A new Folio collector’s edition H. P. LOVECRAFT
THE CALL OF
CTHULHU & OTHER WEIRD STORIES
Introduced by
Alan Moore With illustrations by
Dan Hillier
‘The twentiethcentury horror story’s dark and baroque prince’ STEPHEN KING ALSO AVAILABLE
as a 750 copy limited edition with an exclusive binding, presentation box and an original print signed by Dan Hillier.
Available exclusively from www.foliosociety.com
SFN 141 Welcome
2018 is going to be one hell of a year for comic book movies. Avengers: Infinity War, Deadpool 2, Ant-Man And The Wasp, Venom and two X-Men films… But if we’re ranking them based purely on our excitement levels, Black Panther is hovering near the top. In a marketplace that could reasonably be described as ‘crowded’, the opportunity to be shown something new will always grab our attention, and what we’ve seen of Ryan Coogler’s movie and the world of Wakanda has been supremely striking. The character’s solo film has been long, long overdue, and we talked to Coogler and star Chadwick Boseman about why Black Panther is a very special film indeed. The same can be said of Guillermo del Toro’s absolutely stunning The Shape Of Water, a beautiful and unusual fairy tale that balances fierce social commentary with one
GET EXCITED ABOUT ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL You can read more about Robert Rodriguez’s adaptation of the manga favourite on page 14, but we just can’t wait to see James Cameron’s passion project finally hit the big screen. With an incredible cast and an eye-catching first trailer, we’ve got high hopes for Alita.
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of the most affecting love stories that we’ve seen in years (which just happens to be between a woman and an amphibian creature). It’s the kind of film that only he could make, and we were thrilled to talk to him and the cast. Then there’s the return of two icons, as Mulder and Scully are back with another season of The X-Files, the long-awaited and extremely R-rated Netflix series of Richard Morgan’s hardboiled SF noir Altered Carbon, and the first sci-fi movie from arthouse darling Alexander Payne in eccentric comedy Downsizing. We’ve got superheroes, aquatic creatures, supernatural investigators, body-swapping criminals and much, much more, and we can’t think of a better way to welcome in the Jonathan Hatfull new year. Editor
SCIFINOW 141 Contents
PORTAL
08 Black Lightning
We talk to the cast and creator of The CW’s latest superhero smash.
12 Winchester
Will this Helen Mirren horror be the ultimate haunted house movie?
16 Games Workshop
From the back of a van to a fantasy institution.
FEATURES
20 Black Panther
Ryan Coogler and Chadwick Boseman tell us about T’Challa’s return to Wakanda and why the King’s solo movie is long overdue.
30 The Shape Of Water
We sit down with Guillermo del Toro and the cast of the most beautiful genre love story in years.
40 Cloverfield
We attempt to put together all the clues from Bad Robot’s secretive monster franchise…
44 The X-Files
Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny tease what’s next for Mulder and Scully as the iconic show returns with a bigger, better season.
50 The Maze Runner: The Death Cure
The YA franchise that aims to go out with a bang.
54 Downsizing
Alexander Payne talks shrinking Matt Damon in this festival favourite sci-fi comedy.
58 Altered Carbon
Find out why Netflix’s hugely ambitious new series is the hard-R, hard SF spectacle you’ve been waiting for.
BLACK 20 PANTHER
64 Requiem
The creator and star of this atmospheric British mystery series tell us about bringing Don’t Look Now-esque chills to the BBC.
REVIEWS
08
68 Star Wars: The Last Jedi
What did we make of the most divisive Star Wars movie to date?
70 Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle
How did The Rock fare in the long-awaited reboot?
71 Coco
Is Pixar’s latest a future classic?
Plus:
The Shape Of Water, Bright, Black Mirror, Dark and more…
BOOK CLUB
80 Authors On Authors
John Gwynne writes about the heroism in David Gemmell’s fantasy classics.
88 Marieke Nijkamp
The author of Before I Go on her snowbound YA mystery.
Plus:
All the latest book and graphic novel reviews.
TIMEWARP
90 The Outer Limits
The complete guide to the original run of the groundbreaking anthology classic.
98 Louise Jameson
The Doctor Who star talks about Leela, Tom Baker and giant rats.
106 Jason And The Argonauts
Remembering Ray Harryhausen’s finest hour.
Plus:
Halloween: H20, Batman. 006 |
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MEET THE TEAM Q. What’s your favourite fictional fantasy realm??
Jonathan Hatfull Editor
A. Robo-Hungary Home of the evil were-car, where the locals choose to believe what they were programmed to believe.
Abigail Chandler Deputy Editor
16
44
A. The world of His Dark Materials Few concepts in fantasy literature have resonated with me as strongly.
Poppy-Jay Palmer
54
90
News Editor
A. The Wizarding World Or more specifically, Hogwarts. It’s always there to welcome you home.
Marcus Faint
Art Editor
EVERY ISSUE
112 SUBSCRIPTIONS Subscribe to the magazine and save money today.
114 NEXT ISSUE Your first sneak-peek at the next issue of SciFiNow.
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A. Gotham City Where would our favourite caped crusader be without the seedy city that he loathes/loves...
Rachael Harper Sub Editor
A. Narnia Talking animals, enchanted islands, silver chairs. Shame about the ‘always winter never Christmas’ bit though… | 007
PORTAL
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Your essential, trustworthy and unrivalled guide to the latest genre happenings
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DISNEY BUYS FOX
What does the colossal deal mean for genre fans?
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WINCHESTER
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ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL
Helen Mirren has built the ultimate haunted house
From bigeyes to bot fights: we preview Alita
017 GAMES WORKSHOP A new book about GW’s early years needs you
LIGHTNING STORMS The cast and creators of The CW’s Black Lightning tell us about the new series WORDS POPPY-JAY PALMER INTERVIEWS ADAM TANSWELL
With 16 seasons of four different shows already under its belt, The CW’s Berlanti-verse isn’t done expanding. Sauntering into the party is Black Lightning, the superhero alter ego of high school principle Jefferson Pierce (played on the show by Cress Williams). After putting his superhero days behind him, Pierce is forced to get the suit on again and come out of retirement when his community comes under threat. “One of the things about the comics that is very important is that Jefferson Pierce and Black Lightning were almost two different people,” explains Williams. “They’re the same person but it’s like a dual personality. Jefferson Pierce is put together and almost Obama-like but with Black Lightning there’s more flavour. There’s more sarcasm and we’re gonna carry that voice through.” The first time Williams saw himself in costume had quite the effect on him. “I kind of screamed,” he confesses. “I screamed out loud and I couldn’t get away from the mirror, but at the same time I was ready to fight. I’m like: ‘Let’s go.’ I wanted to tear down a door or go through a wall. It’s so exciting.” As with the comics, the series is set to revolve around Pierce’s relationship with his family, or more specifically his daughters, Jennifer (China Anne McClain) and Anissa (Nafessa Williams), both of whom
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family issues like we all do, and also develop superpowers over the solve those issues and get through course of the series. them together. But, we have a really “When the show starts out, I good relationship in real life, so I’m don’t have my powers yet and I just really excited. Like, China’s my have no clue that anything like that little sister from the day we met is going on in my family, so I’m just at the audition. We were obsessed being a teenager getting into a lot with each other. So I’m sure that of trouble, sneaking out, all of that will translate on normal stuff that screen and will happens, and just show us struggling,” says going through McClain. “When the world of the powers this universe come, instead of together.” it being like: ‘Oh An unusual my God! I’m a thing about superhero! This is awesome!’ it’s Black Lightning more like I feel is that it’s a alienated. I don’t show with a know what to black family at do, especially its centre, which since at first I is a rarity for not can’t control only superhero it. So if I touch series but an electronic primetime shows device, it shorts in general. out. I can’t get “You’re slowly on Twitter or starting to see Instagram. No black characters NAFESSA WILLIAMS social media, so in the genre, it’s super alienating.” itself,” says co-creator Mara Brock “I’m very protective over Akil. “You want to be invited to that [Jennifer], being the oldest sister,” party. But, more than just being adds Williams. “You’ll see that happy to be there, what can you do sister relationship, just wanting to once you’re there? And one of the protect her and maybe just school things that I think is important is her on things that I went through that images are powerful. They’re before. You’ll see us go through powerful because when you can see
YOU’LL SEE US GO THROUGH FAMILY ISSUES TOGETHER
yourself, you have to show up. If you can see yourself, it’s like: ‘Uhoh, who else can see me? What am I doing with my life? What choices am I making? Who am I? Where do I serve, and fit in?’ If you remain out of the conversation, out of the storytelling, you feel like you can be on the sidelines. But when that spotlight is on you, what are you gonna do? “I think this is why I’m excited about this time to be in this,” Akil continues. “To take a black superhero that’s also a father, taking back that narrative of black men not being in their family’s lives – they are. It may not look the way that you want it to look, but it is there. They are there, they are loving. And they’re raising their children. And then, skipping to young black women; black women are some of the most invisible people in media, in life even within our own culture, sometimes black men get their needs met before we can even talk about our needs. But to see two young black women raised at a time that they are to be empowered by a strong black woman and a strong black man to step into their power; and then, be guided by that and challenged by that. It’s time for that, at a time in real life when women are looking for those choices.”
Black Lightning premieres on 23 January 2018 on Netflix UK.
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PORTAL
MOUSE TAKES FOX
What does Disney’s purchase of 21st Century Fox mean for genre fans? WORDS JONATHAN HATFULL
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t’s got to be one of the biggest deals in Hollywood history. If Disney’s proposed buy-out of 21st Century goes through (for the Disney Princess-ly sum of $66 billion), we’re going see a lot of signficant changes. It’s worth noting that, at the time of writing, the deal has not been closed and won’t be for some time, and that the full impact this will have on jobs and divisions at Fox is still unclear (there’s been some concern about the future of arthouse-skewing arm, Fox Searchlight). However, there are some things we know. For starters, Disney will definitely be looking to bring the X-Men, Fantastic Four and Deadpool (hey, he’s kind of his own thing) into the MCU, as Bob Iger confirmed to Deadline. He also told THR that we shouldn’t expect to see Wade Wilson suddenly stripped of his R-rating. Indeed, he seemed to
suggest that the possibility for more R-rated superhero movies (which Fox seemed to be pursuing) isn’t necessarily going to be closed down just because there’s a Disney logo. “There might be an opportunity for a Marvel-R brand for something like Deadpool,” he told THR. “As long as we let the audiences know what’s coming, we think we can manage that fine.” But while it’s exciting to imagine the cross-over possibilities, it’s also worth taking a step back to consider the broader implications, and not just the ones we mentioned in the first paragraph. As James Mangold worried at a recent screening of Logan (reported by Deadline): “If they’re actually changing their mandate, if what they’re supposed to do alters, that would be sad to me because it just means less movies.” Fingers crossed we see more, not less.
WIZARD TECH
There’s no place like Hogwarts with this new Harry Potter RPG WORDS POPPY-JAY PALMER
B
ack when everyone was still obsessed with Pokemon Go, there was a little bit of talk about the possibility of a Harry Potter-themed version of the game going into development. That project is yet to happen, but we have happily been granted with the next best thing: a Harry Potter mobile RPG. The upcoming game, which is called Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery, has been developed by Jam City and is part of the Portkey Games label from Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment, making
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it 100 percent official. With story-driven narrative game play, Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery will basically allow players to attend Hogwarts on their phones, meaning fans all over the world will finally be able to fulfil their dreams of getting a proper wizarding school education. Sort of. After creating your character (or recreating yourself in witch or wizard form) you’ll be able to practice your brewing skills in Potions, learn how to take down a boggart in Defence Against the Dark Arts, and sign up for extracurricular activities like the Duelling Club.
The next best thing to attending Hogwarts.
Speaking to Pottermore, cofounder and CEO of Jam City Chris DeWolfe said of the game: “As Harry Potter fanatics, we have great respect for the millions of people throughout the world who have followed the Harry Potter stories for more than 20 years. This game is a labour of love for our developers and artists, who
are dedicated to creating the most magical entertainment and game play experience for everyone who adores JK Rowling’s Wizarding World.”
Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery will be available sometime in 2018.
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HOT NEWS
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom Trailer Breakdown
keeps on finding JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN Life KINGDOM TRAILER BREAKDOWN a way on Isla Nublar WORDS POPPY-JAY PALMER
1Dinner date
2 Forever friends
3 Yes Goldblum
4 It’s a stampede!
5 Fight!
6 The end of the world
After almost dying horrible deaths together in Jurassic World, Owen and Claire probably hoped they’d never have to see each other again. Oh well.
If you thought the stampede in Jumanji was bad, it’s nothing compared to being chased off a cliff by a gang of prehistoric beasts.
In a tender moment, we’re treated to a flashback in which Owen begins to train the adorable baby version of velociraptor Blue.
You know something wild is about to go down when the biggest, fiercest dinosaur is killed out of nowhere by an even bigger one.
A bearded Dr Ian Malcolm coming back to give his two cents on the whole situation is all we’ve ever really wanted.
With an erupted volcano and nowhere to run, we’re expecting Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’s body count to be staggering.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is in cinemas from 8 June 2018.
“GREAT BOOK AND WOULD MAKE A FANTASTIC CHRISTMAS PRESENT FOR ANY CAPTAIN SCARLET FAN.” AMAZON.CO.UK CUSTOMER REVIEW
W W W. H AY N E S . C O M
AVAILABLE FROM ALL GOOD BOOK SHOPS
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HOW TO BUILD A HAUNTED HOUSE Five reasons why we can’t wait to be terrified by Helen Mirren haunter Winchester WORDS JONATHAN HATFULL
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THE REAL STORY IS FASCINATING
The history of the Winchester Mystery House sounds more like a movie plot than anything else. It was built by Sarah Winchester, the heir to the Winchester rifle fortune, who was convinced by a medium that she was being haunted by the souls of those who had been killed by the weapons she’d made millions from. Once work began, it didn’t stop for nearly 40 years, as Sarah demanded constant work and more and more rooms…
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HAUNTED HOUSES DO NOT GET MORE HAUNTED THAN THIS
When we think of the great haunted houses, we think of The Overlook Hotel, Hill House, or, more recently, Allerdale Hall in Crimson Peak. The Winchester House seems to have been almost custom-made in anticipation of a horror biopic to come. There’s the door to nowhere, the rooms that are completely out of place, and there’s the infamous staircase that just goes into the ceiling. There are a lot of theories about the house’s
incomprehensible design, one of which is that Sarah wanted to confuse all visitors, living and deceased.
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HELEN MIRREN’S IN A HORROR FILM
How often does this happen? While Dame Mirren does pop up in giant blockbusters every now and again (Fast & Furious 8, for example), she very rarely strays into horror. The haunted and quite possibly insane Sarah Winchester should provide her with plenty to sink her teeth into, and we can all enjoy watching one of the greatest actors carry a haunted house movie.
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THE SUPPORTING CAST IS GREAT
5
THE SPIERIGS ARE ON A ROLL
The film begins when Eric Price, a psychiatrist from San Francisco, is sent to the San Jose estate to examine Sarah Winchester’s mental health. The skeptical shrink will be played by Jason Clarke, who’s been a dependable presence in genre films both good (Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes) and bad (Terminator: Genysis). Speaking of genre favourites, Winchester also stars Angus Sampson (Mad Max: Fury Road’s Organic Mechanic and Tucker from the Insidious films), and Sarah Snook, who was absolutely stunning in the Spierig brothers’ Predestination. Which brings us to…
Winchester is directed by Peter and Michael Spieirg, who have been enjoying a terrific run of form recently. The brothers broke on to the scene back in 2003 with Undead and made a name for themselves with stylish vamp movie Daybreakers. However, they really came into their own with the brilliant (and somehow still underrated) SF Predestination, and they’re fresh off the success of the hugely entertaining Jigsaw. We can’t wait to see what they do with this. Winchester is released on 2 February.
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HOT NEWS
Posters
BEST OF THE BILLBOARDS Celebrating the best, worst and weirdest movie posters RU NN ER
W IN NE R
UP
WORDS POPPY-JAY PALMER
MEM RY BANK
MIRADA DE CRISTA
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UP
Ezequiel Endelman and Leandro Montejano’s horror Mirada De Crista (translation: Crystal Eyes) might be too obscure for this but its poster is electric so we don’t care.
THE NEW MUTANTS
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V
TOMB RAIDER
The latest poster for Roar Uthaug’s upcoming Tomb Raider film isn’t especially exciting, but it is a damn sight better than the poster that came before it. You know, that one where it looked like three feet of stock image skin had been Photoshopped in to build Alicia Vikander a new neck? Eugh.
BE ST OF T
M OS TI M PR OV ED
Director, Josh Boone, has stressed that his take on the X-Men, The New Mutants, is very much intended to steer away from what we have seen from the heroes in the past and will instead venture into horror territory. We certainly got that vibe from the film’s first spooky trailer, which came complete with graveyards, ominous music and a ‘haunted’ hospital. It’s no surprise, then, really, that the film’s first poster is just downright creepy. That bleak colouring, the scratched font and those fanged teeth screaming out at you! It may not have much information on it but the stark, horrific imagery is all you need to know to look forward to this. The poster is like X-Men meets Dream Warriors and we love it.
STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI
This gorgeous art poster by Matt Ferguson for The Last Jedi’s 3D release at Odeon came in a Kylo Ren/Rey pair, beautifully contrasting the dark and the light.
BLACK LIGHTNING
The CW is going all-out with its latest superhero series, Black Lightning, and indeed the comic book character’s first live-action outing. It’s no wonder, really, we’re rather excited about it too! The latest poster contains a pretty simple concept, but the way it has been executed (the black and yellow perfectly contrasting, as well as that electrifying the lightning bolt, and the tagline!) is enough to make our hair stand on end.
Welcome to Memory Bank, the part of the magazine where we select an issue of SciFiNow at random, flick through its pages and marvel at what on Earth was going on in the world of sci-fi, fantasy and horror that month. This time, we’re looking at issue 95, which featured a rather dashing image of the Guardians Of The Galaxy on the cover, illustrated by Brian Taylor of CandyKiller.com. Within the pages, we took a look at James Gunn’s first Marvel adventure and discovered how a band of killers, thieves, a walking tree and a psychotic raccoon became the saviours of summer 2014. “That’s the great thing about the whole cast: at the end of the day, we really are just a bunch of misfits, man,” said Drax actor Dave Bautista. “We don’t have these glorified pasts; we’ve all got pretty rough, messed-up pasts!” Veteran Marvel comics writer Dan Abnett was pretty shocked when he found out Marvel Studios wanted to turn the characters’ story into a film. “I thought: ‘Wow, that’s amazing!’” he told us. “Mainly because, with all due respect to the Guardians Of The Galaxy, they are not premier league, worldfamous characters like Iron Man and Captain America. For Marvel to take the plunge and take one of their less well-known things and develop that was rather stunning.” Needless to say that plunge paid off big time. Elsewhere, we visited the set of the sadly now-cancelled Channel 4 hit series Utopia to find where the conspiracy was going next in Season Two. It was going to get more violent, that was for sure: “I don’t have a problem with violence,” said Dennis Kelly, the show’s creator and writer. “I think people who have a gripe about violence should just go fuck off, to be honest.”
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IT’S GOT ROBERT RODRIGUEZ Rodriguez may have a history of being inconsistent in terms of the quality of his films, but the fact that he’s helming Alita makes us sure of one thing: it’s going to be bloody fastpaced and action-packed. We’re keeping our fingers crossed for some of his best work yet.
© Pinguino K
MANGA EYES Though the first trailer for Alita: Battle Angel (released in early December) packed a punch, it seems the main takeaway was that Alita (Rosa Salazar) has CGI manga eyes, like in the source material. But that’s more of an observation than a criticism from where we’re standing.
WHAT A CAST With Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly and Mahershala Ali involved, the film is sure to have great performances. Supporting cast include Ed Skrein (Deadpool), Michelle Rodriguez (The Fast & The Furious) and Lana Condor (X-Men: Apocalypse).
THINGS WE KNOW ABOUT ALITA: BATTLE ANGEL
Don’t stand by in the presence of evil. Be like Alita.
© Richard Burdett
WORDS POPPY-JAY PALMER
JAMES CAMERON IS PRODUCING If you want your big budget, CGI heavy blockbuster to be a success, it’s good to get James Cameron on board. Although we don’t know how he’s had the time when he’s got all of the Avatars on the go at the same time.
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A LONG TIME COMING Cameron first got involved with the Alita adaptation in 2000 when 20th Century Fox registered the domain name ‘battleangelalita.com’ to him. He’s obviously busy, so he kept dipping into project until filming began in October 2016.
M BATTLEANGELALITA.CO
Alita: Battle Angel is in UK cinemas on 20 July 2018.
TECHNOLOGIQUE A film based on a hit cyberpunk manga needs to bring the big guns when it comes to technology. Cameron reportedly developed new tech to make the film possible, and Rosa Salazar’s performance was done entirely through motion capture.
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PORTAL
THE ART OF THE
LAST JEDI
PORGS ON THE FALCON Having made Chewie feel guilty about his carnivorous tendencies, the Porgs quickly made themselves at home on the Millennium Falcon. © Lunt Davies
THE MIGHT OF THE FIRST ORDER The sheer size of the First Order’s forces made a rebel victory at Crait seem impossible. This sequence was a splendid blend of visual wizardry and heart. © Jenkins
Inside the making of the controversial new Star Wars film
All images © 2017 Lucasfilm Ltd. and TM. All rights reserved. Used under authorisation
B
y now you will have seen The Last Jedi (probably more than once). You will have formed your own opinion on Rian Johnson’s chapter in the saga, and you will have had endless conversations about its merits. Whether you are a fan of the film or think that it somehow breaks the canon, The Last Jedi is a film that will doubtless reward multiple rewatches and we can’t wait to revisit it over and over again. In the meantime, The Art Of Star Wars: The Last Jedi by Phil Szostak offers beautiful and fascinating storyboards and insights into the production and design of the film, from the visually stunning battle on Crait to everyone’s new favourite scene-stealers the Porgs. Let’s have a closer look…
LUKE AND REY FACE OFF The meeting of the legend and the new hero was full of surprises and here is a breathtaking design for a training sequence. © Engstrom
The Art Of Star Wars: The Last Jedi by Phil Szostak, and Lucasfilm Ltd. © Abrams Books, 2017
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ORIGIN STORY A new book telling the story of Games Workshop’s incredible early years needs your help WORDS JONATHAN HATFULL
B
ack in 1975, three board game enthusiasts decided to turn their hobby into a business. They named their company Games Workshop, started a fanzine called Owl And Weasel, and everything happened very quickly from there. From living in the back of a van while operating their business from an estate agents to securing the European distribution rights to Dungeons And Dragons, all the way through creating the Fighting Fantasy books, Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson opened up a world of fantasy gaming to the UK and beyond, and Dice Men aims to tell their amazing story. “It’s obviously subject to our memories!” laughs Livingstone. “I think if we crosscollaborate we should get somewhere close to the truth! The more it goes on the more excited I get thinking about it, digging through all our old photographs
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and manuscripts and bits of press cuttings and stuff! It’s going to be very visual I think, obviously there’s going to be lots of funny anecdotes and stories to tell but I think the photographs are going to be quite something.” “We’re still coming across photos of the van from 1975,” adds Jackson. “It’s been quite a trip down memory lane!” So we’ll get the story of how Games Workshop quickly outgrew their flat (“there was a public payphone on the ground floor which we shared with our landlord and he’d hang up on the people as we’d zoom down the stairs to try and get there before him!” Livingstone remembers), the period during which a squash club membership kept the two men presentable during the van times (“we could get out of the van first thing in the morning for a shave, shower etc. and got pretty good at squash by default…”)
Expect a treasure trove of photos.
and how a trip to the US in 1976 changed everything: “We got back and we were overwhelmed, we had no money to buy all of these games that we’d ordered,” remembers Jackson. “My mother sent me a cheque for £50 as if it would help.” Their ingenuity and passion saw them through, and their business would quickly become an empire… The book will be co-written by Jamie Thomson and comes from crowdfunding publisher Unbound, and rewards for pledges include everything from special leatherbound editions to a
reproduction of the very first Owl And Weasel signed by the duo. For more information on Dice Men: Games Workshop 1975-1985, visit https://unbound.com/books/ games-workshop/
A long way from the van...
