Darkness Film Festival by Courtney Farrell

DARKNESS FILM FESTIVAL

2014 FULL GUIDE 16.22 APRIL

WELCOME The line up of the 2014 Darkness Film Festival is a festival incorporated with Somerset House and Film4, also sponsored by Film4.This is a dark themed British influenced festival that has a strong background with classic sci-fi and horror films like Alien, 2001: Space Odyssey and modern films like Prometheus. Look out for Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell in Moon, Laurence Fishburne as Captain Miller in Event Horizon, and Cillian Murphy as the lead in Sunshine. Surely enough films for you to enjoy in our week long festival

CONTENT SUMMERSET HOUSE SCHEDULE & LOCATION PROMETHEUS

2001:SPACE ODYSSEY

18-21

EVENT HORIZON

22-25

BLADE RUNNER

26-29

MOON

30-33

6-9

SUNSHINE

10 -13

ALIEN

14 -17

SOMERSET HOUSE FILM4 Somserset House is a popular filming location with its exterior featuring several big budget Hollywood films. Among these include two James Bond films, Tomorrow Never Dies and GoldenEye, and several scenes of the 2003 film, Shanghai Knights starring Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson were filmed in the courtyard of Somerset House. Elements of the 2008 film The Duchess starring Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes were filmed in October 2007. Somerset House was also used as a filming location in several Sherlock Holmes films, including the 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and more recently, Sherlock Holmes (2009) starring Jude Law and Robert Downey, Jr. directed by Guy Ritchie. Exterior shots of Somerset House were also used in the 1999 Tim Burton horror film, Sleepy Hollow starring Johnny Depp and the 2006 film, Flyboys. It was used as a filming location in the 2012 Bollywood film Jab Tak Hai Jaan, starring Shah Rukh Khan, Katrina Kaif and Anushka Sharma, and directed by Yash Chopra. Somerset House was also the main location for the BBC’s New Year Live television show, presented by Natasha Kaplinsky, which celebrated the arrival of the year 2006. It also stood in for Buckingham Palace in the episode “Celebrity” of Spooks. 4

S C H E D U L E & L

APRIL 19-22, 2014 LOCATION: Somerset House WC2R 1LA 16 WEDNESDAY. APRIL 8:30-11:00 PROMETHEUS 17 THURSDAY. APRIL 9:00-11:00 SUNSHINE 18 FRIDAY. APRIL 8:30-11:00 ALIEN 19 SATURDAY. APRIL 8:30-11:00 2001:SPACE ODYSSEY 20 SUNDAY. APRIL 9:00-11:00 EVENT HORIZON 21 MONDAY. APRIL 8:00-10:30 BLADE RUNNER 22 TUESDAY. APRIL 8:30-10:30 MOON

PROMETHEUS 16 WED. APR 8:30-11:00

2012 DIRECTOR: Ridley Scott STARRING: Noomi Rapace, Logan Marshall-Green, Michael Fassbender

I was dreaming, really crazy disturbed dreams. I remember I was dreaming that I, I dreamt that I woke up and I was touching my tummy and something was moving, and I saw something kind of coming out.

INTRODUCTION BY NOOMI RAPACE

A team of space explorers embarks on a fantastic voyage to the edge of the universe after making a profound discovery that hints at the true origins of the human race in this belated pseudo-prequel to director Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi classic Alien. Isle of Skye, Scotland: 2089. Archeologists Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway discover a cave drawing featuring a mysterious star pattern not found in our solar system. Upon comparing the image with similar other ones found at different archeological digs all over the planet, the pair realizes that they all match perfectly. They’re convinced that the image is an invitation, and set out on a high tech Weyland Industries ship called Prometheus to - just maybe - unlock the mysteries of mankind’s origins on Earth. Flash forward to Christmas Day, 2093. The crew of Prometheus awakens from stasis to learn they have arrived at their destination. With highly-intelligent android David assisting the mission, and chilly Weyland representative Meredith Vickers calling the shots, Captain Janet brings the ship down to the surface, landing next to a line of awe-inspiring structures that appear to have been built by intelligent beings. But when a small crew led by Elizabeth and Charlie explore the remote planet, the artifacts they find threaten to contradict everything mankind had been taught about its origins. But there’s a secret in this chamber that’s lain dormant for centuries, and now that it senses life, it finally sees an opportunity to escape. If it does, the trip that was supposed to answer al of our biggest questions about life could also be the one that seals the fate of every living creature on planet Earth.

SUNSHINE

17 THU. APR 9:00-11:00

2007 DIRECTOR: Danny Boyle STARRING: Cillian Murphy, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans

I love those classic sci-fi movies that everyone calls masterpieces, which they are, like 2001, Solaris and Alien. I thought it was such a brilliant script in that tradition.

INTRODUCTION BY CILLIAN MURPHY

In 2057, the failure of the sun starts a solar winter and threatens Earth. Humanity, in an attempt to reignite it, loads a massive stellar bomb onto a spaceship named Icarus II.The ship is the second and final attempt to save mankind, as the previous first mission, the Icarus I, was lost seven years previously for reasons unknown. After leaving the range of Earth communications, Icarus II Communications Officer Harvey discovers the distress beacon of Icarus I while passing Mercury.As the stellar bomb’s operation is purely theoretical, physicist Capa recommends to Captain Kaneda they change course; since both bombs depleted all of mankind’s fissile resources, a rendezvous with Icarus I would allow two attempts. Mace, the ship’s engineer, opposes this plan. In planning the new course, navigator Trey forgets to realign the shields that protect the ship from the solar wind, causing damage to the shield. Kaneda and Capa embark on a spacewalk to make repairs while the ship is angled away from the sun. However, a fire in the ship’s oxygen garden, caused by reflected sunlight, causes the ship to realign and face the Sun, and Kaneda sacrifices himself to complete repairs. While Icarus I has a functional oxygen garden and payload bomb, the ship’s computer has been sabotaged, rendering delivery of the second payload impossible. The crew of Icarus I is found dead in the solar observation room, having been exposed to un-shielded rays of sunlight. Suddenly, the Icarus I forcibly decouples, destroying the outer airlock and stranding the four crew members on the derelict spacecraft. Capa, Mace, Trey, co-pilot Cassie, and botanist Corazon remain alive on board Icarus II. Corazon calculates that the ship lacks the oxygen for five crew members to reach the sun and, as evidence suggests the airlock broke when manually decoupled, the crew discusses killing Trey. Capa ascertains that Pinbacker, now heavily burned from sun exposure, snuck aboard and decoupled the airlocks. 13

ALIEN

18 FRI. APR 8:30-11:00

1979 DIRECTOR: Ridley Scott STARRING: Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, John Hurt

Alien, in its gradual, threatening way, took us back to the idea of some eternal war between us and them, mankind and the black hole.

INTRODUCTION BY JOHN HURT

A space mining outfit on their way home to Earth is woken out of a deep sleep by an SOS message. They are required to respond, so they change their course for a distant planet.When they arrive, they move down to the planet’s surface to discover the source of the beacon. They discover some exotic, abandoned alien spaceship, and an enormous, ancient corpse of a creature with its chest bursted out. Deep within the spaceship, they discover an alien’s nest. When one scientist examines an egg, it opens up, and the creature inside attacks him. It attaches itself to his face, and becomes unremovable. The other two crewmen manage to get him back to the ship but Ripley the ship’s second officer in command doesn’t want them to bring him aboard because of possible contamination. But Ash, the Medical Officer, opens the doors anyway, and lets the victim in. They put him in the infirmary, and learn that the hatchling is controlling his breathing patterns. After a while, the hatchling detaches itself. Before going back into cryonic sleep, the crew decides to celebrate the recovery. But during the celebration, the victim goes into panic, and starts writhing in pain. His chest starts to warp, and then it bursts open, and a snake-like creature slithers out. They begin searching for the creature, but before long, it has grown into a huge monster that resembles a 7 foot tall lobster with sharp teeth and claws, and it hunts down the crew, one by one. Ripley and Ash are two of the last survivors, and Ash attempts to kill Ripley, but Parker manages to bludgeon him, revealing that he’s an android. When they get Ash’s head working again, he reveals that his mission was to bring back a living alien for the Company to study. Before long, Ripley, and a cat, are the only survivors. She decides to set the spaceship to self-destruct, taking the alien with it.The countdown begins, and she hurries to the escape pods, with the cat in hand. The pod ejects, back to earth.

2001: SPACE ODYSSEY 19 SAT. APR 8:30-11:00

1968 DIRECTOR: Stanley Kubrick STARRING:

Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester

If any film was meant to be shown on a large screen. This is the one.

INTRODUCTION BY KEIR DULLEA

A mind-bending sci-fi symphony, Stanley Kubrick’s landmark 1968 epic pushed the limits of narrative and special effects toward a meditation on technology and humanity. Based on Arthur C. Clarke’s story The Sentinel, Kubrick and Clarke’s screenplay is structured in four movements. At the “Dawn of Man,” a group of hominids encounters a mysterious black monolith alien to their surroundings.To the strains of Strauss’s 1896 Also sprach Zarathustra, a hominid invents the first weapon, using a bone to kill prey. As the hominid tosses the bone in the air, Kubrick cuts to a 21st century spacecraft hovering over the Earth, skipping ahead millions of years in technological development. U.S. scientist Dr. Heywood Floyd travels to the moon to check out the discovery of a strange object on the moon’s surface: a black monolith. Cutting ahead 18 months, impassive astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole head toward Jupiter on the spaceship Discovery, their only company three hibernating astronauts and the vocal, man-made HAL 9000 computer running the entire ship. When the all-too-human HAL malfunctions, however, he tries to murder the astronauts to cover his error, forcing Bowman to defend himself the only way he can. Free of HAL, and finally informed of the voyage’s purpose by a recording from Floyd, Bowman journeys to “Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite,” through the psychedelic slit-scan star-gate to an 18th century room, and the completion of the monolith’s evolutionary mission. With assistance from special-effects expert Douglas Trumbull, Kubrick spent over two years meticulously creating the most “realistic” depictions of outer space ever seen, greatly advancing cinematic technology for a story expressing grave doubts about technology itself. Provocatively billed as “the ultimate trip,” 2001 quickly caught on with a counterculture youth audience open to a contemplative viewing experience of a film suggesting that the way to enlightenment was to free one’s mind of the U.S. military-industrial-technological complex

EVENT HORIZON 20 SUN. APR 9:00-11:00

1997 DIRECTOR: Paul W.S. Anderson STARRING: Laurence Fishburne, Sam Neill, Kathleen Quinlan

In every sense of a gore film, this is the one that would disturb you the most. Whats more scary than being millions of miles away from home and being stuck on a ship in the middle of space with hell.

INTRODUCTION BY PAUL W.S ANDERSON

In 2047, the rescue vessel Lewis and Clark is dispatched to answer a distress signal received from the Event Horizon, a starship that disappeared during its maiden voyage to Proxima Centauri seven years prior. Captain Miller and his crew Lieutenant Starck, pilot Smith Medical Technician Peters. Engineer Ensign Justin, Rescue Technician Cooper, and Trauma Doctor D.J. are joined for the mission by the Event Horizon’s designer Dr. William Weir. Dr. Weir briefs the crew that the Event Horizon was built to test an experimental gravity drive which generates an artificial black hole to use the immense gravitational power to bridge two points in spacetime, greatly reducing travel time over astronomical distances. Upon arriving at the ship’s decaying orbit around Neptune and boarding the Event Horizon to search for survivors, the crew finds evidence of a massacre. During the search, the ship’s gravity drive activates automatically. Justin is pulled into the resulting portal, returning in a catatonic state. He is later placed in stasis after a failed suicide attempt in apprehension over the events he witnessed during his crossover. The activation of the gravity drive causes a massive shockwave which critically damages the Lewis and Clark and forces the entire crew to board the Event Horizon. The crew then begins experiencing hallucinations of their fears and regrets: Miller sees a subordinate, Corrick, he was forced to abandon in a fire; Peters sees images of her son Denny with his legs covered in bloody lesions; and Dr. Weir, a widower, sees his wife Claire with missing eyes, urging him to join her. After deciphering a warning from a video log of the Event Horizon’s crew going insane and mutilating each other, Miller and D.J. deduce that while the ship’s gravity drive did successfully open a gateway in spacetime, it leapt outside the known universe and into another dimension, described later on by Dr. Weir as “a dimension of pure chaos, pure evil”. The Event Horizon has since then gained an evil sentience and telepathic abilities, tormenting its occupants with the aim of compelling them to return to Hell. 25

BLADE RUNNER 21 MON. APR 8:00-10:30

1982 DIRECTOR: Ridley Scott STARRING: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young

My idea of a villain is somebody who wants to do some nasty, bad things, and Harrisonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s character...his motivation...he has to kill five Replicants, which we are.

INTRODUCTION BY RUTGAR HAUER

A blend of science fiction and noir detective fiction, Blade Runner (1982) was a box office and critical bust upon its initial exhibition, but its unique postmodern production design became hugely influential within the sci-fi genre, and the film gained a significant cult following that increased its stature. Harrison Ford stars as Rick Deckard, a retired cop in Los Angeles circa 2019. L.A. has become a pan-cultural dystopia of corporate advertising, pollution and flying automobiles, as well as replicants, human-like androids with short life spans built by the Tyrell Corporation for use in dangerous off-world colonization. Deckard’s former job in the police department was as a talented blade runner, a euphemism for detectives that hunt down and assassinate rogue replicants. Called before his one-time superior, Deckard is forced back into active duty. A quartet of replicants led by Roy Batty has escaped and headed to Earth, killing several humans in the process. After meeting with the eccentric Eldon Tyrell, creator of the replicants, Deckard finds and eliminates Zhora, one of his targets. Attacked by another replicant, Leon, Deckard is about to be killed when he’s saved by Rachael, Tyrell’s assistant and a replicant who’s unaware of her true nature. In the meantime, Batty and his replicant pleasure model lover, Pris use a dying inventor, J.F. Sebastian to get close to Tyrell and murder him. Deckard tracks the pair to Sebastian’s, where a bloody and violent final confrontation between Deckard and Batty takes place on a skyscraper rooftop high above the city. In 1992, Ridley Scott released a popular director’s cut that removed Deckard’s narration, added a dream sequence, and excised a happy ending imposed by the results of test screenings; these legendary behind-the-scenes battles were chronicled in a 1996 tome, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner, by Paul M. Sammon.

MOON 22 TUE. APR 8:30-10:30

2009 DIRECTOR: Duncan Jones STARRING: Sam Rockwell, Kevin Spacey, Dominique McElligott

The character is definitely very much based on the Hal character. It’s very much an homage to the ‘70s sci-fi films. The film stock is from the ‘70s.

INTRODUCTION BY SAM ROCKWELL

Sam Bell has a three year contract to work for Lunar Industries. For the contractâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s entire duration, he is the sole employee based at their lunar station. His primary job responsibility is to harvest and periodically rocket back to Earth supplies of helium-3, the current clean and abundant fuel used on Earth. There is no direct communication link available between the lunar station and Earth, so his only direct real-time interaction is with GERTY, the intelligent computer whose function is to attend to his day to day needs. With such little human contact and all of it indirect, he feels that three years is far too long to be so isolated; he knows he is beginning to hallucinate as the end of his three years approaches. All he wants is to return to Earth to be with his wife Tess and their infant daughter Eve, who was born just prior to his leaving for this job. With two weeks to go, he gets into an accident at one of the mechanical harvesters and is rendered unconscious. Injured, he awakens back at the station in the infirmary, he assumes assisted by GERTY. GERTY tells him that a rescue team named Eliza will come to the station to clean up the aftermath of the accident.After his recuperation, he takes an unauthorized trip back to the broken harvester, where he makes an unexpected discovery. Because of his find, he begins to doubt his sanity, then his true identity, then the company and GERTYâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s willingness to do what is best for him. Because of his resulting beliefs, his sole mission becomes how to get back to Earth on his own.