we are constantly trying to retell the story of our past, remixing and reshaping it, which Chow does in his novel and Wong does across the three movies in the trilogy. We’re still moving irrevocably toward the future.

There are so many reasons why this is the kind of movie I’m inclined to dislike. It’s all about the sad feelings of a sad man who treats women poorly, a subject matter I don’t find terribly interesting in either real life or fiction. But I don’t dislike this movie. I quite like it, but even more than that, I find it captivating and thought-provoking. For one thing, it’s beautiful and sumptuous and unique, and that’s reason enough for me to pay attention. Well-made art doesn’t have to justify itself to me; I am happy to go along for the ride. For another, the acting is phenomenal across the board, so I am happy to watch these characters having all the complicated emotions they need to have. Zhang Ziyi is particularly wonderful as Bai Ling; in every scene she showcases so many conflicting and heartbreaking emotions.

But there’s more to it, I think. Another reason I find the film so captivating, and the reason I’m going to be turning it over in my mind for a long while, is because of the questions it makes me ask both while I was watching and after: What is science fiction for? What are we doing when we write sci fi stories? What are we doing when we play with the parameters of reality in order to convey some aspect of reality? What’s going on in the conversation between artist and audience when some people relate best to stories filtered through a sci fi lens while others can’t relate to them at all? What does that particular storytelling lens mean for both the big ideas of existing as a part of humanity and the intimate experiences of being a person?

I write sci fi and I write about sci fi, and I am well aware that the answers to those questions are complex and varied. That means they are questions worth asking. I certainly don’t have all the answers.

But it’s more than that: I don’t want all the answers, at least not declarative, definitive answers that are presumed to apply to all people in all situations. I know that embracing such ambiguity is verboten in today’s online pop culture, the place where all nuance goes to die, but I don’t much care. I don’t think pretending we have definitive answers does us any favors. There’s much more to be gained from asking the questions over and over again, through different stories and different experiences, choosing each time to leave room for the full breadth and diversity of human experience.

So, what do you think of 2046? Or Wong Kar-wai’s work in general? Tell me what it makes you think and feel! Or just tell me which of the amazing outfits is your favorite. I’m not even a fashion person and I am completely enamored of William Chang’s wardrobe work. The style simply oozes off the screen in a way that leaves me (sitting at home in a pair of flannel pajama pants decorated with Christmas gnomes) crushingly envious.[end-mark]

Welcome to the Summer of Silliness

It’s time to switch gears for July. I did not purposefully choose films that all came out within a few years of each other. The goal was a selection of sci fi comedies and parodies from around the world. It just so happens that the ’80s (and a bit into the early ’90s) was a time when everybody wanted to laugh at sci fi.

July 2 — The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), directed by W.D. Richter

Some people tried to capitalize on the success of the earnest and epic Star Wars trilogy by imitating it. The screenwriter of 1978’s masterpiece Invasion of the Body Snatchers did this instead.
Watch: Amazon, Fandango, Apple, Microsoft.
View the trailer.

July 9 — Mr. India (1987), directed by Shekhar Kapur

You have to understand that deep in my heart I believe all superhero films should have song and dance elements.
Watch: Amazon. You can also find uploads on YouTube, but not all of them have English subtitles. (Some do.) In some regions it seems to be available on BiliBili, if you or your VPN have access to that.
View the trailer (but there are no English subtitles).

July 16 — Delicatessen (1991), directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro

I have previously refrained from making jokes about cannibalism. Now I am going to do nothing but make jokes about cannibalism.
Watch: Kanopy, Hoopla, Amazon, and others.
View the trailer.

July 23 — Kin-dza-dza! (1986), directed by Georgiy Daneliya

This is what we would get if Monty Python made The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as Soviet social satire.
Watch: Amazon, Hoopla, several streaming services I’ve never heard of, and the Mosfilm YouTube channel.
View the trailer.

July 30 — Spaceballs (1987), directed by Mel Brooks

Let’s go to ludicrous speed with this classic Star Wars parody.
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Column Science Fiction Film Club

The Quiet Earth: Alone and Together at the End of the World

Three survivors of the apocalypse navigate their isolated new reality…

By Kali Wallace

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Published on June 18, 2025

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The Quiet Earth (1985). Directed by Geoff Murphy. Written by Bill Baer, Bruno Lawrence, and Sam Pillsbury, based on the novel of the same name by Craig Harrison. Starring Bruno Lawrence, Alison Routledge, and Pete Smith.

What would you do if you were the last person on Earth?

I don’t know what I would do. As I was watching The Quiet Earth, at first I thought, “Well, I couldn’t just give up. I still have to take care of my cats.” I have priorities, okay, and the abrupt disappearances of all of humanity wouldn’t change that. Then I realized that in the film all the animals are gone as well, so I wouldn’t even have my cats to provide purpose and structure to my initial days. What would I do? Look for others? Try to figure out what happened? Lose my mind?

I’m not sure. It’s one thing to imagine it as a fictional scenario, but it’s very different to think about what I would do in the real world.

Even more difficult: What would you do if you were the last person on Earth, and you were pretty sure it was at least partly your fault? And you never intended to be alive to see what happened?

People have been using the real or apparent isolation of post-apocalyptic scenarios to explore society and the human psyche for about as long as there have been people. Ancient myths and folklore from around the world deal with the idea of everybody being swept away and only a few remaining—usually, but not always, in the context of angry gods punishing all but a handful of deserving survivors. Like a lot of ideas that would evolve into sci fi favorites, the trope remained strongly religious in nature until the modern era, when Romantic and Gothic writers got into the mix. That’s when we get books like Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885), and of course H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895). The genre’s popularity only grew throughout the 20^th century, thanks to the anxiety-inducing trends of global urbanization, industrialization, and of course all the war going on everywhere all the time.

The Quiet Earth sits comfortably within the boundaries of Cold War-era atomic sci fi, although it might be the only one of that vast array of films that opens with a surprise shot of full-frontal nudity. (I was surprised, at least, but only because I momentarily forgot that the 1980s were just Like That sometimes.) But it has roots that go back quite a bit farther.

Exactly how much farther is a matter of some debate. The film is directly based on the novel The Quiet Earth by Craig Harrison, which was published in 1981. But it is also widely acknowledged to be an unofficial remake of the American film The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959), which was written and directed by Ranald MacDougall, who is perhaps better known as one of the screenwriters behind Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963). The World, the Flesh and the Devil stars Harry Belafonte as the man who wakes up to find himself completely alone in an inexplicably empty world, Inger Stevens as the young woman he meets after going a bit mad in isolation, and Mel Ferrer as the third survivor who shows up to complicate things.

That movie was, in turn, was based on two acknowledged sources: the 1901 novel The Purple Cloud by M.P. Shiel and the short story “End of the World” by Ferdinand Reyher. I am really struggling to find any information on the Reyher story—if anybody knows anything about it, please let me know in comments!—but The Purple Cloud is more well known. I haven’t read it, but apparently both H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft loved it, and it sounds completely bonkers. A polar explorer is the last man left on Earth after a mysterious purple cloud kills everybody else, and he travels the world living in palaces and burning cities to the ground; then he meets a beautiful woman, because what’s the point of being the last man on Earth if you don’t get a beautiful woman out of the deal?

The Purple Cloud was picked up by a Hollywood studio for production in the ’20s, but there wasn’t much movement on the project until 1940. Then, of course, WWII intervened, and afterward people interested in stories about the end of the world didn’t need fictional purple clouds. They had very real atomic mushroom clouds that would serve the same purpose.

The trouble was that in the aftermath of WWII everybody and their brother was making films about the end of the world. We’ve watched several of those movies in this film club! So it was set aside for a little while longer, and when it was finally brought to life again it had another angle: the American civil rights movement and the film The World, the Flesh and the Devil. That movie’s producer was Sol Siegel, who was white, and he wanted to focus the story on the very topical theme of racial tension in the United States. So he reached out to Belafonte, who was at the time at the peak of both his entertainment career and his prominence in the civil rights movement, and Belafonte ended up co-producing the film with Siegel.

It didn’t quite turn out the way anybody wanted, as the cast, much of the crew, and nearly all critics felt that the film failed in its goal of thoughtfully exploring racial tensions in a post-apocalyptic setting. It’s a bit hard to figure out from articles about the film exactly what changed in the process, but MacDougall, the film’s writer and director, was vocally unhappy about the ending, which shows the three characters (a Black man, a white woman, and a white man) peacefully walking hand-in-hand down the street, all conflict between them apparently resolved.

