Category / Science Fiction

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Battle Royale (2001)

THE ZONE has my review of  Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale: Director’s Cut, which has recently been re-released on DVD.

My review attempts to localise Battle Royale within a dystopian tradition which, it seems to me, is peculiarly Japanese. What distinguishes Battle Royale from many dystopian fictions starring plucky teenagers is that the film uses every possible opportunity to mock and ridicule the suffering of its teenaged scapegoats. Indeed, while writers in this tradition are quick to point the finger at governments that blame the young for social problems, works in this tradition also pour scorn on the youth that allow themselves to be victimised:

Again and again, Japanese genre writers depict modern Japan as a hellish place where the old lash out against the youth in ignorance, fear and hatred but the youth refuse to organise and refuse to do anything about their treatment thereby suggesting that no matter how immoral these old people might be, they are not entirely wrong about Japan’s passive, consumerist youth.

The ways in which Fukasaku mocks and trivialises his teenaged characters feeds directly into my one serious complaint about this re-edition: Was a Director’s Cut really necessary?

by Jonathan M

X-Men: First Class (2011) – Better Without The Class

Living in the second decade of the 21st Century, it is difficult for us to cast our minds back and to recall the shocking novelty of Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000). Up until that point, super hero films tended not to take place in the real world. Tim Burton’s Gotham City was a gothic masterpiece unlike anything on Earth while Richard Donner’s Metropolis seemed resistant to any changes in political culture that might stem from having a super-powered alien enforcing city by-laws. Prior to the release of X-Men, the politics of super hero cinema tended to follow the politics of super hero comics in so far as they existed solely at the level of sub-text. Sure, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original X-Men was about racism and prejudice but those themes only emerged over time and Lee never took the risk of embarking on the sort of direct social commentary that might come from confronting his mutants with real-world events.  This was, after all, the 60s…

By opening X-Men with a sequence involving a young mutant who uses his magnetic powers to bend the gates of a Nazi death camp, Singer elevated comic book politics from subtext to foreground. When American politicians planned to register all mutants, Singer was absolutely clear that this was a form of xenophobic fascism.  When the parents of a mutant asked if their son had tried not being a mutant, Singer was absolutely clear that anti-mutant prejudice was akin to homophobia, racism and anti-Semitism. Bryan Singer’s X-Men films were not mere fantasies… they were stories about our broken and distorted world.

By the time Brett Ratner directed X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), much of the politics of the original film had drained away leaving only hot babes in tight outfits and dull whirlwinds of CGI presented with the same blend of hollow psychobabble and Christian imagery that pervades most super hero films. Five years later, the franchise is resurrected under the creative control of Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman, the pairing who brought us the somewhat uneven Kick Ass (2010).  Moving from script to cinema in less than a year and with a creative partnership not known for either its creativity or its political engagement, X-Men: First Class had a steep slope to climb and while the finished product is far from flawless, the film does boast a level of intelligence and political thoughtfulness that is vanishingly rare in a genre whose recent successes include the dunderheaded Thor (2011) and the hyperactive Iron Man 2 (2010).

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by Jonathan M

Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit… Stripp’d

Gestalt Mash have my column on Matoro Mase’s manga serial Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit.

My column draws on the first six volumes of what will be an eight volume run if Viz Media do actually translate the entire series.  Set in an alternate version of contemporary Japan, the series is about a society that has decided to force its population to make the most of life by killing one citizen in every thousand at random.  The series examines this ideas from two different perspectives; on the one hand, it examines the psychological impact of the death sentences on the victims and their families while, on the other hand, exploring what the effects of this policy are on the Japanese body politic.  The result is a series of graphic novels that paint exquisitely detailed pictures of human grief and suffering whilst also slowly creating the impression that such a society is monstrous and must be overthrown:

Death has the power not just to end lives, but also to change them. It can change them for the better by prompting people to make changes, and it can change things for the worse by fostering a crippling sense of futility and loss. Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit is an exploration of the tension between these two reactions to the revelation that we too shall someday be no more.

The series has also spawned a film adaptation, which I also wrote about a little while ago for Videovista.

by Jonathan M

BG 39 – Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story: High School, Privacy and Blended Identity

Futurismic have my latest Blasphemous Geometries column.

This month’s column is about Christina Love’s latest indie game Don’t Take it Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story, which can be downloaded for free on a variety of platforms.

Set in a weirdly Japan-ised American Highschool in 2027, the game explores issues of identity and social media.  As I suggest in the column, the game is best played as a companion piece to Love’s previous game, the equally excellent Digital: A Love Story, which I wrote about a little while ago. Together, the two games tackle the process of putting oneself online and interacting with other online souls from quite starkly diffing perspectives.

