Despite the fact that 30 years separate both Heijningen’s prequel and Carpenter’s remake, that intervening 30 years was not enough time for Universal to figure out what made the first 2 films into the classics that they are.

Unfortunately, Heijningen’s film pales in comparison to its predecessors because it’s producers not only forgot the nature of their Monster, but also its social relevance.

Campbell’s novella, like Hawks’ and Carpenter’s horror movies were classic Cold War stories. Like the Body Snatchers, Vampires, Werewolves and Zombies that preceded it, The Thing walked and talked like it’s human prey. The threat was that these Shape-shifters — Zombies, Vampires, Body Snatchers and Werewolves –  were capable of achieving sufficient numbers to exterminate mankind and overturn human civilization.

The remarkable failure of Heijningen’s film and Eric Heisserer’s screenplay is that it fails to co-opt our period anxieties the way that it’s precedents did. Way, way back in 2007, ST:TNG’s Ron Moore had successfully relaunched the 70s relic, Battlestar Galactica, as a post 9-11 allegory. Universal was hopeful that Moore might somehow make their Cold War relevant again, and paid him a tidy sum for a first draft.

I have no idea how Moore’s original screenplay fell down, but at some point Heijningen and his producers determined that Moore’s screenplay required a rewrite. Thus, we somehow ended up with a prequel that features the notorious Norwegian camp of Carpenter’s remake, but also two visiting American scientists and an African-American pilot that were somehow ‘unmentioned’ in Carpenter’s original film. In the movie’s PR materials they make a big deal about Heisserer working in the tall shadow Carpenter’s greatness.

“It’s a really fascinating way to construct a story because we’re doing it by autopsy […] we’re having to reverse engineer it, so those details all matter to us ‘cause it all has to make sense.”

– Eric Heisserer on writing The Thing (2011)

Yeah, whatever. The film’s greatest disappointment is it’s failure to capture the anxiety of our era. Hawks’ and Carpenter’s films appeared as book ends to the Cold War. Hawks’ film appeared just before Russia charged ahead with their Sputnik program. Carptenter’s film appeared only after Afghanistan had sent the Russians home,  their tails between their legs, and 2 years before Ronald Reagan demanded that Mikhail Gorbachev “Tear down this Wall”.

Given our post-9-11 anxieties about shoe-bombers, sleeper-agents and other terrorists, it should not have been a big stretch to fashion a paranoid tale of xenophobia down in the No-Man’s Land of Antarctica. In the years following 9-11, numerous production companies have tried — and failed — to bring back the alien invasion movie. Most regrettably, there was the Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig vehicle, ‘The Invasion’ (2007) a poor man’s remake of ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’. Then there was the  Cruise-Spielberg ‘War of the Worlds’ (2005). In both of these films, the star-power overwhelmed the plot, such that the end-product was paranoia without introspection, without emotional anxiety — the Cruise and Kidman never question their own motives or the systemic failure of the world around them, making the resulting movie almost entirely flaccid.

2011′s Thing has no stars and should therefore have been willing to make Red Shirts of the entire cast. No such luck –  the Norwegians (played by Norwegian actors, no less), are picked off like extras, while Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Who?), Joel Edgerton (Who?) and Ulrich Thomsen (What?) are left to hold down the Norwegian Camp from its internal, xenomorphic invader. May their sacrifice not have been in vain.

This Thing it is not so much of a prequel as much as a beat-for-beat recycling of Carpenter’s film. The effects may be better, but the plot is not.

Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

The unsurprising thing is that it works really, really well. The Prohibition-era paradigm shift is similar enough to our own era of ascendant faith to make it relevant. The first scene features Buscemi’s Johnson speaking before a local Temperance group and the environment is as colorful and bannered as a Baptist tent revival. As colorful as Johnson’s life of whoring, dealmaking as the mayor and political boss of New Jersey’s Sin City.

While Nucky Johnson and his complications are the series’ A-story, Prohibition and the fact that Johnson is involved in AC’s bootlegging industry and general criminal enterprise are the show’s B, C and D storylines. Definitely worth catching.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

For fans of: Carnivale, The Sopranos, Deadwood, Sin City, The Godfather, Steve Buscemi and period HBO Dramas in general

Listen up — Turner and Harron have carefully constructed a four-dimensional portrait of a woman who was, initially, a rather innocent studio model. She was good at what she did, attractive and at ease with her body in a way that made nudity easy. She was many things to many people, even as those fantasies and figments overlapped and contradicted on another.The modelling was so easy, that distortions such as S&M, Fetishism and role-playing were a bit of a joke to her, even as she posed for pictures by the notorious Irving and Paula Klaw.

