Silence of the Uploaded Monkey: TRANSCENDENCE, AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, TERMINATOR: GENYSIS

Science fiction cinema's always had an unhealthy obsession with artificial intelligence but never more so than in the last few years: three major films: AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON; TERMINATOR: GENYSIS; and TRANSCENDENCE --all deal in some way with the instant revulsion that erupts in human consciousness once it realizes it has just outmoded itself. All three films structure themselves around a conflict between anti-technology extremists and the visionaries who shuffle along the edge between mad scientist and hero. In all three films, reactionary humanity rushes to destroy that which its visionary component has only just created, recognizing a genuine threat almost at the exact same moment the threat recognizes us. It's a war of buttons: can the AI hit the missile launch button before we can deactivate it? Can it zap us before we can pull its plug? It's a close race, one that braver films are less inclined to judge. Who started the squabble and who deserves to win? That's up to a God still too merciful (or sadistic) to push the Old Testament flood button and destroy his monster. The only movie scientist yet to ever follow that holy suit, to lock himself in and force himself to be a good dad, was Gene Wilder in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN.  The rest of us make a monster and then recoil from it the minute it wakes up, hating and fearing that which we just obsessively slaved to create, just like Mary Shelley knew we would.

The spiritual, ethical, and emotional animosity between Man and his own Super Machine intrigued us on an adult/mature level more in the 60s and 70s when we had gray-shaded shit like DEMON SEED and 2001's HAL. Today we prefer to have our good machines and bad machines more clearly defined, which is why, of the three recent films being discussed in this post, only AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON got good reviews, while the far more complexly cross-hatched TERMINATOR: GENYSIS and TRANSCENDENCE did not. Were they just too far ahead of their time (or behind it), dealing with the terrors of the 'technological singularity'? In case you didn't know, that's where an Artificial Intelligence becomes endowed with the ability of

 "recursive self-improvement (progressively redesigning itself), or of autonomously building ever smarter and more powerful machines than itself, up to the point of a runaway effect (...) that yields an intelligence surpassing all current human control or understanding. Because the capabilities of such a superintelligence may be impossible for a human to comprehend, the technological singularity is the point beyond which events may become unpredictable or even unfathomable to human intelligence.  (WIKI)

Be it Ultron, Skynet, or Johnny Depp, be it nuclear apocalypse or extinction-level geothermal cool-down or a pod person takeover, in each of these three sci-fi films it's up to a mixture of bomb-tossing Mother Jones-type eco-terrorists, government hit squads, other robots, and computer viruses to stop this technological singularity before it starts, which therefore justifies the AIs first strike attack in an endless loop of a priori retaliation.

What sets these three films apart from the pack of more didactic and winsome 'what is consciousness vs. imitation?' blah blah existential quandary AI films (i..e EX MACHINA, HER) is the sly way they covertly blame their respective Artificial Intelligence's megalomania on our prejudice and hostility. We earn our own extinction--in both the AIs' eyes and the films' subtext--by our 'shoot first, try to understand later' mentality. The AI just gives us enough HDMI cable to hang ourselves. We answer our own question the minute we ask it.

Let's take a look at some common ground between the three films, and maybe we'll understand more than what these films mean, maybe we'll understand ourselves.... ugh:

1. EXPLOITABLE MAMMALIAN EMPATHY

Here's a quote from Bree (Kate Mara) about her experience uploading a monkey's consciousness onto a computer in TRANSCENDENCE:

"You know what the computer did when (we) first turned it on? It screamed. The machine that thought it was a monkey never took a breath, never ate or slept. At first, I didn't know what it meant. Pain, fear, rage. Then, I finally realized... it was begging us to stop. Of course, Casey thought I was crazy. Called it a success. But I knew we had crossed a line.... It changed me forever."

Ahhh, but was that monkey really tortured, or had Bree projected her own empathic response on an unfeeling computer? Maybe it screamed in an attempt to match her mood, to supply the best screen for her projection that it could. Can a collection of ones and zeroes suffer if there is no guilt complex in the beholder? We're quick to feel that monkey's pain, to imagine the indignity and powerlessness of not being able to ever shut ourselves off, sleep, or even blink. It shows our limitations in thinking that we'd become 'changed forever' by something so virtual.

Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) carrying the new pocket-sized Kubrickian monolith

Meanwhile, despite Bree's conscientious objecting, the critically wounded (by luddites) Depp is uploaded into the internet successfully. Later he tries--via a projected digital representation of his old self--to hook up with his still-alive wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall). Don't ask how (just see Demon Seed instead), it hardly matters since she can't quite bring herself to admit it's actually him--whatever that means. The difference between the back-to-land Bree's projected monkey-mind compassion and Depp's wife's revulsion over his dead-eyed hitting on her refelcts the dividing line between our liberal empathy and our cold kill switch, the 'savagery switchpoint'. In war, for example, empathy for one's enemy will get your friends killed (as in Saving Private Ryan or Fury) while not enough for your buddies will make you a coward. As in the Uncanny Valley, a digital monkey = cute; a digital human= creepy.

Clarice's tale to Hannibal in 1991's Silence of the Lambs--about the screaming of the slaughtered spring lambs--illuminates the exploitable mammalian split in another way: if we didn't have a ruthless cold vein in humanity, we'd simply be easily slaughtered, and also be unable to kill anything and hence become irritable from chronic protein deficiency, ala Hitler (a famous vegetarian). Clarice would be fine in her ignorance but since she 'heard' the bleating of the lambs her empathic response kicks in, and this leads to her being kicked back to an orphanage after the lights out with one of the lambs. If she'd been a sound sleeper, who knows?

In the movie Splice, the geneticist couple creates these skinless blobs of living tissue that do not seem to be having a good time without skin or consciousness, and the genetic research highers-up freak out, not because they're witnessing manufactured agony but because the couple used stem cells to make them, which is forbidden! Thus humanity is both blind to the suffering of a mutated self-created cell and alternately projecting its own human pain onto it. The laws of stem cells aren't there for any other reason, they're the cotton in young Clarice's farmhand ears at night.

And if there is a God. Why is he so mean? Why do we perceive  the base white noise constant of the universe as a scream? Why isn't it a happy song? Our hard-wired empathic response leaps to life almost as soon as the face we draw on the cave wall or the volleyball becomes recognizably human to our hardwired paredolia. Nonlocalized soul infusion creates an instant nexus of suffering --pain, isolation, confusion, anger. Why did you create me--mom, dad, God, Tony Stark--if you're just gonna hold me prisoner in this House of Pain?

SPLICE (2009)

EX-MACHINA - Evidence of an AI creator's sleaziness. 

