Old Yorker

  • Prometheus

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ridley Scott (2012)

    There are some remarkable things to look at in Prometheus but, in a big-budget science-fiction movie, that’s no more surprising than the fact that there’s sound (and even if Prometheus did cost some $100m less than Avatar, according to Wikipedia).   Although it may seem unfair to take the technical wizardry for granted in this way, it’s a striking feature of these sci-fi epics that a lot of thought and talent goes into the CGI realisation of the world of the story and a lot of screen time is then spent annihilating people and things in that world, as elaborately and as often as possible.  I’m sure the film-makers don’t see it this way but I like to think that partly reflects their recognition of the grandiose vacuity of what they’ve created.  Prometheus, written by Jon Spaihts and Damon Lindelof, is reckoned to be a kind of prequel to Alien:  ending with the appearance of a jagged-toothed alien-like creature may therefore not presage a follow-up in the way it looks to do.  But since this is the seventh entry in the Alien franchise (counting the two Alien vs Predator movies) it would take a brave man to bet against an eighth.  I walked out of the first Alien film and I’ve not seen any of the sequels but, although Prometheus is mostly tedious, I never felt I wasn’t going to see it through.  What forced me out of the cinema in 1979 was annoyance that the notoriously shocking moments in Alien depended on the creation of images that were physically repulsive rather than terrifying at a deeper level.  I’m not sure Ridley Scott has developed much in the more than thirty years since then:  Prometheus has plenty of throbbing tentacular organisms and gory ventral eruptions.  I don’t know whether to be relieved or depressed that this time I not only stayed put but laughed when the archaeologist heroine, Elizabeth Shaw, managed to abort the alien foetus inside her and it emerges, bulbous and gloppy, from her innards.

    I went to see Prometheus for two reasons:  (a) the attention and audiences it’s getting; (b) Michael Fassbender.  He plays a robot called David with platinum blonde hair and a bone-white complexion.  At first, I wondered whether David’s android nature would be distinguishable enough from the humanoid clichés who are his companions on the spaceship ‘Prometheus’ for Fassbender’s performance to work.  I needn’t have worried.   By the end – and especially after his head has been wrenched off his body but carries on talking and thinking regardless – Fassbender’s David is much more vivid a personality than anyone else around.  This is partly because Ridley Scott struggles to bring human beings to convincing life at the best of times but mostly thanks to the actor – even though most of what Fassbender’s given to say isn’t up to much.  David, although he has a stupendous brain, is treated as a servant by the other crew members and his valet-ish lines are particularly mouldy.  Early on, David watches a clip of Peter O’Toole (sharing a scene with Harry Fowler, who died earlier this year) in Lawrence of Arabia.  The moment has partly the same charge as the excerpt from Hello, Dolly! in WALL-E – a reminder of distant civilisation.  But David isn’t just watching:  he’s imitating the way O’Toole speaks his lines and it’s clear this is what Fassbender is doing too.  (The T E Lawrence hair colouring is also a persistent reminder of the connection.)  He is resiliently witty playing this non-character – both in the way he speaks and in how he makes the physical design of David entertaining.  (The other thing that’s slightly comical about Fassbender here is noticing, which I hadn’t before, that his legs are rather short in relation to his trunk.)

    As Meredith Vickers, the spaceship’s control freak of a mission director, Charlize Theron has an amusing emotionless hauteur and is almost colour co-ordinated with Fassbender.  When the ship’s plain-speaking captain (Idris Elba, pretty good) asks Vickers if she’s a robot too, he’s sarcastically voicing the question that must be on the audience’s mind from the moment Theron opens her mouth.  It’s slightly disappointing that she and Fassbender aren’t two of a kind – in spite of the fact that Meredith turns out to be the daughter of the geriatric CEO of the company that finances the ‘Prometheus’ mission (in the hope that – if I understood this right – what it discovers will prevent his impending death) and this old man (Guy Pearce, under hyper-wrinkly make-up) has said that David ‘is the closest to a son that I’ll ever have’.  Without her Lisbeth Salander make-up, Noomi Rapace as Elizabeth Shaw looks more human than in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.  In fact, she looks rather wholesome and ordinary and, although she expends a lot of physical energy in what’s in effect the Ripley role, her acting is pretty ordinary too.  The same goes for Logan Marshall-Green as Elizabeth’s doomed boyfriend.   The other crew members include Sean Harris and Rafe Spall:  it would be nice to see these two breaking into the Hollywood big time here – if they were recognisable, which they’re not.  Kate Dickie is also on board, surrounded by a very different set of surveillance cameras from the ones in Red Road.  Patrick Anderson appears in a brief clip as the child Elizabeth’s father.