I have not read Craig Harrison’s novel The Quiet Earth, but from its “too long or excessively detailed” summary on Wikipedia, it seems like the novel doesn’t share much with The World, the Flesh and the Devil. To me it looks like the film The Quiet Earth took the characters and setting from the novel and slotted them into a movie structure borrowed from The World, the Flesh and the Devil, and we get an odd hybrid adaptation/remake as a result.

This is not unusual in sci fi, and especially in sci fi films; people are always remixing and reusing sci fi premises for different purposes. The “last man on Earth” trope is constantly being remixed, because humans will never get tired of imagining what we would do in situations where both the comforts and pressures of our social existence are removed—and often what we would do when that isolation is interrupted by other survivors, and we are faced with the challenge of relearning both humanity and community.

(Quick aside: Like many American children in the ’80s, my first introduction to this trope was the posthumously published 1974 novel Z for Zachariah by Robert C. O’Brien. O’Brien also wrote Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, a book I reread one million times as a child. I did not reread Z for Zachariah one million times because I found it very unsettling. People have noted similarities between The Quiet Earth and Z for Zachariah, but I honestly think that’s just an example of everybody thinking about the end of the world during the Cold War.)

Perhaps the most surprising thing about The Quiet Earth is that all that shuffling and remixing of inspirations resulted in quite a good movie. Murphy was established as a respected director in New Zealand when he made it; he had recently directed Utu (1983), a critically renowned and commercially successful historical film about a Māori warrior on a quest for revenge. The switch from a historical epic based on real historical events to a post-apocalyptic sci fi film with three characters might seem a bit odd, but it works out.

I do think The Quiet Earth has some trouble translating the already wobbly racial commentary of The World, the Flesh and the Devil from ’50s America to commentary on ’80s New Zealand, and there are some weak spots toward the end. (It’s very hard to care about a love triangle when reality is about to collapse.) But overall, the film is incredibly unnerving in a way that I very much enjoyed.

The film opens with scientist Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence, a longtime collaborator of Murphy’s) waking up in his home, driving through town, and heading to work, all while slowly realizing that all the people have vanished from the world. Hobson’s manner is baffled but not as hysterical as one might expect—which only makes sense much later in the film, when we learn that he had intended to kill himself that morning and didn’t expect to wake up at all. Hobson figures out very quickly that whatever happened—”the Effect”—was due to an American-led international energy project he was working on.

Knowing what caused the Effect doesn’t change Hobson’s situation, nor does it help him figure out why he remained when everybody else vanished. He goes through a series of sensible actions in order to find other survivors, such sending out a radio broadcast and painting signs everywhere, but when none of them work he begins to break down. Understandably! What becomes of a person’s mind when there is nothing in their daily life that matters?

Unlike most other post-apocalyptic scenarios that we see in film or read in books, Hobson is not presented with any obvious dangers. There are no zombies, no roving bands of cannibals, no aliens, no mutants. He’s alone. He’s completely alone. He drives through the countryside alone. He wanders the city streets alone. He’s not wanting for resources. Even when the power grid fails, he has the knowledge necessary to rig up generators. He’s simply very alone, and stewing in guilt, and slowly becoming unhinged. Lawrence’s performance is great, evolving from a fairly flat affect that we don’t initially understand to a nadir of hysterical desperation, before that finally breaks and he settles into a more determined survival mode.

That’s when he meets Joanne (Alison Routledge), another survivor, who is bubbly and friendly and shifts the mood of Hobson’s survival completely. The two of them start looking for others. Or, rather, Joanne looks for others, while Hobson secretly researches the Effect without telling her. There are eerie details sprinkled in here and there about their mysterious survival. While most of the world is empty of corpses—even of animals and insects—Joanne mentions finding the body of an infant in a hospital, and together they find the bodies of car crash victims. It’s only after Hobson encounters Api (Pete Smith), a Māori man, that the three of them figure out that they survived because they actually died at the moment of the Effect.

All the while Hobson is still studying the Effect, because they all sense that reality is destabilizing. Hobson’s theory is that if they destroy the energy grid that caused the Effect, they can stop it from happening again, and they can keep living.

It’s a marked shift from Hobson’s perspective early on, when he swung wildly between reckless uncaring and active suicidal tendencies. And it highlights what I think is the most interesting aspect of this film: the answer to the question “What would you do in this situation?” is always, “Well, it depends.”

It depends on what’s left. It depends on whether you’re alone, and if you’re not alone, it depends on who you find. One person is a survivor. Two can be a team. Three? Three is a community, and communities are complicated. People want different things in different ways, and that is true even when there are only two or three of you left in the world. So many post-apocalyptic stories add complication by expanding the number of people, by having survivors encounter groups of others or find existing communities.

The Quiet Earth doesn’t do that. The apocalypse was global, but the human complications remain intimate. I really like that approach, because I like that the way it frames all of the big things we explore in post-apocalypse stories—how to survive, how to cooperate, how to think about the future—all comes down to individuals and their thoughts, feelings, and desires. Even though I think the movie is at its most unsettling and unique when Hobson is alone and so many questions remain unanswered, I still like what happens when that isolation is broken. There is no space in this story for the choices of these three individuals to be obscured by the actions of a larger group, or for any violence or selfishness to be blamed on communal action.

As for what happens at the very end… Well, people have been discussing it for forty years. (You can watch the ending here, if you don’t mind spoilers.) Hobson’s final scene on the beach is left unexplained on purpose. He doesn’t know what happened, and neither do we, and how we interpret that scene depends on the perspective we bring into it. Is it another world? The same world but in a different reality? Is he actually dead this time? Or has he died at the moment of another Effect and now he’s got to go through it all again? There is no firm answer from the people who made the movie, which is exactly how it should be.

What do you think is going on in that ending? And about the movie as a whole? Where does it sit in your personal ranking of “last man on Earth” stories?

Next week: Let’s head over to Hong Kong for Wong Kar-wai’s 2046, where we might be in the past, and we might be in the future, and even the most devoted film critics fumble when trying to describe the structure and plot. Watch it on Amazon, Fandango, or Microsoft.[end-mark]

The post <i>The Quiet Earth</i>: Alone and Together at the End of the World appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

The Long Walk: Grief, Guilt, and the Inescapable Weight of the Past

Ghosts, time travel, and terrible choices in rural Laos…

By Kali Wallace

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Published on June 11, 2025

Credit: Lao Art Media

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Credit: Lao Art Media

The Long Walk (Lao: ບໍ່ມີວັນຈາກ) (2019). Directed by Mattie Do. Written by Christopher Larsen. Starring Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy, Vilouna Phetmany, Por Silatsa, and Noutnapha Soydara.

Normally when I write about a movie from a country this film club hasn’t visited before, I would give a little overview of that country’s cinema and film history to provide some context and general background knowledge. I have to do something different here, because Laos doesn’t really have a film history. So few movies have been made in Laos that it made international news in 2008 when a movie was filmed as a collaboration between a Thai director and a Lao producer. There are only four movie theaters in the entire country, which has a population of nearly 8 million.

The reasons for that are complex but also exactly what you might expect: a mixture of colonialism, war, and extreme censorship. Laos was a French colony for the first half of the 20^th century, but unlike other colonized countries (like Algeria and Tunisia, for example), it wasn’t a place where early French filmmakers went to make movies in exotic locations. Laos gained independence in the 1950s, only to immediately fall into a 16-year-long war between the existing royalist government and a communist movement—or, perhaps more accurately, a proxy war between North Vietnam, supported by China and the Soviet Union, and South Vietnam, supported by the United States. During the Vietnam War, Laos was invaded by North Vietnam and bombed nearly to oblivion by the United States, earning it the extremely dubious distinction of being the world’s most heavily bombed country relative to its population size. We all know how the Vietnam War ended.

In Laos, the communist government that took power after the monarchy was overthrown kept the country relatively isolated from international relations while also maintaining extremely strict control over press and media. Fifty years of near-absolute government control over what can be broadcast or portrayed has understandably made it difficult for a native film or television industry to grow. The first national television station was formed in 1983, but both before and after that many Laotians got their media via spillover television from neighboring countries, especially Thailand, which sits across the river from the capital city of Vientiane and has historically been (and continues to be) a prolific producer of filmed media.

It’s not that nobody wanted to make movies. Laotian filmmakers have been working, in many different ways over the years, to establish a local film industry. There are filmmakers and production companies, and there have been for decades. The problem is that having the resources to film movies is one thing, but creating a film industry with the infrastructure, expertise, and resources to do that consistently, then release the films to the public, is a very different challenge. The government controlled all filmmaking until 1989, after which point independent studios were finally allowed to form. But there was still no money and no real pool of expertise to pull from.