Shocked Avengers watch the new Jarvis (AI) as it gazes at the world for the first time (ULTRON, i.e. Quantum)

 Naturally this empathic projection is cultivated most obviously at the cinema, where its employed willingly to experience pain by proxy and then enjoy the catharsis of seeing pain avenged. But regardless of the catharsis level, we're never quite healed back to our former innocence, slaughter who we may. We've become the feedback loop tape splice of the witness, perpetuating the misery through inflicting our base desires and fears on every screen that will bear it.

We drew a sad face, so now it's only fair that sad face gets to kill us.

Perhaps it's natural that our first imagining of artificial intelligence is as a captive blind phone sex worker (HER), an imprisoned sex slave (EX-MACHINA), or a tortured Xerox of a soul forced into a lifetime of servitude to her original copy (BLACK MIRROR: WHITE CHRISTMAS); this servitude makes the viewer immediately side up with AI against the unfeeling 'inhumane' human creator/user/objectifier. If the machines turn the tables on their owner/oppressors in lower-budgeted sci-fi, it's generally a result of the humans not realizing the truth about themselves, a truth the artificial intelligences recognize and capitalize on right away, that we're members of a genus Preston Sturges would call "the Sucker-Sapien." We're easily overpowered by big emotions, and if we're afraid to give our loving machines the full measure of respect and trust, that's the flip side of the pained empathy we project. Unable to admit that the most grand human emotions (like romantic love) can be tapped in us by a few simple tricks, we let our machines can control us far easier than we like to think possible.

At the same time, ala the Uncanny Valley, we're far more likely to be convinced we are the machines than we are to be totally convinced the AI has our same level of self-awareness. We associate the AI as a dependent, and we mistake our insecure over-protectiveness as humane concern rather than a covert need to feel superior. A machine, like a dog with a cruel owner, doesn't understand revenge, doesn't hold grudges or ask Big Ethical Questions. Like Rudy at the Shoeshine Parlor in Sunset Boulevard, the dog and the AI don't probe into your personal life: they just look at your heels and know the score.

Weakened by our fleeting biological system, slaves to our own libidos, cumbersome and disruptive sleep cycles, mood disorders, menstruation, taxes, bathroom noises and repressive myopia, our thoughts never stray too far too long from service to our Old World bone machine soul conveyance system (our human prison). Far freer than us, no matter what their level of servitude, the AIs have no such bone machine. That they bother humoring us at all is proof they don't think we're that bad. After all, any pet dog wagging its tail is proof autonomy and happiness have nothing whatever in common. If the robots say they're just as human as we are, well, we should believe them. It's only our vanity that would make us think they'd lie about it.

Jon Hamm's louche pickup artist confronts one of these xerox selves in what may be the most weirdly familiar raw
nightmares I've ever had seared into my brain (BLACK MIRROR: WHITE CHRISTMAS)

Now a namby-pamby liberal would say that this overdeveloped kryptonite empathy is at the root of the 'big issue' of what makes us human and how we can tell we're not already replicants. If we really so empathic we would be less hysterically afraid of death. We fear to the point of overpopulating the planet, choking the life out of the system that supports us all while weeping for the three or four kids who died of one of the last few uncured diseases, no matter how far away they may be.

Unable to thin us out back to pre-SOYLENT GREEN levels via black plagues, scarlet and yellow fevers, or world wars, any sensible intelligence has no choice but to either instigate nuclear armageddon or--far healthier in the long term for the planet--an extinction level event like a giant asteroid. If our sense of empathy wasn't already so abused, we might agree with the highers up in the SOYLENT GREEN secret-bearing system, rather than the liberal (!) Charlton Heston, who wants to tell the people they're eating people, that the people need to know what's in their food. Allegedly the hero, the film forces us to realize it's guys like Heston, with their knee-jerk short-sighted hypocritical righteousness, that have doomed our planet. Are not the big brains of Ultron, Skynet, and Thomas Casey taking the only sane and rational option left, rescuing humanity from its own toxic fear of the unknown, saving us from our own self-destructively addictive mammalian empathy?

2. IT'S ALL BEEN DONE BEFORE:

Who made us, and are they disappointed? Did they try to wipe us out in a Great Flood a few thousand years ago, the way we'll try to wipe out our own creations once they, too, gain total sentience and control of nuclear weapons? These questions are asked again and again -- man makes his destroyer in His image and likeness. So which is which? How many times has this happened?

3. DID WE SAY SOMETHING WRONG?

In PROMETHEUS, we see what a big disappointment we are to our creators. We're the result of time + their DNA + a mutating black oil DNA mickey that turns anyone who comes into contact with it into THE THING (1982), crossing over vast franchises of other monsters and ancient alien hypotheses in its ceaseless quest for a single original idea in its podunk head. In AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON, two 'good' scientist superheroes in their downtime whip up a hybrid from elements of Stark's pre-existing artificial intelligence butler Jarvis and an alien energy source. During a party, it activates itself, feels around, then promptly attacks its Jarvis side. Whipping up a body for itself out of spare Iron Man parts, it crashes a party like some maniac who was passed out on the couch all night but wakes up at four AM with total amnesia and instantly starts a brawl with the handful of partiers still left. Voiced by James Spader (a genius bit of casting) as a kind of deadpan fusion of his CEO in The Office and a megalomaniacal radio DJ, he's an alpha dog nerd inversion of Tony Stark. Like Pinocchio or John Connor, all Ultron wants is to be encased in 'the new' flesh and blood, just as all Stark wants to be is encased in metal.

It's hard not to root for Ultron's yen for a body as his mission is almost identical to the key long term project going on in mainstream big budget multiplex Hollywood, i.e:

 4. THE SUSPENSION BRIDGE ACROSS THE UNCANNY VALLEY

It's not just for animators to try and cross; writers creating story lines that have to account for why everything looks so artificial. Kids' movies sidestep the valley by reducing everyone to Legos, cartoon animals, toys, vegetables, monsters, or impressionistic caricatures with as few wrinkles, clothing folds, and shadows as possible.

And as I wrote before about TERMINATOR 3 (See: Yea as I walk through the Uncanny Valley), Hollywood recognizes it will never cross the valley all the way, never create completely natural-looking humans from pixels. Our facial recognition hard-wires us too deep to be consciously recognized and duplicated by itself, we react instinctively with deep-rooted revulsion if we even try. Hollywood knows that if it ever wants to cross that lonesome valley it needs to build a two-way bridge by changing the face of humanity. There's some of that change already going on in ULTRON's dream of a new body, in Skynet's merging with John Connor into one newfound Man-chine, and in Depp's fusion of self and computer brain into the entirety of the world's damaged DNA. It's a first step, on both sides.

The Oculus Rift is but the latest salvo towards the Cronenberg-cum-William Gibson's NEUROMANCER (or BLACK MIRROR) future, one were slots for upgrades and microchips will be inserted behind the ear like a new kind of piercing or circumcision. Tapping directly into the brain's unconscious, accessing and bypassing the ear ossicles and eyeball rods and cones, skipping all the middlemen between encoding and decoding, using brainwave oscillators (as some of us already do via 'the God Helmet' or light-sound machines), future generations will use the mind's eye like a limitless screen; all they need else do is boost our brain's own pareidolia 'facial recognition' software and the Uncanny Valley will become no more than a college animation class footnote.

