Dvaldron May 29Th, 2011 12:09 AM
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DValdron May 29th, 2011 12:09 AM The Moontrap Timeline Alright, I'm bored, and I don't feel like getting back to Green Antarctica or Axis of Andes just yet. I'll get to them, I promise. But in the meantime, I want to mess around a bit with a media-based alternative history timeline that includes everything from Total Recall, to Alien, Predator, Mad Max, Escape From New York, Blade Runner, the Hidden, The Last Starfighter, etc. etc. Basically, the notion I want to play with is that most of the 'non-franchise' Science Fiction movies and television of the 80's and 90's, can be fit into an alternate history continuity I call the Gigerverse. (Although arguably, we could call it the Cameronverse, the Ridleyverse, the Shwarzeneggerverse, etc.). The underlying idea is that our Sci Fi visual media, film and television, represented a relatively homogenous view of the future and of the universe and our place in it, which, surprise surprise, reflects where we are now. In the 50's and 60's, Sci Fi was essentially optimistic, the ships were gleaming silver needles, the heroes were establishment men - space pilots and captains, military officers and engineers, at the top of a hierarchical system with that hierarchal system backing them up. The state was a benign thing. The enemy was 'othered'. But by the 80's, that optimism had withered. The Sci Fi that was birthed in the contortions of the 1970's - of Vietnam, Watergate, the near financial crash of New York, of corporate and state malfeasance, and of new environmental awareness was much more battered. Instead of being crack rocketjockeys or square jawed military men, the heroes of this age, Mad Max, Snake Plissken, Deckard were near outcasts or renegades, alienated from authority. And that authority, be it the state or corporation, as Ellen Ripley finds, at best indifferent, and often actively hostile. There's a much more ramshackle build to this universe, more a feeling of palpable decay, from the rusting corridors of the Nostromo, to the decaying rain city of New L.A., to the wrecked landscapes of the Road Warrior or Plissken's New York. As always, the actual number of ideas floating around is far outnumbered by the product - hence, we get a large number of very suspiciously 'Aliens' type creatures, we get dystopian cyberpunk futures, we get lots of analogues of the ill fated crew of the Nostromo, lots of post-holocaust stuff, all freely mixed, matched and borrowed, stolen and recycled. Interestingly, what we find with many of these movies is that their future has become our past. Escape From New York City is set in 1997. Creepozoids in 1998. The Bronx Warrior in 1999. There's apparently been a very limited nuclear war in the 1990's, and massive political and environmental collapse. A lot of movies from this period give very specific calendar dates that we can peg a timeline on. Anyway, so this thread, if I stick with it, is going to be a little bit of timeline, a little bit of 'conspiracy theorist connect the dots' and a fair bit of cockeyed film review. So let's start.... *********************** MOONTRAP Co-starring Bruce Campbell from the Evil Dead, and Walter Koenig from Star Trek and Babylon 5, featuring ancient astronauts, killer robots, zombies and a daring trip to the moon (and a budget of apparently a dollar ninety five), this is a Sci Fi nerd's wet dream. I'm always surprised it didn't get spun into a franchise or at least a TV series, particularly given the sort of crap that often did get spun. Okay, here's the story: Bruce and Walter (and I don't care about their character names, they'll always be the B & W) play space shuttle pilots who are bored with being glorified bus drivers and pine for the wild days. Well, there's a chinese curse that warns about getting what you asked for... Because no sooner do they curse the tranquility, when out of the darkness comes a spaceship the size of a frigging ocean liner. Yowza. Even bigger yowza, it turns out to be derelict, its been drifting for thousands, tens of thousands of years. And its current orbit is its last one, after that, it gives a big french kiss to Mister Sun. Well, that means that there's nothing for it but for our heroes to check it out, its the one and only chance. Anyway, they go aboard, its really creepy and disturbing, nice sense of the haunted old house, and of course, there's the big fake scare - in the sense that they stumble across a corpse in a space suit and a pod, both apparently inanimate. Figuring that souvenirs would be nice, and not a T-shirt in sight, they take the corpse and pod back with them. And its when they get back to Earth that we get our first sign of the budget shining through. NASA apparently consists of six guys, including our heroes, and NASA facilities appear to be some hallways, a commissary with vending machines, and one small multi-purpose lab. Bummer. And it was going so good up to that point. And this is the problem, the movie's ambitions continually outstrip its budget. Ironically, its at its worst the closer we get to regular life on earth. But then, that sort of makes sense - the outre outer space stuff, no one really knows, so they can fake their way through it. It's the down to earth stuff that catches them up. We've had 40 years of television of huge banks of NASA computer and space shuttle operators, the vast infrastructures of the space program, the cyclopean structures and armies of personnel, the rigorous bureaucracy. This is ingrained in us, its what we expect. So when we get a NASA that consists of a sparse handful of people, empty halls and shabbily dressed offices, where a couple of space shuttle jockeys are able to talk their way into a moon launch.... well, we just don't buy it. But never mind, I love this movie and I'll forgive that. You should too. Anyway, at this point, the next plot development kicks in. Remember how I said that the corpse and the pod were inanimate? Well, turns out, that's true for only one. The corpse stays a corpse. The pod wakes up, takes a look around, and immediately hacks its way into the computer systems. Now, here's a nice touch. Exposition is the death of literature. Of movies, novels, television. There's always that moment when the plot grinds to a dead halt so characters can explain to each other things that they already know, in order to dump info on the audience. But here, its handled cleverly. Instead of Walter and Bruce explaining things to each other, or some droning lab coat giving a report to a general, its snuck in through the back door. The pod, hacking into the mainframe, searches out the files on itself and the alien corpse. We discover: 1) The alien corpse is human, space suit and all, looks a little russion. 2) The alien corpse is 15,000 years old. 3) Backtracking the derelict ships orbit 15,000 years, gives us an origin point on the moon. After sussing things out, the pods sprouts a whole lot of tentacles, and much waving occurs. Cut to our heroes. Anyway, the next thing we know, our boys are rushing down a corridor, and they encounter an eight foot hulking thing. It's the corpse of the alien astronaut hulked out. Well, borged out. It's actually the pod, which has used the corpse and everything else it could get its tentacles on, computer parts, lab equipment, office supplies, etc., to construct itself a walking platform. So it turns out, this pod is actually the alien McGyver. There's a brief moment when NASA's scientist... Yes, NASA has one scientist. One. Sorry, ....when NASA's scientist tries to communicate with it in the spirit of interstellar brotherhood. It's a straight quote from Howard Hawk's 'The Thing.' But this time, the scientists realizes its hostile and yells to blast the hell out of it. Nerd humour, I bet it went over huge at the Star Trek convention. Pod/Zombie monster gets blown to smithereens. Which is okay, because frankly, it was pretty tosh. Again, its one of those moments where the budget shines through. Easy enough to write "Terrifying amalagamation of corpse and mechanical components dripping menace..." in a script. But then, when it comes down to actual production design, there's only so much time, and so much budget, and once you've got a contraption built its almost impossible for the stunt man inside or the puppetteers outside to move the damned thing, so it looks like crap and it moves like an arthritic nun. Now, in a bigger budget movie, a Ridley Scott or a James Cameron would just tear it up and send the production design team back to their drawing boards to try again and again until they come up with something that doesn't look like cobbled together shit. Or find a way to shoot around it so that you think you're seeing a lot more than they're showing. Or, if you've got a production team which is either brilliant or lucky, and both Scott and Cameron started out as production designers, so they had a knack for the visual side of things, they'll get it right first time out.