The sci-fi genre seems to have more than its share of B-movies. You can watch all of the very best A-list sci-fi epic movies ever made in a single weekend, and not even stay up late doing it. But you can spend the rest of your life watching the not-so-good ones, and so it is wise to develop a taste for them. In my thirst for science fictional goodness, I have done exactly that.
Not all B-movies are created equal, however. There are many different varieties. Some are failed blockbusters, who somehow manage to be less than the sum of their parts…like a really great cake recipe that still manages to taste bland, somehow. Others are one trick ponies, who seem to exist for the sake of a single plot twist or action sequence, but bore the viewer to tears getting there (cough, cough, pod race). Many are simply guilty pleasure exploitation films, justifying their existence with slavering bug-eyed monsters and scream queens clad in impressively skimpy spacewear. And a tragic number of them are simply schlock, hastily slapped together by low-budget studios who have learned that any movie can make money if you keep the costs down, because we really are a lazy, couch-dwelling species who will watch anything that moves if we are bored enough.
But my favorite kind of b-movie is the sincere and heartfelt effort of a filmmaker who lacks the budget…or the talent…to bring his vision to the big screen. (Ed Wood was one of those filmmakers. Ed had neither money nor talent, but he had a dream, and thanks to his efforts we can enjoy some of the most delightfully bad cinema in sci-fi history.)
Which brings us to Humanity’s End. Humanity’s End is far from being a great movie, but what it lacks in polish it more than makes up for in enthusiasm. Most director’s, when confronted with a limited budget, will take a page from Roger Corman’s playbook and tell a story that manages to isolate a small group of people on a single set. But not Neil Johnson. Neil decided to damn the space torpedoes and shoot a galaxy spanning epic with enough explosions to make Michael Bay jealous. And even if its shoestring budget shows in places…the giant space armadas soaring over alien armies that never seem to have more than ten soldiers, the air force surplus g-suits and discarded star trek convention costumes, the space battleships that look suspiciously like they were built from cannibalized submarine model kits…it still rivals the efforts of more expensive efforts created with far less love. In fact, love is the Achilles heel of this particular flick. It quickly becomes obvious that this film is its creator’s magnum opus, and he has tried perhaps a bit TOO hard to cram every story idea he had into much too small a space, and the movie nearly collapses under the weight of endless exposition. Fortunately, the cast is both endearing and talented, the special effects guy overachieving, and the explosions abundant, so the pacing never falters too badly. (If you want to see a movie talk itself to death, see Disney’s Tron sequel)
The only fly in the ointment for me was the film’s soundtrack, which made me want to stuff Playdough in my ears after five minutes. What was intended, no doubt, to be an inspiring choral that evoked a sense of timeless mystery reappeared so often that it made me feel like I was being stalked by Christmas carolers whose Risperdal prescription had just run out. But aside from that, I enjoyed the film. I was never bored (except, perhaps, by the overlong exposition in the very beginning), and ultimately entertained, by a low budget film that never resorted to a single bug-eyed monster or bare boob. That is an accomplishment many a Syfy channel movie could envy.
In my last Transformers review, I equated the Giant Hasbro Robot moviegoing experience with being shoehorned into a rock tumbler and allowed to roll down the ancient stones of one of the pyramids of Giza, with popcorn. This third cashgrab in the franchise provides a similar ravaging of the senses, but in a much more enjoyable way. The movie makes excellent use of the third dimension at every opportunity, and seldom slows down long enough for anyone to get bored. In the few moments grudgingly surrendered to character building, the moment you begin to suspect there is only enough plot to fill a teacup, the cup itself is smashed into a million pieces beneath the flaming wreckage of an unlucky autobot and hurled at you so convincingly that you are forced to duck. The laughs are genuine, the acting less so, and the physics simultaneously ridiculous and completely believable. In a day and age when amazing visual effects have become commonplace, this unrelenting assault on your eyeballs from all three dimensions still manages to impress.
The reason for this is visible in the credits, as the same crew and whiz-bang process that produced the 3D visuals in Avatar was used to conjure up the machine-made mayhem that threatens to leap off the screen and pulverize the first three rows of your local theater. This will be a future Blu-Ray demo disk for owners of 3D flatscreens.
It is not without its shortcomings, however. The biggest disappointment for moviegoers will likely be the absence of Megan Fox, whose lovely lips managed to get her ousted from the franchise by speaking more of the truth than Hollywood likes to hear. Very little in the way of explanation is offered for her character’s absence, but her replacement is curvaceous enough that any lingering questions the audience may have are long forgotten by the time the camera finishes the sightseeing crawl up her neverending legs. While off-the-shelf lingerie model Rosie Huntington Whiteley lacks Megan’s charisma, she has more curves than the Burma road and is impressively capable of prancing over fallen rocks in 6-inch stilletos, so she slips easily into the limited role director Michael Bay had envisioned for his female lead. (One of the sources of contention between the directors and Fox had been her discomfort with being a sexy action figure in the Hasbro playhouse). Sadly, that role is not as endearing as the one that came before, and she seems less dimensional than her robot adversaries.