In 1995, filmmaker Som Ock Southiponh, who co-founded the studio Lao Inter-Art, explained the situation for filmmakers in Laos: “Laotian cinema does not exist. There are no other independent filmmakers in Laos. There are nine of us at Lao-Inter Art, all of whom left the Ministry of Information and Culture to help form the company. All of us received our education abroad in such countries as Bulgaria, Russia and Czechoslovakia. The only thing we can hope for is that through co-production, meaning 100% foreign financing and 100% Laotian talent, Laotian cinema can keep, at least momentarily, its artisans active until better days arrive.”

Those better days are finally underway for Laotian filmmakers. A very small but very significant boom in Laotian filmmaking starting in the early 2000s with Sabaidee Luang Prabang (2008), the co-production I mentioned above. That movie is a romance story that was, by director Sakchai Deenan’s own admission, specifically chosen so as to appeal to audiences used to Thai dramas and to not to give the government censors anything to complain about. But Laotian filmmakers didn’t stick to what was safe, and there are several people making films now. Their films also showcase a broader range of genres and styles. Director Anysay Keola’s At the Horizon (2012), for example, is a violent thriller that had some trouble finagling its way past the censors, but it was released and it was successful.

That brings us to director Mattie Do, who has the most charmingly random filmmaker origin story I’ve ever come across. Do was born in Los Angeles to parents who had left Laos for the United States in 1975. Do never studied film; she studied ballet and cosmetology, and she eventually worked in Italy as a teacher at a ballet school and a makeup artist for theater and film productions. In 2010, she and her husband, Christopher Larsen, moved to Laos to take care of Do’s father, intending for the move to be temporary.

Neither of them had filmmaking experience, but Larsen had worked at a film school in Italy and was interested in being a screenwriter. He was also curious about Laos’ nascent film industry. The couple went to the very first Laotian film festival—they were invited by, in Do’s words, “this random white dude we met in a café”—and there met the filmmakers of the production company Lao Art Media. The company guys were—again, in Do’s words—“fucking plastered,” and drunkenly invited the couple to stop by their office and talk about making movies.

Likely because they were fucking plastered, the Lao Art Media producers hadn’t really understood that Larsen was an aspiring screenwriter who didn’t have any directing experience, nor did he have much interest in directing. In the ultimate Wife Guy moment, Larsen told them his wife could so totally direct a movie. Do, who was presumably sitting right next to him when he said this, was extremely surprised to be volunteered as a film director, as she was—I cannot stress this enough—technically still employed as a ballet teacher in Italy and currently on a leave of absence for family reasons. They fought about it, but Do went and read Michael Rabiger’s classic film textbook Directing: Film Techniques and Aesthetics, sat in on some acting classes, and made a movie.

That movie was Chanthaly (2013), which Do filmed entirely in their house in Vientiane. It’s based on the ballet Giselle, and it’s the first horror movie to come out of Laos. Do is frank about the fact that she and Larsen had pretty low expectations; it was a way for them to learn filmmaking, and they never expected it to screen anywhere outside of a very limited showing in Vientiane. It was made for a Laotian audience, with the Laotian government censors in mind. But it did reach an international audience; Chanthaly had a North American premiere at Fantastic Fest in 2013. You can watch Chanthaly on Do’s YouTube page, and probably other places as well, as Do and Larsen released it into the public domain as part of their crowdsourcing campaign to raise funds for their second movie, Dearest Sister (2016).

Dearest Sister, a horror thriller about a young woman from the countryside who goes to take care of a wealthy family member in Vientiane, was also a success. It secured international distribution, received positive press around the festival circuit, and in 2017 was chosen by Laos as its first-ever submission in the Academy Awards foreign language category. In addition to being financed by crowdsourcing, Dearest Sister was an international co-production with companies in France and Estonia.

That, more than anything, is a sign that Laotian filmmakers are working hard to claim the spotlight. The money and training is still coming from elsewhere—from anywhere filmmakers can get it—but they are pushing to have more Laotian talent making more Laotian stories. As director Anysay Keola said in an interview with the Locarno Film Festival, the Laotian filmmaking community is still very small, with unique challenges in terms of how they reach their audience and how they have to navigate government censorship. The whole system is very dependent on hustling for international support and utilizing multinational expertise, but the industry is growing, and people are paying attention.

With the extra attention comes extra criticism, often from people in the film world who couldn’t find Laos on a map if their lives depended on it. Do has spoken about how many people—particularly white Westerners—reacted to Dearest Sister with a depressing but unsurprising degree of cultural ignorance about Laos. Dearest Sister takes place in a very wealthy corner of Vientiane society, one that outsiders, whose only conception of Laos comes from tourism advertisements of impoverished and exotic villages, had no idea existed and weren’t interested in acknowledging. If it didn’t match their idea of what a poor Southeast Asian country looked like, because the clothes and cars were too nice, or because the characters were too clever and worldly, then it didn’t count as real Southeast Asian horror.

There are of course important conversations to be had about the differences between the stories told by people who grow up in a culture and those told by members of the diaspora, or those told in conjunction with foreigners. From every article and interview I’ve read, it’s obvious that Laotian filmmakers are having those conversations. It’s an issue that is foremost in their minds as they work to tell their stories in their own way. They are well aware of the complications that arise when their money comes from Europe and their production crews come from Thailand and their most globally recognized filmmaker is an American-born woman who moved to Laos as an adult. Building a film tradition from the ground up is not an easy task, and the prevailing sentiment seems to be: “We are doing this our way, not your way, even if you don’t like it, and we are using every resource we can get our hands on.”

And The Long Walk is a film that grew directly out of those bad-faith criticisms from outsiders.

Note: There are a lot of spoilers for The Long Walk from this point forward. I offer this warning because it’s a film that benefits from going in without knowing that much. But I’m not your mom. You can spoil yourselves if you want to.

About the origin of The Long Walk, Do said in an interview, “I was just like, ‘Okay, fine. Let’s give you your poor, sad brown folk, let’s give you your little hut and dirt road. Here’s some Asian mysticism. It’s true, we believe in it … but it’s going to be done on my terms. So like, fuck you! It’s a [time travel] serial killer movie now.’”

The Long Walk takes place in some ambiguous near-future where people have implanted microchips that contain identification, tracking, and financial information, but technological advancements don’t make much difference in the lives of those living in rural Laos. There is a city full of skyscrapers visible in the distance, but in this countryside village the roads are unpaved, poverty is commonplace, and a house’s electricity might come from a car battery hooked up to a single solar panel. Tourists and NGO workers pass through cluelessly without changing much. Everybody knows everybody else but that doesn’t automatically lead to connection. People flee to the city for a better life and never come back.

The setting is very limited, and the atmosphere is incredible. Cinematographer Matthew Macar isn’t doing much that’s very fancy here, as everything is slow and understated by design, but he sure does get a lot of impact out of repeated shots of a young woman standing on the same road in different contexts.

The first character we meet is the Old Man (played by Yannawoutthi Chanthalungsy). Very few of the characters have names. The Old Man makes his meager living by scavenging things from around his dilapidated home. We watch him collect parts from an old motorcycle in the woods, and we see that there is a very obvious human skeleton on the ground just a few feet away. When the Old Man heads into town to sell the motorcycle parts, he places a small offering on a roadside shrine.

As he walks along the dirt road, a young woman walks besides him. The Girl (Noutnapha Soydara) is completely silent, but the Old Man talks to her, remarking that they’ve been walking together for fifty years but she’s never said a word. She can’t be any older than her early twenties, so it doesn’t take long to figure out that she’s a ghost. This is Soydara’s first film role, and she does an amazing job as a character who communicates almost entirely by gesture and expression. Some of her expressions are very eloquent.

The Old Man sells his scavenged goods to a shopkeeper who gossips about the missing owner of a noodle shop across the road. (Context: 400,000 Lao kip is about $18.) Then the man returns home—the Girl stops outside the gate—where we learn that he has an old woman locked up inside his house. We’ve found the missing owner of the noodle shop.

The woman is dead and lying in a pull of blood; she has used an exposed nail in the room to kill herself. The Old Man buries her nearby while her own ghost watches. She, too, is silent, but the man talks to her and reassures her that she’ll be safe here, and she won’t be alone.

This sequence of events is an eerie and disorienting way to open a movie. The pacing is extremely measured, the tone solemn, the lighting deliberately scant. When it’s night, the darkness is suffocating. Every scene is filled with long silences and deep shadows in which a great deal is left unexplained and unrevealed.