The Klaws, of course, were a brother-sister team, that ran a mail-order photograpy business, whereby people would send away for stylized ‘artistic’ pictures of  costumed models. The Klaws were *not*. pornographers. But their collaboration was an odd one, with Irving serving as the product manager requesting certain kinds of pictures from his sister Paula, who actually posed and photographed the models.

Finally, this would also seem to be the break-out film that Gretchen Mol was unable to deliver during the 90′s. The girl has serious chops, convincingly becoming the Nashville-born Page as she leaves Tennesee and arrives in NYC, where she becomes “The Pin-Up Queen of the Universe.” One of the film’s most striking story arcs is Bettie’s transformation from Southern Girl to Shakespearian Thesp. The Connecticut-born Mol (b. 1972) convincingly sells us Page’s humble roots, before deconstructing both herself and Page. Looking back, it’s remarkable that the entire thing clocks in at 90 minutes.

See it.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

The series is only about 35 issues long (#0-#30, plus the graphic novel 2112), but Byrne does a very good job of turning it from a Clonus Horror tribute comic into a story that eats time-travel, holodeck incidents and alternate-reality tropes alive. In fact, it’s elegant in a way that I wish ‘Inception’ (2010) had been.

Unlike every other comic book property out there, I doubt that Next Men will be made into a movie anytime soon. That, because the studios have utterly failed to get past the Superman idea of comic book heroes in capes and tights to bother with the concept of character-driven, often literary aspects of Bronze Age and Modern Age comic books.  The reason that Alan Moore’s masterpieces, Watchmen (published 1987) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (published 1999) failed as movies is that both were part of a period of postmodern thinking in American comic books that the movies have yet to catch up with.

JBNM is like one of those wtf?! moments in Season 4 of Farscape where the bottom keep falling out and the rabbit-hole just keeps getting deeper and deeper.

For those  interested, Next Men is supposed to be revived as an ongoing title this Fall.

If anyone is thinking of trying to do a catch-up with the Next Men, IDW sells them both as a pair of bande-dessiné style black-and-white books ($18/per) and a 3-volume color edition ($33/per) that I presume is printed on better paper with a nice semi-gloss finish. There are at least 6 trade paperback volumes of the original run, but those cost about $16/per and the trades above are the better value. If you hunt them out, you can probably find the b&w volumes for as little as $11.25/per+shipping on Ebay or Amazon, slightly used.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Nick Chinlund is John Reilly (a ‘Reilly, Ace of Spies‘ reference?) involved in some double-agentry that the audience hasn’t been informed of, and the character goes through several changes about what he knows and what he may or may not know. Malheuresement, I feel that Amir Mann hasn’t done enough to win my sympathy for Reilly and his predicament.

Why has Mann chosen Africa as the site of Reilly’s imprisonment? The Middle East would have been a more timely place for the story to occur,  with the subtext of extraordinary rendition. Mann gave away currency and revelence when he chose to site his drama in Africa.

The Fifth Patient is stylish, timely and relevant film punctuated by an occasional subliminal message/dream-state/flash-back editing style. For all of it’s good looks, director Mann willfully resists competing the protein that would make his film stand out. Perhaps Mann and the studio were trying not to be too on-the-nose with his anti-war statement, but he film loses a lot of potential by opting out of current events.

One other thing that mars this film is over-explanation. They mention that Reilly has been programmed, re-programmed and programmed again. In the plot-holes where Reilly and his alleged wife, Helen (Marley Shelton) are talking about the family life he can’t remember. But a wife and 2.5 kids are the American dream, something that Reilly shouldn’t necessarily question laying claim to. At another point in the script, one of Reilly’s African wardens makes a point about Western arrogance, “Americans are just naïve — I’m a reralist. I realize that sometimes bad things have to happen for the greater good.” The African Prison Warden literally lectures Reilly, the American, on the Realpolitik of the Bush II years. Wow, just wow. Nice swing, but…

During interviews with his wife-apparent (Shelton), Reilly asks Helen whether they have any children and how they met, since he has no memory of them, only her word that she is his wife. Just like John Byrne’s, “Once In a Lifetime”, this scene begged the question, “You may ask yourself, this is not my beautiful house/You may ask yourself this is not my beautiful wife”. This scene comes and goes without apparent significance, but a better director would have forced this scene to hang a bit more significantly because it’s here that writer-director Mann touches down on one of his central themes — identity — and fails to make it a structural component of his drama. Perhaps it’s just this reviewer, but for reasons such as this, it sometimes felt as though it was shot by a director who had overlooked the writer’s intentions.