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TELEVISION ROUND-UP
PORTAL
What’s cancelled? What’s returning? What’s greenlit?
THE OA Brit Marling has confirmed that filming for Season Two will start this month. Get your movement clothes on.
DIRK GENTLY’S HOLISTIC DETECTIVE AGENCY It’s sad times for fans of Max Landis’ spin on the Douglas Adams favourite, as BBC America has pulled the plug.
"DOOMED WITH AN ICONIC BOOGEYMAN" Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury on going back to Leatherface's American pastoral roots WORDS ANTON BITEL
A
lexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury have been making films together since the pregnancy panicfest Inside (2007). They’ve had an uncompromising approach to on-screen depravity – so we were surprised to hear them say they toned down the violence in Leatherface – a prequel to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre mythos, and the first film they’ve made that they’ve not written.
Leatherface is the first film you’ve made together working from a screenplay by someone else. Was this constraining or liberating? Alexandre Bustillo: It was liberating, because it was like holidays for us. We didn’t write the script but we brought our touch to it. We liked that it was
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not a survival-slasher like the other Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, but it was closer to a road movie. We just asked to rewrite the violent sequences because it was over-the-top. We added our touch on the violence and mood, but not the structure. How did you come to be involved in the prequel? Did you find it, or did it find you? Alexandre Bustillo: They found us. We were attached to lots of sagas after our first movie. We were supposed to do the new Hellraiser, and then we were supposed to do Halloween 2. New Line offered us the new Nightmare On Elm Street to direct – and each time it was a failure. But one day Millennium sent us Leatherface. We were like: “Oh god, it’s a new
Texas Chain Saw Massacre, it can be a good idea – so okay, we’ll read it.” We liked the script, so we said: “Yes! Let’s go, we can try, but you must know that we are doomed with an iconic boogeyman, because we failed to do a movie with Pinhead, we failed to do a movie with Michael Myers, and we failed to do a movie with Freddy Krueger.” But we succeeded. How would you characterise the film? Julien Maury: We wanted this movie to be a crossover between Malick’s Badlands and The Virgin Suicides – two movies far away from the mood of a horror movie, and from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre especially, but this was for us a way to raise the bar. We wanted to do a naturalistic movie, and to take time with our characters. We wanted to show things that have never been shown in the saga. We tried our best to surprise the audience. It’s difficult with that kind of movie. Horror fans know all the tricks – and here we are in a franchise, so we have to deal with the character that people know, and they have expectations – but we wanted to have this movie as a standalone movie.
Leatherface is available on DVD and digital download now.
DARK The best Netflix show that not enough people are talking about has been given a second season. If you haven’t seen this German supernatural mystery: get on it.
THE PUNISHER Jon Bernthal will be back for more rage-filled screaming and vigilante justice as Netflix confirms Season Two.
THE TWILIGHT ZONE Jordan Peele’s update on the Rod Serling classic has been officially greenlit by CBS All-Access. Marco Ramirez and Simon Kinberg are also on board.
TEN YEARS LATER, THE MCU FINALLY HAS A BLACK LEADING CHARACTER IN T’CHALLA. BUT WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG? WE TALK TO DIRECTOR RYAN COOGLER AND STARS CHADWICK BOSEMAN, MICHAEL B JORDAN AND LETITIA WRIGHT ABOUT WHAT BLACK PANTHER MEANS FOR THE FUTURE OF REPRESENTATION… WORDS POPPY-JAY PALMER INTERVIEWS ADAM TANSWELL
COVER FEATURE Black Panther
BLACK PANTHER is making history, but for all the wrong reasons. If you haven’t been too preoccupied with hunting for Easter Eggs and hanging back for post-credits scenes, you might have noticed the distinct lack of black people not only in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but in the world of superhero movies in general. Yeah, there’s been a bit of representation every now and then, but nothing to write home about. The likes of Falcon and War Machine were only ever supporting characters, and although Deadshot was front and centre in DC’s Suicide Squad, there’s no denying that one was intended to be an ensemble film. Finally, 17 films deep into the never-ending MCU saga (or 18 if you count The Incredible Hulk, but who does?), Marvel has realised that the leading man doesn’t always have to be white. Instead, it has set Black Panther up to make the kind of history that should never have been a big deal in the first place. So why has what Black Panther is doing never been done before? “It’s interesting,” says director Ryan Coogler. “With any industry, you have moments where something that hasn’t been done is tried – and it either works or it doesn’t. But particularly with entertainment, you can look at sports and there’s the same kind of relationship going on there. There was a time in professional basketball where there were no black players allowed. Or with baseball. There was a time where Latin players couldn’t play baseball. Whether it was race relations or whatever, generally it comes down to business. Owners probably originally thought: ‘If I put a Latin player up, or if I put a black player out there, people won’t come to the games.’ And then you do it and you discover that’s totally not the case. “You flash forward to now, and it’s like: ‘How could there ever have been a time where there weren’t any black basketball players?’ You know what I mean? But it’s just one of those things. Filmmaking is a relatively newer medium. And for whatever reason, the opportunity hasn’t really come up for a film of this size and of this canvas. This is a story that’s based on the continent of Africa. It’s about people who are African. But hopefully it connects with audiences. We’ve been working hard, so I hope that’s the case.” Sure, diverse representation is something some comic book movie fans don’t strain themselves worrying about, but for many more, it’s almost 022 |
incomprehensible how Marvel has come this far only presenting white men as the central characters. Over the course of the last ten years, since Iron Man first premiered in cinemas, the problem has only become more and more conspicuous to the point where it is now impossible to ignore. “We should’ve seen it already,” says actor Chadwick Boseman, who took on the mantle of Black Panther in Captain America: Civil War. “I’m not saying anything against [Marvel]. Marvel Studios has built itself up to be what it is over the past few years – and in its building, it has people in place who have those sensibilities. They were probably more ready for it than the world was ready for it. It’s great that they were courageous enough to do it. “When you see the poster and the movie in theatres, somebody had to be the first to think: ‘We’re going to do this. We’re going to do this.’ That’s a significant moment, because there’s always going to be somebody to tell you your idea is stupid. There’s always going to be somebody who tells you: ‘This will never work.’ Or: ‘People won’t go and see that.’ Or: ‘How are you going to make your money back with this idea?’ Those are the things you hear, so this movie is significant because
TEAM UP ERIK KILLMONGER (Michael B Jordan)
Alias: Killmonger Occupation: Tribal leader Bio: Erik Killmonger was born in Wakanda as N’Jadaka. However, his family was exiled after the death of his father and he ended up in Harlem. He has no superpowers, but extensive training has made him as expert fighter and the Panther’s greatest nemesis.
SHURI
(Letitia Wright)
Alias: Black Panther Occupation: Princess; regent; queen; Black Panther Bio: Shuri always dreamed of being the first female Black Panther. Her powers include enhanced durability, and the ability to turn her body and clothes into rocklike material and transform into a flock of birds.
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BLACK PANTHER
It’s Hard For A Good Man To Be King
Wakanda is far from defenceless.
it got through whatever those voices were and I think it ended up being something that people are interested in. That’s a huge deal to go from inception to this moment.” It looks like Black Panther could be a turning point for Marvel. Frankly, with the Panther comic books often effectively dabbling into political satire and its roots being influenced by black culture, no hero could break the line of white protagonists better. T’Challa is not only black but from Africa, and he even has an African accent. “The accent was my idea,” says Boseman. “People are used to hearing certain things. It’s not just the world, per se, but it’s also how acting is taught. We’re taught acting from a standpoint of classics that are very European. For me, when I learn those things, I immediately reference them to African American and African ideas, and to our writers. I have always said that our writers are just as classical, just as tragic, just as comedic as European writers – and they have just as much depth as any European writers, so it was important to me for that reason. If you’re going to have a character who is the protagonist in something that’s going to be as epic as this, I wanted it to be okay for his voice to be African. It also fits the mythology. They’ve never been conquered.
THE COMIC BOOK NOVICE’S WHO’S WHO OF WAKANDA OKOYE
(Danai Gurira)
Alias: N/A Occupation: Driver; bodyguard Bio: A member of the Dora Milaje (an order of bodyguards and wives-in-training), it’s Okoye’s job to serve and protect the King of Wakanda. Each member of the order was chosen from a different Wakandan tribe; a political tradition that helps to maintain peace among the tribes.
M’BAKU
(Winston Duke)
Alias: Man-Ape Occupation: Leader of Jabari tribe Bio: Born and raised in the Jabari Village, M’Baku was one of the greatest warriors in Wakanda, second only to T’Challa himself. While part of the White Gorilla cult, M’Baku adopted the mantle of Man-Ape, challenged the Panther’s right to rule and became one of his deadliest foes.
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NAKIA
(Lupita Nyong’o)
Alias: Malice Occupation: Bodyguard; royal concomitant Bio: Another member of the Dora Milaje, Nakia became infatuated with T’Challa and tried countless times to get his attention. After being left for dead by Killmonger, Nakia’s health was restored by the Altar of Resurrection, giving her special powers and turning her into the villainess Malice.
RAMONDA
(Angela Bassett)
Alias: N/A Occupation: Queen Mother of Wakanda Bio: Originally from South Africa, Ramonda fell in love with the former king of Wakanda, T’Chaka, after his previous wife N’Yami died while giving birth to T’Challa. She became T’Challa’s surrogate mother before falling pregnant with her first and only child, Princess Shuri.
W’KABI
(Daniel Kaluuya)
Alias: N/A Occupation: Wakandan Chief of Security Bio: As the chief of Wakanda’s security and T’Challa’s second in command, W’Kabi is held in high regard by many. In the comics, he was killed by the evil Morlun alongside Zuri. His epitaph read: ‘W’Kabi, Son of Wakanda, Protector of the Nation, Warrior and Friend.’
ZURI
(Forest Whitaker)
Alias: N/A Occupation: King’s regent; royal bodyguard Bio: Zuri was a warrior and a loyal companion to T’Chaka before the latter passed away. Zuri was killed by Morlun alongside W’Kabi while trying to protect T’Challa. His epitaph read: ‘Zuri, Warrior of Wakanda, Keeper of the Spear of Basgenga, Champion and Friend.’
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COVER FEATURE Black Panther
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BLACK PANTHER
It’s Hard For A Good Man To Be King
Everett K Ross gets a royal welcome.
They’ve never been colonised. They’ve never been enslaved. So why would their sense of what intelligence is be European? For me, he had to speak in a voice that was African because that’s just what the mythology is.” Michael B Jordan, who is set to play antagonist Erik Killmonger in the film, has similar sentiments: “I feel like it’s the perfect time [for a black superhero film]. I feel like there are so many things that had to kind of happen for this movie to be possible. But I understand that this is a business. Chadwick had to have the career he had up until this point, Ryan had to have the career he had in his own right to get to this point, I had to have the career I had, Lupita [Nyong’o] had to have the career she had, Danai [Gurira] had to have the career she had. “So many things had to come into place for people to think: ‘Okay, cool. This is something we want to invest in. This is something that we are going to get a return on.’ The political culture temperature in the world, especially in America, is at a certain level. We needed a Disney, or a Marvel, to get behind and legitimise this project. It’s very, very expensive – and if it doesn’t work, we may not get another one. You know what I’m saying? That’s real. A lot of things had to fall into place in order for this to happen. There are also lots of shows that have helped. You’ve got Atlanta. You’ve got your Insecure. You’ve got Master Of None. You’ve got so many different shows and
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things that are going on, so people are finally feeling comfortable to embrace the culture.” Though Black Panther isn’t Jordan’s first Marvel film — he played Johnny Storm/The Human Torch in Josh Trank’s ill-fated Fantastic Four in 2015 — it’s his first time playing in the MCU, and playing a villain no less. As a comic book fan at heart, he relishes the fact that he’s been given a second shot, and after trying both ends of the spectrum, he has concluded that it is much more fun playing the bad guy. “I think it’s fun to do something different, because I feel like there’s a perception out there of me, personally, as a good guy. The characters I play have tended to be good guys over the years, so to play a guy who is unapologetically who he is – who doesn’t give a fuck about anything – is fun. It’s definitely an element of fun to have no boundaries, to have no ceiling, to do things by any means necessary. I think that those are fun characters to play. It’s a lot of fun.” Although Killmonger is technically the film’s villain, there’s a lot more to it than that. His villainy is something of a grey area. “He cares about a lot of the same things that T’Challa cares about, but he has totally different ways about going about getting them,” explains Jordan. “I feel like he is technically the villain in this movie but hopefully, if we have done our job right, you guys can empathise and see his point of view. I think some of the best villains are ones where you
can kind of see where they are coming from – and you can understand their pain.”
ince T’Challa left Wakanda for Vienna and then Germany to fight alongside Tony Stark in Captain America: Civil War, we got to know him a little prior to his solo film. But even though the character got more screen time than most of us were expecting, we’ve barely scratched the surface. Titular Marvel heroes usually star in their own movies before appearing in a group outing, but an exception was made for Black Panther. Boseman admits that he didn’t really know what to think of that at first. “I didn’t necessarily know it was the right thing when it was presented in that way, but I have since seen that it was a great idea,” he tells us. “The Russo brothers – who I love as directors – did a great job of giving us just what we needed to move into the next movie. I think at first I wasn’t as sure about it. I thought: ‘My father is dying this quick? Can we wait until we at least get to the standalone movie?’ But I think it was the right idea because it gave us something catastrophic and tragic. It gave the character a certain amount of depth to go into this movie with.” As a result, the tone of Black Panther is set to be a little different to that which we are used to
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COVER FEATURE Black Panther
from the MCU. Basically, shit’s about to get real. “I think Marvel movies sometimes have a certain level of comedy in them,” Boseman explains. “They feel the need to hit a certain level of comedic tone at certain points. It does do that in moments, but it doesn’t force it. You don’t feel that need for comedy because this is serious for a longer period of time than most Marvel movies. That’s what I feel anyway… I would say for the most part, there’s a weight to this movie that’s a little different.” A lot of that weight could come from having T’Challa as the central character. Going on what we know about him from Civil War, he’s not the kind of fella who likes to throw out a quip after throwing a punch. He’s sensible and regal. He’s a king, after all. As someone with a lot of experience playing real people (including Thurgood Marshall in Marshall, James Brown in Get On Up and Jackie Robinson in 42), Boseman looked towards real people for inspiration when it came to characterising T’Challa and transferring his personality from the page to the screen. The actor’s inspiration list is quite extensive: “Nelson Mandela. Patrice Lumumba. Shaka Zulu. Obama. My father. A priest that I know, who is unknown to others. Some teachers. It’s funny because you can pull from people that you projected a certain stature and reality on to, but you can’t just use them because you don’t know them. I say all those people from history that I don’t know; that I’m projecting ideas on to, but then I go back to my father and my teachers, who are people that I’ve touched and have touched me. I would say all of those people are reflected in the movie at different points.”
fter working with filmmakers like Peyton Reed (Ant-Man), Jon Watts (SpiderMan: Homecoming) and Taika Waititi (Thor: Ragnarok), the MCU has made a habit out of hiring directors with a back catalogue of smaller films with tiny budgets and throwing them into the money-drenched, effects-heavy deep end of the franchise. The same is true of Ryan Coogler, whose only other feature film credits include gritty biopic Fruitvale Station and Creed, both of which also starred Michael B Jordan. Understandably, the pressure was on for Coogler before he even took his seat in the director’s chair. “For sure, we feel pressure,” he says. “Working with Marvel has been terrific. It’s been a really great relationship. Any relationship has ups and downs – but I’ve had the time of my professional life working with the folks there. As far as the pressure goes, I care about the movie and I love making movies. I want every movie that I work on to be good and to connect. I felt pressure when I was in film school making films with budgets that were a few hundred bucks – but on this, the pressure’s real and it’s in your face all the time. Sometimes the pressure of working with such a massive budget is extremely daunting. Sometimes
Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o as Nakia.
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The Dora Milaje have T’Challa’s back at all times.
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DO YOUR HOMEWORK SIX ESSENTIAL BLACK PANTHER COMICS YOU SHOULD READ
BLACK PANTHER #1-5, ‘THE CLIENT’
JUNGLE ACTION #6-18, ‘PANTHER’S RAGE’
BLACK PANTHER: SECRET INVASION
Writer: Christopher Priest Artist: Mark Texeira, Vince Evans Released: November 1998 Priest has spent a lot of time with the Black Panther over the course of his career, and got to know the character rather intimately. That fact certainly comes across in ‘The Client’, which kickstarted a thrilling saga that explores T’Challa’s identity as both a superhero and a king of an African nation.
Writer: Don McGregor Artist: Rich Buckler, Gil Kane, Billy Graham Released: October 1972 McGregor changed the Marvel landscape after expressing disapproval at the fact that Jungle Action only featured white, blond superheroes fighting crime in Africa. He wanted a black character as the hero, so he became a Black Panther buff and made him a central character.
Writer: Jason Aaron Artist: Jefte Palo Released: July 2008 The usually very well protected Wakanda finds itself in danger after the Skrull Invasion saga that wreaked havoc through much of the Marvel Comics universe. The story may have been a bit more violent than what we were used to from Black Panther, but it’s an exciting read.
BLACK PANTHER #1-6, ‘WHO IS THE BLACK PANTHER?’
BLACK PANTHER: THE MAN WITHOUT FEAR
A NATION UNDER OUR FEET
Writer: Reginald Hudlin Artist: John Romita Jr Released: May 2009 In this story, Hudlin took everything we loved about Priest’s take on the character and updated it. Huts and loin cloths were replaced with modern technology and education, and we saw the nation of Wakanda through an entirely new lens.
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Writer: David Liss Artist: Francesco Frankavilla, Jefte Palo Released: February 2011 T’Challa left the technology of Wakanda behind in favour of New York. Or, more specifically, Hell’s Kitchen. Things get dark as Black Panther teams up with Daredevil, a vigilante who has his limits, and we find out just how far he’s willing to go while fighting crime and keeping people safe.
Writer: Ta-Nehisi Coates Artist: Brian Stelfreeze Released: August 2016 Things get political as T’Challa attempts to deal with the fallout after an upheaval in Wakanda, and the antics of superhuman terrorist group The People don’t help matters. It’s all drama for Black Panther as he realises just how difficult it is to balance super-heroism with the throne.
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COVER FEATURE Black Panther
Killmonger wants the throne.
the pressure of filming is extremely daunting. The scale of everything is huge and you realise that this is a machine you’re never going to be able to outwork. There’s always going to be something to be done and questions to be answered. Somebody that’s waiting for something from you. And then there’s the pressure of the money. If you ever think about how much money’s being spent, it’s like: ‘Oh my God!’” The question of whether or not a Marvel film will be a financially viable investment is barely in question anymore. Black Panther may be the studio’s first film led by a black superhero but, 16 films in, the MCU has proven again and again that it has found the winning formula. However, even if they have all been making money, some parts of the franchise have not managed to win themselves as much approval from fans and critics alike than others. “At the end of the day, it’s only really one pressure that counts and that’s the pressure to make a good movie, which is the same pressure that was there when I was in film school,” Coogler continues. “That’s the one thing that matters when it’s all said and done. Is it good or not? If the people watching feel something or not. If people lose themselves in it or did they feel like it’s BS? That’s the biggest pressure, so I just try to focus on that. I focus on the nuts and bolts of it. Marvel was great because as successful as it is and as big 028 |
as it has become, that’s all it really cares about too. That’s its only question. Is this working? Is this good? And if it’s not, why not? It’s great to have a partner like that.” Having grown up reading X-Men and SpiderMan comic books, Coogler could have very easily been persuaded to direct a number of Marvel movies. He was never as familiar with T’Challa’s story as he was with some of the others, but when he first started talking with Marvel back in 2015 he felt that Black Panther was the one for him for
Andy Serkis’ Klaw is out for blood.
many different reasons. It was more a case of the tale finding the storyteller than the storyteller finding the tale. “At that time, I was dealing with issues in my personal life and in my personal relationship with society,” he explains. “I was looking at themes of cultural identity and ancestry, and the effects of colonisation. Frankly, I was obsessed with all these different things and I was obsessed with trying to get back to the continent of Africa, where I had never been. I was approaching 30 years old and I had never been to Africa. Nobody in my immediate family had ever really been, even though it was a place we often thought about and talked about. “One of the things I wanted to do when I got done with Creed, was go to Africa with my fiancee at the time. I was like: ‘Hey, let’s go to Africa. Let’s get there and see, instead of always talking about it.’ It’s a part of African-Americans. We’ve got a strained relationship with the continent, so all those things were all in the forefront of my mind – and then the biggest studio in the world says to me: ‘Hey, do you want to make a movie about Black Panther?’ If I was going to make a movie of that scale, this was the one to do at the time. I could focus all of that energy and that attention and those questions into something constructive.”
Black Panther is in cinemas on 12 February.
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BLACK PANTHER
It’s Hard For A Good Man To Be King
NOT ALL HEROES WEAR CAPES ACTOR LETITIA WRIGHT ON WORKING WITH HER HERO ANGELA BASSETT
Ross will have his eyes opened.
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When actors are cast in comic book movies, it’s not unusual for them to end up playing their childhood heroes. However, for Humans star Letitia Wright, who plays tech buff Princess Shuri in Black Panther, she got to pretend one of her own personal heroes, the brilliant Angela Bassett, was her mother. “Angela was in the movie that made me want to become an actress, so it was incredible,” Wright enthuses. “Akeelah And The Bee was the movie that inspired me – and now I’ve got to work with Angela. It’s incredible. When the news came out that she was going to be in Black Panther, I was excited. On her first day, we had a table read and then went out to dinner and I knew I had to say thank you to her. She said to me: ‘Baby girl, you don’t have to thank me.’ That was the start of something special. “This is my first big-budget movie and the schedule was crazy – but she often would pull me aside if I was having a tough day and say: ‘Remember who you are. Remember what you have. If you need help, look up and pray. Keep going. Keep being strong.’ I remember thinking: ‘Dang, you don’t have to say that right now. You can kill it on set and go straight home to your kids. You don’t need to care about me on set.’ But she did. I will love her forever. She is awesome.”