I suspect your reaction to the movie depends a great deal on how much patience you have with this sort of storytelling. I happen to love it, particularly when the tension rises so subtly I don’t notice until I’m already clenching my teeth and trying not to blink. That’s what happens here, for the movie’s full runtime. I think the film deserves a patient viewing, one that lets the scenes flow without explanation for a while. The film opens with death—the Girl and her skeleton in the woods—and death is suffused throughout, completely inescapable; there is a relentless build of very quiet tension that never lets us get used to it.

Right from the start, instead of giving us a chance to orient ourselves to the murderer and his ghosts, the film instead twists to introduce us to the Boy (Por Silatsa). This is the Old Man fifty years ago, on the day the Girl was struck by a vehicle on the road and left to die alone in the woods. The Boy finds her and holds her hand while she dies, which seems like a sweet moment until we realize that he’s going to just… leave her there. He takes a photo and money from her suitcase. He doesn’t tell anyone about her, doesn’t fetch his parents or the authorities, and most egregiously doesn’t ever give her the opportunity to be cremated so that her spirit might move on.

Laos is a predominantly Buddhist country, and this is a very Buddhist film. Just as importantly, Laos is also a country where a great many people maintain animist folk beliefs right along the practice of Buddhism. The belief that spirits can interact with the living is common (as it is in most of the world), and customs are built around treating those spirits well. Corpses must be cremated and the ashes scattered so that the spirits of the dead can be reincarnated.

The Old Man claims he doesn’t let the Girl or the women he kills move on because he doesn’t know what awaits them, as though he’s doing them a favor, but that’s a lie. He knows what the right thing to do is—and so does the audience. The true horror in this story comes from his refusal to let the spirits go. When Lina (Vilouna Phetmany) comes to the village in search of her mother, the Old Man pretends to help her, knowing all the while where he buried the woman who died by suicide while locked up in his home. He knows her mother’s ghost is just outside. He does nothing about it until he is forced to.

This is haunting as imprisonment, haunting as control, with silent, nameless women trapped by a man who insists on telling them, and himself, that it’s for their own good.

The most chilling moment in the film is when the Boy meets the Girl’s mother on the road. She is desperately searching for her runaway daughter, and she has heard the Girl might be haunting this road. All the mother wants is to find her daughter’s body in order to give her a funeral and let her move on. While the mother is pleading, the Girl is standing right beside the boy, silent and watchful. There is no real hope in her expression; she already knows how this will play out. The Boy looks at images of the Girl when she was alive and is unmoved. He tells the mother nothing. When the parents have gone, all he says to the Girl is, “I didn’t know you had a dog.”

When the Boy is first introduced, it looks like it might be a flashback explaining how the Old Man and the Girl met. But we quickly learn that it’s not that at all, because the Old Man and the Boy can interact. That’s where the time travel comes in. The Girl can bring them through time, both forward and backward. The visual cues to signify stepping through time are subtle: lanterns versus lights, cigarettes versus vape, fields that are tended versus overgrown. When their interactions influence the Boy’s choices, we see the consequence reflected in the Old Man’s present in different ways, some of which are subtle and unsettling, and some of which are outright horrifying.

Do has said she and Larsen looked at a lot of time travel stories to figure out what structure to use. They very much wanted changes in the past to be reflected in the future, without the future having any memory of the changes; she namechecks both Back to the Future (1985) and Primer (2004) as part of their research. Critics have similarly namechecked La Jetée (1962), and while I don’t know if Do and Larsen ever watched it, I think it’s unlikely that a couple of people who sat down to learn how to make movies in the 2000s wouldn’t have at least heard of it. I also got some vibes of Timecrimes (2007), because both films present time travel as a spiraling escalation of violence and horrors as a man who is already doing bad things keeps doing more bad things to reshape his world.

(Note: On all three of their movies, Larsen is the credited screenwriter and Do is the credited director, but in interviews they talk about how they develop the stories together before he writes the screenplay.)

Even though there are a lot of familiar elements in the time travel, the ghost story, and the crime story, the way The Long Walk blends them together leads to a film that is wonderfully strange, dark, and unique. The spiraling nature of the time travel isn’t just a structural choice; it leads, in its bleak, meandering way, directly to the heart of the story.

At the end, when the Girl finally speaks, she reveals that she has been ferrying the Old Man across time for countless lifetimes, always hoping that he will finally make better choices, stop killing woman and imprisoning their spirits, and let her go. He never does. He never lets go of the guilt and grief he feels about his mother’s death, regardless of whether he had a hand in it or not. He never lets go of his anger at being abused and abandoned as a child. Everything he holds on to festers inside of him, forming a rotten core that is never excised. He never lets the Girl’s spirit move on, because he never believes that her ability to reincarnate is more important than his self-imposed loneliness. He never stops filling his mother’s favorite flower field with the spirits of women who stand in silence and watch him grow up and grow old again and again and again.

Time loop stories are often about a character trying again and again to fix something, to get something right. But usually the character is aware of the loop, or becomes aware of it, and that knowledge becomes part of the lesson. That isn’t the case here—at least not in the same way, because this is a film with a Buddhist perspective on reincarnation deep in its bones. It doesn’t matter what the Old Man tells himself about not knowing what comes next for the women’s spirits. He is doing monstrous things in this life and every life, and he is always justifying them to himself, and he does not stop. That’s the cycle in which he has trapped himself and the Girl.

I love this movie. I had no idea what to expect when I watched it. I went in knowing nothing more than “time travel and ghosts,” and I haven’t stopped thinking about it ever since. It’s a film with equal amounts of empathy and horror, with a very distinctive perspective, and an almost oppressively mournful style. If Do’s goal in making this film was a defiant “Fuck you!” to the Western critics demanding their own version of Laotian stories, she has succeeded marvelously. It’s bleak and unsettling and unique. It gets under your skin. I will be thinking about it for a long time.

What do you think of The Long Walk? In an interview, Do mentioned that she and Larsen actually disagree on where the Old Man dies at the ending of the film—whether it’s before or after he burns the house down. I can see it either way, and like that it’s ambiguous. What do you think?

Next week: And now for something completely different, but still about loneliness and guilt and grief, with the New Zealand post-apocalypse film The Quiet Earth. Watch it on Hoopla, Kanopy, Amazon, Roku, and more.[end-mark]

The post <i>The Long Walk</i>: Grief, Guilt, and the Inescapable Weight of the Past appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Navigating the Landscape of Human Emotion

Does this beautiful, weird, messy movie hold up over 20 years later? Absolutely.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on June 4, 2025

Credit: Focus Features

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Credit: Focus Features

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). Directed by Michel Gondry. Written by Charlie Kaufman, based on a story by Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, and Pierre Bismuth. Starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, and Tom Wilkinson.

Sometimes when I rewatch movies I saw several years ago, I have to pause and think, “Was that movie actually great, or was I just painfully in my twenties when I saw it?”

There’s a bit of trepidation that goes along with that thought. I was painfully in my twenties in 2004 and have little reason to trust the heightened emotional memories of the time (mental illness, graduate school, etc.). But I am happy to report upon rewatch that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is still great.

In fact, it’s even better than I remember.

The story behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind begins, as many great stories do, with some friends sitting around and wondering, “Dude, what if we could erase our exes from our minds?” Except they probably wouldn’t have said “dude” because they were French. Please substitute the appropriate French term to imagine the scene accurately.

The man posing the question was artist Pierre Bismuth, who became fascinated by the idea of what would happen if we were able to erase people from our memories. He even contemplated carrying out a performance art experiment of sorts, where he would send cards to people telling them that somebody had been erased from their minds. Sometime in the late ’90s he shared this idea with his longtime friend and filmmaker Michel Gondry.

Bismuth and Gondry had known each other since the ’80s, when Gondry was the drummer in the French pop band Oui Oui. That band, and music in general, was how Gondry got into filmmaking. He started out making music videos for Oui Oui; here is one that you can watch online: “Ma Maison.” His trippy videos caught the eye of Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk, and she brought Gondry on to direct the music video for “Human Behavior” (1993), the lead single from her first solo studio album, Debut.

Everybody should take a few minutes to watch that video and remember that it launched the illustrious careers of two world-renowned artists. Let that serve as a lasting reminder to all artists to live your truth and never let the world file down your weird edges. And maybe to include giant teddy bears and hedgehogs in all artistic endeavors.