    As with most big sci-fi movies, Prometheus is more concerned with technology than with ideas.   Its admirers will claim that, on the contrary, it deals with important themes – where do human beings come from, does life as we know it exist elsewhere in the universe? – but these questions are used only to fuel the plot, not in any more substantial way, even though characters keep mentioning them.  Although I had only a vague idea of what was happening – every so often someone on screen will exclaim ‘What the hell is going on down there?!’ or ‘What she’s talking about?!’ and I could sympathise in these moments – the tone and movement of the film made me confident this didn’t matter.  It’s spectacular in a turgid way and there are no surprises in the way that it proceeds.  (The music by Marc Streitenfeld is entirely generic – so is Scott’s use of it.)  To be fair, it would be hard for this movie to please me.  Not only is it science fiction, it concerns two kinds of pursuit – exploration of space and archaeology – which bore me rigid in real life.  Near the end of Prometheus, when the vessel has been destroyed and everyone else on the extraterrestrial Time Team is dead, Elizabeth tells David’s head she wants to go back to the homeland of the ‘Engineers’ (humanity’s progenitors) – ‘They created us, then they tried to destroy us.  I need to know why they changed their mind’.  (Or words to that effect.)  ‘What would be the point of that?’ asks David.  ‘I need to know’, Elizabeth insists, ‘I’m a human being and you’re a robot.  That’s the difference between us – I need to know’.  The moral of the story of Prometheus seems to be there’s a lot to be said for being a robot and especially if he’s Michael Fassbender.

    10 June 2012

  • Pinocchio

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ben Sharpsteen, Hamilton Luske[1] (1940)

    One of the very few books I still have from early childhood is a hardback copy of Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio (first published in 1883).  The book has a home-made dustjacket of brown paper with my name and address handwritten on the front cover – I’d guess when I was seven or eight.  I don’t recall getting the book and I suspect it wasn’t mine:  inside it, my brother has written his name and our address too.  It looks like Steve’s handwriting from his early teens.  He was probably, tactfully, reminding me that the book really belonged to him but wasn’t inclined to fight to retrieve it.  This is an advantage of being the youngest child by a few years:  by the time you appropriate your siblings’ possessions they’ve grown out of them.  Yet in spite of taking the trouble to claim ownership, I’m not sure I ever read The Adventures of Pinocchio or that, until yesterday, I’d ever seen the classic Disney film in its entirety – as distinct from clips across decades of BBC Disney Time compilations at Christmas and Easter.

    The opening of Pinocchio has Cliff Edwards (Jiminy Cricket) singing ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ after a celestial choir intro.  The credits give way to shots of an antique-looking edition of Collodi’s book (with, on the shelf behind it, volumes of ‘Peter Pan’ and ‘Alice in Wonderland’ – both forthcoming Disney attractions).  I was all ready to be sentimentally nostalgic.  My mood had changed, a few minutes later, on completion of the tour of the workshop of the woodcarver Geppetto.  The surrounding Tuscan landscape is beautiful and the lighted windows of Geppetto’s house, which we first see with Jiminy Cricket from the outside looking in, are greatly welcoming.  Inside, however, the place is full of comical clocks and waggish automata; Figaro isn’t quite a cat or a kitten but a sort of dwarf feline; and Geppetto’s goldfish Cleo bats long eyelashes and has pouty lips.  As is often the case in Disney, the external world is invested with an enchanting, sometimes menacing quality – the images are supercharged picture-book illustrations.  He and his animators realise ingeniously their complete understanding of the essence of movement of particular animals or natural phenomena (in Pinocchio, for example, the lapping of sea on the sand after Geppetto and his household have escaped from the belly of a whale).  But many of the living creatures on planet Disney make you queasy.

