2010 – The Year We Make Contact

I'm going to commit a few, unforgiveable, burn-me-at-the-stakes heresies here.

This is another of the sequels that is better than the original.

“How can you say that” you ask, as you stack the wood up and soak it in oil. “How can this workmanlike picture starring hammy old scrotum Roy Schneider be better than Kubrick's mindblowing spectacle.”

The truth is, very easily. Everyone likes 2001, because it is Kubrick, because it has got some spectacular visuals, but because IT IS A FILM YOU MUST LIKE IN ORDER TO LOOK INFORMED – AND OF COURSE, COOL.

This is bullshit. Hardly anyone really likes hard sci fi, and this movie is leaden with it. The film essentially boils down to:

Act 1 – Monkey's throw sticks at each other (witness opening of Star Wars Holiday Special for similar Simian grunting fun). For ages.

Act 2 – Endlessly praised match cut leads into hours of boring space ship stuff set to music by proto Nazis. The most noteworthy event here is a man visiting a toilet upside down.

Act 3 – Two very wooden astronauts do very dull things while watching themselves on “BBC12”. Computer eventually gets so fed up it kills everyone until its building block brain is removed.

Act 4 – Man goes down cool space tunnel while eerie Ligeti music plays; eventually he meets an older version of himself with a face covered in plasticene.

The End.

2010 has some cool spaceships, fantastic sequences involving aero braking around Jupiter, a bit of action, some hard sci fi elements that aren't as dry as dust, Helen Mirren, and John Lithgow playing a homosexual space engineer – this element of his character however is excised from the movie, although it is explicit in the book. OK it also has terrible voiceover exposition from Schneider, a horrible hokey cold war plot, and Helen Mirren doing a terrible Russian accent even though she is Russian while other members of the cast opt for Mr Chekov style “Nuklee-ar Wessels” tomfoolery.

But at least things happen!!! It doesn't bore the arse off you. 2001 is the world's most boring film ever, making Solaris look like Toy Story, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar.

And what other sci fi film can boast having a future Queens of the Stone Age keyboard player in the cast?

The young Natasha Scheider in 2010

And here with QOTSA for "Lullabies to Paralyse"

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18.04.14

Computers! Our Abusers!

Currently watching the ever glorious Horror Channel, and a peculiar film called “Holocaust 2000” - starring Kirk Douglas, Simon Ward, and some variably dubbed Euro types.

I've missed most of it, and what I'm seeing I don't understand. But it appears that Kirk is beset with the problem of a son who isn't really his, but some kind of anti-Christ with an unborn demon son, and an all powerful computer tended by an eventually bisected Anthony Quayle.

A film full of rip offs from the Omen, Demon Seed, and Rosemary's Baby with a gentle dusting of The Medusa Touch, it is evidently entirely awful, and along with Saturn 3 shows where Kirk Douglas' career had ended up by the late 1970s. But more pertinently, it's a film that seems to show one of our obsessions of the time; the evil computer.

Now computers were commonplace in media, if not the home, by 1977, and most of the time were portrayed as inanimate clusters of metal filing cabinets the size of Belize, with huge reels of 3M magnetic tape whirring endlessly around. They generally failed to solve crimes, and ran nuclear power stations not terribly well, but their failings were without malice.

But other films portrayed other kinds of computers, computers hell bent on making our lives a misery. HAL9000 in 2001 (made in 1968) was merely mentally ill, a machine who's murderous condition was brought about by its human programmers seeking to conceal the information the computer felt its raison d'etre was to explore and reveal. But the Colossus of the Forbin Project from 1970 was a tyrant – a machine that felt it was far more capable of running the world than its pitiful human creators – capable of rape, and worse still in the context of the times, collaborating with its Soviet counterpart in oppression.

1977's Demon Seed brought us Proteus, another insemination obsessed intelligence with an ability to charm Julie Christie out of her nightdress with only minimal force before beheading folk with its Rubik snake physical form. Rollerball featured a semantic computer controlled by a bumbling Ralph Richardson, and even Superman 3 got in on the act, with an Atari influenced supercomputer destroying the world to save us from any more Richard Pryor movies.

The true mark of the evil computer is that it must not look like a computer. It is a visual cue to the viewer than any humble 16K tape trundler the weight of a Black Hole isn't going to do any harm. The demon computers, the demon seeds, must not look like a computer. They must be huge rotating crystals, or pillars of light like a Jean Michel Jarre concert, a giant metal skyscraper, or if you think about it, an enormous machine city powered by shaved headed beefcake actors covered in the slimy stuff you find in pork pies.

They must not be familiar, because no familiar machine can be worshipped like a god by humans who don't actually realise they are doing that. The computer is a tool, and an altar.

Copyright Bloody Mulberry 18/09/2013