Gondry kept making music videos for Björk and many other musical artists: “Around the World” by Daft Punk, “Everlong” by Foo Fighters, “Fell in Love With a Girl” by The White Stripes, and so many more. He also directed a bunch of high-profile ad campaigns, including the famous “Drugstore” ad for Levi’s and the even more famous “Smarienberg” ad for Smirnoff, the latter of which is cited as an inspiration for the “bullet time” visual effect used in The Matrix (1999). (To be more precise, John Gaeta, the visual effects supervisor for The Matrix, specifically named Otomo Katsuhiro’s Akira (1988) and the collective works of Michel Gondry as inspirations for the funky time-and-perspective trickery that makes up the bullet time effect.)

Gondry’s career directing music videos and commercials was wildly successful, but his first attempt at directing a feature film was a dud. That was Human Nature (2001), which I have not seen, so all I know is what’s in the plot summary on IMDb: “A woman is in love with a man in love with another woman, and all three have designs on a young man raised as a chimpanzee.” Take that as you will.

Human Nature was Gondry’s first collaboration with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would be their second. Gondry presented Kaufman with Bismuth’s memory-erasing idea, and they put together a pitch to bring around to various studios in Hollywood. They both assumed it would be a tough sell, but it generated a lot of attention and a bidding war, and it was picked up very quickly. They didn’t have a script at that point; Kaufman had to go and write it.

This was in the early 2000s, when Kaufman had already earned a reputation as a screenwriter of weird films thanks to Being John Malkovich (1999), which was the debut feature film for both Kaufman and director Spike Jonze. It was the kind of film debut that garnered a lot of very position attention, and also the kind of film that meant when Kaufman and Gondry pitched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind nobody was really surprised by the whole “it takes place almost entirely in the main character’s mind” approach.

Humans have always been fascinated by the workings of our own minds. And I do mean always: there are Mesopotamian stone tablets that provide advice on interpreting dreams. One of those tablets is a fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh that was infamously among the thousands of artifacts looted from Iraq and purchased by Hobby Lobby founder and odious evangelical Steve Green. According to the tablet and Gilgamesh’s mom, if you dream about hugging an axe, it means you have an epic bromance in your future, and also that you should never shop at Hobby Lobby.

That doesn’t have anything to do with this week’s movie. It’s just proof that humans have always wanted to poke around inside our own minds, and we have always used stories as one way of doing exactly that. The recent success of Inside Out 2 (2024) suggests that nobody is getting tired of the trope any time soon. We humans are terribly self-involved creatures, and it drives us nuts that we don’t really understand the workings of our own minds. We’re always looking for ways to conceptualize, visualize, and analyze what’s going on inside our troublesome noggins.

Visualizing a person’s thoughts and emotions is the concept at the heart of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The film tells the story of a guy named Joel (Jim Carrey, in one of his best performances) who learns that his girlfriend, Clementine (Kate Winslet, in one of her best performances), has undergone a procedure to erase him completely from her memory. He retaliates by choosing to do the same to her. The procedure is carried out by Howard (Tom Wilkinson) and his trio of employees (Mark Ruffalo, Kirsten Dunst, and Elijah Wood in his first of several post-Lord of the Rings roles playing a weird little creep). While the procedure is in progress, however, Joel changes his mind. What follows is a chase through his mind as he tries to hide memories of his relationship with Clementine from the erasure procedure.

The film makes no attempt to be scientifically rigorous; Kaufman is very candid about the fact that he wrote the sci fi premise as a tool for exploring the story of a tumultuous relationship. On screen, this manifests with a deliberate mundanity: the ordinary doctor’s office, the unprofessional employees, the cheesy sleep helmet and clunky computers that make up the system. Even the assumed links between experiences, objects, and memories are more or less handwaved in favor of getting into the meat of what it means for the characters. We aren’t meant to care much about the neurology, because that isn’t the point. The point is Joel’s journey through his memories of the relationship, mostly moving backwards from its bitter end to its waning days to the excitement and warmth of how it began.

It’s less common these days, but when the movie came out there was a bit of commentary, including from Kaufman himself, that the lack of scientific rigor—and a lack of interest in scientific rigor—means it’s not really science fiction. I’ve never liked that sort of genre-splitting, and I suspect that in 2004 a lot of it came from a place of people thinking, “Well, if it’s good and emotional and wins awards, it can’t really be sci fi.” Which is, of course, silly, and “imagining a new technology that changes how people live” is one of the most classic sci fi premises out there, even if the science is wishy-washy.

What matters is that it’s a very effective way to tell the story of a relationship. One component of why it works so well is that Carrey and Winslet are both such good actors playing such messy characters—but without any sort of moralizing or judgment on how messy they are. Because they are messy! They have fantastic chemistry and charm, but he’s sulky and passive to a fault, and she’s a mercurial alcoholic, and sometimes we want to shove them both out a window because of how frustrating they are. It’s so easy to believe both that they love each other and that they eventually can’t stand each other. These are complicated characters in a complicated relationship, and for extra emphasis they are surrounded by the equally messy relationships of the doctor’s office employees.

That story would already make for a perfectly fine movie, but this movie is better than perfectly fine. It’s unique and wonderful, and that’s because of how it shows their relationship. The imagery that is used, the symbols that weave through the subconscious world, and the overall structure and composition of the scenes, it’s all visually striking and very memorable.

It was also, apparently, something of a trial to achieve during production. Gondry was the director and Kaufman was also heavily involved in the production process (which is unusual for a screenwriter), and there are two more people whose work is intrinsic to the look of the film: director of photography Ellen Kuras and editor Valdis Óskarsdóttir.

Quick aside: Film editor is the one high-level movie production role that has historically been held by a significant number of women, even in the most high-profile films. Still nowhere close to parity with men, but noticeably more than, for example, the percentage directors or DPs who are women. It’s rare for both the DP and editor of a major feature film to be women. Both Kuras and Óskarsdóttir are, obviously, very good at their jobs, and their work in the film is lovely to behold.

In a 2012 interview, Kuras spoke a bit about the particular challenge of filming a movie that Gondry wanted to look both realistic and surrealistic, the kind of film where one scene can be a convincingly drab New York apartment and another scene can be a brightly distorted childhood memory of bathing in the sink, and both scenes look and feel like a part of the same world. It’s a tricky balance, but they manage it by limiting the number of visual cues that separate the “real” world from the world inside Joel’s memories. There is very little CGI; the effects are mostly in-camera or practical, making use of techniques like forced perspective, split focus, and unusual lighting and sound to create the surreal instability of Joel’s flight through his memories. Both realities have the same texture and palette, which makes them hard to distinguish at first, but they operate by different rules when it comes to the navigation of time and space.

That’s also where the editing of the film comes in. Óskarsdóttir has also talked about the process. Her perspective on it is delightfully no-nonsense. About figuring out how to convey the director’s vision when it’s not necessarily captured on camera, she said, “A director might say, ‘What about that shot where he’s sitting and you can see that he’s thinking, and then he stands up and he’s very disturbed’. And you look at the shot and there’s just some guy standing up and walking across a room.” I love that. We always think of films showing us a director’s vision, but the editor is the one who has to look at everything that’s been filmed, all those variations on guys standing up and walking across rooms, and put together the pieces that actually capture that vision.

Apparently the editing room for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was a somewhat crowded and contentious place, as Óskarsdóttir and Gondry—who both describe themselves as stubborn—frequently clashed over how to piece the movie together, and Kaufman was also offering his input. That’s a lot of opinions to wrangle, and it was by no means a simple process, as on the whole the movie is non-linear and a bit inside-out in terms of structure, and on a granular level there are scenes were elements are repeated, deleted, or obscured for emotional impact.

They all knew it could very easily be too confusing for audiences, and there was a lot of trial and error involved in shaping the film into something that told the story as effectively as possible. They were also aware that filmgoing audiences in 2004 would have expectations for a non-linear film about memory, as Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000) had come out just a few years prior. The movies are very different, but what’s in a movie is not the same thing as what casual audiences pick up from promotions and taglines. Interestingly, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of the few movies I’ve read about that used the test-screening process as an actual, good-faith beta-read on the film (rather than the usual studio-mandated test-run for marketing). They made note of where the test audiences were confused by the film’s timeline and re-edited some things to address the problems. In an interview with AV Club, Gondry said about the test screenings, “We need other people to watch it with us and come at it from a fresh perspective.”

Luckily for us, all of that effort and all those editing room arguments were worth it in the end, because the movie comes together wonderfully. I know there are some people who found it confusing, but for the most part critics and audiences had no trouble with the film’s nonlinear structure—or understood that some parts are meant to be confusing, because Joel is often as confused as we are.