In total, this year’s Giant City-Smashing Robot movie is little different from last year’s Giant City-Smashing Robot Movie, in the sense that patrons silly enough to show up expecting Shakespeare will be bitterly disappointed. However, if you are like me, and are simply looking for the kind of colorful, near-apocalyptic destruction that we used to have to import from Japan, then you will most likely leave the cinema with a throbbing headache and a smile on your face, because Dark of the Moon delivers it in spades. While it can’t really rival the original in any particular department other than the third dimension, it certainly eclipses the sequel, and offers more than enough popcorn-munching fun to justify wearing the silly glasses for two and and a half bladder-busting hours. (Although it is highly unlikely that you will miss a crucial plot point at any given moment you leave for the bathroom, you WILL miss at least fifty car crashes, fourteen explosions and four gee whiz moments, one of which will involve whatever Rosie is wearing. So buy the small drink.)
Screenwriters of Hollyweird have long known that the best way to resolve a dramatic problem is to blow it up. It neatly wraps up the story by delegating any lingering plot holes or ethical issues to the fire department, and gives the pre-adolescent pyromaniac in all of us a happy. Science fiction cinema has always been on the bleeding edge of the explosive climax…perhaps because, as any schoolboy knows, the most fun you can have with a model when you are done building it is to blow it up…so I thought I’d take a minute to pay homage to some of the finer fulminations of science fiction:
Best destruction of national landmarks: Independence Day. How many people attended that movie because they saw the trailer featuring the White House exploding? Honorable mention to V for Vendetta, which gave the British the same satisfaction of seeing their seat of government get the spanking it richly deserved.
Best destruction of a motor vehicle: Matrix Reloaded, for ramming too big rigs together in slow motion. Some scenes in a movie justify their entire existence: The skeleton duel in Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts, Samuel Jackson becoming shark food in Deep Blue Sea, Salma Hayek doing the snake dance in From Dusk Till Dawn…you get the picture. Reloaded’s freeway chase and it’s eye-popping climax are reason enough to sit through the otherwise mediocre Matrix sequel. (Honorable mention to Terminator, which had to make do with only one truck.)
Best destruction of a spaceship: That’s a tough one, since almost all cinema spaceships are prone to exploding in a spectacular fashion sooner or later. I think my favorite is the fiery death of the Roger Young in Starship Troopers.
Best destruction of a space station: The Death Star still holds this title, but you have to give props to the immolation of the hangar bay in the Space:1999 episode, “Space Warp”. In fact, for sheer quantity of pryotechnic bliss, it’s hard to hold a candle to Space:1999. Their Eagles blew up more often than Pintos in a demolition derby. Now that I think of it, don’t hold a candle anywhere near them.
Best destruction of a bridge: True Lies would be an easy win if it weren’t for the sobering truth that both nukes and VTOL aircraft like the Harrier, while they would have been sci-fi a few decades ago, are old news now. Hats off to Buster Keaton for destroying a REAL bridge by driving a train off of it in his film The General, but that isn’t really sci-fi, either. Neither is the Bridges at Toko-Ri, but its bridge-busting climactic aerial attack served as inspiration for the trench run in Star Wars, and that’s close enough for me.
Best destruction of a giant monster: It seems like the only really effective way to rid yourself of a giant monster is to blow it up. The king of the monsters himself bravely turned kamikaze to save the Earth from Destroyah in the imaginatively titled flick, Godzilla vs. Destroyah. It was not only fiery, there was pathos. It isn’t often that a giant radioactive reptile can bring a tear to your eye.
Best cartoon explosion: Even more emotion to be had in the explosive climax of Iron Giant, a brilliant yet underappreciated sci-fi flick.
Best destruction of a sea creature: Jaws is the obvious winner, but you have to admire the sheer lunatic abandon of the aptly named Asylum Pictures who brought us all the spectacle of giant exploding Mega Piranha.
The premise of this film is simple: what if alien invades decided to attack South London rather than the more popular stomping grounds of the U.S. or Japan? In this case, it looks like the result is some comic fun…
Humanity’s End is a curious little b-movie that seems like it could be big fun. I’m not sure what it’s about, as I’ve only seen the trailer. It looks like the the last living human being is going to go to war with every other alien in the galaxy and somehow survive for at least an hour and twenty-five minutes. Except he’s not really the last human, because he met a hot chick. Unless she isn’t human and she’s just not, y’know, picky about species. Plus there’s some mechs and some spaceships and lots of gratuitous CGI destruction, and at some point it looks like it becomes necessary to launch an amphibious invasion on the beach this guy hangs out on with his hot trans-species girlfriend. I don’t know. It looks like the director took everything he loved about sci-fi movies, stuck them in a blender, added a million dollars or so and produced….this:
