Savant's new reviews today are
Screenings this week ... lets' see ... THE VILLAGE was sort of a wash. It wasn't outright ludicrous like SIGNS, but its stinger ending was a weak idea more suited to a 30 minute Twilight Zone show, and even without being tipped off I could see it coming a mile away. In fact, one of my college scripts - and not one of the better ones - was a similar idea. That's a shame because some of the acting and even some of the direction was very nice.
COLLATERAL was another superior Michael Mann show, so nicely put together that I didn't mind Tom too much. It also had a pitifully predictable ending but the moment-by-moment flow of the movie was exciting enough to compensate.
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE was a big disappointment. It's a revamp of the original without a lot of point to it. Although I'm in full accord with the picture's anti War on Terror theme, it doesn't jibe well with a conspiracy plot that has to be made 20 times more complicated than the original Frankenheimer show. The movie comes off as science fiction, with the How requiring so much work, there wasn't much room for any thrills or romance or tension. We just think about how things are shifted from the original and wonder why the ending doesn't mean anything to us. Loved the propaganda, but wasn't excited about the drama.
At the Cinematheque last week I got to see a long wished-for movie, the 1963 Czech IKARIE XB-1, which I saw and loved at age 11 as VOYAGE TO THE END OF THE UNIVERSE. MGM had only one unscreenable print and no negative for the AIP dubbed version so it is probably near to being a lost film now. Besides being in Czech and subtitled, the original movie is a couple reels longer and its story entirely changed around. In the U.S. rehash, the space travellers are revealed at the end to be aliens coming to Earth on a one-way pioneering trip, a ploy repeated in Bava's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES and sort-of repeated in PLANET OF THE APES (well, a little). The derelict space ship they encounter is therefore an alien craft to them.
In the Czech original, the Ikarie is an Earth spaceship on a fifteen-year mission to explore a part of the galaxy, in particular a white planet that might have intelligent life. The derelict space ship is boarded and revealed to be a U.S. craft from 1987, full of dead card-playing capitalists and soldiers who have killed each other to conserve a dwindling oxygen supply. The gas guns used are painted like toys and called "Tigger Fun." There are a lot more dead bodies discovered.
The space travellers are much more individualized, with one leader saddened because his pregnant wife decided not to join him. Another astronaut's baby is on the way and its birth becomes a hopeful event in the finale. I believe the 'astronaut goes mad' and 'sleeping sickness' subplots are reversed in the chronology. A mysterious detail is cleared up; people exchange little sniffer-tubes with nostalgic scents (or something more complex?) from back home: "Ah, the first frost of winter in November..."
The ending is jubilant, spacey and has a sense of wonder that predates 2001: after being saved from the radiation of a black star by a force field projected from the white planet, the space travellers penetrate its atmosphere to be greeted by a city of lights, seen from high above. It was very moving, with more group shots of astronauts reacting. In the AIP recut, the image dissolved to a ratty stock shot of the Statue of Liberty.
The picture is in 'scope B&W. It has some great effects and some not-so-good ones but the human drama and the details of life on the ship are wonderful, as are the spaceship interior designs that remind of 2001 without being as polished. The movie is one of the best outerspace movies ever, and surely the most serious made before Kubrick's film. It appears to have been copied very poorly as SPACEFLIGHT 1C1 a couple of years later.
That's it from Savant this week ... thanks for reading!
Posted by DVD Savant at August 19, 2004 06:24 AM