It’s a beautiful movie. I love the way it meanders back and forth between stark winter landscapes and cozy domestic interiors, from scenes of acrimonious commotion to moments of oppressive loneliness. I love how all of that beauty works together with the strong writing and fantastic acting. No element feels out of place. There are some movies where it’s easier to imagine them in a different form, such as a novel or a stage play, but this isn’t one of them. The quirky movieness of it all is part of the film’s statement about how we might visualize and experience our own memories.

Perhaps the most impressive part of the movie is how all of those elements combine to send us on such a powerful emotional rollercoaster. We’re along for the frustrating, painful, but still hopeful ride of Joel and Clementine’s relationship, and we never really get away from it, even in those moments when we are convinced they are terrible for each other. We see in excruciating detail why they fell apart, but in the end we still get that little pang of hope, the same one the characters are feeling, that maybe they can work it out. Maybe they can find happiness again, and maybe it will be worth it even if it is temporary. People aren’t neatly-trimmed puzzles pieces made to fit together without friction, after all, and memories are not cleanly cleaved into pleasure or pain. We’re all so much more complicated than that.

What do you think of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Do you think it holds up twenty years later?

Next week: We’re wandering down a haunted road through time in Mattie Do’s The Long Walk. Watch it on Hoopla, Kanopy, Amazon, Roku, and more.[end-mark]

The post <i>Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind</i>: Navigating the Landscape of Human Emotion appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Watership Down: Creating a World in the English Countryside

Thoughts on rabbits, mythology, and speculative storytelling…

By Kali Wallace

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Published on May 28, 2025

Credit: Nepenthe Films

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Credit: Nepenthe Films

Watership Down (1978). Written and directed by Martin Rosen, based on the novel by Richard Adams. Starring John Hurt, Richard Briers, and Michael Graham Cox.

If I had a nickel for every time I wrote about how a father’s whimsical story for his children evolved into a hauntingly mature parable about humanity in animated form, I would have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but…

Well, okay, it’s not really that strange. A lot of children’s books begin their lives as stories parents tell to their kids, even when those books deal with rather serious topics. I should preface this with the disclaimer that while I have read Watership Down, I was so young and it was so long ago that I don’t remember it well. The details have been lost in the miasma of books I read as an earnestly nerdy child who never wanted to admit when she didn’t understand things that were beyond her current level of comprehension.

Richard Adams’ Watership Down has a very sweet and wholesome origin story. Back in the early 1970s, Adams was a mild-mannered civil servant living in London with his wife and two daughters. One day they piled into the family car for a road trip; they were, according to Adams, headed to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Judi Dench in Twelfth Night. Adams’ daughters asked for a story to keep them entertained on the drive. Without any preparation, he began telling them a story about a pair of rabbits having adventures.

Adam also credits his daughters for encouraging him to write the story down later, as well as demanding a happier ending than the one he originally planned. In fact, right up until his death in 2016 at the age of 96, Adams was consistently maintaining that his daughters contributed a great deal to Watership Down, which is very charming in a very dad kind of way.

While Adams was writing, he consulted Ronald Lockley’s 1964 book The Private Life of the Rabbit for some information about rabbits. Lockley was a Welsh naturalist and conservationist who spent most of his life studying and advocating for seabirds that migrated through or made their homes on various islands, but in the 1950s he spent about four years studying rabbits for the British Nature Conservancy. After that, he went back to mostly writing about birds, but Lockley and Adams became friends, and Lockley appears as a character in Adams’ 1977 book Plague Dogs. (Plague Dogs was also adapted into an animated movie by Martin Rosen; we might watch it in the future.)

It’s part of the lore of Watership Down that it was rejected by many publishers before finding a home, but nobody can agree on exactly what that means. It looks like it may have been rejected by a mere handful of publishers and agents, which barely even counts as rejection. But it is true that those rejections came from people who didn’t know quite what to make of it. They felt that it didn’t fit easily into either adult literature or children’s literature, a problem that publishers have only gotten worse at handling in the past fifty-some years.

Adams did find somebody willing to take on Watership Down. That was Rex Collings, who ran an eponymous one-man publishing house that mostly offered books about Africa and was responsible for bringing the works of several African writers to the United Kingdom. But he liked Watership Down and wanted to publish it, even knowing it was a gamble. In an obituary following his death in 1996, an acquaintance of Collings recalled that after accepting the book he wrote to her, “I’ve just taken on a novel about rabbits, one of them with extra-sensory perception. Do you think I’m mad?”

Maybe he was a little mad. Collings couldn’t afford to pay Adams an advance and the book’s initial print run was 2500 copies. But it was a madness that paid off, because Watership Down quickly became a runaway success with both readers and critics, and it went on to sell more than 50 million copies worldwide.

Film producer Martin Rosen optioned the book just a few years after it was published. Originally he hired animator John Hubley to direct it, but he fired Hubley after a few months due to creative differences—and they were genuine creative differences, not euphemistic film industry “creative differences.” According to Richard Bell, one of the artists who briefly worked on the film with Hubley, Rosen wanted more grit and naturalism, whereas Hubley wanted a more playful and experimental style. Obviously Rosen won out, taking over as director after Hubley left, but a bit of Hubley’s work remains in the film, in the form of the extended prologue sequence that tells the rabbits’ mythological origin story. (Much more recently, Rosen has landed himself in hot water with the UK courts and the Adams estate in a dispute over the rights to Watership Down.)

The naturalism in Watership Down is one of the film’s most distinctive aspects. It certainly wasn’t what was in style in animated films of the time; this was the era where animal films generally looked like Disney’s The Rescuers or The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (both from 1977). Audiences were plenty used to seeing an animated rabbit on their movie and television screens, but that rabbit was Bugs Bunny. Rabbits that talked and schemed and had terrifying quasi-spiritual psychic visions of dark fates but still looked and moved like ordinary rural rabbits were not what people expected from their animal cartoons.

A lot of that distinctive visual style of Watership Down comes from the work of lead animator Arthur Humberstone. Humberstone had gotten his start at Gaumont-British Animation, the British animation studio founded by former Disney director David Hand (of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves [1937] and Bambi [1942] fame). The studio was part of industrialist J. Arthur Rank’s plan to build a British film industry that would rival Hollywood. Which, uh, didn’t quite work out the way he wanted, but some of Rank’s efforts were more successful than others. One of the more successful ventures was the establishment of Pinewood Studios, which has been used to make many of the world’s biggest films since 1936, including Superman (1978), Alien (1979), most of the James Bond franchise, and Batman (1989).

Alas, the animation venture was not among the successes; Gaumont-British Animation lasted only a few years before shuttering. Some of what they produced during their brief existence was Hand’s Animaland (1948), a series of humorous shorts about animals frolicking in a magical woodland. Watch just a few seconds and Hand’s Disney style is immediately recognizable.

This was where Arthur Humberstone was learning the work of animation, but it wasn’t the only animation studio in the UK at the time. Back in the late ’30s, the husband-and-wife team of filmmakers John Halas and Joy Batchelor had started making animations, mostly for advertisements. Halas, who had been born in Budapest as János Halász, had learned animation under George Pal, who was the creator of Puppetoons, as well as the producer behind a number of Hollywood sci fi films, including The War of the Worlds (1953) and The Time Machine (1960). In 1940, Halas and Batchelor founded a film studio (which was called—surprise!—Halas and Batchelor) and spent the war years making propaganda films with morale-boosting and anti-fascist themes. They also made Britain’s first feature-length animated film: the 1945 film Handling Ships, a 70-minute stop-motion instructional video for the Royal Navy.

A few years later, Halas and Batchelor went on to make Britain’s other first feature-length animation, the one that got released in theaters and wasn’t a navy video: the 1954 adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. One of the animators on the film was Humberstone, who was given the task of animating the characters of Boxer and Benjamin after expressing an interest in horses. Humberstone would work on different projects over the next several years, both with Halas and Batchelor and elsewhere, including Yellow Submarine (1968), The Osmonds (1972), and the early ’70s cartoon series The Jackson 5ive.

(Aside: In spite of being fully cognizant of my looming deadline for this column, at this point I was thoroughly distracted by reading about the surprisingly broad variety of musical groups who had animated series associated with them. That’s how I was reminded of the early ’90s fever dream that was Hammerman. Now you’ve been reminded of it too. I’m sorry/You’re welcome.)

Back to the rabbits! It was Humberstone’s experience with animated critters that got him the job as the lead animator on Watership Down, and brought him back later to work on Plague Dogs. For Watership Down, Humberstone actually kept rabbits in his garden to sketch and film; he would show the frame-by-frame movements to the animation artists as references. He also filmed his own dog to get the movements of the film’s dogs right, such as in the scenes with the dog sniffing out the rabbits along the riverbank.