PS: In the article, I mention a paper by Andrea Baker called “Mick or Keith: blended identity of online rock fans”, it can be downloaded (for free) HERE.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Death Notice: Ikigami (2008)

Videovista have my review of Deah Notice: Ikigami, Tomoyuki Takimoto’s adaptation of Motoro Mase’s manga Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit:

There is something profoundly refreshing about Death Notice because not only does it seek to tug the heart-strings rather than quicken the pace, it also tugs the heart-strings in a way that displays a real depth of insight into the human condition and the different ways in which we face death. Each of Death Notice‘s episodes functions as a delicious and perfectly contained capsule of loss, grief and hope in the face of death.

In fact, I enjoyed the film so much that I went out and purchased a few volumes of the manga.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Monsters (2010)

Videovista has my review of Gareth Edwards’ low-budget science fiction film Monsters:

The ‘big idea’ behind Monsters is that instead of fearing the alien and trying to isolate ourselves from the ‘other’, we should be opening ourselves up to its strangeness by looking at it with an open mind and an open heart. Edwards initially makes us fear the creatures by drawing upon our fears of terrorism, immigration, chemical weapons and third world squalor. However, he then makes us come to appreciate the innate beauty of the creatures and, in so doing, suggests that there may be some beauty to be found in the things that we, as a culture, fear the most.

Easily one of the best science fiction films in recent memory, Monsters was (of course) absent from the recently released Hugo award shortlist for Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form thereby raising the question, yet again, of what point the award actually serves beyond reminding the world that Hugo voters know fuck all about film.

by Jonathan M

Limitless (2011) – Mega Mega White Thing

They say that cocaine can make a good man great.

The also say that it can make him into a tedious jabbering fool.

These things are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

One of the more intriguing sequences in Charles Ferguson’s Oscar-winning documentary about the credit crunch Inside Job (2010) reveals that, prior to the crash, a number of New York brokerage houses and management consultancies allowed their employees to pay for sex on their company credit cards. Ferguson uses this revelation to add a tinge of decadence to his depiction of Wall Street institutions but it also raises the question of a degree of kinship between betting large amounts of other people’s money and a lifestyle littered with cocaine and high-class escorts. Ferguson hand-waves this association with some waffling about pleasure centres in the brain but what if the link is not neurology but a question of peer groups? Are the sort of people who tend to do well in banking also the sort of people who tend to enjoy coke and hookers? Does a fondness for coke and hookers mark financial executives out as ‘our sort of chap’?

Neil Burger’s Limitless is a science fiction film about a man who discovers a drug that unlocks the untapped potential of his brain. Initially a struggling science fiction writer, the film’s protagonist soon morphs into the sort of arrogant, swaggering, bollock-talking bell-end that seem to dominate the world’s financial institutions and, as long as he keeps taking the pills, there’s a good chance that this particular bell-end will wind up President.

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by Jonathan M

BG 38 – Sucker Punch: Video Games and The Future of the Blockbuster

Futurismic have my 38th Blasphemous Geometries column.

The column is one part review of Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch to one part examination of the nature of blockbusters to one part analysis of trends in popular culture and the way in which video games are coming to replace super heroes as the blockbuster genre medium of choice (hence the length):

Sucker Punch mirrors the growing intertextuality of the video game experience by having Baby Doll shift seamlessly between the reality of the game, the reality of the brothel and the reality of the insane asylum. However, what makes Sucker Punch such an interesting film is not the fact that it displays an impressively detailed understanding of video game aesthetics, but rather the way in which it uses these images and techniques to attempt to create a cinematic effect.

by Jonathan M

Universal War One… Stripp’d

Gestalt Mash have the second issue of Stripp’d, my monthly column looking at translated comic series.

Written and drawn by Denis Bajram and released in two volumes by Marvel, Universal War One begins as a Dirty Dozen in Spaaaaace story but, once the characters are bedded down and the theme of redemption is introduces, Bajran starts to mess with the gonzo knobs, slowly ramping up the epic and the fantastical until the series ends in a widescreen expose of man’s unparalleled hubris. I enjoyed it quite a bit… it’s silly.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole (2010)

Videovista has my review of Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Kathryn Lasky’s Legend of the Guardians.

Despite really liking Zack Snyder as a director, I thought this film was absolutely terrible.  Though, to be fair, Snyder’s direction is the best thing about it. Here’s a taste of my review:

Snyder is shamelessly misanthropic and perfectly adapted to a cultural climate where the individual is king and the king is assumed to be a complete cunt. His exquisite fetishisation of violence, his love of gore and grue, his spirals of death and destruction are not just an expression of a personal philosophy, they are a coherent and beautiful directorial vision. Zack Snyder speaks to the miserable, lank-haired, compulsively masturbating homunculus in all of us, but while the singularity and power of this vision has won him a legion of fan-boys, it also makes him a somewhat poor choice for making a children’s film about owls.