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BIG MOVIE The Shape Of Water
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THE SHAPE OF WATER
A MANY SPLENDOURED THING
GUILLERMO DEL TORO AND HIS CAST TELL US ABOUT MAKING THE TRULY BEAUTIFUL AND TIMELY LOVE STORY THE SHAPE OF WATER WORDS JONATHAN HATFULL
It all started with Creature From The Black Lagoon: “Every Sunday they had most of the Universal library on Channel 6 in my hometown,” remembers Guillermo del Toro. “So, I was about six years old, and I saw it. I fell in love with Julie Adams and I fell in love with the Creature. And I really wanted them to end up together because the Creature was so lonely and Julie Adams seemed to be out of place with the rest of the guys, they were kind of regular creeps! I thought that could be a great love story and it wasn’t, it didn’t end well so I wanted to correct that.” Forty years and many incredible movie monsters later, and the filmmaker has finally righted 1954’s wrong. Julie Adams may have never connected with the Creature in that way, but The Shape Of Water delivers a wonderful romance between Elisa Esposito (Sally Hawkins), a mute cleaning woman at a secret government facility in 1962, and an amphibian creature (Doug Jones) captured in the Amazon who had been worshipped as a god. It’s a film that only Guillermo del Toro could make: a tender love story that’s violent, sexual and somehow innocent. A work of social commentary that peels back the glossy veneer on America’s golden period. A fairy tale that is profoundly human, and a courtship between a woman and an amphibian creature that never takes its characters any less than absolutely seriously. “I loved it immediately, I loved the idea,” remembers Richard Jenkins, who plays Elisa’s neighbour and confidant Giles. “But I didn’t see the movie that you see now. I mean, I saw a lot of it but I didn’t see Guillermo del Toro’s imagination when I read the script. I didn’t understand it, I didn’t know that was coming. I thought: ‘How are you going to make this work?’ And I think he thought: ‘How am I going to make this work?’ It’s a very tricky thing to do. He said: ‘They’re either going to go with me on this or they’re going to laugh me off the screen.’ He didn’t say: ‘It’s a love story but it’s with a creature,’ he just said: ‘If you’re in love what do you do?’” Perhaps unsurprisingly given the challenges, del Toro has been tinkering with the idea for The Shape Of Water for years. This wasn’t simply a story that had been sitting in the prolific filmmaker’s legendary ‘to-do’ pile. “I actually pitched it as a B-horror movie idea but then when I elaborated on it I didn’t find it satisfactory, because when you go through the scientists and the secret agent it’s kind of boring,” he remembers. “And I tried it with Abe Sapien and the Princess on Hellboy II, a nice love story between different people, but it didn’t work the way I wanted it. And then in 2011, I was having breakfast with Daniel Kraus and he said: ‘You know, I have an idea for a janitor that discovers an amphibian man in a super-secret government facility and decides to take him home,’ and I thought: ‘That’s the way to do it.’ Doing it not through the big doors but through the back doors of service in a huge facility, that thematically made sense to me.”
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Enter Elisa Esposito, who cleans the facility with her friend Zelda (Octavia Spencer). Her life is rigorously set to a routine, from the moment she wakes up and puts an egg in boiling water to when she clocks out of work for the day. But that routine is disrupted when stern government agent Richard Strickland (Michael Shannon) arrives with his strange new specimen, a completely new discovery that could be the element that puts the Americans over the Russians and win them the Cold War. To Elisa, however, this creature is not an asset. He’s something much more important. That Cold War setting is a gift to the film on many levels. First of all, it’s the perfect way to discuss the issues we face today, with fear, prejudice, paranoia and violence covered under the blanket of strength and patriotism. “I knew I wanted to make it about now, not about then,” del Toro explains. “But most of the time the fairy tale needs ‘Once Upon A Time,’ so I thought: ‘What is the most cherished time in recent American History?’ I thought of 1962 because it’s when everybody is talking about the future, the space race is on and you have beautiful jet fin cars, suburban life, a TV in every house, Kennedy in the White House and Vietnam is starting to escalate. And then Kennedy’s shot, Vietnam escalates and everything kind of dies and skepticism is born. But when people say: ‘Let’s make America great again’ they’re thinking of ‘62. But this is if you were a WASP. If you were a minority the problems were horrible.” This is an intention that del Toro has carried with him right from the beginning of developing the film, and while the film’s message clearly rings especially true at this moment, the filmmaker explains that it’s always been there. “As a Mexican I’ve always had a sort of Midnight DOUG Express experience when I go through customs and immigration in the US,” he says. “Through the years you get a sense of all the things that are not well so I started writing the movie with this in mind, I was already feeling the undercurrent of what is now very above ground. “But I think what the movie says or what the movie shows is that the ‘other’ can be many things to many people,” he continues. “The amphibian man is a god to Giles, a beautiful recognition of her own nature for [Elisa], a wonderful natural being for Michael Stuhlbarg’s character [Dr Robert Hoffstetler – a scientist with a secret], and a dirty slimy thing that comes from South America to [Strickland], and I tried to show that the otherness actually can pull us closer rather than allowing ideology to tear us apart.” “He wanted the people in this movie that everyone overlooked,” adds Jenkins. Of course, once the story was in place, the next piece of the puzzle was Doug Jones. The actor behind the amphibian has been a staple of del Toro’s films since playing one of the creatures in Mimic 20 years ago, bringing the likes of Pan’s Labyrinth’s Faun and Pale Man, Hellboy’s Abe Sapien and Crimson Peak’s ghostly mother to life. However, he tells us that del Toro had some concerns about whether he’d want to take on The Shape Of Water’s leading
role: the film’s adult nature. This is not a PG fairy tale, this is a love story that is very open about its sexuality. “In a strange way it’s my first adult movie and also it’s my first life-affirming movie; all the others have a tinge of nostalgia and loss and they are all centred on paraphrasing my childhood,” del Toro explains. “I wanted to make it a movie that shows, in an incredible natural and not perverse way, that love can take any shape. That love can have many, many forms, and I thought it was important to show that in this Beauty And The Beast, Beauty makes breakfast, shines her shoes and masturbates in the first three minutes, and that the Beast is not going to turn into the Prince, and yet when they have sex it’s shown in a very matter of fact way. It’s not the centrepiece of the movie, it’s not the reason to be.” “We were working on Crimson Peak, and he pulled me into his office to present this idea to me of the next movie he wanted to make, a smaller budget movie with some more artistic drive to it, and I was just so tickled pink to hear about that because it sounded reminiscent of our Pan’s Labyrinth days together,” Jones remembers. “He said: ‘The reason I wanted to ask you about it today, Dougie, is, well, you’re a good Catholic boy and I wanted to make sure you’re okay with this.’ Oh boy, oh jeez, here we go, what’s wrong? So, he used a cuss word beginning with f, and he said, he was hinting there was steamy love scenes to be had, and I said: ‘Oh dear, does that mean, wait, the creature and the cleaning lady, right?’” However, whatever Jones’ concerns may have been, he tells us that they had dissipated by the time that del Toro had laid the story out. “There was an innocence to this and the Catholic boy in me was JONES totally fine with this,” he laughs. “I told him: ‘I don’t even think the Bible has a protocol for animals in the wild getting married first! I assume it’s okay, we’ll be okay!’ So, the innocence of that love really made this one, and he kept stressing to me: ‘You’re the romantic leading male of this film.’ That was a new twist for me, I had never been the romantic lead of any film before, human or monster, so that was a new twist to me and it brought a new element of stress and pressure for me to pull this one off.” Thankfully for Jones, his fellow actors were very understanding of the strains of his work. “Oh, I was brutal with Doug!” laughs Jenkins. “’Please, I could put a fish suit on and everybody would think I’d be great too. Oh, that’s really hard, Doug.’ The first scene I shot with him is the scene where he’s in the tub and I say: ‘Have you always been alone your whole life?’ And we were waiting to shoot and I was thinking: ‘Guy in a fish suit sitting in the bathtub, I don’t know how this going to work… ’ And then they said action, and he changed. ‘Oh, I get it now.’ Doug is the nicest man ever. Oh my god, I was brutal. He loved to laugh, so I’d just say [incredibly drily]: ‘Oh, that was good. Really good take, Doug.’” The other half of this silent, beautiful relationship is Elisa. It’s the kind of character that demands an extraordinary performance, and Sally Hawkins is truly exceptional in the film. Not only does
“GUILLERMO SAID ‘YOU’RE A GOOD CATHOLIC BOY AND I WANTED TO MAKE SURE YOU’RE OK WITH THIS’”
THE SHAPE OF WATER
A Many Splendoured Thing
CABINET OF CREATURES Assessing del Toro’s finest creations
Reapers (BLADE II)
Location: The sewers under Prague Status report: These newly evolved vampires are deadly feeding machines that exist to bleed their victims dry, whether they’re humans or bloodsuckers. Strategic possibilities: The potential for military application is tremendous. As is the potential for our military to be eaten by them. Our assessment is that it’s probably not worth the risk.
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The Faun
Hellboy
Kaiju (deceased)
Amphibian Man
Location: Rural Spain Status report: We believe that this creature has made contact with a young girl and has convinced her to carry out errands for it. It may be helping her work through some issues. Strategic possibilities: There are none, really, but obviously we won’t know until we crack it open and see how it works. Obviously, we would have to find it first.
Location: Government facility, Newark, New Jersey Status report: Big Red is as grumpy as ever, and careless about being seen, but he gets the job done. We’ve got him his kittens and Liz Sherman’s return has made him happier. Strategic possibilities: Honestly, when the world is being threatened, we hand him a cigar, make sure he’s got enough ammo and stay out of his way.
Location: Shatterdome, Hong Kong Status report: As the kaiju get bigger, the need to understand them and defeat them grows more pressing, so we’ve accommodated Drs Geiszler and Gottlieb with their work. Strategic possibilities: Dr Geiszler has suggested that drifting with the kaiju might work. But it may also alert them to our plans, and kill Dr Geiszler.
Location: Occam Aerospace Research Centre, Baltimore Status report: Colonel Strickland has returned from the Amazon with this specimen. It prefers being in salt water and lashes out when provoked, but it seems to be fond of our cleaning staff Strategic possibilities: Is it a new stage in evolution? Dr Hoffstetler has asked for more research time, but we think we need to vivisect it.
(PAN’S LABYRINTH)
(HELLBOY)
(PACIFIC RIM)
(SHAPE OF WATER)
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MAKING A HUMAN MONSTER Michael Shannon tells us about creating The Shape Of Water’s sinister government agent… INTERVIEW JOANNA OZDOBINSKA
There are very few character actors out there who so consistently impress as Michael Shannon. He’s prolific but picks his projects carefully, and has garnered a well-earned reputation as one of the most watchable and intriguing stars out there. In The Shape Of Water, Shannon brings complex menace to the role of Agent Strickland, the man who brought the Amphibian Man back from the Amazon and is eager to make it reveal its secrets by any means necessary… We heard that you stayed in character in between takes… It may not be me staying in character per se. I’m just really focused on my work. I am focused on the film itself. I’m just staying focused so I will go and talk to Guillermo. I look at the footage. I’m not in character, really. I’m just a real perfectionist, and I’m just trying to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything or that there isn’t an idea [we haven’t explored]. The thing I hate the most is waking up the next morning and thinking: ‘Oh, man, I should have done that.’ So, I’m trying to avoid that. It’s not really me being in character. I don’t want to drift away or daydream. I want to stay focused. Strickland reads The Power Of Positive Thinking and motivates himself in front of a mirror. Was it important to make him insecure? I think there were probably a lot of very confused uptight anxious men reading that book during that era. It’s a desperate attempt to try to figure out how to be happy. My character is a deeply frightened and anxious man who tries to keep that a secret at all times but this era was full of paranoia and neurosis and everybody expected something terrible to happen at any second so usually a lot men in that situation were trying
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to hide that by trying to act like they are really tough. What was the appeal of working on this movie? I think the first thing that happened is Guillermo reached out to me and Michael Stuhlbarg and said: “I want to make a movie with you. I’ve been writing a script with both of you in mind. What do you think about that?” We both said: “We like that. That’s very nice of you. Thank you.” And that’s how it started. Then, once we got the script, we felt even more lucky, because it was, for me – I hate to say it – I thought it was very funny. I thought there was a dark humour to it that reminded me a lot of Dr. Strangelove, which is one of my favourite movies. Particularly our storyline, the interaction between Michael and I. So that’s what drew me in, yeah. How did you find the whole experience of working with Guillermo del Toro? One of the great things about working with Guillermo is that you can trust him. So, if Guillermo says: “We’ve got it,” you know you’re working with one of the top filmmakers in the world, so you can trust him. And he’s not going to say it just because he wants to go home. He cares about it as much as you do. Did you have a mental image of what the creature would look like? I didn’t really put much into that because I thought no matter what I came up with Guillermo’s version would be better. I’m not going to lie – I don’t have that fetish in my life, that movie creature fetish. My favourite otherwordly character was what Jeff Bridges played in Starman, that was the one I was the most fascinated by because he was just a person. The movie posters I have at home are The King Of Comedy and Alphaville so I’m not a big movie monster guy. But Guillermo is so I’d just waited to see what he would come up with.
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MAKING THE AMPHIBIAN MAN Guillermo del Toro and Doug Jones on creating this unique character
Designing the creature
Del Toro: The first time I talked to the design team, I said, there are two things we’re not going to refer to. We’re not going to refer to Creature From The Black Lagoon because that’s already in the DNA. It’s like you’re designing a giant ape, King Kong is in the DNA, you don’t have to even address it. But the one we’re going to avoid systematically is Abe Sapien, because if you take Abe and put it in the middle of this film, it won’t work. Jones: I had to make this fishman not look like or resemble any of the other fishmen I’ve played for Guillermo del Toro! People are going to be looking at me and making that comparison no matter what. If you see those two characters side-by-side you will see distinct differences.
A force of nature…
Jones: He didn’t want any human gesturing or any human traces at all. So the challenge for me was to throttle back and second guess my humanity. I needed to find this love story with no verbal dialogue spoken. He’d also be reminding me that I’m an animal. So, between takes he might growl at me: “Dougie! [growls]”, and that would remind me: ‘Okay, I’m doing something too human right now, I need to animal this up.’ Del Toro: I said: ‘You need to have a very animalistic, very self-possessed centre but it’s not human, so you need to be sort of predatorial.’ Doug understood that he was a force of nature. Not a creature of earth or of water, it was more of a creature that was a god, that was elemental.
And a leading man
Jones: In the dialogue of the film it’s suggested that where I was found, the local people there worshipped me as a god. So, what came with that was a superhero stance and he wanted a bit of a matador thrown in as well. It’s a butchering sport, but the choreography that goes with that is very graceful and very confident and very sexy because a matador leads all their movement from the pelvis, and he wanted to see that kind of sexiness, that kind of confidence. Del Toro: He had to get a beautiful bullfighter pose, or like a Barishnikov, that is very masculine but very unaffected. When we sculpted him I was always thinking of Johnny Weissmuller in Tarzan And His Bride. Elisa’s love gives her incredible courage.
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the actor convey every emotion so vividly that you’re on the brink of heartbreak or joy at a moment’s notice, she completely sells this determined character who falls for this extraordinary creature. “I found her amazing in Fingersmith, Submarine, Happy Go Lucky, Blue Jasmine, even something like Paddington,” enthuses del Toro. “What I thought was remarkable in Paddington was she was looking at the bear as if it was there. And then what I found remarkable in Fingersmith is this love story between these fabulous two women was not done in a titillating or perverse way, it was just matter-of-fact. And then what I loved about Submarine was she did a lot of the acting silently, just by presence and looks, and I thought ‘I can write this for her.’ I started writing it for her around 2013 with her in mind and when I pitched it to Fox Searchlight in 2014, I said that’s one of my conditions, the one and only choice for her is Sally Hawkins. I think she has one of the most luminous beautiful faces in cinema today and at the same time you could believe that you could see her in a bus in the middle of a city. She has a reality and yet an otherworldly luminosity to her.” “Oh yeah, Sally Hawkins is an angel from heaven,” agrees Jones. “I can’t say enough good about her. I’ve never worked with a talent like her ever before. I’ve worked with a lot of fantastic actresses over my 30-year career but Sally Hawkins is in a class all of her own. When action is called and cameras are rolling, something very magical happens where you’re playing a real moment with a real person in a
“WHEN I PITCHED THE FILM, I SAID ONE OF MY CONDITIONS IS THAT THE ONE AND ONLY CHOICE FOR ELISA IS SALLY HAWKINS. SHE HAS ONE OF THE MOST LUMINOUS FACES IN CINEMA TODAY” GUILLERMO DEL TORO
Richard Jenkins as Elisa’s confidant Giles.
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real setting, and all the cameras and the crew and the boom mic and everything, it all disappears and you are just entranced by the reality of what’s being placed in front of you. Connecting with her on film was the easiest thing I’ve ever done.” While the story and the emotions of these two characters are the centre of the film, it almost goes without saying that it is beautifully made and meticulously designed. From the clinical coldness of the lab to the warm creakiness of Elisa and Giles’ apartments, this is as gorgeous as any film del Toro has made, and that’s purely from a design point of view. The camera work by Dan Lausten (Crimson Peak, Silent Hill), the soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat, the effects work… it’s all stunning. And remember, this was the little personal project del Toro was talking about while promoting Crimson Peak. “It looked like a classic Hollywood movie to me,” marvels Jenkins. “He speaks in film language, the way he shoots, he understands how to make a movie, what film can do that theatre can’t. That’s what he understands, that’s what he uses and I wasn’t ready for it. I was dying for it but I didn’t expect it. As soon as I saw my apartment, the set, I knew it was going to be something different, something that I always hoped movies would be. I walked into that place and everything was authentic of the time period but nothing was real. It was just… I knew I was in a movie set. It was a piece of art.” “It was incredibly difficult,” the filmmaker affirms. “Because we were trying to make a 60-million-dollar movie for 19.5. What is astounding is that the movie was made for the exact same amount of money as Pan’s Labyrinth and yet it looks four times its
size. And the trick there was: ‘Can I shoot faster? Can I shoot better, more mobile, on a lower budget? Can I pack that kind of musical camera work from a Stanley Donen musical in that budget?’ And the answer was yes, in exchange for my mental health and peace. It was one of the most difficult shoots we’ve ever had, very fulfilling, but boy was it difficult and very exhausting.” The budget and the tight production schedule were the trade-off that del Toro knew he had to make, not only in order to make the film, but to ensure that it was advertised for what it was. Trying to make it fit into an easy box simply wouldn’t work. “Crimson Peak cost over 50 million dollars and that’s why they had to market it as a horror film, to recoup 150, which they didn’t,” he explains. “So, I felt that if I wanted this marketed for what it is, I needed to make it for under 20. This is a feathered fish but then you can market it as a feathered fish. The problem is marketing a feathered fish as just a fish or just a fowl. I think if Crimson had been marketed as a strange Gothic romance it would have probably been better understood, but I don’t know. I think this movie is the movie I’m the proudest of because it pulls off a very eclectic combination of musical, melodrama, comedy, thriller, spy movie, and yet it feels of a piece.” He’s not the only one who thinks that they pulled it off. Since the film premiered at Venice, The Shape Of Water has been flooded with five star reviews and awards nominations, and is shaping up to be a strong contender for the Oscars. As we mentioned previously, given the subject matter, there must have been some concerns
“MY MOTHER AND FATHER WOULD HAVE LIKED THIS. IT’S A HOLLYWOOD MOVIE. IT’S A BEAUTIFUL, BEAUTIFUL LOVE STORY. IT’S LIKE FRANK CAPRA MADE A GENRE MOVIE” RICHARD JENKINS
about how this was all going to go over, and the answer is ‘extraordinarily well’. “Well, of course, you always worry,” del Toro nods. “I think that the success and failure at the first level only exists within you. At the primary level, it’s about how much you love the movie you make. But on a secondary level, which is incredibly important, is: how does it connect with people? And you feel very happy when it connects with a lot of people but the main satisfaction after 25 years of career for me in every movie is not how many people it connects with but how deeply a movie connects with people.” “I knew going in that we had something special,” enthuses Jones. “Going back to that first day with Guillermo describing the story to me, I thought to myself: ‘Hmm, this could be the movie that gets him back at the Oscars again,’ so when I saw those early reviews I was like: ‘Hah, I might have called it!’” “It’s not finished until somebody sees it, it’s a public art, it’s for you guys,” adds Jenkins. “This connects. You think: ‘I love this but what if nobody else does, does that make me out of my mind?’ Because you always believe that there’s an emotional connection that all people get when it’s right, and when you see a movie that everybody loves you go: ‘Oh, okay, I know why.’ But it’s so hard to do and I think he did it this time. My mother and father would have liked this. It’s a Hollywood movie. It’s a beautiful, beautiful love story. It’s like Frank Capra made a genre movie.”
The Shape Of Water is released on 16 February.
Sally Hawkins is incredible as Elisa.
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Can Elisa and Giles help the Creature escape?
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Decoding d l e fi r e v o l C es of JJ Abrams’
Putting the piecpuzzle together... most fiendish
LER WORDS ABIGAIL CHAND
1-18-08
The first Cloverfield trailer came with just this date on it, and no title. What did it mean? What had knocked the head off the Statue of Liberty? The speculation – and the immense ARG/viral marketing campaign – begins…
has Slusho! seen n e e b also bot’s o in Bad R ge, n ri F Alias, eroes H , 8 r e Sup rams’ b and JJ A The . k re T Star cy conspira .. s w gro .
Slusho!
This drink’s logo was seen in the trailer and led viewers down the first of ma ny rabbit h oles. Wha t does this d rink’s man u fa ct u re r have to do with the C loverfield incident? W hat is the ‘d eep sea ingredient’ that gives S lu sho! its great flavo ur and hea lth benefits ? Whatever it is, it was found on the ocean floor, acco rding to www.slush o.jp. You k now what else came from the o cean? THE CLOVER FIELD MON STER.
ite The Hatsui satell What was the item seen falling from the sky and into the Atlantic Ocean in the finale flashback scene of Cloverfield? Was it the satellite that the Hatsui Satellite was supposedly looking for? Was it an asteroid hitting earth, bringing the monster with it? Or was it something we haven’t actually seen yet?
e events of tellite before th sa a ed ch un la Tagruato e that its in a press releas ng mi ai cl d, el fi of another Clover broken remains e th r fo ok lo ntic purpose was to ll into the Atla fe ly nt re pa ap h to look satellite, whic tellite launched Sa ui ts Ha e th s Ocean. Or wa n of Chuai g the destructio in ow ll fo r, te ns for the mo , and Tagruato r awoken/escaped te ns mo e th d Ha Station? ver it up? was hoping to co
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Chua i Sta tion
s erfield wa ov l C in y t . g away par by Slusho! Rob’s goin he had been hired because
Tagruato
The parent company of Slusho! are a Japanese company with a number of subsidiaries, which seems to be primarily involved in off-shore oil drilling.