The commitment to naturalism in the film extended to the setting. Watership Down is a real place; it’s a hill located near the village of Ecchinswell in Hampshire in South East England, and the novel was named after the hill. (According to Adams, it was his publisher Rex Collings who came up with the title after seeing the landscape that inspired Adams.) If you look at photographs of the hill—or visit it, I guess, should you be in the neighborhood—it’s immediately recognizable as the hill, the one from Fiver’s vision, the high, wind-swept place where the rabbits eventually make their home. The film embraces the Hampshire setting wholeheartedly, not just in the hill itself but in the churchyard, the farm buildings, and fields.

The result is, of course, beautiful. It’s a truly gorgeous film, particularly in those scenes that embrace the painterly, watercolor style of traditional landscapes. It’s a film stylized to feel like stepping into a series of pastoral paintings.

Which makes it all the more interesting, I think, that the story is so freaking weird.

Oh, I know it’s weird in the book too. I’m not denying that. I just want to take a moment to emphasize just how weird it is, because I think it’s easy to forget because it’s been such an ingrained part of Western pop culture for so long.

People have spent decades interpreting Watership Down in countless different ways: as a religious allegory, a Homeric quest, a work of socio-political commentary, a version of Joseph Campbell’s heroic monomyth, and so on. Adams, for his part, always dismissed such high-minded readings of his book. In a 2007 BBC interview he said, “It’s only a made-up story, it’s in no sense an allegory or parable or any kind of political myth. I simply wrote down a story I told to my little girls.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean various analyses are wrong. It could just mean that Adams had no interest in telling the world how to interpret his book about rabbits having an adventure. Adams took bits of pieces of everything from classic myths to his own wartime experiences to Lockley’s observations about rabbits, and he mixed them all together to create his story.

That’s why it’s fun—for a particular definition of fun that I get to choose—to look at Watership Down as a work of speculative fiction. As I was rewatching the movie for the first time in many, many years, I kept thinking about how different elements of the story recall different themes and ideas that speculative fiction loves to explore.

It begins right off the bat with the rabbits’ origin myth, which I absolutely love because it comes from asking: What would an origin story look like for a skittish yet ubiquitous prey animal? It looks like the story of El-Ahrairah, “The Prince With a Thousand Enemies,” which highlights the constant danger rabbits live in while also providing for the sort of enduring morality that cultures love to weave into their lore.

And it continues through the rest of the story. What sort of society might we imagine to combine the natural reality of being a rabbit (everybody wants to eat them) with the human requirements of telling a story (they have to think and act in ways human readers can understand)? What happens when that society is subjected to cataclysmic change? When the individuals at the top of a militaristic hierarchy refuse to react to that change? What different types of society might evolve from same natural pressures?

We see examples throughout the film: the original warren that Fiver and the others leave before it’s destroyed, the precarious survival Cowslip and his warren manage by cooperating with a human farmer, the sheltered naivete of the captive farm rabbits, the cult-like authoritarianism of Efrafa under the control of Woundwort. Kehaar the seagull even provides an outsider perspective on the way rabbits organize their communities. (Quick aside: Kehaar is voiced by American actor Zero Mostel, who played Tevye in the original Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof, and starred opposite Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks’ 1967 film The Producers.)

Having these kinds of questions about individuals, communities, and societies woven into the story is why Watership Down feels like such a thoroughly speculative story to me. We can take any one of those threads and place it easily in, say, an episode of Star Trek or a sci fi novel. A social structure that looks familiar but is still a bit alien to us, the desperate seer trying to warn of imminent destruction, the hopeful adventurers coming upon a sinister trap, the clash against a cruel and rigid community—these are all premises that we love to explore in countless iterations, because every new story is a way of digging a little deeper into what makes people tick.

I think that’s one of the reasons Watership Down has remained so enduringly popular over the years. Sure, it also has something to do with how it traumatized a generation of children with so much bunny death, but it’s more than that. I think we’re also captivated by a story that explores these speculative ideas by using the pastoral mundanity of the most ordinary of animals. It’s a disarming approach, one that allows for some depth that we might not expect from a story with the plot “some rabbits look for a place to live.” It’s also an example of how the apparent simplicity or familiarity of a story is not necessarily indicative of what we find when we dig down a little beneath the surface.

How many of us have Watership Down memories from childhood? Have your thoughts about the story changed over the years? I’d love to hear from anybody who has read the book recently or knows it well!

For those keeping count at home, this is the third John Hurt film we’ve covered in this column, but it won’t be the last.[end-mark]

We’re Working Through Some Stuff

People like to say science fiction is about ideas, but sometimes it’s all about feelings. Big, messy, human feelings like love, loneliness, fear, and grief. In June we’re watching a selection of films from around the world all about what happens when human emotions get science fictional.

June 4 — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), directed by Michel Gondry

The sci fi breakup film against which all other sci fi breakup films are measured.
Watch: HBO, Amazon, Apple, and more.
View the trailer

June 11 — The Long Walk (2019), directed by Mattie Do

Grief and guilt in a time travel ghost story set in the Laotian countryside. Not to be confused with the upcoming film based on the Stephen King novel. That’s a different long walk.
Watch: Hoopla, Kanopy, Amazon, Roku, and more.
View the trailer

June 18 — The Quiet Earth (1985), directed by Geoff Murphy

Isolation and connection after the end of the world in New Zealand.
Watch: Hoopla, Kanopy, Amazon, Roku, and more.
View the trailer

June 25 — 2046 (2004), directed by Wong Kar-wai

The layered, non-linear, genre-bending final film in the informal trilogy that began with Days of Being Wild (1990) and In the Mood for Love (2000).
Watch: Amazon, Fandango, Microsoft.
View the trailer

The post <i>Watership Down</i>: Creating a World in the English Countryside appeared first on Reactor.

Column Science Fiction Film Club

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind: Living and Dying in the World We Create

Miyazaki’s classic celebrates scientific curiosity as a heroic act.

By Kali Wallace

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Published on May 21, 2025

Credit: Topcraft/Studio Ghibli

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Credit: Topcraft/Studio Ghibli

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984). Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, based upon his manga of the same name. Starring Sumi Shimamoto, Gorō Naya, Yōji Matsuda, and Yoshiko Sakakibara in the original Japanese cast, and Alison Lohman, Patrick Stewart, Shia LaBeouf, and Uma Thurman in the 2005 English cast.

Let’s get this out of the way: Hayao Miyazaki is one of the most written-about filmmakers in the world. I don’t say that lightly. I’ve researched a lot of filmmakers for this column, and there are very few, even among the most revered auteurs, who have as many books, essays, scholarly articles, and documentaries about them and their work. On top of that, Miyazaki himself has spent decades talking freely and frequently about his life and work; he has never been shy about sharing his thoughts about anything from his own art to world politics and everything in between.

On the one hand, that’s great, because there is an answer out there for every single question anybody might have. On the other hand, there is nothing that I can say here that hasn’t been said one million times before, and the sum of what has been said is far more than I can sift through in the week or so I have to write this piece. So please forgive me if I awkwardly try to land in the center of an enormous Venn diagram where “things of interest to animation fans” and “things of interest to cinephiles” and “things of interest to sci fi fans” all overlap.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is pretty interesting for how it sits at the intersection of those realms of art and entertainment. It’s a Japanese animated film from the 1980s deeply inspired by folklore, real-world events, and American and English sci fi and fantasy of the ’60s and ’70s. It led to the founding of Studio Ghibli, whose films have so thoroughly influenced the art and business of animation that their impact is apparent everywhere you look. It’s an environmental fable with elements of atomic-era sci fi, and it’s also a story about a princess saving the day. There are giant bugs; they’re kind of psychic. It makes everybody who watches it wish they could fly.

But for all of that, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind actually has a pretty mundane origin story. Unlike many of the movies we’ve watched, it wasn’t a flashy debut or a passion project or a genre-bending experiment, and it certainly wasn’t the world’s introduction to a hot young auteur filmmaker.

I like that about it. I like that a movie that would have such a cascading effect on animated cinema can come about just because a longtime industry veteran was doing his job really well.

Hayao Miyazaki began writing the manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in 1981. He was forty years old and had been in the animation industry for nearly half of his life. He had started in 1963, when he went to work at Toei Animation as an inbetween artist, or one of the animators who would illustrate frames to provide the transition between the main artist’s primary frames. As I mentioned in the article about Soviet animation, he almost gave up as soon as he started; the way he tells it, it was a screening of Lev Atamanov’s The Snow Queen (1957) that convinced him to stick with it.

Miyazaki spent the next twenty years or so working in the industry: advancing from inbetweening to key animation and storyboarding, spearheading labor negotiations, seeking out more creative opportunities, writing tie-ins as well as original manga, contributing to dozens of projects in both film and television animation.

His first work as a director came in 1971, after he left Toei to work at Tokyo Movie. He directed several episodes of the anime series Lupin III, or Lupin the 3rd Part I. (The “Part I” was added later when more parts came along.) If you’re an anime and manga fan, you already know about the Lupin III franchise; if you’re not, it might be hard to appreciate just how enduringly popular it is. It’s a long-running series of stories about a gentleman thief who gets into all manner of criminal shenanigans; the first manga was published in 1967 and the franchise has been going strong ever since.

That included the 1979 film Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro, which was the first feature film Miyazaki wrote and directed. I haven’t seen The Castle of Cagliostro—feel free to chime in if you have. Although the film was well-received by critics, it wasn’t very successful upon release. It has gained a cult following in the decades since its release, although that’s mostly on account of it being Hayao Miyazaki’s first feature film.

Even though it wasn’t successful, The Castle of Cagliostro caught the eye of Toshio Suzuki, editor of the manga magazine Animage. Suzuki approached Miyazaki about writing something for Animage, and Miyazaki began Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The manga became very popular, and Suzuki encouraged Miyazaki to make an animated adaptation, even though that hadn’t been part of the publishing agreement. Miyazaki agreed, provided he was allowed to direct it.

Animage’s parent company, Tokuma Shoten, was a magazine publisher, not an animation studio, so Miyazaki and producer Isao Takahata had to find a studio to work with. They chose a small studio called Topcraft. You’ve seen their work before, even if you don’t recognize the name: Topcraft worked on several Rankin/Bass films, including The Hobbit (1977), The Return of the King (1980), and The Last Unicorn (1982). Topcraft was already struggling financially by the time Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind came along, and in 1985 Miyazaki, Takahata, and Suzuki acquired the studio and folded it into the newly formed Studio Ghibli.

But that came later. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind was made before the founding of Studio Ghibli, and the studio probably wouldn’t exist if the film hadn’t been successful. It has been retroactively slotted into the Ghibli library, which is why a lot of people refer to it as a Ghibli movie, even though it technically isn’t. I know that’s the sort of thing only pedants really care about, but anime fans are among the world’s most enthusiastic pedants, so maybe I should have called it “the first Ghibli movie” just to provide enrichment for commenters.

The Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga has a total of 59 chapters and was published sporadically between 1982 and 1994. The movie was made pretty early in the process, when there were only 16 chapters. I haven’t read it, but from what I understand the story we see in the film is, for obvious reasons, a much shorter and more focused tale than the sprawling, philosophical graphic novel.

Much has been written over the years about the many inspirations behind both the manga and film. Those inspirations include Frank Herbert’s Dune, Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea series, and Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse, a book I am thinking I need to read since it keeps making unexpected appearances in things I write about. Another facet of the idea came from the industrial pollution of Minamata Bay and subsequent Minamata disease, which was caused by a petrochemical company dumping tons of mercury and mercury compounds into a harbor in a seaside town on Japan’s Kyūshū island. We can see the threads of this real-world inspiration in the sickness that afflicts Nausicaä’s father, and in her desperate questions about who could have polluted the world so badly that nature would change itself in order to adapt.

One more source of inspiration worth mentioning is the Japanese folktale The Lady Who Loved Insects, which is about—you guessed it—a lady who loves insects. The woman in the folktale is an eccentric who defies the expectations of Heian-era womanhood by caring more about making up little poems about her caterpillar friends than she does about being beautiful and demure. The story exists only as an incomplete fragment of unknown authorship, but most scholars seem to think it was originally meant as a cautionary tale against such unladylike behavior.

But what’s meant as a warning in the 12^th century can be wholly aspirational in the 20^th century, and that’s how Nausicaä’s character is presented. That’s also what I love most about this movie.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m very fond of the whole movie. The art is beautiful in spite of having been animated on a very brisk timeline (as was and still is normal in the Japanese animation industry). The music by Joe Hisaishi is delightful in a very ’80s anime epic kind of way. That was the first time Hisaishi and Miyazaki worked together, and Hisaishi would go on to score all of Miyazaki’s films from that point forward. The story may be simplified from the manga, but it’s still refreshingly complex for a family-friendly animated feature film. It contains all the elements that would become hallmarks of Miyazaki’s films: the earnest naturalism, the determined anti-war stance, the lived-in sense of place and worldbuilding.

This movie also has one of my favorite horrifying atomic bomb analogues in sci fi: the Giant Warriors. The film doesn’t go into much detail about them; all we know is that they were created to be more destructive than anything else, they nearly destroyed the world in the Seven Days of Fire, and it’s a bad idea to use them again, because it is always a bad idea to use a weapon that previously destroyed the world just because you think you can control the destruction this time. The warriors are eerie and terrifying—I love the glimpses we get of their skeletal remains in the wilderness—but the best part is the way the revived warrior horribly melts when the Tolmekians try to deploy it. It’s grotesque and ugly in the worst way, strongly implying the ravages of atomic weaponry while looking like an absurd caricature of a human.

Fun fact for anime fans: The warrior attack sequence was animated by Hideaki Anno, who would later go on to co-found the studio Gainax, where he would create and direct a little show called Neon Genesis Evangelion.

All of that is great, but what I really love about this film is that Nausicaä saves the world with scientific curiosity. Her heroic act is one that is woven into the entire film, from the very first moment she appears on screen. She wants to study and understand the world. She wants to know why her father is sick, why the Sea of Corruption exists, why the Ohmu are so protective of it, why the world outside of her safe valley works the way it does. (Note: The Sea of Corruption is called the Toxic Jungle in the 2005 English dub. I don’t know why. The Japanese name is 腐海, which translates to Sea of Decay. What’s important is that all of these names would make excellent titles for angry, anthemic, environmental-themed metal albums.)

Maybe it’s because I find Nausicaä’s curiosity so very relatable. I don’t normally want or need fiction protagonists to be relatable in any particular way, but I did spend many years of my life studying the natural sciences. It’s very difficult for me to understand how people can not be curious about the way the natural world works. So I get it. I get why Nausicaä looks at a post-cataclysm world that everybody else has accepted as inevitable and thinks there is more to it.

Everybody agrees the Earth is poisoned and the Sea of Corruption is spreading and the insects are trying to overtake the world. But Nausicaä wants to explore precisely what that means. Where is the poison? Is it in the soil or water or plants or animals? What is making the Sea of Corruption spread? Why do the insects react to stimuli the way they do? What happens when those stimuli change? What would it look like to have a mutually beneficial relationship with the inhospitable wilderness rather than an antagonistic one? It’s not enough to wonder and speculate; she conducts experiments herself, in secret, exploring possibilities she knows others won’t understand.

My personal appreciation for sci fi that treats scientific curiosity as a heroic act is one thing, but I think my reaction to rewatching this movie now, in the year of our unending miseries 2025, goes beyond that. It is a distressing truth of modern life that pro-environmental and anti-war stories only ever get more relevant and more urgent. A feeling of urgency doesn’t really sit well with this movie—or any Miyazaki movie, as a sense of timelessness is part of the style—but it’s there nonetheless, rearing its head this time with wearying predictability every time I read an article about politicians attacking scientific research, or college students outsourcing their ability to think to ChatGPT, or nations insisting that this time setting the world on fire is going to cleanse it properly.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is a beautiful movie with a lot of very smart things to say about human curiosity and aggression, about the endless adaptability of nature, and most of all about how to view ourselves as an active, intrinsic part of the natural world rather than a force separate from it. Those ideas have only grown in importance in the past forty-one years. I wish we didn’t need so very badly to be reminded of them, but I guess I’m glad we have films like this ready to serve as a reminder to anybody willing to listen.

What do you think of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind? I didn’t get into the tale of the infamous first English dub released as Warriors of the Wind (1985), which was so bad it made Miyazaki swear off allowing Americans to edit his films ever again, but if anybody has seen it and cares to share their thoughts, I would love to read them. Same goes for anybody who has read the whole manga!

Next week: It’s about cute bunnies, right? Everybody likes stories about cute bunnies. Watch Watership Down on Max, Criterion, Amazon, and more.[end-mark]

The post <i>Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind</i>: Living and Dying in the World We Create appeared first on Reactor.