How did Helen even get to Ngobo in the first place? Did the government of Ngobo just take her identity at face-value when she turned up? Did Ngobo pay for her passage or did the Americans? And the revolving-door of suited white men who were able to gain access to Reilly seemed to defy common sense.

Yet, this film has the courage to investigate the tortuous perils and paranooia of a war we’ve been involved with for the better part of a decade. While the script could suffer a touch-up and some performances be sharpened (a slow-clap towards the end fails me), the cinematography and art direction were solid. I give it a 4/5.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

1. ‘Children of Men’
2. ‘Moon’
3. ‘District 9′
4. ‘A Scanner Darkly’
5. ‘Avatar’
6. ‘Donnie Darko’
7. ‘Star Trek’
8. ‘Minority Report’
9. ‘Cloverfield’
10. ‘Serenity’

CoM, check; Moon, looked good, but it didn’t keep me awake; District 9, not — why South Africa? — and on and on. I am just incapable of becoming excited by most of these titles. Minority Report was interesting because of it’s Philip K. Dick cachet (and the fact that it was made during Bush II) , but very few of those movies had the **umph** of the movies I grew up on. As a child of the ’70s and ’80s, I feel as though I’ve lived a charmed life, given that the following came out during the period that sanned 1979-1989:

‘Alien’ (1979)
‘Altered States’ (1980) ‘The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
‘Blade Runner’ (1982)
‘The Thing’ (1982)
‘Return of the Jedi’ (1983)
‘Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai’ (1984)
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ (1984)
‘Dune’ (1980) ‘Back to the Future’ (1985) ‘Brazil’ (1985)
‘Re-Animator’ (1985)
‘Aliens’ (1986)
‘The Fly’ (1986)
‘Robocop’ (1987)
‘Near Dark (1987)
‘They Live’ (1988)

And I’m still unable to think of a good sf movie for 1989.

Since some of the best sci-fi of the passing decade has occurred on the small screen, I couldn’t resist listing a few television shows, if only because their effect on our pop-culture was indelible. In no particular order:

‘The Man from Earth’ (2007)
‘Children of Men’ (2006)
‘Minority Report’ (2002)
“Firefly”
“Battlestar Galactica”
‘Night Watch’ (2004) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Watch_%282004_film%29
‘Day Watch’ (2007) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_Watch_%28film%29
‘Iron Man’ (2008) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Man_%28film%29
‘X-Men 2′ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men_2_%28movie%29
“Farscape” (1999-2003) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farscape

Many of these moives and shows, I’ve already written about on this site.
Now, none of these entertainments as groundbreaking as any of those eighties movies, but I just needed a place to start this thing.

During the week, I’ll make an attempt to justify my choices, but in the meantime, I’ll ask readers in the audience to recommend their own science-fiction favorites or offer their own recommendations from a faded

Operation Paperclip Nazis working in criminal sanitariums off the coast of Washington State? Mind control? A WWII veteran and widower with PTSD? Visuals by David Lynch.

It’s 1951 in this film and the most unfortunate thing about Shutter Island is that Scorcese and writers Stephen Knight and Laeta Kalogridis decided that it’s okay not to make sense. They decide to just let go. Film is a visual experience and flourishes are flourishes, so why the fuck not? If your local cinemat can affor to spend $750k on a new 3D projection kit, you can sit and watch Martin Scorcese orchestrate some crazy in 2D. On Shutter Island, the Eater Eggs and Red Herrings run thick, wild and free. So wild, that you may want to pause and consider throwing a few back, before deciding which ones you want to take home to eat.

Emily Mortimer is both Rachel Saldano whom Marshals DiCaprio and Ruffalo have been sent  to find, but also a Concentration Camp victim that DiCaprio liberated Dachau back in ’44. Saldano was committed 8 years ago, after she stabbed and drowned her 3 children, but disappeared out of her cell 3 nights ago. DiCaprio and Ruffalo wake up one morning to discover that Saldano has returned.

And then Scorcese lets it all fall away, revealing that DiCaprio is, in fact a Nº 6 and he’s been lured to the island for treatment,  and that he’s apparently murdered his dead wife. It’s a brain teaser.