Teddy Hanssen, a memb er of T.I.D.O. Wave was the boy friend of Jamie, a character brie fly glimpsed in the Cloverfi eld film. In videos posted online, we saw him post Jamie some evidenc e against Tagruato (seemingly the pure key ingredient of Slusho!), sho rtly before being captured by the org anisation. He was never heard from again.
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One of its off-s was hore Chua drilli i Stati ng p of N on, j latfo ew Y ust o rms ork dest ff th City. roye e co T d h ast shor is sta the C tly b tion love efor was rfield e the e the d film. vent estru Tagr s of ction uato on p blam rote ed T.I.D st gr .O. W oup ave.
What was happenin g Chuai Station?!? W at er they experimentin e g on the creature?
Videos and ‘news reports’ showed that the station didn’t merely sin k – at one point, chunks of the destroyed station were thrown from the ocean and into the air. The Cloverfield monster seems to be to blame.
Chuai Station destroyed on 27 December 2007. A few months before the events of Cloverfield..
T.I.D.O. Wave The protest group denied destroying Chuai Station, but maintain that Tagruato is up to no good.
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y r e t s y m The . . . s n e p e e d ld Lane loverfie Where do 10 Carticle fit in? and God P
LER WORDS ABIGAIL CHAND
January 2016 The trailer for 10 Cloverfield Lane lands with little fanfare, only two months before the film hits cinemas. Fans rush to their computers and eagerly await the start of another crazy ARG campaign. It begins again…
Bold Futura
Slusho! pops up in the mov ie, of course, bu t this time the campaign is centred on a different Tagr uato subsidia ry – Bold Futura, the arm of Ta gruato that deals with satellites. The old Tagruato website from the Cloverfield m arketing cam paign came back on line, with lists of their ‘employ ees of the mon th’.
Howard Stambler
Employee of the month for February 2016 is none other than 10 Cloverfield Lane’s ant agonist, Howard Stambler (played by John Goodman), a former Na vy guy who started working at Bold Futura seven years before the events of 10 Cloverfield Lane, accord ing to his write-up on the Tagruato website.
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If 10 Cloverfield Lane takes place in the Cloverfield universe, that means Howard joined Bold Futura AFTER the Cloverfield incident. Did he join them specifically to investigate them?
The Navy Howard’s messages to Megan reveal that while working for the navy he witnessed a cover-up regarding the failure of real-life satellite Sea Sat in the Seventies. He suspects that something extraterrestrial caused the satellite to fail – or were the navy covering up a sighting of the Cloverfield monster in the Atlantic Ocean?
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Are the monsters the same?
The monsters at the end of 10 Cloverfield Lane do not look like the Cloverfield monster. Are they different creatures from the same planet, arriving belatedly after the monster awoke in the first film? Or something else altogether? From the ending, we know that large parts of the US fell to this invasion, but that the fight back has begun.
“Untitled”
The film previously known as God Particle, due out in February, is the nex t in the Cloverfield ‘anthology’. It star s David Oyelowo, Daniel Brühl, Elizabe th Debicki and Chris O’Dowd as a team of astronauts stranded on a space station afte r a particle accelerator accident causes the Earth to vanish. A mysterious space shu ttle arrives, triggering a fight for survival .
What is ‘God Particle’?
The Red Flash
In 10 Cloverfi eld Lane Emm ett reports seeing a ‘flash’ in th e sky before rushin g to the bunk er. It’s not the only flash in 10 Cl overfield Lane’s ARG. A USB in one of Stambler’s d ead drops co ntains a recording be tween the IS S and a space station that reports seeing a red flash bu t it’s unclear when the recording is from. WWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UK
When Does God Particle Happen? If it’s connected to the USB recording, then it happens before 10 Cloverfield Lane. But could it happen before Cloverfield, too? Perhaps that mysterious object crashing into the ocean at the end of Cloverfield could be explained in God Particle?
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Is any of this in the same universe? Tagruato links everything together so far, but timelines are unclear. There are vague references to a previous attack or incident in 10 Cloverfield Lane which could be about the events of Cloverfield.
Emmett able on verfield Lane are avail Cloverfield and 10 Clo es. The tur Pic | 043 from Paramount ry. DVD and Blu-Ray now rua Feb 9 on sed ea rel is lm fi eld fi ver untitled Clo
GILLIAN ANDERSON, DAVID DUCHOVNY AND CHRIS CARTER DECLASSIFY THE X-FILES SEASON 11 WORDS JONATHAN HATFULL INTERVIEWS ADAM TANSWELL
THE X-FILES Trust No One
“Knowing the way Chris likes to name characters, I’m surprised he hasn’t had a character named Cliff,” David Duchovny quipped at the NYC Comic Con late last year. “‘Nice to meet you. What’s your name? Cliff Hanger. Nice to meet you, Agent Hanger.’” It’s unquestionably a dad joke of the highest order, but Duchovny has got a point about Chris Carter’s fondness for leaving the audience wanting more. At the conclusion of The X-Files’ return in 2016, 14 years after Mulder and Scully were last on the small screen, we were left with one hell of an ellipsis. While her partner is on death’s door thanks to a virus that could wipe out the entire human race, Scully, protected by the alien DNA in her body, stares up at the lights of a UFO… “Well, I mean, what is closure?” asks Carter when we sit down with him after the panel. “You think you have closure, and then all of a sudden, what you imagined was finished, or done, or past comes back somehow in the future, just like life itself. So, I think until a character dies, there’s no complete closure. And so far, in this season, we haven’t killed off any main characters!” Indeed, The X-Files seems to be in the business of bringing characters back from the dead thanks to the Cigarette Smoking Man’s miraculous recovery from taking a missile to
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the face back in the Season Nine finale. Season Ten showed Mulder’s nemesis making his power play move, and Season 11 follows the two agents as they hunt for their missing son, William, in a desperate attempt to find out how he fits into CSM’s dastardly plan. In fact, it’s going to pick up exactly where we left off, and Gillian Anderson tells us that it’s not going to be short on surprises. Indeed, she describes her reaction as a simple: “What the fuck!” While none of our interviewees will be drawn on the details of the WTF, we know about one key element of the upcoming episodes. Before Season Ten started there was speculation about whether the show would even address the fact that Mulder and Scully had a kid, but they managed to turn William’s absence into one of its most affecting elements. Anderson tells us that she’s thrilled that the character will finally be a presence in the show. “Very excited,” she enthuses. “It was nice to meet our son; the actor playing him. So, he does show up, we’re working on that episode now and I don’t know where it goes from here. I haven’t read those scripts so I don’t know to what degree we interact with him beyond this but it’s nice to have a face. It’s nice to have a face to our child that we talk a lot about.” “I think people who are interested in the William story are going to be happy to know
that we’re dealing with that in an interesting way. You can expect more William this time out,” adds Chris Carter. “I think we’re dealing with Skinner’s relationship in his life in an interesting way that we haven’t before,” he teases. “So, we’re actually going into his character and some of his backstory that you haven’t seen before. We deal with the Mulder and Scully relationship in a new and interesting way. We’ve always played that real and honest about where their characters would be in our minds from year to year, and I think you’re going to find that it makes plausible sense where we find their characters in Season 11.” William was a huge part of what bound Mulder and Scully together, but the years since the show’s previous ending have shown their relationship continue to develop in (admittedly staggered) leaps and bounds. They were finally living together in the 2008 film I Want To Believe, and were an estranged couple when Season Ten began. The ‘will they, won’t they?’ of it all has been resolved to some extent, allowing the characters to move forward. “I think Chris was smart from the very beginning,” opines Duchovny. “You have a serialised television show that’s now had well over 200 episodes. You’ve got to parcel out the goodies little by little. So as much as | 045
MUST-SEE TV The X-Files
THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE… NEXT TIME THE GREATEST X-FILES CLIFFHANGERS
DUANE BARRY
(Season Two, Episode Five) One of the finest hours The X-Files ever produced, the first half of this two-parter about a dangerous man claiming to be an abductee ended with Scully being kidnapped by the titular lunatic. The pay-off in the next episode, ‘Ascension’, was brutal, with Scully abducted and Mulder bereft.
ANASAZI
(Season Two, Episode 25) The Season Two finale is pretty much as good as it gets when it comes to The X-Files mythology episodes, as Mulder finds proof of alien life in Navajo territory. Just as he’s investigating a boxcar full of incredible evidence, the Cigarette Smoking Man pitches up and tells his men to burn it all… but where’s Mulder?
PIPER MARU
(Season Three, Episode 15) Having revealed Alex Krycek for the two-faced bastard he was, the show delighted in putting him through hell while making him a necessary evil for Mulder. The final moments of this two-parter were the first step on the character’s worst time, as we see that he’s been infected by the alien black oil.
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COLONY
(Season Two, Episode 16) The alien bounty hunter would be one of the series’ most enduring baddies, and his shape-shifting nature gave this arc episode a grand finish, as Scully lets Mulder into her hotel room… and promptly gets a phone call from the real Mulder. This episode actually opens on a great cliffhanger too…
MY STRUGGLE II
(Season Ten, Episode Six) Okay, so this was enraging but isn’t that kind of the point to a cliffhanger? The episode was a barrage of information that the season hadn’t had time to space out cleanly, and just when we were getting our heads around what was happening, Scully sees the lights in the sky… and cut to black.
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THE X-FILES Trust No One
rather quickly so that we can get into doing the show that we always did, which was less kind of self-consciously about the show itself which is unfortunately what those episodes tend to be. Even if they’re interesting mythology, they’re kind of about the show.” We are naturally thrilled that this year will see another Darin Morgan episode, and the cast absolutely share our love of the man who gave us some of the show’s finest moments, including ‘Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose’ and ‘Jose Chung’s From Outer Space’. “Whenever you have a Darin Morgan episode, there’s a pretty sharp left turn that happens and so we’ve definitely got one of those and it’s funny,” Anderson enthuses. “I mean our shows have always been, from the very beginning from the very first season, we’ve had episodes that are comedic and so I think that is something that the fans do expect and look forward to. We certainly look forward to them. I don’t think the humour is different; it feels like it all fits within the realm of what’s expected of us and that we’ve always done. I’m
“I THINK UNTIL A CHARACTER DIES, THERE’S NO COMPLETE CLOSURE” CHRIS CARTER
If Skinner’s working with CSM, who can Mulder and Scully trust?
fans might think they want this or want that, unfortunately once you cross the line, it’s hard to go back over to the other side. “I think what’s interesting about their relationship is their working partnership and their kind of reliance on one another,” he continues. “I think that’s what people like about the male-female partnership of Mulder and Scully. They may want a sex scene but I guarantee you, they don’t really, especially not at the age where you’re at right now.” Something that will guarantee more development is the simple fact that the episode order has been bumped from Season Ten’s all-too-brief six to a much healthier ten. In the last season, it felt like we were being rushed through a checklist to some extent.
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We had the Chris Carter-written arc episodes bookending the show, we had James Wong and Glen Morgan’s monster of the week episodes, and we had the special treat that is the Darin Morgan hour in the wonderful ‘Mulder And Scully Meet The Were-Monster’. “The last time you would have seen our characters was a movie that was in 2008. That was seven years, so we had a lot of exposition to cover,” Duchovny remembers. “That took two episodes. And then at the end, we’ve got to wrap it up. That took an episode. So that left us with three episodes to do what we do, which is nothing, which is not enough. So now we’re doing ten. We do have some exposition to take care of, to get us out of the mess that we got ourselves into at the end. But that’s dispensed
not sure that would be allowed; I don’t think it would get as far as the shooting script if it was completely uncharacteristic.” Carter described the episode as “a thumb in the eye to the show,” but Duchovny clearly feels like there’s something a bit more personal going on with Morgan’s treatment of Mulder, as he explained: “The thumb in the eye business I find really interesting, because aside from being a thumb in the eye of the show, Darin seems to have a special hatred of Mulder,” he said. “He’s exorcising some personal demons by attacking the character of Mulder, and I find… I love the scripts, and I find it very interesting to play the same character while deconstructing and self-destructing the character at the same time. Darin was presenting special challenges in that one.” It won’t just be Mulder coming in for closer examination. As previously mentioned, we’ll have an episode that digs into the history of everyone’s favourite badass Assistant Director, as Mitch Pileggi promised that “you’re gonna be finding out more about Wally” and that | 047
MUST-SEE TV The X-Files
Working on The X-Files is still a life-threatening occupation.
we’ll see Skinner’s younger self (not to mention a fight between Mulder and his boss). Then there’s the intriguing fact that two actors with close ties to the Cigarette Smoking Man are returning, with Veronica Cartwright and Chris Owens reprising their roles as his ex-wife Cassandra and son Jeffrey Spender respectively. Lauren Ambrose and Robbie Amell will be back as Agents Einstein and Miller (no sign of their mooted spin-off yet, but we’re hoping they’ll have more to do this time round), and, somehow, Dean Haglund will be back as Langly, seemingly with more to do than be present for another mushroom-induced hallucination. Meanwhile, new additions to the cast include Karin Konoval (who looks very creepy in the promos), Haley Joel Osment is playing an as-yet unconfirmed character, and the great Barbara Hershey will be a mysterious figure in the first episode. While it’s exciting to see the show embrace its past and explore the future, it’s been fascinating to see how the writers have adjusted to the new climate in which the series now exists. Back in the early Nineties, conspiracy theories and distrust of the government seemed like the preserve of the margins. Now, it’s all we see all day, every day. “We deal with the political realities of today in this show,” affirms Carter. “We’re all interested in them. It’s a curious time to be doing The 048 |
X-Files, because the show is a science-fiction show, but really, it’s a science show. Scully’s science is the centre and core of the show, and Mulder’s belief, which we call the conspiracy aspect of the show, was always out there and he wants to believe. Now, it’s the opposite. People have thrown science out the window and they believe in conspiracy theories. So,
“HE’S SOLVED THIS MANY CASES: ZERO. HE’S THE WORST FBI AGENT OF ALL TIME” DAVID DUCHOVNY
we’re dealing with a situation that’s almost completely reversed.” As we watch Mulder and Scully navigate these interesting times, it’s been fascinating to watch Duchovny and Anderson reprise their roles after so many years, and to see the nuances and changes they bring to these iconic characters. In a lot of ways, they remain
unchanged, as Carter describes Mulder as “not a peaceful character”. “He’s driven and he’s searching for the truth, and he’s continuing in that fashion,” he continues. “But his character has seen so much and done so much, and we respond to that. I think that the mythology, the way it has taken shape speaks to characters who now have a lot under their belt. So, I think that we’re dealing with that spine of the show in a more interesting way.” “I mean, maybe Mulder has changed but I really think [in terms of] what drew me to him in the beginning, I think it’s the same,” opines Duchovny. “There’s a certain kind of fearlessness to the guy. I’ve always said that we have 212 episodes that we’ve done. He’s solved this many cases: zero. So, he’s the worst FBI agent of all time. If he was on Law And Order, there’d be no order. I feel like his resilience is great. I feel like the fact that he can still believe what he believes even though he’s never, never gotten the truth is kind of phenomenal when you think about it; or sad, I don’t know.” As for Anderson, she does have a couple of words of wisdom that she’d impart to the Special Agent Dana Scully who started work on The X-Files back in 1993: “Oh hell. Lighten up, maybe,” she laughs.
The X-Files returns to Channel 5 soon.
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One season, ten episodes
2005-2006
NIGHT STALKER
One season, 13 episodes
2001-2001
THE LONE GUNMEN
One season, 20 episodes
1996-1997
DARK SKIES
Two seasons, 19 episodes
2001-2002
SPECIAL UNIT 2
Two seasons, 40 episodes
2012-2016
GRAVITY FALLS
Four seasons, 62 episodes
2013-2017
SLEEPY HOLLOW
Three seasons, 67 episodes
1996-1999
MILLENNIUM
Five seasons, 64 episodes
2009-2014
WAREHOUSE 13
Five seasons, 100 episodes
2008-2013
FRINGE
Six seasons, 121 episodes
2004 – 2010
LOST
Six seasons, 123 episodes
2011-2017
GRIMM
Thirteen seasons, 273 episodes
2005 – present
SUPERNATURAL
“WE GET INTO DOING THE SHOW WE ALWAYS DID” DAVID DUCHOVNY
THE X-FILES LEGACY
THESE SHOWS OWE A MASSIVE DEBT TO THE X-FILES… BUT HOW LONG DID THEY LAST?
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BIG MOVIE
WORDS POPPY-JAY PALMER INTERVIEWS JOANNA OZDOBINSKA
Maze Runner: The Death Cure
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MAZE RUNNER: THE DEATH CURE Escape The Maze
IN THE AGE OF YA FRANCHISES, MAZE RUNNER’S FINAL INSTALMENT, THE DEATH CURE, IS DARING TO BE DIFFERENT.
When Warner Bros first announced it was going to split The Deathly Hallows into two parts — both for time and for financial opportunities — a lot of people started scratching their heads, but it didn’t take long for the likes of The Hunger Games’ Mockingjay and the Twilight Saga’s Breaking Dawn to follow suit. Many expected The Death Cure to do the same, but director Wes Ball has always been adamant about not splitting up the final book. From his point of view, there has always needed to be three acts: a beginning, a middle and an end, and he reckons the end will be a satisfying conclusion. “It’s a bit of a personal movie this time; it’s centred around characters but we’ve got plenty of the action adventure stuff that I think we’re known for with these movies,” Ball tells us. “But it’s very much a rescue mission to save their friend, it’s just that simple, that’s all what [Thomas] cares about, is to get his friend back and this little family unit that we’ve seen kind of grow over the last four years. Essentially they just want to do what they can to kind of stay together and it’s in the process of going after Minho that things will get a little bit more complicated, a little bit more interesting and things will end big.” Though the Maze Runner series got off to a solid start in 2014, a number of fans were less than impressed with the second instalment, The Scorch Trials. Thankfully, Ball is well aware of that fact, and hopes to rectify it with the final film. “I’m hoping that they can also somewhat forgive me when they watch this third one and they go back and look at the second one and they can see that, while it might be a slightly different interpretation of James Dashner’s books, I think it’s a good movie series,” he explains. “So fingers crossed! They’re certainly in my heart and I hope that they are satisfied with the end result.”
However, Maze Runner has been luckier than some: the Divergent series only managed to adapt three out of four books before Lionsgate decided to call it a day with the movies, instead opting to turn the final book into a TV series that’s still pending. “It’s interesting… the studio could have said: ‘Nah, we’re done, let’s move on,’ but they didn’t,” says Ball. “They wanted to see the end of the story, which is great, and I think part of that is because it’s the same people making the movies. So beginning, middle and end, this is the last one and the things we were setting up in the second movie are going to pay off in this third movie so I think we all collectively really want to see this story come to a completion, which is great. “The second thing for me is that even though we came out during a ton of other YA things, I was never a fan of YA, so I didn’t make this with that in mind. I just kind of made it as a movie that happened to have young people in it so I didn’t try to shoehorn these sort of tropes of the YA genre – love triangles and teenage issues or whatever it is, do you know what I mean? I try my hardest to just make a good movie and make a good adventure following these characters with this conceptual idea that James laid out. So I’m hoping that kind of helps us on this third one where people won’t see us as: ‘Ohhh, it’s the last one of those YA things,’ because we’re not seeing too many of those anymore. I hope that people will see us as just a good conclusion to a film series as a whole.” When we first met protagonist Thomas, played by Dylan O’Brien, in the first Maze Runner film, he was just a kid with no memories and no clue what was going on. When we left him in The Scorch Trials, he’d been to hell and back and was ready and willing to team up with rebel group The Right Arm to take down evil organisation WCKD. “It’s been quite the evolution, hasn’t it?” marvels O’Brien. “Thomas has been really cool to play, and it’s amazing to be back. It means a lot to me and all of us so I couldn’t be happier to have been able to do it and finish it. As far as Thomas goes,
WITH THE FINAL CHAPTER ON THE HORIZON, WE TALK MAZE RUNNER: THE DEATH CURE DIRECTOR WES BALL AND THE CAST ABOUT PUTTING WCKD TO BED ONCE AND FOR ALL… WWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UK
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BIG MOVIE
Maze Runner: The Death Cure
at this point in this third film when we see him I feel like with all the characters, we’re really seeing for the first time these kind of grown up versions of them.” The Death Cure is set to pick up six months after the end of The Scorch Trials. “It’s really the longest passage of time that we’ve experienced in the trilogy. They’ve experienced things, they’ve been surviving. They only really covered a week in the first two films combined! We’re really going to see a different group of kids, they’ve grown up a little bit now. And for Thomas especially I feel like he’s really weathered at this point, I think he’s so different from the kind of scared little kid that we were introduced to in a cage. I think he’s really strong in a lot of ways and also really still carrying a ton of weight on his own shoulders.” Adamant on going out with a bang, The Death Cure will pack in more action than we’ve seen so far, with big Mad Max-style sequences to boot. “I think that was all part of what Wes wanted with this last one,” says O’Brien. “I think he wanted it to feel bigger than the other ones, he wanted it to feel more powerful than the other ones. He wanted everything to rise to this conclusion and everything comes with that – the emotion, the loss, the conflict, it all comes to a head in this one and the action comes with that as well. I think it’s going
Teresa is dealing with the aftermath of her betrayal of the Gladers.
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to set it apart. Our hope is that all of those things are evident in the film and our efforts can send people away feeling like we made the best one of the three.” “The third one was probably most challenging,” adds Ball. “It’s just bigger. It’s like three times bigger than any of the other movies. And also, just the emotional thing of trying to come up with a satisfying conclusion to the series and doing it properly. This is their swan song, this is the last one and we wanted to make sure that we did everything properly. “It was certainly a cool experience but I don’t think things changed much. Most of the things are the same, it’s just that now it’s: ‘Hey, remember that thing we did, let’s try it again or let’s not do that again’. There’s a little bit more experience, I guess but for the most part it’s the same creative team, it was just this whole kind of family thing with these movies that I think is just really special. I think it actually shows through in the movies – there’s something about this cast of people that grew and we were all in this travelling circus together and we went off and we love these things, and we do our best, do our best no matter what.”
Maze Runner: The Death Cure is in cinemas on 26 January.