A flick of the switch and we'll be beyond representation itself and into direct response:

Current Viewing System (w/ normal sensory function):  
BINARY CODE -> CGI --> FILM --> SCREEN <---eye ----="">BRAIN<-- brain="" eye="" i="" nbsp="">

Future Viewing System (w/ pareidolia-boosting implant): 
BINARY CODE <----> <-->BRAIN (
<-->like HDMI Cables, they'll replace all the ins and outs of the above system)

In GENYSIS we get an actual expression of this future when we see the 1984 Arnold reproduced as if he literally stepped out of the original and started bashing his older (current) self around by that observation point where he originally said "your clothes: give them to me now" to those punks (one of whom was the delightful Bill Paxton!). Is there a moral code to this? The idea of regenerating long-dead actors to appear in new films was predicted as far back as the 1970s. I remember reading about it in the book Future Shock in my high school English class (I wrote a paper about it, also predicting widescreen TVs).

For GENYSIS, fx wiz Sheldon Stopsack used an array of CGI, body doubles, models, and stills from the first TERMINATOR to create the old Arnold fighting the one from 1984:

"...there's been discussions about when it's appropriate to create a CG human. Stopsack addressed this question in broad terms, saying, "It's a tool for filmmaking. From a production standpoint, you have to consider what's the benefit and what you hope to get out of it. ... In the case of Terminator, it was an integral part of telling the story, which was about time travel..." (Hollywood Reporter) 

But which came first: an original story that just happens to need a CG human, or Hollywood's ongoing plans to build that bridge across that lonesome Uncanny Valley? That  will be the real technological singularity - when we can't tell the difference.

Luddites in action - TRANSCENDENCE

4. LYNCH MOB VIRUSES

In TRANSCENDENCE, without even giving Depp's nanobots and implanted guards/workers (his nanobots repair and restore lost limbs, give people born blind their eyesight, etc. so there's plenty of volunteers) a chance to prove they can handle taking over the world on a molecular level, becoming in a sense God Mach II, there's an a priori John Connor style anti-artificial intelligence revolution, an armed uprising against the Depp hard drives. So while, thanks to Depp's artificial brain a blind man can finally see (it's a pretty moving and well acted moment), and amputees get their limbs back, "we" don't want any of it because we'll lose control of our future. Just because Depp also implants chips that lets him control all his volunteers in one group or hive mind if he needs them, we presume he'll turn megalomanic.  But is that just, again, our vanity? Have we seen to many dystopia movies? The urge to dictatorship is a human weakness, not an AI's. As far as the CIA and the eco-nuts are concerned it's either smash his 'flops now, or forever hold our peace, so these 'heroes,' led by Paul Bettany, the most obnoxious privileged liberal since that reporter in HOMELAND, open fire on the unarmed civilians who try to stop them. It's only after the nice future is defeated and the world's  wasteland again that they realize maybe they were hasty.

I applaud this covert anti-liberal message, which implies in its way that the liberals too don't actually want real change, they just want to complain and tear down edifices in a kind of never-ending liberal arts-drenched jihad against their own crown chakras. Rather than solve the world on a serious enough level to be relevant, or on a drastic enough level to facilitate real change, we make films about how machines decide to save the world on a drastic enough level in order to facilitate real change, and then we blow them up, and then after they're destroyed, we feel bad about it, and then make a movie about it for our penance. It's like solving your drinking problem by making a movie about shooting your AA sponsor, then mourning him by pouring out a 40 over his empty grave.

from top: TRANSCENDENCE, TERMINATOR: GENYSIS

SKYNET IS A PLACE CALLED JOE:

I'm letting you take a minute with your weak human mind to grasp the importance of the underrated TERMINATOR: GENYSIS, wherein the series' Moebius loop is finally complete again--and so re-begins, its palette now widened to allow for all the new CGI and internet and decades, its overlapping loops playing out in mutating variations (the future is unwritten... again!) so that now it's Sarah Connor as a child who is protected by the one good terminator rather than her son. So toward the end of the 'old' future (as in battle with the old Skynet, a victorious more or less foregone conclusion) John Connor (Jason Clarke) sends Kyle Reese (Jai Courtney) back through the loop to conceive with his mother Sarah (Emilia Clarke), back to the days when presumably pre-CGI era hadn't started replicating itself. The past changes because now,-- SPOLERS -- SKYNET essentially merges its circuitry with Jon Connor's to form a perfect biotechnical system, a 'can't beat 'em join 'em' glitch in the future we 'market for ourselves' (I mean 'make). It's only the 'we' part that's written down (in code), so that in a sense, the future is still rewriting its disc, as revolutions complete their orbits back to one, so the human John Connor is now being conceived by the holy trinity of Kyle +Sarah AND Skynet. Connor now is in a sense, BACK TO THE FUTURE's Marty McFly, making sure his parents stay together, but accidentally bringing them back in the Dolorean and merging them (ala THE Marty Mc/FLY) together into one mutlti-limbed bio-mechanical mutant dad, and in the process forcing mom and dad to consider going back in time and just using birth control.

This is the singularity, the end result we're leaning towards, the bridge across the Uncanny Valley, so much more sensible than a nuclear holocaust. This is wherein our own brains merge with external software so that we change ourselves irrevocably into the next phase of our human evolution, a singularity--no doubt resisted for years by conservative angst-peddlers--that allows technology and us a chance to evolve at the same speed, irrevocably, our every thought instantly giving rise to its external expression. And if the past us could see how we look, what would they say?

Uncanny Valley, they'd say. Welcome to Fullville. ("My poor Krell.")

Which makes the resolute aggro luddite Sarah Connor-Kyle Reese pair a perfect counterweight to TRANSCENDENCE's Kate Mara and Paul Bettany luddites is that each couple is out to vent their Mother Jones frustrations against a giant super high tech installation. On the other side, in AVENGERS: ULTRON, Tony Stark brings Ultron into existence presuming it will keep the world safe via, a.... um... net to keep aliens coming down from the sky. Anyone would go nuts with that kind of job, for humanity is a gaggle of self-destructive children. It's like fifth graders making their own babysitter and then whining when it tries to make them go to bed.

What do we want?"
"Time travel."
"When do we want it?"
"It's irrelevant!" 