    I didn’t like the look of Pinocchio (voiced by Dickie Jones) either before or after the Blue Fairy brought him to life – although there’s no denying that you empathise with him enough to be horrified by the nose he grows when he tells lies.  (It eventually extends to a branch in bloom with a bird’s nest full of fledglings.)  The story must have presented a particular challenge to the Disney team:  they had first to animate the inanimate before finally humanising Pinocchio, once he’s proved himself, through the courage and altruism he shows, as a ‘real boy’.  The scheme of metamorphosis in the film is, in some other instances, more complex and more worrying.  The ne’er-do-well boys who go to Pleasure Island are eventually transformed into jackasses, to be sent to work in salt mines or perform in circuses.   It’s upsetting enough to see them grow donkey ears, hooves and tail; when the Coachman who transports the boys to the island yells at one of the semi-morphed creatures that he isn’t yet a proper jackass because he can still do more than bray, this momentary reminder of the real order of things is jolting.  You think:  why shouldn’t a donkey speak, when a cricket and a fox have just been talking and singing?  The magical being that is the Blue Fairy, who grants wishes made upon the wishing star in the night sky, is the most humanoid in terms of physique, hairdo and voice (by Evelyn Venable) – all of which combine to turn her into a Hollywood star of the period.

    If I ever did see Pinocchio as a child, I think I’d have been taken with the classy, composed Blue Fairy.  I’d have been troubled – I was even yesterday – by the comic humiliation of the vulpine ‘Honest’ John Worthington Foulfellow (Walter Catlett), inflicted inadvertently by his dim (mute) alley-cat sidekick, Gideon.  It’s probably a legacy of being impressed, like Jemima Puddleduck, by Beatrix Potter’s sandy-whiskered gentleman in a frock coat.  Anyway, I felt embarrassed for Honest John when Gideon’s sledgehammer trapped the fox’s head inside his own top hat.  The actor’s life offered to Pinocchio by disreputable Honest John is a more specific temptation than the attractions of Pleasure Island.  I’m certain I’d have seen a place devoted to all-lads-together self-indulgence as purgatory.  I’d rather have gone to school and read books than played hookey and games so the moral lesson of Pinocchio would have been lost on me.  (It does seem to be a lesson for boys rather than for children generally – although, when the delinquent Lampwick shows Pinocchio how to shoot pool and smoke cigars on Pleasure Island, this idea of corrupted youthful behaviour brought to mind C S Lewis’s (later) illustration, in the last of the Narnia books, of how girls go wrong:  Susan Pevensie is dismissed from the fulfilment of the Christian story, and presumably loses out on Heaven, once she’s interested in lipstick and nylons.)

    The moralising is underpinned by humorous but persistent xenophobia in the characterisation of Stromboli, the man who runs the travelling puppet show, and the Dutch, French and Russian marionette dance acts that feature on the bill.  It’s no coincidence that Pinocchio’s conscience, Jiminy Cricket, is the most straightforwardly and unpretentiously American voice to be heard but Cliff Edwards does make it likeable.  I felt comfortable with the visualisation of Jiminy too – perhaps because I don’t have a clue what an actual cricket looks like.   The song score by Leigh Harline and Ned Washington has achieved deserved longevity.  The soundtrack of only five numbers includes, as well as (the Oscar-winning) ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’, ‘Give a Little Whistle’, ‘Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee’ and ‘I’ve Got No Strings’.  The relatively unremembered song is ‘Little Wooden Head’, sung by Geppetto (Christian Rub).   I wonder if the ‘Worthington’ in Honest John’s name was inspired by Noel Coward’s warning against the stage, released in 1935?

    1 March 2015

    [1] Sharpsteen and Luske are named on IMDB and by Wikipedia as the film’s ‘supervising directors’, among Walt Disney’s seven-strong directing team for the film.

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