In the last scenes there’s an uncomfortable acceptance of roles, where DiCaprio and Ruffalo briefly acknowlege the role-playing game they’ve been involved in, before DiCaprio joins the men with the pitforks and shovels (literally!) to take his long walk off a proverbial short pier. Scorcese spares us the pier, but leaves us wondering what kind of mannerist, noir, magic realism thing we’ve just given 137 minutes of our lives to. It’s beautiful and occaisionally sublime to behold, but I somehow suspect Dennis Lahane’s novel makes more sense in print.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

Terry Gilliam attempted to bring ‘Watchmen’ to life twice, once in 1989 and a decade later, in 1999. He gave up because he felt that the story couldn’t be adequately covered in 2 hours’ time and that the material might be better dealt with as a miniseries, Though there is no Gilliam ‘Watchmen’, I credit ‘Watchmen’ and it’s alternate-apocalyptic 1985 for the rich visual landscape of thr film that Gilliam went on to produce in the mid-’90′s, ’12 Monkeys’ (1995).

Moore’s ambivalent heroes were a sea-change for comic book industry back in 1985, but Zack Snyder’s 2009 film stops far, far short of of Moore’s moral revisionism and even further from the Watchmen send-up that was Brad Bird’s ‘The Incredibles‘ (2004).

Anyone attempting to translate Moore’s 12-issue, 264 page graphic novel — a would-be 4-1/2 hours in screenplay-time — into filmed entertainment had a daunting enterprise ahead of them.

Snyder’s ‘Watchmen’ fails as an adaptation because the writers failed to adequately adapt the prosaic storyline to suit the 2-hour commercial format. The David Hayter/Alex Tse screenplay, hews too close to the dramatic beats of the original novel. At full length, those beats have their place because they furnish Moore’s 8 protagonists with engaging backstories, however, even at 166 minutes, the 264 page version of the thing fails to be fully satisfied.My other problem with the movie — besides the length — was the writers’ decision to comp so closely to the comic books’ dialogue and Snyder’s tolerance for some very average performances. I often felt as though the actors were reading their lines off of a teleprompter rather than inhabiting their characters. That and 2009 is not 1986 — people like Chrysler’s Lee Iacocca have neither standing or relevance, 23 years later after Chrysler has been bought, sold and is in the ditch once again. I’m certain that 90% of the cherished 16-24 viewing audience drew a complete blank the movie’s reference to Iacoccoca.

As a fanboy, I generally like to see my favorite stories faithfully reproduced for the screen. However, as an audience member, I saw too many rich characters crowding the screen, only to see their potential wasted. Each and every one of Moore’s Minutemen team were not only superheroes, but also tragic figures, trapped in their own peculiar hells. Silk Spctre (Sally Jupiter) is a 2nd-generation hero, having inherited her title from her mother, Sally Juspeczyk. Similarly, Nite Owl aka Daniel Dreiberg wears the costume of a legendary Silver Age hero. But the most formidable dysfunctions are to be found in the older heroes — Dr. Manhattan, the original Silk Spectre, Ozymandias and the Comedian because their idealism and nostallgia poison their daily lives.

Like Oliver North, The Comedian sees himself as a formidable patriot, despite the fact that his marching orders came from questionable quarters. When the one super-powered being, Jon Osterman, transmigrates into Doctor Manhattan, he leaves his humanity behind.

From my writerly perspective, Watchmen ought to have been Rohrshach’s picture — as with ‘Taxi Driver’, we ought to have had a good long taste of Rohrshach’s daily, hard-luck P.O.V., down to stealing Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl’s beans. The rising action of the Comedian’s death should have allowed Rohrshach to recount his troubled relationship with the man, but deciding to investigate the matter nonetheless.

There was no reason for this movie to run almost 3 hours. If you’ve got 246 pages of comic book script to turn into a movie and only 120 minutes to tell the story, then you’re going to have to cut some pages. Sometimes this happened, but we lost lots of important character development along the way. This is especially tragic because Watchmen is a character-driven piece. Like ‘Rosebud’ in ‘Citizen Kane’ we had an opportunity to see Jon Osterman’s childhood obsession with watches, but that didn’t play out in this film, even though it showed up on ‘Heroes’ (and then, was wasted).

I’m sure that the Snyder’s choices will justify themselves upon the 2nd and 3rd viewing, but the name of the game in moving works of literature into film is adaptation. Though I’m a huge fan of Carla Gugino, they ought to have diminished her role more and given Malin Akerman more space to explore being a 2nd-generation hero and Dr. Manhattan’s forgotten love interest, precisely because the Osterman/Janey Slater subplot doesn’t pay off as well as it does in the book.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Imagine a couple million dollars of filmmaking equipment, and empty studio and several tens of state-of-the-art technicians waiting on some Seattle lawyers, and you get the idea. though the film is a little more substantive than  that.

As someone who’s hasn’t played many video games in the past 20 years and been disappointed by just about every game-to-movie adaptation I’ve seen. ‘District 9′ exceeds all of the expectations I never had for ‘Halo’.

Plot-wise, ‘District’ is sort of novel because it starts with an unlikely premise — technologically advanced extraterrestrials end up marooned here on Earth, living in dire, 3rd world conditions. Strangely enough, these aliens don’t exert their prowess and take-over the planet. Somehow, they end up as an underclass here on Earth, whiling away their time in an aimless barrio in Johannesburg, as poor as any of the former bantustans living off of cat food

Why Joburg? To quote the characters on ABC’s current space-opera, Defying Gravity, “H2IK” — hell if I know. Any other storyteller would use the Joburg location to make a point — about South Africa’s apartheid history, it’s role as a former British colony or Nelson Mandela’s heroism. Unfortunately, that’s just where ‘District 9′ seems to fail. You shouldn’t pull an ornate prop or set-piece out of storage unless it’s going to serve your play in a constructive manner. Here, Johannesburg is just a city, like any other.

With all of the potential that D9‘s dystopia had to offer, it really doesn’t go anywhere. Had D9 been set in Asia somepalce, the film might have played as an metaphor for the money that the West pours into Asia year after year, only to see human rights violations  and hungry children persist.

My understanding is that director Blokamp hails from Joburg and had done a 6-minute science-fiction film, ‘Alive in Joburg‘ (film) back in 2005. ‘District 9′ is an expansion of the AiJ premise.Though the visuals are fairly impressive, I didn’t get the impression that D9 was ever intended to be a game-changer the way that ‘Close Encounters’ and ‘Star Wars’ were. 30 years ago.

Shot for only $30M, the film is a marvel of low-budget, high-end effects, but it’s still too expensive for the SyFy channel. I only wish they’d given the script another 2 weeks, to drive home an enduring story.

Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

While the franchise’s demons, the Cenobytes, appear within the film’s first 5 minutes, we only get a glimpse — they are by no means central to the story. Rather, Pinhead and the Cenobytes are simply the vehicles of hubris:The cenobytes both identify and punish those who are willing to overreach. Though the SciFi Channel insists that all genre movies reveal their creatures within the first 15 minutes, that formula — dictated by commercial requirements — is really irrelevant because ‘Hellraiser’ is an epic drama that circulates around Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence) and her evil stepmother, Julia (Clare Higgins).

Indeed, writer-director Clive Barker waits over an hour to give the audience a good look at the franchise’s signature demons, the Cenobytes, specifically Pinhead. The key antagonists in the first film are really Julia and the posthumous Uncle Frank. Julia wears little makeup, and Frank little skin.

What makes ‘Hellraiser’ an effective and entertaining movie is its emphasis on character and story, rather than makeup.

Uncle Frank rises from the dead at approximately the 20-minute mark, whereupon he marches around for the next 45 minutes fully flayed and in search of skin that can only be acquired vampirically, via the victims that Julia supplies him.

Looking back, ‘Hellraiser’ really was one of the precursors to the big genre franchises that the studios are wont to get ahold of these days — you know, the one-picture spec that turns into the 3 picture franchise-project after box-office receipts cross the $120M mark. Even Mr. Barker is probably surprised that his little million dollar picture spawned seven sequels and warranted a remake.

The remake — due in either 2009 or 2010, depending on where you look — one hopes that Seraphim Films and the Weinstein Company will work toward a 3 picture story-arc and take into into account the many continuity errors of the first two movies, like the Julia-spawning mattress that somehow survived the Dresden-like house fire at the conclusion of the first movie. Though substantial time is spent on a retcon-recap at the beginning of ‘Hellraiser:Hellbound’ (1988) that one would hope that the Weinsteins would choose a capable director and take the LoTR approach.

But the real value of ‘Hellraiser’ lays not so much in its latex prosthetics and stage-blood, but the slow burn of it’s domestic taboo themes: incest, infidelity and lust. It’s not selling her soul to the Devil that’s Julia’s error, it’s her transgressive relationship to brother-in-law Frank that drives her to participate in a Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka-like serial-killing spree, to restore skin to Uncle Frank’s undead sinews. Certainly, the soap operatic Bonnie and Clyde prepending of Hellraiser that makes the first movie so effective, especially when one considers similar movies — Bernard Rose’s ‘Candyman‘ (1992) and Paul W.S. Anderson’s ‘Event Horizon‘ (1997) — and their reasons for relative mediocrity.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

*Actually, the Cenobytes do make an appearance at the 3 minute mark, but it’s dark and ambiguous — the only real concluusions viewers can draw is that they wear leather and are comfortable around medical waste.