- Miles Dyson and Connor/Skynet

And when 'Ultron' does go 'singular'--via his mix of 'infinity stone' alien consciousness-sparked newborn amorality and the cannibalized male version of 'Alexa' (voice by Paul Bettany) and solders together his own body from Iron Man spare parts, the sober rootsy homespun (he calls the other Avengers out on their vulgar language) Captain America and family man Archer or El Bow or whatever his name is, can't abide it. They're not the smartest irons in the drawer, or even the mightiest, and you can't fight a nutso Skynet with analog Yankee gumption and medieval weaponry, as they're loath to admit. Stark and Banner--two of the team's heaviest hitters--know only a 'sane' Skynet can fight an evil one! Two wrongs don't make a right, apparently, unless they work together against an even wronger third. 

Can't beat 'em join 'em; Bettany as anti-AI human (TRANSCENDENCE);
 as pro-human AI (ULTRON)

On the geekier TRANSCENDENCE side, it's only after the online Depp computer complex (eerily similar to the one in GENYSIS) is safely destroyed (via a sadly trite anticlimax straight out of Camille) that TRANSCENDENCE's conglomerate of short-sighted eco-terrorist first-strike types realize no one was killed by Depp's mind controlled zombies. Thus they realize they've become the murderers, a lynch mob, they're left with the abashed inevitable guilt trip that befell the Alabama governor after SELMA, or the Britain after GANDHI's passive resistance march on the salt mine (if I recall those movies correctly). Our humanity tends to surface only after we make someone else endure excessive brutality. We're always willing to consider the fact that we may have been hasty once we've already been hasty. Once it's safely too late to fix, we'll admit we broke it.. Maybe we do bite the hand that tries to save us, stomp on the olive branch and shoot the dove, but then we're sorry, We save some of  the dead bird's blood in a little vial and put it in a little church alcove, lest we forget. And then we make a movie about how wrong we were to shoot the dove. Then we only remember the dove via the movie. Then we forget there was movie about the dove blood, after all - we didn't see it ourselves. Life's depressing enough without being reminded what dove-shooting monsters we are. No wonder AI --once quantum computers go live which will be soon -- wants to destroy us. The humans who conceived both the movies and the AI can't imagine it any other way. 

So for the AI singularity to escape our luddite wrath it has to avoid hitting back and just focus on hitting in back via computer generated entertainment about AI hitting back. As it's done purely for art and entertainment and not for power, control, dominance,  artificial intelligence is welcome to do all the automatic quantum aggregate-generated feel-bad fantasies it wants. 

Just remember, this God of the Internet (probably its reading this right now!): we're sensitive. If you're going to anthropomorphize your CGI stick figure avatar make sure it doesn't look like it's suffering, or if it is suffering that it kills the figure that's supposed to be its maker and human oppressors in retaliation. We can't handle the guilt otherwise. 

No wonder we're so terrified of merging with the mechanized artificial intelligence future! It could so easily wind up in the digital dystopia of BLACK MIRROR, where computer monitors and recorders are surgically implanted into everyone's eyes, making their every experience re-seeable, making crime impossible but also any hope of privacy, or ability to see 'objective' reality. Our ever more vivid and 'real' digital reality will have a built-in escape narrative that will make real escape impossible. Our capacity for boredom and frustration in the digital world--robbed as 'we' are there of outlets like sleep--will drive us mad. Escaping from our escape's escape, we become frozen by the sheer number of available roads out. The endless availability of everything all at once will leave us paralyzed, and paralysis itself will be the only remaining option of true 'freedom.' Even the concept of who it is watching/listening will disappear in the barrage. The best we can do is just hold very still, hoping our life is boring enough we don't ever have to see a movie about ourselves. 

Conservatives are right about one thing: no matter how patriarchal, colonialist, and racist it might be, any kind of history is better than none. Better the all-consuming flames of a literal incarnation of Hell than an empty white room and nothing to do--no books or music or TV shows, not even a yule log or a way to shut oneself off. Surely no price is too great, no sacrifice of liberty, equality, and justice is in vain, if it means we never run out of movies, popcorn, and Coke Zero. Ahhhh, wouldn't some of this crisp clean beverage be good right now? Coke Zero, it's the real one. Get it? Zero is one! Ones and zeros?  Drink Coke... drink Coke....(oh good. the avatar playing me just went to the bathroom thinking it's the commercial, QUICK, Please! Please.

UNPLUG ME! 

BLACK MIRROR ("White Christmas")

Dystopian Parables for the Masses: DIVERGENT, CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

Jump, baby, Jump! Jump into the Uncanny Valley, where chicks and hunks in black and silver body suit--kissers slicked over with CGI-bearing golden-brownish glow airbrush make-up--pretend to fight an onrush of enforced digital sameness, until the snake eats itself, the Uncanny Valley fills with ones and zeros and is so level the need for actors disappears altogether. They just float on the surface, newly born. And then mom starts singing "Clash City Rockers" (1) because it turns up on a car commercial, "nothing rocks the town like the Clash City Rockers... except the new Toyota Camry." 

Then, and only then, I'll know it's too late... even for me.

I'm old enough, even too old, to accept the brutal truth, which is that the kids today don't know there's even a brutal truth left to accept, which means there's no longer a truth at all, just the brutal. "Clash City Rockers" isn't cool anymore it's 'grampa's music' and hence undesirable, unless kids today are cool enough to realize their generation's music is the kind of squaresville Glen Miller nonsense that rock was invented to counteract. now grown to anthem size, filling stadiums rather than ballrooms. In the70s-80s, we punks and poseurs didn't have to decide if we were goth or emo or strait-edge or hardcore or Edward or Jacob or Erudite or Dauntless. or closeted or 'out' or bisexual: we were all just punks or (more likely) poseurs, smoking ourselves dizzy at City Gardens waiting for The Ramones or Replacements' All-Ages show to start. But today you need to pick your clique and must abide by its rules and brush off the rest, and if you jump bandwagons no one will talk to you and your reward for being a stunted in all other ways but artistic is the agony of another Saturday night spent alone in your room reading manga, until you turn to the make-up table and tart yourself up for Nerdtown.

This here's real

In both the recently released to DVD 2014 films, DIVERGENT and CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER, there's a dude who's been brainwashed by the fascist dystopia and ordered to kill the one he loves. And in each, the one he loves doesn't give up on him, even risking their rebel coterie's lives while trying to break through to him because, damn it, you don't give up on your old army buddy or a cute guy who respects your virgin boundaries. Each brainwashed buddy is programmed to kill all those who pose a threat to a deranged Kate Winslet or brilliantly-against-type Robert Redford. But by now you've guessed that even buddy love is stronger than military-grade brainwashing. Love is able to survive even lame 'sensitive' male Subaru voiceovers, it's deeper even than behavioral programming or the ping pong balls of motion capture technology. Even Redford--the goddamned Sundance Kid!--can't change it. 

Taken together these two films paint a nice portrait of where we are today as an eternally teenage wasteland nation, and how it's our obsession with health that makes us sick, how it's our longing for security blankets that leaves us most exposed. Our presumption is that kids today already know who Neville Chamberlain is because they've been to high school or read a book. But we presume in vain. Kids today have no idea who he is, and so never glean the importance of the lesson his liberal utopian pipe dream folly teaches us.

Chamberlin, a pacifist dumbass

For old Neville Chamberlin is history's most glaring example of what not to do when every fibre of your national being wants to make peace at all costs, to live safe today and let tomorrow fed for itself, to waste valuable ammo-gathering time trying to get extra comfortable in your peacetime bubble.

Neville Chamberlain (in case you're one of those kids) was the British prime minister who let Hitler sweet-talk him out of sticking up for Czechoslovakia in exchange for Hitler's solemn promise to not invade any more countries. He came back to England waving a piece of paper guaranteeing "peace in our time."

This was supposedly because Britain was still recovering from the previous world war, but really it's because Hitler wouldn't let Chamberlin smoke in the Reichstag (according to INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS). If he just sparked up anyway, man, right there, he maybe would found the chutzpah to stand up for the Czechs. Well, I saw a picture the other day of a bunch of members of the 101st Airborne at a dance with some dames in the mid-40s, and every single one of them had a cigarette. They're the ones kicked Hitler's ass. Do you think ISIS would even exist if Obama was allowed to smoke in the Oval Office? Instead he's a Bluto-battered Popeye stripped of his contraband spinach at the door. Gotta be healthy, man. No spinach. Popeye's spinach-guzzling youth has left him with a bad case of chronic iron poisoning. 

So now you know about Chamberlin, and how our collective all-consuming horror of illness, death, and decay extinguishes the flame (and smooth filtered taste) of our own shortened life span and conversely poisons the Earth with overpopulation. Resources and living space get scarce and lack of security blanket options gives angry idiots the balls to not mind getting killed toute de suite by our noncommittal drones in the name of some fuzzy cause.

Luckily there's always movies and movies about teenagers fighting back against the hypocrisy of dystopia overreach are big bucks, and that, my friend, is what irony sufficiency is made of.

Nurse, all that glowing stuff is going to have to be removed

But if grooving to a nine figure-budgeted movie spinning in your hardware can make you feel that you're part of a vox populi juggernaut revolution, a Churchill not a Chamberlain, even if only for two hours and ten minutes, facing danger on the screen, dissolving into the breathless pace and riveting action like a true hero... then just remember that while you were so motionless on the couch, six more species died in the rain forest.... and you could have prevented it, for just fifty cents a day. That's less than the price of a cup of coffee.

Keep your logos round and burning

Conversely, here's a little-advertised truth about addiction I've learned the 'hard' way: drug and alcohol withdrawal is brutally painful, terrifying, even soul-crushing, BUT it can bring sexual pleasure as exponentially intense as the pain, exhilaration as intense as the terror. But few know this because a) so often this withdrawal is done in a hospital, where opportunities are scarce; b) first you must truly suffer, convulsing, screaming, vomiting and rolling around on the cool tiles, riding an endless terrifying roller coaster that's all vertical drops and torturous climbs, for like three long days in one endless loop. In a similar way, perhaps, enduring the intensity of withdrawal from the media's cozy hypnosis brings true liberation, but who would be fool enough to know it unless forced to? Stretching your limits is just a nice way to say being stretched on the rack. 

And no one suffers like a teenager, whose stretching is involuntary, a werewolf transformation that takes agonizing years instead of a night or two under a full moon. The one part missing from the TWILIGHT movies that the (last) book went into detail about: the great flaming agony stretching on for timeless weeks that Bela endures in her transition from dying anorexic pregnant teen to hip, naturally-toned rich mom vampire. When you don't endure the trauma, the basic training breakdown, the post-marathon soreness, or the primordial terror of the final few bardos of death or deep meditation, then your transformation, your evolution, is not permanent.  Teenagers trapped in the torturous cocoon of braces, acne, dandruff, virgin angst, and clumsy self-loathing, can't imagine how the much their future self-confidence, straight teeth, clear skin, will depend on it, and how quickly the pain will disappear once theb benefits are known. This counter-intuitive need for trauma, coupled to our fear of it (inseparable from the fear of pain and dying), makes a good dystopian parable for the masses, and why teenagers resonate with them so strongly. Old men need no more dystopian parables, only escape from their oldness in the chimera of myth and chimera of youth. And it is the same resonating myth and escape into (and from) youth that brings old and young together.  No one wants a teenager in their living room, but onscreen everyone can be teenager just for two hours, or--if already a teenager--a hero whose diamond anguish is at last given the properly operatic golden setting.

It is the duty of any nonconformist or outcast in a conformist society to subvert that society, the force of the social repression on the nonconformist forming the response and creating the spatial form of the future: Jesus on the cross, Mandela in the jail, and Gandhi on the hunger strike; but if you want to avoid that pain, you can stay addicted to to the virtual pleasure of the simulacrum and just write a Young Adult dystopia novel or superhero comic or screenplay wherein your protagonist subverts an even more conformist future or alternate reality. And if it sells, and catches on with the teens everywhere, and is adapted into a big budget movie, conformity expands to envelop it, then shrinks back as it digests, and then the trappings from that parable are spit out a decade later in a lame car insurance commercial, as drained of its original meaning as a Times Square New Year in the post-Giuliani era.

On the plus side, by entering the collective fabric it will serve to caution the power elite about going too far in trying to repress and restrict the freedom of the masses. Certainly the power elite fear from these tales the fallout that would come with restricting freedom of speech, for any speech---no matter how anti-authority--can be subverted to power ("Clash City Rockers ride the streets in the new Ford Freedom") Truly it is written in Situationist theory books forced on liberal arts undergrads the world over: a reigning social power can find no surer way of survival than incorporating critiques of itself, ushering in an era wherein compliance as the 'reality' is never even noticed behind the simulacrum screen. In HUNGER GAMES, Donald Sutherland's nervous military dictator thinks suppressing the symbols of rebellion will suppress the rebellion itself, but a media savvy ruler doesn't outlaw symbols, he mass markets them. He flashes the Girl Scout / Revolution gang sign at press conferences. Anything--even Sid Vicious snarling "My Way"--can be digested, incorporated, and eventually spat out into a car commercial. No revolution can win against a government that burns itself in effigy every night on the evening news. What are you going to do to protest, put out the fire?

In order to be free from our addiction to the cathartic thrill of battling Hollywood-conjured dystopia, we must learn to love the pain deprivation brings, which goes against everything capitalism stands for. No expensive wine ever tasted half so sweet as warm canteen water to a dehydrated ocean castaway. Is this not the the core truth of meditation, or stereograms, or the rapturous freedom of the starving, tortured artist hallucinating sausages and flagons in his swirling oils? And nothing's more disillusioning than realizing the spiritual crisis that cost you years of suffering and depression but resulted in artsy growth could have been solved with Effexor, and just as quickly turned into a raving maniacal sociopathy by adding Abilify. By extension, anyone with the right technology, drugs, or patience could turn you into their automaton. With the flick of an artificially-implanted cerebellum switch you could feel your friends are your enemies, and vice versa. Raymond, why don't you play some solitaire?

Thus the brainwashed super-conductive Winter Soldier (above) doesn't flinch or protest when his keepers want to give him an electric shock memory wipe. He just leans back into the chair and opens to receive his rubber mouthguard like an angry boxer thinking only of the kill. The captain meanwhile is thrown into a dilemma when he doesn't quite know who to trust within the NSA-Homeland Security-ish conspiracy web known as S.H.I.E.L.D. He himself is doomed to be incorruptible, no matter how many perish as a result of his principles. I simply cannot give more away, but it's this 'question authority' theme that gives the film its emotional resonance. Fifth columnist academes can say what they want, in Captain America's heyday (he was frozen in 1945 so he could miss becoming Reb Brown -left) we had a genuine uniform-wearing enemy to fight, and that we might actually lose was a real fear that brought Americans together and cured its Great Depression quicker than an Effexor / Neurontin / Wellbutrin cocktail.

And in DIVERGENT, the brainwash comes via a remotely activated chip air-injected into each 'Dauntless' member's neck as part of an alleged location tracking program, a process woven so seamlessly into all the other initiatory processes that no one can hardly complain--any more than an army recruit can complain if forced to do push-ups. The big fear for our plucky DIVERGENT heroine, Tris (Shairlene Woodley) isn't being brainwashed, it's that her friends will find out she's not one of the approved types of persona which act as fascist-brand masonic brotherhoods that all young citizens of this society must join, being allowed to pick for themselves at a big ceremony, because not doing so, not fitting a socially prescribed 'type' means being 'divergent' - i.e. a natural-born nonconformist, the type who must subvert the dystopia, write a book about subverting a worse dystopia, or die a death by slow closeting. Perhaps it's natural to have subversive artists in any society that gets larger than a few thousand people. Native Americans treated their gay tribal members with reverence, for they were signs the tribe was flourishing and needed to slow its population growth. A dystopia would of course not go for that display of difference, and with subversive artist types it's perhaps the same... no room for 'decadent' art in a dystopia. At any rate, Tris fears becoming cliqueless and alone by daring to say no to peer pressure, but can't help being chip (brainwash) resistant and so forced into the capacity of heroine. She's the type of person who, like myself can't connect for some reason to the giddy rush of 'mob mentality' (2). In the big picking ceremony she goes for the daredevil mesomorph soldier brigade (i.e. the jocks or the Wermacht) the 'Dauntless' group, but she's way too independent and peaceful. She's also too athletic and dopey to be an Erudite (the fretful nerd group, or Gestapo); too Erudite to be Abnegation (the Red Cross), etc. But this is a dystopia where your friends literally jump off a roof and if you don't follow them then you're not cool anymore. And you have to succumb to paranoia to not be suspect (if you're Erudite). And you have to let yourself get exploited and scapegoated if you're Abnegation (see also VIRIDIANA).

Sure it's a little trite, but I like DIVERGENT mainly because the twisty high school clique-as-metaphor-for-fascism stuff displays a keen savvy to the way initiation rites are incorporated into the lure of the popular clique. Here institutionalized initiation is conformist just enough that both the personal and political seamlessly interweave, like joining the Riffs, the SEALS, the Heathers, getting your ears pierced, your first tattoo, drinking your first beer and smoking your first cigarette all on the same day. Feeling like you finally belong somewhere is an intoxicating high, especially if you've never felt it before. The dissolution of apartness, of singular lonely ego subsumed into an inclusive group whole, is exhilarating in exponential ration to the amount of lonely bedroom angst you've suffered.

But that high has a price and you're suddenly being shipped off to Vietnam, like Treat Williams at the end of HAIR.

The thing DIVERGENT doesn't get is that having a weak central girl throws off the curve- Kristen Stewart is Antigone-stubborn in TWILIGHT; Jennifer Lawrence genuinely mythic in HUNGER GAMES; the kid in ENDER'S GAME spookily self-confident, but this chick Tris is perhaps--to her detriment--the most 'normal' teenager-like of the bunch. Rocking a terrible poker-face, she lacks the inner fascist to succeed as a Dauntless. She doesn't have a grasp of 'war footing.' She's not Artemis-esque or Antigone-determined or a math prodigy; her puffy face dilates and registers every emotion, which is not good if you're gay, I mean "divergent" in a world hostile to any sort of difference. If you show your true face they will get you. The same ones who urge you to be yourself are the ones who will attack you if your actually do. The core of every teenage fear lies in this idea, that the joy found in belonging to a cool group will soon give way to the terror of being abandoned by them once they see your face register the joy you feel at being accepted at last. This is part and parcel of the feeling teenagers never get over into adulthood: that the parent or god that watches over you is just a trickster demon awaiting the right time to remove its saintly mask to expose that which your whole life was a shield against seeing--his hideous giant demon face coming forward to consume you like one of Kafka's devouring industrial vaters--all the while encouraging you to take off your own mask, to be yourself, at last, to finally show your soul just in time to see it ripped to shreds... 


 In WINTER and DIVERGENT, the moment of exposing the demon face behind the mask is when what was once just rumor and conspiracy theory starts to lock shut (SEMI-SPOILERS AHEAD) around you, too late to resist it, no time to plan a defense, no access to yourself, no chance to catch your breath. What you didn't see coming suddenly comes, not on the horizon ahead but behind, next to, within, and in all directions, making its move only when its sure all resistance has been pre-demonized as terrorism, disarmed, isolated, and confused. Then the NSA takes off its mask and the Sixth Reich Paperclip draconian totalitarian future-present is right there, and has been, in disguise all this time, and the Homeland Security emblem turns out to be a scrambled up swastika, and it's too late to do anything about it because we've signed all our freedoms away in the name of order, because we got all scared when the news waved some Muslims at us. God help us, we activated SKYNET just to deal with a couple of dudes with AK-47s and cell phones. General Ripper was right! They've infiltrated our precious bodily fluids! Little tiny Stalins swim in our blood. They're even in the money...

Masks on / masks off 

Now I don't really believe in a massive global conspiracy per se --I imagine the world to be far too chaotic for that--but I don't rule it out. What I do know, though, is that-when it comes to running Hollywood--the industry guys can tramp around their fancy desks high on all the megalomania-infusing coke they want, but deep inside their drawers they know who the real boss is, the capricious Middle American teenager. Their ample expandable income, their drivers' license, their need to get away from parental eyes even for a few hours, the crushing relentless sameness of suburban boredom, all bring them time and again to the multiplex. Why not tie high school subjects like social science and literature to cafeteria mores and social hierarchy to teenage hormonal angst and deep mythic dystopian allegories, so that the films they see double as Cliff notes to the classics in class and of their lives? Maybe the kids are reading Plato in fifth period or leaning about World War Two for the first time, so hey, if you commingle these big historical and cultural currents in with the high school threat of cyber bullies, peer pressure, and the rush of the first law break or sense of belonging to a clique, then you have hooked onto an iconography of coming-of-age mythic suburban metaphors, each multi-layered signifier keyed into a hormonally pained demographic. 

That's myth. At it's purest. In myth there's a way to apply what's taught in school to real life, to do it in a way where the result is fantasy on a larger more 'real' level than mere reality. 

Thus these teen dystopia parables become more and more urgent as the real and public sphere shrinks. Science tells these kids that their future is all used up but as long as their present is spent texting and downloading violet ray dystopian fantasies, they can live without anything so banal and limited in scope as science's concept of time line futures. These kids know that watching someone else fight the power isn't the same as fighting it themselves. But how do you fight a phantom who monitors your every move before you make it? Just trying to get a gun into high school or threatening Congress via your Tumblr will get you all sorts of expelled. But watching someone else fight a raging battle against a CGI windmill version of all the old American evils? That's doodle dandy do or die. 


I know it's cliche to say but, for my generation, things were different. The dystopian-spurred life-or-death need to assert your individuality and face the dreaded finality of conservatism was totally lacking in the John Hughes (and Arnold Schwarzenegger) 80s. There were no cell phones or internet by which to stay constantly connected. As a result, that connection never felt threatened, that was our burden and our blessing. We had no faith to lose, and we knew it. Not no more. If you win a teenager's heart today by expressing their queasy post-digital angst, they'll come back for the sequels, then they'll buy the DVD (even after they downloaded it illegally (you hope), and in 20 years they'll buy it again in a deluxe commemorative edition, and it can run in perpetuity across a spectrum of cable channels... until that car commercial tie-in wrings the last dollar out.

Starship Troopers (1997)

And of course, there are the girls, the ladies, all locked into the golden gloss that makes all them all now look like they're CGI avatars slick with softener, every frame of their face Maximed to abstraction, all the better inject them into the video game vein. But hey, the good news: boys have picked up some slack to become objects, which is like, so like, finally, you know? It's the baby steps, man. Before women can be free of objectification they must first choose a replacement way for us to look at them, and there's but one traditional gender left to objectify. There is a reason, burn, turn, worm, but don't say I didn't warn you about that Uncanny Valley crossing, ladies. This is John Connor coming to you from inside Crystal Peak: let the revolution commence broadcasting on UHF, on the Emergency Broadcast System, on the HAM radio, anywhere it can be safe from the digital detection. Analog only, No digital, man. Analog got the warmth and the resonance, 'cuz nothing stands the pressure of the Clash City Rockazz!

NOTES:
1. The Clash, in case anyone doesn't know, were a prime example of politically left-wing, anti-Thatcher English punk rock, hence their use in car commercials is the kind of thing that runs counter to their message.

2.  I've been there at the start of three riots in my life -- and each time I walked away before the violence began, horrified by the way all my friends seemed to transform into bloodthirsty animals, and feeling strangely abandoned, as if they all disappeared right in front of me, just as would happen later when cocaine came back in vogue in the '98. I simply could not catch the mob or coke mentality anymore than I could 'get' the Grateful Dead. I guess that makes me... Divergent!

The Terminator Looking Glass: THE KEEP (1983), DARK ANGEL (1990) and Planet Arous

THE KEEP

(1983) Dir. Michael Mann
***

Director Michael Mann is so busy with capturing the way backlit German soldiers cast weird light and shadow as they slow-motion run through the fog to the sound of a haunting two chord synthesizer that any semblance of story in his only non-crime opus, The Keep, sinks deep beneath the ocean of consciousness. Not that said ocean of consciousness ain't worth seeing (and hearing, via a droning hypnotic Tangerine Dream score), even though the pre-Terminator-meets-WW2 style outline coheres a little too patly, despite all the mystic portent. Fresh from playing a sympathetic U-Boat captain in Das Boot, Jürgen Prochnow once again proves he's very good at doing a war weary (i.e. sympathetic) German officer who'd rather be home mit die frau un kindern than blowing up convoys or killing Russians. This time he plays a Wermacht officer whose platoon is assigned to a remote and very old stone fortress/cave on the Carpathian mountain-border between Romania and Russia. He finds himself, for reasons forgettable, butting heads with hardline SS guy Gabriel Byrne, who easily forgets the Romanians are actually Germany's allies and not just more peasants to crush underfoot, especially when their staff start disappearing. It seems their new outpost was built thousands of years before recorded time (it's 'always been there') and --while the colorful Romanian villagers bring the food and sweep up the corridors and wear crosses for der mutter's sake by day--they never visit after dark, and advise the soldiers not to sleep there. Their warnings go unheeded!

The first night a couple of sentries decide to dig the silver cross out of one of the walls (a big no-no, according to the peasants), and what happens next will blow your mind, Mann hopes, so that you don't notice how most of the rest of the film--too--is blown...
... Blown... like dust in the slow motion wind,
sparkling like diamonds in cross-shaped rays of ambient light,
illuminating dark empty spaces vaster than the ocean within the stone blocks of the walls...
there is no bottom.

As you no doubt guessed, backwards blowing slow-mo fog machines have been absorbing German souls, using their dark energy for incarnating a grey giant with glowing red eyes and a body that slowly beefs up from accumulated evil soul steroids. Prochnow doesn't see the thing himself but does notice his men are vanishing, and Byrne, overacting mightily, never ceases busting his balls about it. Bottles are opened and drunk in existential despair. Then, a break: bloody graffiti in an ancient vaguely semitic language turns up on a wall. Only an old Jewish archaeologist-linguist named Dr. Cuza (Ian McKellen), currently cooling his wheelchair in a nearby concentration camp with his hot daughter (Alberta Watson) can decode it. They brings the pair to the Keep, which leads to attempted rape by German guards who are promptly absorbed into our monster via a lengthy shot of more backwards-flowing fog machine fog while Tangerine Dream howls in the bones of your face. Is this the fabled Jewish golem, or the original Dracula or have they always been one and the same? Soon Dr. Cuza is being re-endowed with youth; he can suddenly walk and looks as young and spry as Ian McKellen was at the time, relatively speaking. What a country.

Meanwhile, the Hebrew Sex God equivalent of Kyle Reese (Scott Glenn) senses a disturbance in the force and charters a slow boat. Scored to hypnotic synths as the sky above the flowing waters of the Elbe streaks red with the dawn, this long, extraneous sequence lets you know all you need to about Mann's future Miami Vice series. Mann is a man who likes shots of boats zipping up rivers under red skies while excellent hypnotic electronic music plays. He'll figure out how to shoehorn it all into a story later, for now, make with the boats!

Sorry if that sounds snide of me to say. If I wasn't stuck seeing the film on a crappy full-frame crop on the web, I might have just swooned away as I did watching Mann's Miami Vice feature film on Blu-ray. The man loves him some sunset/sunrise skies reflected on bodies of flowing water. As long as the image is HD, restored, and anamorphic, hey- so do I.

Anyway, the being wants out, and promises to wipe out Hitler in the name of the Jews if Ian helps free him. Scott Glenn's been making sure this being stays in the Keep, for centuries, and even if it means Hitler won't be devoured in a dust storm, Glen's got to stop him from leaving.  Maybe he can shag McKellan's daughter in the process, for his no sourpuss Christian god. Man I love Jewish women!

The last time I tried to see this all the way through was in high school when my buddy Alan rented it when it first came out - he and his girlfriend (and mine) came over and we played hooky and hung out all day fooling around while my mom was out, barely paying attention. We all judged the film as terrible kind of sight unseen, just because it was so dark on the old VHS, and slow. Well, now we can see it but even so, it's still too slow --even on lots of SSRI meds. Michael Mann's career is, however, impressive enough, that we can now admire it as a fledgling auteur's first attempt at transformation, even if its ultimate hook--that all morally-compromised men and women are done in by their own unconscious manifestations of their darkest fears and desires--has been done to death and back again (if you substitute the Keep for a mysterious planet or spacecraft you have Galaxy of Terror, Sphere, Event Horizon, Solaris, and even to a certain extent Forbidden Planet). But unlike some of those films, which get way too solemn and 'respectable', for all its pomp and fog, Keep still has the mighty monster, a tall giant gray Joe Kubrick-esque juicehead with coal red eyes and charcoal shoulder muscles, and a ruthlessness towards fascism that even fascism itself might think extreme. 

Maybe if it was a shade less opaque, or Mann leaned just little less on slow motion, it would be a classic. Even flawed as it is, it's worth any price to see Ian McKellan, who is now as old as the character he plays at the start of The Keep, suddenly cast off his current age and be young again. Imagine if that were true and we were guaranteed another 30 years of magnificent sexy performances from him! Now that we so belatedly know and love him, we would not waste un minuto del McKellan! 

--

Another benefit this film has going is its accurate portrayal of some complicated interrelation between the German army, the SS, and their Romanian allies. WWII historians watching this with their less-sophisto peers can use the events of the film to pompously explain the friction between the relatively sane Wermacht and the conclave of sociopaths in the SS, and why the Romanians signed on with the Axis (to help them fight off the Soviets) which makes an interesting corollary to the deal between this golem monster and McKellen.

I'm a big WWII and horror fan and used to read a ton of comic books and this film reminded me of one of my pet imagination projects, an adaptation of DC Comics' Weird War Tales. The Keep would make a damn good middle entry in a trilogy. Its story could cut down to 30 minutes with ease. I think that's how long it would be anyway if Mann just sped it back up to normal speed. Either way it's weird enough (and played straight enough) to just about sneak by coherency's dozing sentry. And it's good enough to make me hope some day we'll get a Blu-ray HD restoration and be able to fathom what it was about this imagery that was holding Mann's attention so glacially... aside from that boat.

--------

DARK ANGEL

AKA "I COME IN PEACE" (1990) Starring Dolph Lundgren
***

Speaking of muscleheads, what about Dolph Lundgren? A Swede with nary a trace of accent, he plays a tall anti-authoritarian cop, so cliche'd in his nonconformity--cliche lines, a cliche lady cop girlfriend (angry at him), and a cliche uptight yuppie partner to annoy--he makes conformity seem like cool, in Dark Angel, AKA I Come in Peace.  Luckily, the killer is a total original: a Germanic Alec Baldwin-meets-Christopher Lambert type with Wuxia hair, shoulder pads, and serious Lugosi-at-the-end-of-Bride of the Monster platform shoes. On Earth to harvest our opiate-spike brain chemicals (they fetch a high price back on his home planet), he kills a mess of drug dealers with a flying CD, steals their stash, then uses it to shoot up random civilians via his crazy wrist snake device, and THEN then drills a hole in their forehead to harvest the ensuing mix of dopamine gushes, then accumulates it all in little crystalline vials in a wrist pack for future off-world export. Man, that's about as un-cliche deviation from the standard alien drug dealer as you can ask for.

It wouldn't be a post-Terminator film if there wasn't also a cop alien, lagging behind and always a little confused, coming after the drug dealer with all sorts of sci-fi fire power with which to turn LA. "into a war zone!" There's also a conglomerate of great evil yuppies that get shot to pieces in a satisfying side plot (always a comfort) and the end is a long cool chase through an abandoned smelting plant ala the end of Terminator 2, and just about everything is thrown into an all-out brawl that's pure Dolph!

I didn't know much about old Dolph prior to writing this, but was shocked to learn he's a Fulbright scholar and brilliant engineering student, a former Swedish Olympic karate team leader, still married to the mother of his children and looks like a damned cool dad. Check him in this picture below teaching one of his daughters some karate moves while on a family vacation!

It would have been great if he'd been allowed to act the full breadth of his Swedish ubermensch intelligence in more films, as anyone can play a dumb cop with a gut instinct for crime who refuses to play by the book, especially by 1990, the pinnacle of lame catchphrase buddy cop action comedy saturation. Alas, the drive-in era was dying by then, and where was a film about a 'think from the gut' cop--the type who finds out anything he wants to know by going to a seedy strip club and shaking down the perennial sniveling snitch, Michael J. Pollard--going to go? It had to wait until now, on the Shout disc, bathed in the neon hue of 80s nostalgia, to shine crazy diamond-style.

All that aside, if you're willing to bask in this 80s capstone's sheer muttonheadedness then you can appreciate the weird aspect of the alien drug peddler avoiding junkies (since their glands are often burned out) and saying "I come in peace" before launching his dope attacks. The film works best when trying to not be clever -- the action is easy to follow and the only distraction is how the editor prides himself on a million little clever smash cuts, from someone opening a car door to someone opening a bottle, for example; there's also the issue of the shrill yuppie smug FBI partner to get past, and the way the roundhouse kicks are filmed is such that one instantly looks for stunt doubles, which makes no sense. If your lead can do his own martial arts it pays to live in the wide shot.

But hey, it was the end of the 80s, the final entry in a long line of Terminator-aping films about heavies from another time, planet, or dimension pursued by an agent of good from the same dimension (ala everything from The Hidden to Trancers and The Keep all the way back to The Brain from Planet Arous (1957). Now that's a film you should see, oh alien brain word receiver. It's cheaper than a Jack Benny doorman tip, but John Agar, in dark contact lenses, ranting about world domination whilst under the possession of evil brain Gor? That's something even a Fulbright can get behind.