TERESA ON TERESA
Kaya Scodelario on being a role model SO WHAT’S GOING ON WITH TERESA? She has a little bit of immunity. Now she’s living in a very different world to the Gladers. She’s in a different place emotionally as well, she’s on a very different mission but we get to see in this movie why she made the decision that she made in The Scorch Trials and kind of get to see her struggle with ‘was it worth it or not?’. SHE WANTS TO GET ALL OF HER MEMORIES BACK… She does. I think she wants humanity back, she wants everyone to be able to live how they’re suppose to live – with their memories and also without this horrible disease that is devastating the world and she’s committed her life now to finding the cure. I think the Gladers really focus on survival in the moment whereas Theresa has always had this instinct to focus on survival in the long term and how to create a world where people can live in forever. DO YOU SEE TERESA AS A ROLE MODEL FOR THE YOUNGER FANS? I always think Teresa is an inspirational character not just for young girls but also for young boys and I think that’s really important to always talk about… it’s important to play strong female leads that the girls can look up to that but I think it’s important for young boys to see that like with Wonder Woman – there’s a whole generation now of ten-year-old boys who get to see this kickass action hero, and I think Teresa is the same. I like to think that she can inspire a generation to go with their instincts, do what they think is best, even if it’s hard to make that decision and even if that decision could upset some people. She shows that if you truly believe in the greater good that it’s okay to go off on your own and try to make that happen.
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NEWT ON NEWT
Thomas Brodie-Sangster talks the final chapter DOES NEWT EVOLVE FOR THIS FILM? Newt’s got a nice character arc through this movie and firms up his relationship, particularly with Thomas, which is nice. Me and Dylan did a lot of work together and we get on well so it’s great. IS NEWT SORT OF LIKE THE GLUE THAT HOLDS THIS GROUP TOGETHER? Yeah, that’s what people say. Thomas is the leader so he goes into situations very gung-ho, he makes split second decisions and hopes that it works out. Newt’s the person that’s there with him because most of the time it does work out and he trusts him. He’s the person that makes sure everything has been taken into account properly and will take him aside if he’s ever feeling unsure about things or himself or the world, because it’s such a messed up crazy world and he’s the person that is a shoulder to cry on, who will lift you up when you’re feeling down and push you forward and throw you into a situation but also look after you and have your back and be a true friend. He thinks the most important thing in life is friendship and family because that’s all he has got.
“THIS IS THREE TIMES BIGGER THAN THE OTHER MOVIES”
WES BALL
SO NEWT’S A PRETTY GOOD ROLE MODEL FOR YOUNGER FANS. Oh yes, absolutely. He’s not a bad person in any way. He’s only a nice guy and his morals all stem from the right place. He just believes in trying to find a place in which one can be happy to be themselves and to go to sleep at night and not worry if anyone’s going to kill you. Finding a place where you can wake up, have a nice breakfast, look at the sun and hang around with people who love you and who you love back. A FIGHTING PHILOSOPHER? Yeah, yeah, he would put up a fight as well when the time comes, he can put up a fight.
Giancarlo Esposito returns as Jorge.
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DOWNSIZING DIRECTOR ALEXANDER PAYNE TALKS TO US ABOUT MAKING THE BIG LEAP TO GETTING SMALL
WORDS ABIGAIL CHANDLER
DOWNSIZING Little Trouble
Damon was the perfect fit for the everyman.
WE’VE GOT TO BE HONEST, WE DIDN’T EVER EXPECT TO BE INTERVIEWING OSCAR-WINNING FILMMAKER ALEXANDER PAYNE FOR SCIFINOW MAGAZINE. Known for his ultra-real comedy-dramas satirising humanity, no-one expected Payne to make a sci-fi movie starring Matt Damon. Yes, the director of Sideways, The Descendants and Nebraska has made a film in which Matt Damon signs up to be ‘downsized’ – i.e. shrunk down to the size of a LEGO man so he can live a cheaper, lavish life on his meagre savings in the tiny luxury community of Leisureland. When we speak to Payne on the phone a few weeks before his film hits cinemas in the UK, he’s the first to admit that science-fiction is not his usual thing. But when you’re a filmmaker, he says, you’re just always looking for “the right clay, the right dough, the right taffy you can yank and pull in all sorts of different crazy directions, and this [story idea] seemed to be a good metaphor... to look at a lot of the world right now.” Not being a huge sci-fi fan himself doesn’t mean he doesn’t respect the genre, nor the storytelling opportunities it offers. “Ray Bradbury was asked: ‘You’re such a good writer, why do you always write about science fiction, why don’t you write about the real world?’ He said science fiction is the only
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genre which deals with the real world. And that’s kind of what Jim Taylor, my co-writer and I felt about [Downsizing]. It’s cinematic, it’s funny and it’s a good social satire prism.” Downsizing hits the social satire nail right on the head, with references to looming environmental disasters (and the sciencedenying naysayers who make matters worse), and Leisureland’s underclass immigrant workers (many Mexican) who are forced to live behind a wall. Amazingly, though, the original script for Downsizing sat on a shelf for years – way before the idea of a Mexican wall had been forced into the public consciousness. “It saddens me that this film is more topical than it would have been a few years ago,” Payne says. The political digs, however, are not remotely accidental. While Payne doesn’t like the idea of developing conscious and heavy-handed ‘themes’ for his work, preferring to let it all come about organically, he does admit that he and Taylor “had an urge to make something approaching a political film. But we’re not Michael Moore or Ken Loach or Oliver Stone, beating our drum in an elegant or inelegant way, we’re satirists. We make comedy. Comedies hopefully that have a bite and invite the audience to think about things. But in a movie theatre I want to be entertained and I want to be entertaining.” Politics might seem
like a departure for Payne, who’s normally more interested in satirising or examining the minutiae of humanity, but as he points out, “any time you satirise politics, you satirise humanity. Politics is human psychodramas being played out in a large external arena.” On one hand, Downsizing is very much an Alexander Payne film – but it’s also a sci-fi movie with certain visual effects requirements that necessitated a bigger budget than he’d normally need. And a bigger budget meant that everything had to be bigger than usual – including a big lead actor. Enter Matt Damon. “I needed a big movie star to get the financing,” Payne explains bluntly. “I thought of all the big movie stars in that upper echelon of English-speaking movie stars, who’s the one that I could most believe as an everyman? A befuddled, well-intended everyman. Tom Hanks could have played it 10 or 15 years ago, he’s just half a generation older… But right now it’s Matt Damon.” Even before sounding Damon out for the part, Payne did his research, asking other people who had worked with Damon what he was like: “Everyone said what a gentleman and a professional he is.” Payne, too, has nothing but praise for Damon, which he says has nothing to do with the fact that he’s promoting a film and has to say nice things, because he “couldn’t care | 055
‘BIG’ MOVIE Downsizing
less about that.” He calls Damon “a lovely guy and a wonderful actor, and as we’ve seen from his movies, more versatile than we might have expected from him at first, years ago. [It] couldn’t have had a better experience – lovely guy, totally professional, family man, real pro.” Rounding out the three central roles alongside Damon’s newly-downsized everyman are Christoph Waltz’s Serbian businessman Dusan and Hong Chau’s Ngoc Lan, who Payne describes, through giggles, as an “idealistic, dogmatic, monomaniacal, Christian environmentalist Vietnamese dissident with one leg”. For a non-sci-fi fan, Payne does an excellent job of outlining an uncanny parallel between Downsizing’s three unlikely heroes and Star Wars’ classic threesome. Payne was keen to make his downsized world as international as possible, and knew he didn’t want to cast an American actor as Dusan, but initially he dismissed Waltz as not looking Serbian enough for the part of Dusan. “Then we were having coffee together and Christoph Waltz said ‘come on, can’t anyone be from anywhere?’ And I said, well, he’s got me there.” As for Hong Chau, Payne was thrilled to find someone of Vietnamese descent who was perfect “mercifully early in our casting process” and says that Chau “steals the film”. Payne tells us that “that old cliché is extremely true, 95% of directing is casting. Not just actors but your technicians as well. Ideally just say ‘action’ and watch them kick the ball across the field.”
TINY PEOPLE ON SCREEN
ANY TIME YOU SATIRISE POLITICS, YOU SATIRISE HUMANITY. POLITICS IS HUMAN PSYCHODRAMAS BEING PLAYED OUT ON A LARGE EXTERNAL ARENA ALEXANDER PAYNE
And the technicians were key on this movie, as Payne was tackling visual effects for the first time in his career. “It was my first time so it was interesting. It’s not that hard, it’s just timeconsuming. And as a director it’s the same process I do with directing a performance: ‘Do I believe it or not?’ With visual effects I’m the audience. I sit there watching going: ‘I don’t buy it’ or ‘wouldn’t it be funnier if...’ or ‘why can’t that look more realistic? I don’t buy it’. That’s the process.” On set, the process was more technical. “It’s an exciting and also tedious challenge… In shooting you have to give over
part of your process to these math majors. You’re shooting a movie with people talking and suddenly there’s a bunch of nerds running around with balls and measuring equipment.” It’s rare that visual effects are used for something other than creating a big, flashy sci-fi or fantasy world, or a spectacular action scene. Payne had the unique challenge of making a film with up to 750 visual effects shots look like a straight comedy drama. “I wanted the effects to be so real as to be banal,” he says. “This is a real movie and there are shots that are on for a long period of time,
Paul and Audrey (Kristen Wiig) think small.
Downsizing isn’t the first film to shrink people. HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS This Eighties classic gives you everything you could want from a film about shrunken people – bug attacks, giant every day objects and a mad scientist. ANT-MAN Being tiny gets a superhero spin, and the greatest Thomas The Tank Engine cameo anyone could have ever hoped for. FANTASTIC VOYAGE A crew of special agents and doctors are miniaturised and sent into a scientist’s body to cure a blood clot on his brain. RICK AND MORTY: ANATOMY PARK Rick and Morty combined Jurassic Park and Fantastic Voyage for this episode about an amusement park set up inside a homeless man.
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DOWNSIZING Little Trouble
DIRECTORS WHO WENT ‘GENRE’
Alexander Payne isn’t the only director to make the unexpected leap from ‘real-life’ films into sci-fi or fantasy. Here are some of the directors who made the transition before him.
Leisureland looks a lot like a naff resort...
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KENNETH BRANAGH THOR The British actor and director was famed for bringing Shakespeare plays to the big screen, alongside other similarly high-class productions. His experience of Shakespearean tragedies is no doubt what led to Thor and Loki’s relationship becoming one of the most complicated and fascinating elements of the MCU.
DANNY BOYLE A LIFE LESS ORDINARY Danny Boyle exploded onto screens with Shallow Grave and Trainspotting and was heralded as the voice of gritty Nineties Britain. Then he did A Life Less Ordinary, an American fantasy-comedy featuring angels, and the critics were stumped. Later he did 28 Days Later and Sunshine. Clearly he’s a guy who likes variety.
ANG LEE HULK The Taiwanese director had done action before – of the elegant, lyrical kind – with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But he was mostly known for Sense And Sensibility and The Ice Storm before he tackled Hulk, his only foray into comic book movies. It remains one of the most unlikely director/ subject pairings in cinema.
long enough to give audience members the opportunity to look around the frame and say ‘this doesn’t look real’. That was a unique challenge to the visual effects department; the fact that we were going to linger on the shots for a long time and I wanted photo-reality. That was the accomplishment of the film.” Payne took the same approach to production design as he did to visual effects – the goal was to create something that looked ordinary and believable. In other words, something that, despite the sci-fi conceit, was an Alexander Payne film. “I wasn’t looking for something pristine and kind of a dainty presentation of a supposedly perfect reality as you might have seen in Edward Scissorhands or The Truman Show.” Payne says. “I didn’t want it to be those. I wanted it to be banal. Boring. Leisureland was supposed to look like a combination of Las Vegas and Orlando and Palm Springs. You go through this whole rigmarole to get yourself downsized and you wind up in one of these bogus places. Like a lot of things in life.” For all that Payne is keen to stress that he’s not one to build a film around what themes he wants
PATTY JENKINS WONDER WOMAN After stunning audiences with the Oscar-winning Monster, Patty Jenkins’ film career was put on hold for a decade. She did TV work for the likes of The Killing, Betrayal and Entourage before coming back to cinema big time with Wonder Woman. The success of Wonder Woman ensures that she won’t take another long break.
to convey, Downsizing emerges as a celebration of humanity – a microcosm of all of our flaws and strengths. Humanity is both the cause of its downfalls and its saviour, and in Downsizing that is writ, well, not large but small. “It’s a pessimistic film, the world is going to hell,” Payne admits, but adds that pessimism isn’t the point. The point is how humanity reacts to a world that is, essentially, doomed. “We have to accept that fact as you have to accept the fact that we’re going to die, especially if you get the terminal cancer diagnosis. You can’t fight it. You can fight it for while, you’re angry and you fight it, but eventually you have to accept it. We have to accept we’re going to die, then you can begin to find beauty and just remember that kindness is all you should be thinking about.” Payne might not have set out to produce a film with a ‘message’, but that doesn’t mean that Downsizing doesn’t have one. And it’s a really quite a lovely one at that.
Downsizing is in cinemas nationwide from 24 January. | 057
MUST-SEE TV Altered Carbon
THE SKIN YOU’RE IN
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ALTERED CARBON
The Skin You’re In
IF DEATH IS A THING OF THE PAST, THEN HOW THE HELL DO YOU SOLVE A MURDER? WE TALK TO STAR JOEL KINNAMAN AND SHOWRUNNER LAETA KALOGRIDIS ABOUT BRINGING R-RATED CYBERPUNK NOIR ALTERED CARBON TO LIFE WORDS JONATHAN HATFULL
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN you’re no longer scared of dying? When you know that, whatever happens, you can just come right back in a shiny new body of your choosing? What would you do with that knowledge? That’s the world of Altered Carbon, the new Netflix series based on the books by Richard Morgan, or rather, that’s the world for a select few. “It’s a sci-fi cyberpunk noir set 300 years in the future where the human consciousness can be downloaded into a chip, so the body is a transferable object,” star Joel Kinnaman tells us. “But the technology is expensive so it’s almost exclusively to the benefit of the rich, who have become immortal because of it. So, the influence and the powerful that these 300-, 400-year-old people have over the rest of society is immense and it’s exaggerated all the inequalities we see in society today.” So, while the rest of the humanity struggles on below, the elite, known as ‘Meths’ due to their Methusaleh-esque life spans, live in a different world in skyscrapers above the clouds. They can do whatever they want to whoever they want, safe in the knowledge that they can always return, either in a cloned skinsuit or as someone with an entirely new face. Still, that doesn’t mean that someone like Laurens Bancroft (James Purefoy) is going to take his murder lightly, especially given that someone tried (and failed) to junk his consciousness as well as his body. To that end, Bancroft paroles the consciousness of the notorious Takeshi Kovacs, puts it into a new body (Joel Kinnaman), and hires him to find the killer. There’s a lot going on in Altered Carbon. It’s got very detailed futurescapes, a hardboiled noir hero, endless fascinating tech, social commentary and a lot of R-rated violence. It’s easy to see why a writer-producer like Laeta Kalogridis, who has both the mystery of Shutter Island and the spectacle of an upcoming Avatar sequel on her résumé, found it so enticing. “I was so impressed with the first book back in 2002,” she remembers. “Unfortunately, at that time the rights were at Warner Bros with Joel Silver. I tracked it over time because I knew the mandate was to try and make a PG-13 film, and I knew that that version of the story would be quite different than the cyberpunk hard-boiled feel of the book. I always felt like there was another version, a hard R version, that would be truer to the tone of the book and to what I thought of as the cinematic roots of the book.” Eventually, when the rights became free again, Kalogridis tracked down the author and made a pledge. “He was willing to option them to me for a
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much lesser price based on what I now think of as a ridiculously wacky pitch,” she laughs. “I told him that I wanted to do the hard R version but I didn’t know how long it would take because it was going to be a bit of an odyssey to find a home for it, and that I was also working full time on other things and this was a passion project, it might take me a while to get there, and for reasons that I will never be able to fathom, he actually thought that sounded reasonable. He realised that I was being starkly honest with him about the difficulty of it because I wasn’t interested in doing the PG-13 version. I was picking a more difficult road.” On the course of that journey, it became clear that a film adaptation of Altered Carbon simply wasn’t going to happen. The landscape of the industry had changed, but that would turn out to be a blessing, as setting the show up at Netflix suddenly meant that Kalogridis had ten hours to play with as opposed to two, not to mention no restrictions on tone or content. “Honestly, it felt like I was in the middle of some giant field in Wyoming or something, where I could just run from one end to the other!” she laughs. “It was creatively so freeing to suddenly discover that we had room to explore all of these things, that we could create something like a novel with chapters and honestly it was creatively one of the best experiences of my career. The challenges were all about how to convey that hardboiled tone to the audience and be able to bring to life what I loved in the book. Both in terms of event but also in terms of spirit.” Kalogridis’ commitment to bringing a fully realised world to life combined with the backing of Netflix made Altered Carbon impossible for Kinnaman to say no to. “It was its grit but it was also the ambition that got me,” he enthuses. “Because when you see something like this and you hear it’s a TV show, you’re like: ‘Yeah but how are the effects going to look, are they going to be able to create that world?’ And then when I found out what the scope of the whole project was, I realised it has never really been done before. You’ve never seen a hard-R-rated sci-fi show that’s got the scale and the budget of a big Hollywood movie. I’ve been in a couple of those movies, and as soon as the budget comes up to a certain point, it’s always PG-13. I’m a sci-fi nerd and this was a way to get to do something in the genre where you really get everything. You get the world creation and the scale but you also get to tell the story in a realistic way.” The show certainly earns that R-rating. The violence is brutal, with crunching bones, bloody bullet wounds and grisly torture sequences. It’s also not bashful | 059
MUST-SEE TV Altered Carbon
about the sexualized nature of this society and its technology, with male and female nudity on prominent display. It’s shocking in places, but Kalogridis tells us that it was essential to tell the story properly. “Yes, absolutely,” she affirms. “To me, the dark side of the technology isn’t something you could experience without maintaining the tone of the book. You have to see the danger in a world where bodies are disposable and yet the perfect body is prized. You can’t play the metaphor unless you understand what the stakes are and that requires a certain level of sexual content, violence and intensity to sell the disposable nature of the human body in this world. Otherwise it doesn’t land emotionally.” It’s certainly a grim world that Kovacs finds himself in, and a disappointing one. Although the character is introduced as a murderous terrorist, we quickly learn there’s another side to that story. Kovacs was an Envoy, part of an elite force who turned against the people that run this new world order, so being defrosted and strong-armed into their service isn’t an appealing prospect. “[It was fun] to play a character that comes alive after 250 years, so everyone he ever knew or loved is dead, or so he thinks, and everything he fought for is lost and gone,” Kinnaman tells us. “I get to experience this world at the same time as 060 |
the audience does. But it’s really challenging, in a good way, to play a character that isn’t sure if he wants to be alive or not. Because you become powerful when you don’t give a shit. It’s like the world has to prove its value to you, you’re waiting for life to show itself to be valuable enough to live. In the first couple of episodes he’s still figuring out if he actually wants to be alive. Everything that Bancroft represents is what he was fighting to de-seat, and now they have won and Kovacs’ only choice is to basically be his slave.” The result is a pissed off, surly and abrasive noir hero whose heart is hard to find, which is tremendous fun to watch, especially in an environment like Altered Carbon’s. “Yeah, I revelled in that!” laughs Kinnaman. “And it’s a balance you’ve gotta strike. You want all the sarcasm and misanthropic qualities and the challenge was to feel like they come from a place of hurt. That’s his way of shielding himself from the world by not letting people in and being sarcastic. But I love those kinds of characters so I revelled in the opportunity to be one of them.” “I enjoy trying to recreate what I regard as the tonal balance of the book where Kovacs is incredibly sarcastic and dry, and also the tonal balance of some of my favourite noir films like Big Heat, The Big Sleep and Chinatown,” adds
Kalogridis. “There’s a way that noir heroes are funny, and the world has intensity but also humour, and that humour is something that you can’t bear the intensity without. It makes it bearable but it also lets you experience this roller coaster ride of emotion without getting numbed to the darker aspects of it. Without that you’re lost, I think, and I felt good about being able to do it.” It wouldn’t be a noir tale without a cop and a face from the past, and Altered Carbon puts a spin on both. The dogged detective is Lieutenant Ortega (Martha Higareda), who can’t decide whether Kovacs is a menace or a way to finally see a little justice brought to the elite, and who also has an attentive neo-Catholic mother to contend with. The face Kovacs sees when he dreams is that of Quell (Hamilton’s Renée Elise Goldsberry), an Envoy leader and Kovacs’ commander, who is now painted as a villain in history museum reconstructions. “I admire Laeta for creating this world of such strong women, like Quell who fights with amazing purpose to making things right,” enthuses Higareda. “It’s been wonderful working with Laeta. She has a fascinating mind. Sometimes I wonder how she puts such a complex world together; all these different stories and the strong female characters. She’s always fighting
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ALTERED CARBON
The Skin You’re In
for us women to be recognised as strong, while also having the ability to be vulnerable. Being okay with your vulnerability and embracing it, is strength as well. She’s been wonderful creating this well-rounded woman that is Kristen Ortega.” “The first time I met Laeta Kalogridis was in my bedroom, via Skype,” adds Goldsberry. “I was completely inundated with the Hamilton musical but somehow we found time to connect and discuss Altered Carbon. In all honesty, I hadn’t even had time to read the pilot script. All I knew about the show was that it shot in Vancouver, and I lived in New York City. With two small children, I could not imagine participating. I was surprised that within about ten minutes of the conversation I knew what I wanted to do next – play Quellcrist Falconer. We have the same dream, Laeta and I. We want to create heroines that women – all women – can be inspired by. Laeta’s vision for this character is what brought me here. I would follow Laeta into battle anywhere.” There’s a fascinating rogues’ gallery of characters lurking at the edges of Altered Carbon, including an AI hotel, twin Russian mobsters, pimps, murderers, and stored memories of murder victims, but what’s just as incredible is the scope and detail of the world in which they move. Blade Runner is, of course, the first and most obvious influence in this crowded, dirty and vibrant neon future, but it goes beyond that. “I know that we have a visual overlap that people associate with Blade Runner but we are pulling from Philip K Dick and William Gibson – those were huge influences on the Blade Runner world, but we were also pulling from modern day hyper-inequality,” Kalogridis explains. “One of our inspirations was a single-family home
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ALTERED CARBON FOUND THE THE THREE KOVACS’ HOW THREE FACES OF ITS LEADING MAN Altered Carbon’s leading man is somewhat unusual in that he has three faces. Thanks to the body-swapping tech, we see Takeshi Kovacs at three points in his life, with Joel Kinnaman playing the ‘present’ incarnation. The first we meet is played Byron Mann (Arrow, The Man With The Iron Fists), who plays the previous Kovacs, and the last, but earliest, is played by Will Yun Lee (The Wolverine, True Blood). “I had the advantage of going first!” laughs Kinnaman. “I was allowed to set the tone in a way and they both came in and asked me if I had any specific mannerisms and things like that. So, we had a couple of those discussions just to see if there was any sort of physical traits that they could pick up on to create a through line. It’s kind of odd, I’ve never had that before!” “It was an interesting search to find all three of the actors who play Takeshi Kovacs and it was part of what the challenge and the joy of the show was, to be able to illustrate different times of his life by showing specifically what he
looked like in that moment or in that period,” remembers Laeta Kalogridis. “What was most amazing about this experience was being able to simultaneously cast three different people to play Kovacs. And Joel obviously is carrying the heaviest weight as the present-day iteration, but I think it’s impossible to articulate how profound the work all three of them did because they all knew each other and interacted with each other and were all able to collaborate. “So, part of the search was for this incredible bravura performance that I think all three of them delivered,” she continues. “Certainly, Joel is ridiculously, embarrassingly good. I think he’s never had a chance to show this level of depth because he hasn’t been a lead in a television show. He gave so much depth and life to it and to have that same process with Will and have it with Byron, and both Byron and Joel play more than one character. So that’s a whole other level of intensity and crazy artistic talent that the people who played Kovacs brought to this role.”
Clockwise from right: Bay City took its inspiration from cyberpunk classics, Renée Elise Goldsberry as badass Envoy leader Quell, Kovacs gets caught up in a zero-G gladiator battle.
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MUST-SEE TV Altered Carbon
in India built by a billionaire that is the largest single-family home in existence to my knowledge. It was the visual impact of how huge it was, built over a mass of people below it, and it was made for one person and his family. The Burj Khalifa in Dubai was a huge conceptual influence. There’s a kind of intensity to the idea of a human structure that is taller than the clouds are that really inspired what the Meth world was like. Part of our aesthetic was that we were trying to codify the idea of: what does inequality look like?” With so much on display, you might expect the production to opt for green screen wherever possible, but Kinnaman was delighted to discover that wasn’t the case. “No, that was the thing that was so amazing shooting this,” he remembers. “Other big movies that I’ve done, it’s been a lot of green screen, whereas here we have these amazing sets. One of the sets we have is like three football fields deep, and there was a full living street of the city with noodle shops and stores and tattoo parlours, construction and police officers and bridges on three levels with over 350 extras and rain… it was like a living, breathing world that we just stepped into. I have seen some of it myself and you can really feel that it makes
“YOU HAVE TO SEE THE DANGER IN A WORLD WHERE BODIES ARE DISPOSABLE” LAETA KALOGRIDIS
it so much more realistic.” All these elements will help Altered Carbon stand out from the crowd, but there’s something deeper going on beneath the surface. “What was interesting about this show is that because it deals with life and death at its core, all of the questions become existential,” Kinnaman tells us. “It’s been really fun to talk about this show because you can talk about the entertainment value and all that but you really quickly get into the existential questions of what is a soul, what does it mean to be alive, and what does living forever mean? What does that mean to our humanity?” “We’re not the only science fiction show on the air but I hope that we’re bringing something new to the conversation about our awareness of the moral questions that come from future technology,” adds Kalogridis. “And honestly what always interests me in this story is: what is love? If the body becomes utterly disposable and the soul, for lack of a better word, is a thing that endures, then does love become eternal? What is love in that scenario?”
Altered Carbon will be available on Netflix on 2 February. 062 |
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ALTERED CARBON
The Skin You’re In
THE ALTERED CARBON PHRASE BOOK
DON’T CONFUSE YOUR NEOCATHOLICS WITH YOUR METHS
CORTICAL STACK The chip at the base of your skull in which your consciousness is stored. If this gets destroyed, you’re dead. Like, properly dead.
DFH Digitised Human Freight. That’s the consciousness itself.
SLEEVE A new body into which your consciousness can be transferred, or ‘re-sleeved’. They are expensive, but if you’re rich, who cares? If the state pays for it, well, it may not be exactly what you wanted.
NEEDLECASTING This enables your consciousness to be transferred to another sleeve remotely. You can be in Russia while you’re taking care of business in Bay City.
METH One of the ultra-wealthy elite. They’re named after Methuselah because they can afford to never die. Must be nice.
NEO-CATHOLIC According to the pious, re-sleeving is an abomination and that everyone should just have the body they’re born with. If your consciousness is brought back, even to solve a crime, your soul is damned.
BAY CITY San Francisco. City by the bay!
PROTECTORATE The big society.
ENVOY An elite soldier trained to jump into new bodies in new environments and withstand incredible pain and torture. It’s why Kovacs is such a badass.
AERIUM The Meths live in giant homes constructed above the clouds, and this is what the area is referred to as.
GROUNDER This is how Meths refer to anyone who has to live anywhere other than the Aerium.
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MUST-SEE TV Requiem
M I S S I N G P I E C E S BBC ONE IS RETURNING TO GENRE WITH REQUIEM, A GRIEF-FUELLED, CELLO-HEAVY SUPERNATURAL WHODUNNIT SET IN A TINY WELSH TOWN IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. WE ATTEMPT TO START UNRAVELLING THE MYSTERY WITH CREATOR/WRITER KRIS MRKSA AND STAR LYDIA WILSON… WORDS POPPY-JAY PALMER
FTER A GENRE DRY SPELL, BBC ONE IS VENTURING
The death of Matilda’s mother is inexplicable.
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back into the ‘elevated genre’ pool with its new psychological thrillerslash-whodunnit Requiem, and the setup is pretty bleak: on the eve of a performance that could change her career, talented young cellist Matilda receives the news that her mother has killed herself, apparently out of the blue and in horrifying circumstances. “Matilda was raised by her mother alone, and I don’t want to say ‘codependent’ but they were close,” explains the series’ writer and creator, Kris Mrksa (Nowhere Boys, Glitch). “This death, Matilda can’t wrap her head around it, it’s just inexplicable.” The idea that there might be more to the suicide is raised when she goes to her mother’s house and finds a cardboard box of newspaper cuttings that relate to a child that went missing in a small Welsh town years previously. From there, Matilda attempts to figure out if her mother was somehow
involved in the disappearance. The story was actually influenced by the death of Mrksa’s own mother: “I started thinking about how much of my own life, or my early life at least, has died with her, in a way,” he tells us. “To some extent, she was the custodian of my early life. I can’t remember my early life much at all. Before seven or eight I’ve got a fragmentary memory, little bits and pieces. There’s nothing clear or distinct, and a lot of stuff is from a child’s point of view. “There’s a family Christmas where Uncle Bob was behaving strangely, but who the hell knows why? I guess my mum did, but I’ll never know because I never asked her those questions. I don’t even know if I’m inoculated against mumps and measles. She knew all of that stuff. Getting over the loss of a parent is a distinctive kind of loss, I think. There could be nothing worse than losing a child, that’s got to be the worst possible kind of bereavement, but losing a parent [is also a loss] to your identity in a very interesting way. I was grieving her, but I was also grieving all the stuff in my own life that I’d never really know the answers to.” As you can imagine, the role of Matilda ended up being a meaty one, but Black Mirror and Ripper Street actor Lydia Wilson was more than up for the challenge. “Its launchpad is grief, really, and that runs throughout all six episodes of the first series, and at the same time it wasn’t a conventional psychological portrait story because the plot is so complicated,” she explains. “To hold the grief part of the story up and to throw myself into the investigation of it was the biggest challenge, just calibrating both parts.
It was difficult. We took a week off in the middle and coming back to is was really hard. Every time I spend a bit more time with this character I realise there’s a certain heaviness with her.” Even though embodying Matilda and the tragedy that surrounds her could be emotionally draining, Requiem quickly became Wilson’s favourite acting job. Most of that was down to the creative team which, along with Mrksa, consisted of BAFTA-winning director Mahalia Belo, cinematographer Chloe Thomson and producer Susan Breen. “Everyone on set remarked how calm and creative the atmosphere was, which in my experience is unusual, especially for a TV series. It was such a joy, I learnt so much and I have so much respect for this team, which happened to be all-female. They had a different way of communicating with each other, incredibly efficient, and an amazing way of going further with the emotions in the scenes. The atmosphere on set was conducive to that kind of sensitivity.” “Mahalia got it from the word go,” adds Mrksa. “She brought up another picture that we’d never talked about in any of the discussions, Jacob’s Ladder, a movie that was made a few years after the pictures that I was really referencing. When she brought up Jacob’s Ladder, I thought, Mahalia really gets it. That is totally in line with what I want this series to be… She’s nailed the tone and the atmosphere and the brooding uncertainty and ambiguity and all that stuff I was looking for. I couldn’t have asked for a better execution of the material.” Although the series is being marketed as a psychological thriller, genre lovers can also expect a
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REQUIEM
Missing Pieces
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MUST-SEE TV Requiem
BEYOND THE GRAVE
It’s not just Requiem that these films inspired…
INSPIRED BY JACOB’S LADDER • Silent Hill (1999— present), video games and films • The Sixth Sense (1999), director: M Night Shyamalan • A Pure Formality (1994), director: Giuseppe Tornatore • The Jacket (2005), director: John Maybury • Room 6 (2006), director: Michael Hurst • Fractured (2014), director: Adam Gierasch
INSPIRED BY DON’T LOOK NOW • The League Of Gentlemen (19992002), TV series • American Horror Story (2011—present), TV series • Antichrist (2009), director: Lars von Trier • Vinyan (2008), director: Fabrice du Welz • We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011), director: Lynne Ramsay • Texas Killing Fields (2011), director: Ami Canaan Mann
INSPIRED BY ROSEMARY’S BABY • American Horror Story (2011—present), TV series • The Brotherhood Of Satan (1971), director: Bernard McEveety • Mark Of The Devil (1970), director: Michael Armstrong • Black Noon (1971), director: Bernard L Kowalski • The Blood On Satan’s Claw (1971), director: Piers Haggard • Devil’s Due (2014), director: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett
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supernatural element. However, it’s going to be subtle: “I’m a huge horror fan but for my money I always get this kind of diminishing return thing,” admits Mrksa. “The more overt the horror is, typically the less effective I find it.” With Requiem, Mrksa wanted to create a feeling of terror and uncertainty, but make it ambiguous. Inspiration for that came from one of his favourite films, Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. “It’s both the most terrifying picture but also incredibly subtle,” he enthuses. “How much supernatural is there? I guess it’s implied that the protagonist has some kind of ability that he’s unaware of, and there’s that terrifying final sequence, but I think that’s more haunting, powerful and disturbing than some dude coming at you with a chainsaw. It’s so subtle and clever. There’s a whole bunch of movies that do that beautifully. They are restrained and don’t give you an easy answer.” As well as Jacob’s Ladder and Don’t Look Now, the BBC is already likening Requiem to The Wicker Man and Rosemary’s Baby. “I know he’s
a controversial figure but a huge influence on the show is [Roman] Polanski,” Mrksa explains. “It's that trilogy of movies he made, Repulsion, The Tenant and then of course his masterpiece Rosemary’s Baby, which for me is kind of like the greatest horror movie ever made. There’s almost nothing supernatural on screen. There are the sequences when Rosemary is being raped in a horrifying ceremony by a devil kind of figure, but even there she’s hallucinating and she’s drugged and she doesn’t know what’s happening, and you see it all from her point of view. You don’t know whether that’s objective or not. But that’s the touchstone. For me, that’s the most terrifying horror movie ever made because she’s being isolated in this place where no one believes her, and even the audience are kind of asking themselves what is going on. That’s where I wanted to place this show.” With six hours to play with, Requiem has a lot of work to do if it wants to keep the audience in a haze of ambiguous suspense for that length of
time. Although there’s currently plenty of horror on TV, not a lot of it is restrained. “It does tend to be overt,” Mrksa says. “You’ve got your True Blood and American Horror Story, and you’ve got your loving horror-genre tributes like Stranger Things — I mean, there’s a monster rampaging through the town right from the opening sequence; it’s not subtle! People told me: ‘You won’t be able to sustain that psychological horror and that ambiguity and that subtlety for six hours… you can do it for 90 minutes but not for longer.’ Well, we’ve proved them wrong!”
Requiem is on BBC One in January 2018.
“THE MORE OVERT THE HORROR IS, THE LESS EFFECTIVE I FIND IT” KRIS MRKSA
Buried secrets will come to light.
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77 Black Mirror Season Four 78 Dark
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review FILM INFO Released Out now Certificate 12A Director Rian Johnson Screenwriter Rian Johnson Cast Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Daisy Ridley, Adam Driver, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac, Kelly Marie Tran, Andy Serkis, Domhnall Gleeson Distributor Disney Running Time 152 mins
THE LAST JEDI FAQ So, is it time for the Jedi to end? Well, that depends on who you ask, really. The film certainly makes the case for both sides of the argument but I guess the most succinct answer to that question is ‘yes and no’. Or ‘see the film’. Which of the newcomers is the MVP? That would be Kelly Marie Tran as plucky maintenance worker Rose. She’s relatable, she’s got a big heart and she’s brave as hell. That being said, Laura Dern is brilliant as Vice Admiral Holdo, but her excellence was a given. She’s Laura Dern.
STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI
Nostalgia is a wonderful thing, and the last two Star Wars films have lovingly explored their past with great success. Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi knows and loves its predecessors and it certainly isn’t above a heart-warming (or a heart-breaking) call-back every now and then, but it’s a bold step away from what’s come before and that ambition is thrilling to watch. The film’s darkness was expected. This is the middle chapter in the trilogy after all, but it’s more than a glum springboard for the grand finale and it doesn’t just crib from The Empire Strikes Back. It’s about finding hope when all hope is lost, and the way it foregrounds the need for humanity in times of conflict resonates even more strongly than the: “Rebel!” rallying cry of Rogue One. Which all makes The Last Jedi sound rather grand and self-important, but that’s not the case. Rian Johnson’s script is funny (almost jarringly so early on until you click with the tone), with oneliners and well-played character humour
How are the Porgs? Look, the Porgs are brilliant. They are very cute but they’re also weird little things, flying around and making nests in the Millennium Falcon… The Porgs can stay. Will Carrie Fisher make me cry? Oh yes, absolutely. Do not go in thinking you’ll get away without shedding a tear or several hundred.
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Let the past die
puncturing the portentous moments and allowing much-needed relief in an increasingly grim time for the rebellion. It also has a wealth of thrilling action sequences, real character development, beautiful production design, ace new creatures, and somehow there’s a caper in the middle. That being said, the film starts in a fantastically gloomy place and stays there for some time. Hamill’s not been shy about expressing his initial disagreement with Rian Johnson’s treatment of Luke in the script, and it is hard to accept the cynical, abrasive recluse we’re given. But one of The Last Jedi’s most impressive feats is that every big swing, every moment that makes the fan in you a little uneasy, is earned. The film is overlong at two and a half hours, and you may well catch yourself thinking ‘this could probably have been cut’. But it’s all there for a reason and for the most part it’s not to simply prop up big flashy twists and reveals (although, goddamn, it’s not a spoiler to say there are plenty of those). It’s all about character. Each of our leads, old and new, is forced to take a step back and look further beyond their most visceral instincts. That includes Kylo Ren (Adam Driver), who’s pushing to prove to the sneering Snoke (Andy Serkis) that killing his father has only made him stronger. Driver is superb, his
CARRIE FISHER HELPED RIAN JOHNSON WITH THE SCRIPT FOR THE LAST JEDI.
Meuest s now! performance getting more nuanced as we dig deeper into Kylo’s past, and he is matched at every step by Ridley, who goes on a similarly complex emotional journey and has only got better in the role. In fact, everyone’s great. Hamill is fearsome, unpredictable and totally compelling, Isaac adds a short fuse to Poe’s cockiness, Serkis is magnificently odious, Domhnall Gleeson looks much more comfortable as Hux, and franchise newcomers Laura Dern and Kelly Marie Tran (who is wonderful as Rose) quickly make their mark. Everyone matters, everyone gets their moment, and everyone is full of surprises. This helps to make The Last Jedi a surprisingly emotional experience, although we knew in advance that we would be struggling to hold back tears every time Carrie Fisher was on screen. She has a lot more to do here than in the previous chapter and, for fear of spoilers, we will just say that she is wonderful. There are moments that don’t quite land and sequences that go on longer than they need to, but there’s so much to admire here that quibbles are quickly forgotten. The emotional pay-offs are huge, the visuals are stunning, the performances are brilliant and, even as it eagerly explores the darkness, The Last Jedi never loses sight of its heart.
Jonathan Hatfull ★★★★★
OR STAY IN AND WATCH… War For The Planet Of The Apes
Matt Reeves swings for the fences with his superb trilogy-closer.
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REVIEWS CINEMA
JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE Game on!
Details 12 // 119 mins // Out now Director Jake Kasdan Screenwriters Chris McKenna, Erik Sommers, Scott Rosenberg, Jeff Pinkner Cast Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Karen Gillan, Jack Black, Nick Jonas Distributor Sony Pictures Entertainment
Preconceptions can sometimes make or break a film. It’s very easy to dismiss a reboot before even the title card has flashed on screen, and Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle has been particularly unlucky in that respect seeing as the loss of the origin film’s star, Robin Williams, is still raw three and a half years later. The film has certainly had its share of cyber venom but, remarkably, it’s still managed to tumble into the jungle with a positive outlook and a fresh attitude, while capturing the fun that made the original. Beginning at a high school in suburbia, we’re introduced to the new players, a regular band of detention misfits made up of video game nerd Spencer, huge jock Fridge, shy but academic Martha and shallow popular girl Bethany. They are basically the Breakfast Club, bar John Bender. The twist (the one that we all already knew about, at least) comes when we discover that the old wooden board game that ate Alan Parrish in 1969 has transformed into a video game cartridge. The other twist (again, one we already knew about it) is that instead of the jungle coming out of the game, the players and indeed the
audience go into the jungle. Each teenager is given an new alter ego: Spencer in the body of weaknessfree explorer Dr Smolder Bravestone (Johnson), Fridge as tiny zoologist and sidekick Franklin ‘Mouse’ Finbar (Hart), Martha as killer of men and ‘dance fighting’ expert Ruby Roundhouse (Gillen) and Bethany as ‘curvy’ scholar and cartographer Professor Shelly Oberon (Black). It’s a classic body switch movie, with each avatar’s body and field of expertise the polar opposite of each teenager, but it really works. The humour rapidly meanders from clever to silly, but even the dick jokes (of which there are several) are good enough to make you crack your face. The script is tight and fast-paced and the film benefits from the new setting, but really it’s the cast that brings the magic back. Though we may have had slight reservations about revisiting Jumanji in the past, we’re glad someone did. It’s not groundbreaking; it’s just bloody good fun.
Poppy-Jay Palmer ★★★★★
OR STAY IN AND WATCH… Goosebumps
This Jack Black-starrer is surprisingly brilliant and toes the line between hilarity and spookiness.
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BRIGHT
#Orcs
Details 15 TBC // 117 mins // Out now Director David Ayer Screenwriter Max Landis Cast Will Smith, Joel Edgerton, Noomi Rapace, Lucy Fry, Edgar Ramirez Distributor Netflix
A gritty LA cop movie with genre elements should be the perfect fit for End Of Watch director David Ayer, and yet Bright is a plodding, uninspired twist on Alien Nation that lacks that film’s wit and invention and which squanders its potential. Here, magic and fairy tale creatures are a fact of everyday life. Elves are the elite, orcs are the downtrodden lower class, and magic users (Brights) are dangerous terrorists. Smith is Daryl Ward, a human officer who is reluctantly partnered with Nick Jakoby (Joel Edgerton), the first Orc cop. When the duo stumbles across a magic wand at a gory crime scene, they become targets for crooks, crooked cops and the wand’s terrifying owner Leilah (Noomi Rapace). It’s easy to see how everyone got excited about the concept but it’s impossible to be immersed in this world when the conversations feel templated, the exposition is so wooden it may as well be delivered direct to camera (one character stops another to run a re-cap of the story by him halfway through), and the energy is non-existent. It’s as if the filmmakers decided that the only spark of invention required was to add Orcs and Elves onto a standard cop movie and left it at that. There are one or two decent action sequences, but given what
BRIGHT IS NETFLIX’S MOST EXPENSIVE FILM TO DATE WITH A BUDGET OF $90 MILLION.
Ayer is capable of, this is bafflingly dull as Ward, Jakoby and nice Bright Tikka (Lucy Fry) barrel from shoot-out to plot point. Meanwhile, every potential avenue to flesh out the world, whether that’s the ancient war and the Dark Lord, the strange cults, the Orc gang leader or Edgar Ramirez’s Elven magic cop, is ignored or fumbled. The actors do their best but they’re hamstrung by the script, which wants Smith to be the straight man but can’t resist giving him oneliners. Edgerton works hard to make Jakoby endearing but the dialogue is woeful, while Rapace’s menacing presence is woefully underused. Bright clearly has good intentions and it’s striving to say something about racial prejudice and inequality, but the end result is a long, tedious, uninspired slog.
Jonathan Hatfull ★★★★★
OR STAY IN AND WATCH… Alien Nation
James Caan’s racist cop buddies up with Mandy Patinkin’s amiable alien in this superior film.
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review FILM INFO Released 16 February Certificate 15 Director Guillermo del Toro Screenwriters Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor Cast Sally Hawkins, Doug Jones, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer Distributor 20th Century Fox Film Running Time 123 mins
THE SHAPE OF WATER
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A monster love story Guillermo del Toro loves monsters.
THE SHAPE OF WATER FAQ How do you make a monster sexy? It’s all in the eyes and lips, apparently. And del Toro reportedly insisted that he had to have a nice bum, too. Is it a Beauty And The Beast kind of scenario? Nope! The amphibian man stays an amphibian man, there’s no magical transformation into a human man or anything.
That’s always been obvious in his movies – just look at the adoring way he shoots the terrifying kaiju in Pacific Rim, or the way he makes the Pale Man and Faun of Pan’s Labyrinth precisely as beautiful as they are horrible – but The Shape Of Water is his clearest declaration of love yet. Watching it, you’ll find yourself falling in love, too. Set in early Sixties Baltimore, The Shape Of Water is equal parts monster movie and romantic fairy tale. Elisa (Sally Hawkins) is an orphan, left incapable of speech by childhood abuse; as a nighttime cleaner at the Occam Aerospace Research Company, she’s routinely ignored by the scientists whose messes she’s paid to mop up. Her invisibility turns out to be a blessing in disguise, though. When she discovers there’s an amphibious creature – who bears more than a passing resemblance to the Creature from the Black Lagoon – being experimented on by the brutal Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon), she’s able to sneak into the lab unnoticed. And
Is it all CGI then? Again, nope! The fishman effects are mostly prosthetics: actor Doug Jones spent three hours a day being strapped into a latex, foam, and rubber bodysuit, with webbed gloves and an elaborate helmet with built-in gizmos to move his gills. It only needed minor CG enhancements to bring the creature to life.
through look and touch, and yet the things they see in one another – gentleness, kindness, and a shared longing for understanding – are as clear as if they’d spoken the words straight down the camera. There’s more going on here than a straightforward romance, though. Del Toro weaves the imagery of Hollywood’s golden age into his story, pointing to the power of cinema to tell the stories of the disempowered – and to making the lost feel accepted. It’s not just Elisa and her lover who feels the pain of loneliness, after all; Elisa’s neighbour Giles (Richard Jenkins) is forced into the closet by a society unready to accept his sexuality, while her co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) is beset by racism on all sides. For del Toro, monsters are symbols whose meaning is shaped by the viewer – and for viewers like him who feel different and rejected, monsters can become heroes. Even romantic ones. It’s a beautiful film on all levels – as gorgeous visually as it is thematically. Every inch of the frame has clearly been carefully considered, and it’s the kind of film you’ll want to watch again and again, to dive back into like a favourite childhood fairy tale. Del Toro’s previous film, Crimson Peak, might have seemed like a disappointment to cinemagoers lulled by the marketing into expecting a horror film, so this time around, he’s taking no chances. The Shape Of Water is unmistakeably a love story – a love letter to both monsters and monster movies, and it’s going to steal your heart.
Sarah Dobbs ★★★★★
Are there any scary bits to go along with the romance? Some, definitely! There’s even some brutal violence tucked in. It’s just that the monster turns out not to be the real monster…
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there, over shared packed lunches and meaningful glances, the two fall in love. Creating a convincing romance between a woman and a fishman is probably the film’s biggest challenge, but sensitive performances by both Hawkins and frequent del Toro collaborator Doug Jones (Abe Sapien in Hellboy, the ghost of Edith’s mum in Crimson Peak, and many more) make it not just believable but compelling. Each of them recognises something in the other that draws them irresistibly together. No-one could accuse del Toro of subtlety: symbolism is everywhere you look in this film, from the artificially bright green candies Strickland constantly chomps on to the red shoes Elisa buys after she and the amphibian man first make love; good and evil are denoted by different colour palettes; and a subplot about Russian spies could hardly be more timely. But there’s nonetheless a delicacy to the way the romance is handled here. Since neither character can declare their feelings to the other out loud, it’s all communicated
OR STAY IN AND WATCH… Creature From The Black Lagoon
Another story of a lonely fishman but with a more tragic ending.
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THE UNDERWATER SCENES WERE SHOT DRY-FOR-WET, WITH THE ACTORS AND FURNITURE SUSPENDED ON WIRES.
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REVIEWS CINEMA
COCO
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Pixar bring all the feels, again
Details PG // 98 mins // 19 January Directors Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina Screenwriters Lee Unkrich, Jason Katz, Matthew Aldrich, Adrian Molina Cast Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt Distributor Disney
Pixar has a rich history of tugging at the heartstrings with a powerful profundity, from the opening ten minutes of Up to the way Inside Out explored how important it is to save room for the sad feelings as well as the good; the animation studio has regularly displayed its keen emotional intelligence. With its 17th film, Coco, Pixar uses the power of music and its Mexican setting on Day Of The Dead to tell an upbeat story about death and the importance of family. When 12-year-old Miguel (voiced by cheery newcomer Anthony Gonzalelz) is transported to the Land Of The Dead after disobeying his family’s wishes not to play music he learns all about where he really came from. The gorgeous animation taps into Mexican cultural heritage and traditional folk art with brightly coloured alebrijes swooping around the vividly designed landscape. A sparkling orange bridge made up of the petals of marigolds acts as lovingly crafted tribute to the Day Of The Dead and an appearance from Frida Kahlo (voiced wonderfully by Natalia Cordova-Buckley) adds great humour to the warm and exuberant atmosphere. The Golden age of Mexican cinema is brilliantly played with, too, via the character of Ernesto de La Cruz, an idolised actor and musician. Gael García Bernal voices Miguel’s
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guide to the afterlife, Hector, with an endearing, energetic flair and his cheeky references to Kahlo’s magnificent eyebrows are giggleinducing. Catchy tunes such as ‘Un Poco Loco’ bring the laughs while the ballad, ‘Remember Me’, brings many of the feels especially in the film’s genuinely moving denouement. The Land Of The Dead also has a serious side, with the characters going through an airport security check to gain admittance and the bureaucracy subtly touching upon modern day immigration issues. The ‘department of family remains’ recalls the administrative office seen in Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice and it shares a similar approach to the subject of death by dealing with it in an imaginative and candid manner. The film doesn’t go where you initially expect it might go and is all the better for it.
Katherine McLaughlin ★★★★★
OR STAY IN AND WATCH… The Book Of Life A jubilant celebration of Mexican culture with a rewarding feminist stance.
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TOKYO GHOUL
The hunger
Details 15 // 119 mins // 31 January Director Kentarô Hagiwara Screenwriter Ichirô Kusuno Cast Masataka Kubota, Fumika Shimizu, Nobuyuki Suzuki Distributor Anime Ltd and National Amusements
It’s the odd and amusing details in this reimagined live action adaptation of Sui Ishida’s Manga that keeps it engaging amid some dodgy CGI. From the fact that the ghouls can supress their appetite for human flesh via a special blend of coffee or that they each visit a mask maker who works in a gothic fairground-themed studio that wouldn’t be out of place in a Marilyn Manson music video, the film conjures up enough bizarre mystery to pique curiosity. Ken Kaneki (Masataka Kubota) is a hopeless romantic yearning for a woman who regularly visits his favourite local café. When he finally plucks up the courage to speak to her they hit it off thanks to their identical taste in books. On their first date, however, she attacks him, and he ends up in hospital. After a lifesaving organ transplant operation, he morphs into a human-ghoul hybrid and begins to crave tasty human meat. Suddenly thrust into a strange underground world where he is neither one thing or the other, Ken struggles to shift to his new life. Thankfully there is help at hand when a kindly coffee shop owner welcomes him in to a new family of sorts. Tokyo Ghoul tells the story from the supposed monster’s point of view to investigate the moral grey areas in society and for the most part, it succeeds.
COCO’S MIGUEL IS THE FIRST NON-CAUCASIAN HUMAN PROTAGONIST IN A PIXAR FEATURE FILM.
The human drama and new relationships Ken strikes up are genuinely sweet, especially his brotherly connection to a young ghoul who has recently lost her father. On the opposing side, the determined cops who hunt the ghouls are made up of a white haired, donut scoffing, madly pious villain played by a very game Yô Ôizumi and a more reserved rookie who begins to question his boss’ cruel methods. As the film veers between intimate and intricately designed interiors to drawn-out battle sequences featuring a vast array of terrible CG tentacles and weapons the widely uneven aesthetic becomes grating and frankly distractingly ugly.
Katherine McLaughlin ★★★★★
OR STAY IN AND WATCH… Thirst
Park Chan-wook’s seductive vampire film confronts the complex issue of assisted suicide.
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review
ATTRACTION
The day Moscow stood still
Details 12A // 117 mins // 19 January Director Fedor Bondarchuck Screenwriters Oleg Malovichko, Andrey Zolotarev Cast Irina Starshenbaum, Alexander Petrov, Rinal Mukhametov, Oleg Menshikov Distributor Bill Melendez Productions
In 2011, a sci-fi called The Darkest Hour was released – no connection to the similarly titled Winston Churchill biopic about to hit cinemas. Starring Emile Hirsch and Joel Kinnaman, and written by Prometheus scribe Jon Spaihts, the critically and commercially underperforming film concerned an alien attack on Moscow, which, to give that film a modicum of praise, is an interesting setting for a decently budgeted English language production.
SUSPIRIA
Still the greatest
Most who made or have seen The Darkest Hour would probably like to forget it, but for those people, it may spring to mind when watching Attraction – a decently budgeted Russian language production that’s also about an alien arrival in Moscow. Following an accident in space, an alien craft enters Earth’s atmosphere. Damaged by Russian fighter jets, the ship crashes into a populated area of Moscow and a few hundred human lives are ended in the ensuing chaos. Among the victims is the best friend of Yulya (Irina Starshenbaum), a teen who feels immense guilt for abandoning plans with her friend to fool around with her older boyfriend, Artyom (Alexander Petrov) – this leads to a particularly jarring sequence in which the ship’s crash landing is intercut with attempted sexy time between Yulya and Artyom as an electronic dance tune plays.
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A life form from the craft makes contact with Colonel Lebedev (Oleg Menshikov), Yulya’s estranged father, establishing that the beings within just want to repair their ship and leave both the working class suburb they’ve wrecked and the planet as a whole. Military forces allow them to do this, but fear and anger from local citizens makes an eventual clash between Earth and the alien visitors seem inevitable. The film’s plot and tone jerk in various directions from there, including
a girl-meets-alien romance and culture clash comedy mode. While rarely dull thanks to its tonal shifts, Attraction comes across as a weak mixtape of more coherent films; District 9 and The Day The Earth Stood Still among them.
Josh Slater-Williams ★★★★★
OR STAY IN AND WATCH… District 9
Alien visitors face a antagonistic human response in Neill Blomkamp’s film.
MOTHER!
Let there be light!
Details 18 // 98 mins // 1977 // // Released Out now Director Dario Argento Cast Jessica Harper, Stefania Casini, Joan Bennett, Alida Valli Distributor Cult Films
Details 18 // 121 mins // 2017 // • // Released Out now Director Darren Aronofsky Cast Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Michelle Pfeiffer, Ed Harris Distributor Paramount Home Entertainment
It is extremely likely that fans of Suspiria will already have several different versions of Dario Argento’s masterpiece over several different formats, but the truth is that this 4K restoration is an absolute necessity. The film has never looked so good, and those incredible colours and thundering soundtrack will simply astonish you over and over again. It has been 40 years since
Darren Aronofsky plunges the viewer into his horror movie about an egomaniacal male writer who threatens his young wife’s sanity and physical well-being with a booming intensity. At first, this allegorical tale jam packed with biblical references is intriguing but Aronofsky’s blunt message about the destruction of Mother Earth and the sacrifice of women turns into a condescending and
Suzy Bannion (Jessica Harper) first arrived at the Tanz dance academy in Frieburg and uncovered a coven of witches and the technicolour nightmare has lost none of its magic. From the opening howling gale to the closing inferno, the combination of dream logic, brutal violence and beautiful design is still unmatched. The dual-format release from Cult Films also features a new interview with Argento about the inspiration for the film and its production, older featurettes and a commentary with experts Alan Jones and Kim Newman. There’s also a fascinating feature detailing the film’s lengthy restoration process. This is an essential purchase.
Jonathan Hatfull ★★★★★
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repetitive nightmare. Jennifer Lawrence switches skilfully between mildly put-out, to frantic and then completely ruined as a woman treated like a lamb to the slaughter by ‘the poet’ and his adoring fans who invade her idyllic home. It is at this point when the film is most insightful as it touches upon the cult of celebrity and conveys the overbearing burden of panic and anxiety at people taking over with technical flair. Many have claimed this as a masterpiece with its dark humour biting down on male toxicity and the creative process, but it feels like Aronofsky is patting himself on the back a little too enthusiastically for his self-awareness.
Katherine McLaughlin ★★★★★
ATTRACTION DIRECTOR FEDOR BONDARCHUCK’S FILM STALINGRAD WAS THE FIRST RUSSIAN MOVIE PRODUCED WITH IMAX 3D TECHNOLOGY.
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REVIEWS HOME FILM
A GHOST STORY
Boo!
Details 12 // 92 mins // 2017 // • // Released 15 January Director David Lowery Cast Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, McColm Cephas Jr. Distributor Lionsgate Home Entertainment
with vignetted edges – a technical detail that evokes not only a feeling of claustrophobia but also recalls those classic scenes in films where mourning partners watch their departed loved ones projected on to a screen. Think Karen Allen at the beginning of John Carpenter’s Starman. Will Oldham appears as an obnoxious loudmouth to explain the meaning of life in a lively party scene and the wonderful Kesha appears as a ghost friend to C under a floral sheet. Lowery’s surreal cineliterate trawl through space and time is thoughtprovoking and heart-wrenchingly sad. It puts the viewer in their place by confronting them with fears, truths and existential turmoil with poetic grace yet never displays an allknowing arrogance with its notions.
Katherine McLaughlin ★★★★★
OR STAY IN AND WATCH… Under The Skin
Scarlett Johansson stars as an alien in this surreal gaze into the depths of humanity.
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And then there were none
Details 15 // 115 mins // 1971 // // Released Out now Director Dario Argento Cast Karl Malden, James Franciscus, Catherine Spaak Distributor Arrow Video
Director David Lowery cites Poltergeist as a visual reference for his melancholic and profound meditation on grief, love and loss which he also uses as a touchstone for an extended sequence where the viewer is led through death from the point of view of a ghost. Casey Affleck plays that hulking ghost figure from under a bedsheet who returns to the home he shared with his partner (Rooney Mara) for answers but gets distracted by the wondrous life brimming over from inside the house and accidentally ends up travelling through time. Lowery also takes his visual cues from masters of cinema such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Chantal Akerman and Tsai Mingliang building mystery and moments of agonising despair with static long takes of individual longing. Rooney Mara stuffing her face with pie after the death of her partner is excruciating to watch with Lowery refusing to move his camera away from a trembling figure exuding pain for a lengthy period. The love story between the two characters simply named C and M plays out to a haunting score by Daniel Hart with one song working as a reminder of the power of music to move a person through long forgotten memories. There’s giggles and meaningful chat in between all the lingering images that appear in Academy ratio
THE CAT O’ NINE TAILS
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Following the success of The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, Dario Argento returned to gialli with his sophomore film and although The Cat O’ Nine Tails doesn’t match the heights of his debut (or of what was to come), it’s good fun with strong performances and some nasty surprises. One night, retired blind journalist Franco Arno (Karl Malden) is walking past a pharmaceutical company when he notices a suspicious car. After he leaves, the building is broken into, but why? Arno joins forces with reporter Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus), but can they solve the mystery before all the suspects meet a grisly end? The Cat O’ Nine Tails moves at
a leisurely pace but there are some terrific nail-biting and shocking sequences, and the Turin setting works nicely. Malden makes for a warm, witty lead (particularly when Arno is paired with his young niece Lori), and although it is lesser Argento, there is still plenty for fans to enjoy. The best of the extras is a candid chat with the director about his feelings towards the film.
Jonathan Hatfull ★★★★★
REVOLT
Welcome to the resistance
Details 15 // 87 mins // 2017 // // Released 22 January Director Joe Miale Cast Lee Pace, Bérénice Marlohe, Jason Flemyng, Wandile Molebatsi Distributor Entertainment One
It’s hard to look at Joe Miale’s feature directing debut and not see all of its influences. An alien invasion film that follows an amnesiac soldier (a miscast Lee Pace) and a doctor (Bérénice Marlohe) who have to make their way through the chaos and countryside to a resistance base in Nairobi, Revolt has its sights set on the grounded feel of Monsters and the social commentary/special effects extravaganza blend of District 9. The aliens look great; somehow sleek, sharp and a little clunky all at once. The problem is that all the attention seems to have been spent on how the film looks. The dialogue is extremely clunky, which hinders both the message and the attempt at a love story
DAVID LOWERY USED THE MONEY HE MADE DIRECTING PETE’S DRAGON TO FUND A GHOST STORY.
between Bo and Nadia, and a sequence involving a wounded photo-journalist played by Jason Flemyng is particularly and painfully stilted. Miale also seems to lack the confidence or restraint to resist throwing a battle in every few minutes, making the whole thing feel repetitive and badly structured. It picks up a little at the very end but Revolt spends too long going over old ground.
Jonathan Hatfull ★★★★★
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review
LEATHERFACE
THE LEGO NINJAGO MOVIE
Chainsaw gang
Stuff of legends
Details 18 // 90 mins // 2017 // // Released Out now Directors Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury Cast Lili Taylor, Stephen Dorff, Sam Strike, Vanessa Grasse Distributor Lionsgate Home Entertainment
The prospect of yet another TCM reboot didn’t exactly fill us with excitement, particularly after 2013’s risible Texas Chainsaw, but directors Maury and Bustillo delivered two of the most striking French horrors of the last decade with Inside and Livid and we were curious to see what they would do. Sadly, although there are a couple of nice grisly flourishes (one involving a cow is particularly good), there’s nothing about Leatherface that really stands out. It follows a group of teenage inmates who break out of a mental institution during a riot, one of whom will end the film by donning the skin mask and busting out the chainsaw. The performances are
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Though The LEGO Ninjago Movie arguably doesn’t live up to its predecessors, it’s still a marvellous effort. Set in the city of Ninjago, the film follows Lloyd and his band of secret ninjas as they try to protect the city whenever the evil Lord Garmadon (who happens to be Lloyd’s absent dad) decides he wants to try conquering it.
Jonathan Hatfull ★★★★★
The story has been told many times, but the combination of mesmerising animation and a stream of rich gags breathes fresh life into it. It takes everything that’s awesome about the world of martial arts films and adds a LEGO spin. It’s upbeat, charming and optimistic and, unlike many modern animated movies with ‘U’ certificates, almost impossible to grumble at. By this point it almost seems as though the LEGO Movie universe can do no wrong. From Emmet’s quest to become a master builder to the secret ninjas’ quest to save Ninjago to Batman, it hits the mark every time, and for the foreseeable future we’ll happily keep coming back for more.
Poppy-Jay Palmer ★★★★★
Details 15 // 135 mins // 2017 // • // Released 15 January Director Andrés Muschietti Cast Bill Skarsgård, Jaeden Lieberher, Finn Wolfhard, Sophia Lillis Distributor Warner Home Video
cinema screens like a balloon on the wind, then blew apart just about every record worth smashing. After making a new generation scared of clowns, director Andrés Muschietti’s IT comes to Blu-ray. It is the first half of Stephen King’s classic story, with the second slated for cinema release in September 2019. Little Georgie Denbrough is
Details U // 101 mins // 2017 // • // Released 12 February Directors Charlie Bean, Paul Fisher, Bob Logan Cast Dave Franco, Jackie Chan, Justin Theroux Distributor Warner Bros
enthusiastic but the mystery really isn’t as difficult to solve as the film thinks it is, and you will spend most of the film wondering when Lili Taylor’s ferocious Ma Sawyer will return for another face-off with Stephen Dorff’s vengeful Sheriff. It doesn’t fall on its (Leather) face, and it is an improvement on its immediate predecessor, but it’s also entirely unremarkable.
IT The clown that killed is back! IT floated on to
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bouncing along the street when the paper boat he is chasing – given to him by his brother, Bill – is swallowed by rain-swollen guttering. A strange set of (blue?) eyes look up at him and before you can look away, we are slap bang into a bird’s-eye view of fear that belies the film’s 15 rating. It is up to Bill and his raggletaggle friends, The Losers’ Club, to find out what those eyes belong to and in doing so save their town and (if they’re lucky) themselves. The book’s action is updated to the Eighties and the kids are a couple of years older, meaning there’s more modern gags to lighten the tone while the actors delve deeper into themes ranging from child abuse to sexuality and from mental health to isolation. The Blu-ray has bonus features that King’s readers and lovers of movie magic will appreciate. You can eavesdrop on Pennywise himself as actor Bill Skarsgård discusses playing the killer clown in featurette
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‘Pennywise Lives!’ and to calm down, ‘The Losers’ Club’ lets you chum along as the cast get to know each other during production and learn to revel in their own worst fears. A particular treat direct from Uncle Stevie is an interview – ‘Author of Fear’ – in which (the) King discusses the origins of IT and how the story has impacted on his writing. He’s famous for linking his books together from The Dark Tower series to Bag Of Bones, so you’ll be hunting Easter
MUCH OF THE BICKERING BETWEEN RICHIE AND EDDIE WAS IMPROVISED BY THE ACTORS.
Eggs ‘til your heart bursts. The package is finished off with a pretty little bow of deleted and extended scenes as well as a digital download of the film. Wanting a balloon’s only the start of IT…
Charlie Oughton ★★★★★
IF YOU LIKE THIS TRY… Stand By Me
Friends battle bullies, bereavement and adults with stories and growing up.
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REVIEWS HOME FILM HOUNDS OF LOVE Australia’s most disturbing serial killer film since 2011’s Snowtown
Details 18 // 108 mins // 2017 // • // Released 22 January Director Ben Young Cast Emma Booth, Stephen Curry, Ashleigh Cummings Distributor Arrow Films
Based on the crimes of David and Catherine Birnie (think of them as Australia’s answer to Fred and Rose West), Ben Young’s fiercely disturbing debut, Hounds Of Love, is dominated by Emma Booth’s award-winning performance. When high-school student Vicki Maloney (Ashleigh Cummings) attempts to buy a stick of weed for a party, she gets into the wrong car with the wrong people. Suburbanites Evelyn (Booth) and John (Stephen Curry) are responsible for a spate of abductions and murders in Perth. Upon entering their house, the pair’s chatty bonhomie quickly disappears, Vicki is slipped a Mickey Finn and repeatedly brutalised by the pair.
Hounds Of Love could have been another standard-issue entry in the torture porn canon, but Young’s film is way more interested in the messy psychologies of a very gruesome twosome. John controls, manipulates, lashes out and kills girls to mend and heal his own inadequacies and wife Evelyn resides in a scary mental borderland between aggressor and victim.
Martyn Conterio ★★★★★
Cabinet of curiosities
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MOST BEAUTIFUL ISLAND An urban horror tale exploring
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the plight of the underclass
Details 18 // 77 mins // 2017 // • // Released 5 February Director Ana Asensio Cast Ana Asensio, Larry Fessenden, Natasha Romanova Distributor Bulldog Films
If a job sounds too good to be true, that’s usually because it is. Yet undocumented immigrant Luciana (Ana Asensio) is so desperate for readies, she’s willing to take the dangling bait when it’s offered. The well-paying mystery gig sounds better – and easier – than babysitting a pair of upper-class Manhattanite brats (her current main source of income), or standing around dressed as a chicken handing out flyers. A horror film about the plight of migrants who prop up our western economies, the exploited, the invisible, the discarded, Most Beautiful Island is an assured first feature from the striking Spanish
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HAMMER HORROR COLLECTION PART TWO
director, and is executively produced by Larry Fessenden. Shot on grungy 16mm and making great use of NYC locations, Asensio has fashioned an urban nightmare about class, detailing how people are readily debased for the sick thrills of others. As a vision of society, it’s palpably revolting and unshakeable.
Martyn Conterio ★★★★★
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Details 18 // Various mins // 1970-1976 // // Released 29 January Director Various Cast Ralph Bates, Christopher Lee, Rita Tushingham, Shane Briant, Richard Widmark, Martine Beswick, Kate O’Mara Distributor Studiocanal
This second set of late period Hammer Horror re-releases from Studiocanal is a fascinating snapshot of a studio looking for its place in a new world of horror movies. They show the studio that dripped blood venturing into more daring realms of dark comedy, psychological thriller and unpleasantness, and while none of the films are total successes, they’re essential viewing for anyone interested in Hammer’s history. The Horror Of Frankenstein (1970, ★★★★★) is an intriguing attempt to continue the brand without Peter Cushing, as Ralph Bates steps into his shoes. It’s essentially a reboot with a more openly sociopathic take on the character, and while the dark comedy and misanthropy doesn’t always work, it’s interesting to see where veteran writer Jimmy Sangster went. Bates also stars in Dr Jekyll And Sister Hyde (1971, ★★★★★), a gender swapping spin that offers some surprisingly transgressive thrills. Martine Beswick is wonderful and charismatic as Jekyll’s ‘sister’, and the inclusion of real life monsters Burke and Hare, not to mention the spectre of Jack the Ripper, give the whole thing an odd credibility to go along with the moments of silliness, bolstered by the superb
TO THE DEVIL A DAUGHTER WAS BASED ON A NOVEL BY DENNIS WHEATLEY BUT IT DIFFERS GREATLY.
production design and atmospheric direction by Roy Ward Baker. Hammer legend Christopher Lee makes for a monstrous villain as the Satanic priest/cult leader in To The Devil A Daughter (1976, ★★★★★), hunting for a (very) young Natassja Kinski who’s been delivered to occult writer Richard Widmark for safekeeping. The first half is creepy but it’s a shame that it becomes a mean-spirited muddle in the final act. Finally, Straight On Till Morning (1972, ★★★★★) is a sad, strange story of a young woman (Rita Tushingham) who unwittingly falls for a beauty-hating serial killer (Shane Briant). It can’t hold it together but Tushingham is superb and her story is upsetting in its everyday tragedy. It doesn’t feel like a Hammer film, it’s just a grim piece of work.
Jonathan Hatfull
OR STAY IN AND WATCH… Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter
Hammer tried to launch a new franchise centred on Horst Janson’s hero.
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review
BLADE RUNNER 2049 U K, hun?
Details 15 // 164 mins // 2017 // • // Released 5 February Director Denis Villeneuve Cast Ryan Gosling, Harrison Ford, Jared Leto, Robin Wright, Ana de Armas Distributor Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
A sequel to a revered classic was always going to be tricky to pull off – not least because you’re competing not just with a film, but with the idealised version of it that fans have carried around in their heads for years. Blade Runner 2049 passes the comparison-with-the-original test as soon as it shows us its iconic world, reproduced from the original with care, while also expanding on it.
This is a film that respects the original, treating it as an unchangeable holy text. Not one aspect of the original is retconned or otherwise ‘ruined’. Director Denis Villeneuve even manages to maintain the famous cliffhanger of the original film. In a scenario where a definitive answer will alienate half the viewers, simply sidestepping the issue is the wisest move. The fact that Villeneuve manages to pull that off while bringing back Harrison Ford’s Deckard – and also giving Ford the best material he’s had to work with in years – is nothing short of magic. But Deckard isn’t the lead here – if anything, he’s sort of the McGuffin. The film is headed up by Ryan Gosling’s K, a replicant Blade Runner beginning to wonder if he might be more than that. Gosling nails his first sci-fi role, handling both the drama and the action utterly convincingly, even if Robin Wright does occasionally
FLATLINERS
upstage him as his tough boss. Like the original film, K’s mission to locate a replicant child isn’t really the point of the film – as before, it’s an exploration of what humanity really is. But while the film looks great, has some outstanding set-pieces and handles complicated themes well, it’s deeply flawed. Jared Leto never convinces as the villain of the piece (his replicant henchwoman Luv is more compelling), lovebot Joi is treated creepily throughout and, most damning
of all, the film is 45 minutes too long. A tighter edit and this film would have surpassed the original. It’s a shame that the power of the film’s brilliant ending is marred by the fatigue that set in two thirds of the way through.
Abigail Chandler ★★★★★
IF YOU LIKE THIS TRY… Arrival
Denis Villeneuve’s excellent sci-fi film starring Amy Adams will haunt you for days.
WISH UPON
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Back from the dead
Be very careful what you wish for
Details 15 // 110 mins // 2017 // • // Released 5 February Director Niels Arden Oplev Cast Ellen Page, Nina Dobrev, Diego Luna, James Norton, Kiersey Clemons Distributor Sony Pictures Home Entertainment
Details 15 // 90 mins // 2017 // • // Released Out now Director John R Leonetti Cast Joey King, Ryan Phillippe, Ki Hong Lee, Shannon Purser, Sydney Park, Alice Lee Distributor Vertigo Releasing
Niels Arden Oplev’s remake of Joel Schumacher’s 1990 cult favourite disappeared without much of a trace when it hit cinemas, and the living room may be a more forgiving venue. Still, it’s not a particularly thrilling watch, dragging along at close to two hours and suffering from some fairly woeful horror effects. The film uses the same starting point as its predecessor, as charismatic student doctor Courtney (Ellen Page) convinces her colleagues to stop her heart so she can see what’s beyond. When she comes back with enhanced abilities and a lust for life, the others quickly follow, and they will all pay the price… There are some nice twists along the way, some visually impressive
One of the best things about horror movies is that they let us explore what happens when characters make the kind of bad decisions we’d never make ourselves. So when Clare (Joey King, the kid responsible for The Conjuring’s best scare) is given a magic wish-granting box and starts using it without heeding the warnings engraved on its sides, it would be easy to sit back and sneer. But it’s way more fun to go along for the ride. Inevitably, every wish Clare makes leads to disaster. This isn’t your standard monkey’s paw tale, though: Clare’s wishes negatively affect other people, while she gets whatever she wants. A bigger house? Done. A less embarrassing father? Sure. But afterwards,
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nightmares and there’s no denying the quality of the cast (Page is unsurprisingly the stand-out in the film), but the decision to strip away all of the Gothic excess, smoke and wind machines and replace them with strip lighting and sparkly, clean surfaces makes you focus on how daft the whole endeavour actually is, which is especially evident when Diego Luna declares: “No more Flatlining!”
Jonathan Hatfull ★★★★★
people on the periphery of her life suffer terrible Final Destination style accidents. There’s an enjoyably murky morality to the whole thing, because it is really down to Clare to figure out what to do about the chaos she has wrought, and whether she even cares. If you like difficult teenage protagonists and gleefully splattery kills, you’re gonna love this.
Sarah Dobbs ★★★★★
VILLENEUVE WANTED THE VILLAIN TO BE PLAYED BY DAVID BOWIE, BUT HE SADLY PASSED AWAY BEFORE HE COULD BE OFFERED THE ROLE.
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review INFO Released Out now Certificate 15 Creator Charlie Brooker Cast Jesse Plemons, Cristin Milioti, Rosemary DeWitt, Andrea Riseborough, Georgina Campbell, Joe Cole, Maxine Peake, Letitia Wright, Douglas Hodge Distributor Netflix Format Running Time 360 mins
Season Four
BLACK MIRROR Tomorrow’s world
BLACK MIRROR 4 DIRECTOR DIRECTORY TOBY HAYNES Haynes has worked on Being Human, Sherlock and Doctor Who. He also directed the ace Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell. JODIE FOSTER She’s Jodie bloody Foster (and she’s directed episodes of OITNB and House Of Cards, and films Money Monster and The Beaver). JOHN HILLCOAT His last film Triple Nine may have had a muted reception but he’s the man who brought us the brilliant The Proposition, The Road and Lawless.
Charlie Brooker’s 21st century nightmares are back and show the creator still enjoying the benefits of Netflix’s budgets and the opportunity to tell stories with American talent. Indeed, the cast and director roster is arguably more impressive than the third season, which is not to downplay the excellence in front and behind the camera from the first set of episodes onwards. But it’s hard to imagine the show being able to mount episodes like ‘USS Callister’, which is a vicious take on male entitlement set in a brightly coloured, twisted version of Star Trek directed by Toby Haynes (Sherlock), led by a superb performance from Fargo’s Jesse Plemons and anchored by Cristin Milioti’s despairing but determined Lieutenant Cole. That mean streak is something of a Black Mirror hallmark and, following Season Three’s heart-warming ‘San Junipero’, it’s interesting to see when and how Brooker decides to subvert our expectations. While there certainly are episodes which take us on the darkest possible path, there are one or two which
end on a message of hope, or at least a satisfying payback. That’s not only necessary for binge-watching without plunging into a pit of despair, it’s also important for Black Mirror’s continued survival. At a certain point, it’s going to stop being entertaining if Brooker gives us the same bleakness over and over again. That being said, he’s still able to find a mixture of ordinary and unexpected fears to exploit. ‘Arkangel’, directed by Jodie Foster, is essentially about an overprotective mother. Rosemarie DeWitt is excellent as a woman who signs her young daughter up for a technology trial which allows her to see what she’s doing and filter potentially upsetting images and sounds. She quickly discovers that sheltering her child from everything is not the answer, but the way the episode explores those consequences is unpredictable and surprisingly grounded. That grounded feel continues in ‘Crocodile’, directed by John Hillcoat and featuring a great performance from Andrea Riseborough. It’s a nifty spin on
TIM VAN PATTEN One of the great US TV directors who’s worked on almost everything! DAVID SLADE He made Hard Candy, 30 Days Of Night and Twilight and set the tone for Hannibal and American Gods.
a whodunit that follows an investigator (Kiran Sonia Sawar) who uses technology that allows her to see her subject’s memories. It’s predictable but that’s where a lot of its emotional weight comes from. Speaking of emotional weight, the Timothy Van Patten-directed ‘Hang The DJ’ uses its tech in a similar way but for very different purposes. Georgina Campbell and Joe Cole play two users of what seems to be a rigorously enforced dating app. Your device tells you exactly how long you have on each date, with each encounter helping them to pin down your perfect match. The catch is that dates can last hours, months… even years. The episode is well-observed and affecting, and it’s performed with real sweetness and vulnerability by the two leads. There are no big questions in the deliberately slight ‘Metalhead’, which relies on David Slade’s fantastically stylish direction and a compelling performance from Maxine Peake as a woman fleeing from a deadly, unstoppable robot guard dog. When it works, it’s fantastic, but it does begin to outstay its welcome. The season concludes with anthology ‘Black Museum’, which is impossible to discuss without ruining it, but it’s a wonderfully twisted bookend to the series with yet more excellent performances and strong direction from Colm McCarthy. While there may not be a clear standout here, this is a consistently strong and brilliantly acted season from a show that seems to be pushing to evolve.
Jonathan Hatfull ★★★★★
COLM MCCARTHY He’s worked on Sherlock, Doctor Who, Ripper Street and Peaky Blinders, not to mention the brilliant The Girl With All The Gifts.
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OR STAY IN AND WATCH… Room 104
Jay and Mark Duplass deliver an anthology series set in one American hotel room.
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NETFLIX COMMISSIONED SEASON 3 AND 4 OF BLACK MIRROR AT THE SAME TIME.
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review INFO Released Out now Certificate 15 Creators Baran Bo Odar, Jantje Friese Cast Louis Hoffman, Oliver Masucci, Karoline Eichorn, Maja Schöne, Jördis Triebel, Mark Waschke Distributor Netflix Format Running Time 500 mins
Season One
DARK
A DARK WHO’S WHO The Kahnwalds Jonas is a good kid who has returned home after treatment following his father’s sudden suicide. His mother is Hannah, a lonely and determined woman who has her heart set on Ulrich Nielsen. The Nielsens Katharina is the local school principal, and she has two teenage kids (Magnus and Martha), and 11-year-old Mikkel. Her cheating husband Ulrich is a police officer, working for Charlotte Doppler. The Dopplers Charlotte is the local police chief and the mother of moody teenager Franziska and precocious, deaf 8-year-old Elisabeth. Her husband Peter is Jonas’ psychologist and has demons of his own.
The past is never dead
Much as every Scandinavian crime drama is inevitably compared to The Killing, it seems as though every supernatural mystery series will be forced to stand back-to-back with Stranger Things. It’s easy to see the appeal of that comparison for Netflix, but Baran Bo Odar and Jantje Friese’s ingenious and affecting small-town saga Dark is a very different woodland creature. There’s no nostalgia-farming, no selfaware humour. In fact, there’s not much humour at all. This is a closer relation to French sensation The Returned in terms of its mood; rich in grief, misunderstanding and loneliness, but it’s also a meticulously constructed puzzle box. When the story begins, the small German town of Winden is on the look-out for a missing boy. Ripples of unease and panic are beginning to form, and when 11-year-old Mikkel (Daan Lennard Liebrenz) suddenly vanishes, those ripples become waves. The police, led by stoically baffled Charlotte Doppler (Karoline Eichorn) and Mikkel’s increasingly unstable father Ulrich (Oliver
Masucci) are at a loss, and the discovery of an unidentified boy’s disfigured corpse only makes matters more confusing. The connections are there, however, but the answers aren’t in the present… Thirty-three years ago, Ulrich’s brother Mads disappeared under similar circumstances and the culprit was never caught. Has a killer come out of retirement? What clues were missed back in 1986? And what does it all have to do with the nuclear power plant? Bo Odar and Friese are obviously fans of Twin Peaks, and they know the narrative and aesthetic value in a small community full of secrets. That being said, there’s a lot of ambition here that becomes increasingly apparent as a wormhole to the past is discovered and time-slipping begins. The show never loses sight of the importance of the central mystery (which certainly isn’t as simple as ‘Where is Mikkel?’, a question that is answered early on), but it also casts a wide narrative net. Everyone has secrets, everyone has grudges, and happy facades crumble to reveal all manner of
The Tiedemanns Aleksander Tiedemann is the director of the local nuclear power plant. Secretive and powerful, he is the husband of Regina, who runs a hotel with a severe lack of guests. They have one teenage son: Bartosz.
Jonathan Hatfull ★★★★★
OR STAY IN AND WATCH…
HG Tannhaus The watchmaker. People have a habit of talking to him about time travel.
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unhappiness. And by taking us into the past, we discover how all these secretive, wounded people reached this point. There’s a large ensemble cast (especially when you factor in the fact that we meet several of these people in 1986 and 1953) and there’s not a single bad performance or wasted moment. Jonas (Louis Hoffman) is the closest the show has to a lead, as the discovery of a note his father wrote just before killing himself sets him on the path to unearthing the plot, but there’s a wealth of fascinating characters. We should note that Maja Schöne is particularly good as Jonas’ manipulative and tragic mother Hannah, and Ella Lee’s perfect performance as her 14-year-old counterpart shows how impressive the show’s casting department is. Of course, it’s not all about the drama. There’s a complex sci-fi plot mechanism ticking away throughout; certainly more complex than the tagline: ‘The question isn’t where, but when?’ suggests. Every action taken has a reaction and the discord resonates through families from grandparents to young children. There is a big bad who makes his first proper appearance roughly halfway through, but there’s just as much danger in one of the characters making the wrong decision and, as the series progresses, we see just what the characters are willing to do in order to achieve their desired result. It’s called Dark for a reason, and the fact that the emotional rewards are as great as the pleasures of a perfectly constructed genre mystery is truly impressive.
The Returned
The dead return to a small French village and find their lives somewhat changed.
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DARK IS THE FIRST GERMAN NETFLIX SERIES.
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Authors On Authors
John Gwynne on the human heroism of David Gemmell’s legends
082 Book reviews 086 Graphic novel reviews 088 Marieke Nijkamp interview
BOOK CLUB Authors On Authors
Authors On Authors
Show Me A Hero Malice author John Gwynne writes about how David Gemmell combines the epic and the human
I read David Gemmell’s Legend when I was 16 or 17 years old. It was the first book I’d ever read that kept me up reading all through the night because I just had to know what happened next. Say one thing about David Gemmell, he most definitely knew how to write a page-turner. After that, I was hooked on Gemmell. Legend isn’t my favourite Gemmell book, though. That award goes to Sword In The Storm. It’s classic Gemmell, featuring a flawed hero facing insurmountable odds, this time set in a Celtic-Romano inspired world, with our young hero belonging to a Celtic-like tribe soon to be facing the brunt of an all-conquering Empire. The plotline sounds fairly linear and simplistic, but there is a whole lot going on in this book, and Gemmell handles all of it brilliantly. The concepts of honour, loyalty and redemption – oft-trod ground for Gemmell – are considered, and handled with such skill and nuance. But for me the greatness of this tale is how Gemmell asks the questions without ever feeling preachy. What is courage and cowardice? What does it actually mean to be a hero? Can you make amends for poor choices and dark deeds? And the answers are never black and white simple. The central character, Connavar, is profoundly flawed and full of internal conflict, and yet he still manages to be a hero, making tough and difficult choices in the face of insurmountable odds, which highlights the central theme that I think is present in all of Gemmell’s work. Hope. No matter how dark the tale gets, or how far from grace Gemmell’s hero falls, there 080 |
is always the possibility of redemption, of coming back from the brink. And of course, there are plenty of awesome battle scenes, of which Gemmell was a master, whether it was a fist-fight or a full-on thousands-strong battle. Gemmell’s work has always struck a chord with me, feeling exciting and epic whilst also remaining at its heart, characterdriven. It is always epically scaled, but at the same time almost always introspective as well, managing to whisper in your ear as you’re reading: ‘What would you do?’ Much of what I write is inspired by Gemmell. I strive to write believable, flawed humans, whether they are the good guys or the villains of the tale, and I try to avoid whiter-than-white heros or two-dimensional bad guys. And running through my writing is a consideration of the nature of courage, about how it is a conscious choice, an act of will, not just some kind of DNA coding in one person’s blood, that is somehow absent from another’s. Of course, I also love to write about fantastical worlds with huge conflicts and terror-inducing monsters and beasts that stalk the dark places. About swords and shieldwalls and wolves, about giants and angels and demons, about bears and flesh-eating ants and talking crows. But at the core of my writing I hope that you’ll find a strong streak of humanity that gives it a sense of balance and heart. A sense of ‘these are ordinary people in extraordinary times’ people that are somehow relatable, despite the fantastical world that they are living in. Becoming a published writer has been a roller-coaster journey
Gemmell’s heroes are flawed and human.
for me; one that has already had more than its fair share of highpoints, but right up there with all of them was when my first book, Malice, won the David Gemmell Morningstar for Best Debut Fantasy Novel of 2012. That was truly a jaw-on-the-floor moment for me, to win an award with David Gemmell’s name on it really was more than a dream come true. I sometimes think back to me as a 16-year-old lad, reading Legend by the light of my bedside lamp, and being shocked when dawn’s
light started to seep through my window and the birds began to sing. It’s moments like that where my spark and passion for writing were fuelled, and I wonder if, without moments like that, whether I still would have become a writer? Probably not. I wish I could have met Mr Gemmell and bought him a pint.
A Time Of Dread by John Gwynne is available from 11 January from Macmillan.
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AUTHORS ON AUTHORS John Gwynne on David Gemmell
John Gwynne on
David Gemmell
BOOK CLUB A Time Of Dread
What’s your new favourite epic fantasy novel? TELL US YOUR FIRST KING @SCIFINOW ON TWITTER
1. Kings Of The Wyld “Hands down my favourite of 2017. #BookClub” @MCM_ EnglishGent
2. Worldmaker “@ silvanhistorian’s Worldmaker trilogy has been an awesome ride. #BookClub” @andyangel44
3. Demon Cycle “I recently discovered @PVBrett’s #DemonCycle. Great saga that has me totally hooked. Highly recommended. #BookClub” @StuN_UK
4. Blackwing “This thing is just magnificent. #BookClub” @PeteMC666
“AN EXCELLENT JUMPING-ON POINT FOR NEWCOMERS TO GWYNNE” 5. Dragonflight “I recently read Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight recently and frankly, what is not to love about dragons and heroic women? #BookClub” @beckygracelea
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Details Author: John Gwynne Publisher: Macmillan Price: £14.99 Released: Out now
A TIME OF DREAD
Darkness falls
If you weren’t aware that John Gwynne had already written a quartet of novels set in the same world as A Time Of Dread, you might marvel at the confidence with which he conjures this world with its feuding factions, horrifying creatures and big-hearted heroes. What you wouldn’t be is lost, as this, the first in a new series following The Faithful And The Fallen, is an excellent jumping on point for newcomers to Gwynne’s writing. The way in which Gwynne relays information and establishes the rules without sacrificing pace or plot is impressive. We’re given a great mix of plucky young heroes and grizzled old veterans, each with their own sets of problems and issues,
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and we’re thrown into a world of winged soldiers, demons, giants and evil cults. The stakes are high, the characters are engaging and relatable, and the action is thrilling. The demons were beaten by the Ben-Elim, warrior angels who are as lethal and pious as you’d expect. Their leader remains frozen in rock and peace reigns across the land thanks to the liberal application of military pressure. However, the BenElim’s rule is becoming increasingly severe and far-reaching, leading to widespread discontent among the humans who simply want to be left to their own devices. Which is going to be a problem, as the demonic Kadoshim have begun their return. Rituals,
sacrifices, disfigured corpses… it’s clear that this is just the start of something very, very bad, but will the Ben-Elim be too wrapped up in its own bureaucracy to see the greater danger? At the heart of the story are our heroes Riv and Drem. The former is a soldier in training with the Ben-Elim in the city of Drassil, whose obvious skill with a weapon is offset by her uncontrollable temper, and who is beginning to realise that things might not be running as smoothly as she thought. The latter is the kindly son of a trapper who is discovering that his father has kept the truth about his past from him, and that everything is about to change. Both characters could very easily be epic fantasy archetypes (teenagers with great potential hindered by lack of essential knowledge or personal flaw) but Gwynne gives them shading and personality, making them interesting and easy to root for. Riv’s rage is balanced by her curiosity, loyalty and growing conflict, while Drem’s attempts to soften his black and white worldview (mostly for the sake of others) is genuinely affecting. In a novel in which one of the point of view characters is a warrior giant who rides a warrior bear into battle, the fact that we didn’t resent being returned to the main storyline is quite remarkable. Which is not to suggest that Sig is anything less than vital. She acts as a window into the world beyond the highly regimented Drassil and the wilds in which Drem and his father live as Gwynne fleshes the story out slowly but consistently, avoiding infodumps or convenient exposition. She’s also a brilliant character who is tremendous fun to read, and that sheer enjoyment factor is consistent throughout the book. You will storm through A Time Of Dread. Jonathan Hatfull
★★★★★ IF YOU LIKE THIS TRY… The Never King James Abbott A band of warriors break out of prison to take down a tyrannical magic-abusing king.
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BOOK CLUB
The Cruel Prince // The Feed
Details Author: Holly Black Publisher: Hot Key Books Price: £12.99 Released: Out now
THE CRUEL PRINCE
All teenagers probably feel
like they don’t fit into their world at one point or another, but for The Cruel Prince’s Jude, it’s true. As a child, her parents were murdered in front of her, and she and her sisters were taken to live with their killer – Madoc, a general of the High King of Elfhame. Growing up in fairyland is magical, but not in a cute, Enid
Away with the fairies
“MAGICAL BUT NOT IN A CUTE WAY... THESE FAIRIES ARE BRUTAL, AND THEIR WORLD IS TERRIFYING.”
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Blyton-y a way. These fairies are brutal, and their world is terrifying. Just eating the wrong fruit could spell doom for an unfortunate mortal. So Jude grows up tough, all-too aware of the tricks and traps that await her every day. When the High King announces he’s going to renounce the throne, an epic power struggle ensues, as his children fight to take his place – and Jude inevitably gets drawn in. Elfhame is a world of manners, politics and curses; while fairies can’t lie, they’re good at finding loopholes in their promises, and danger lurks around every corner. Author Holly Black creates an enticing world that’s as sinister as it is appealing, and a heroine more than equipped to manoeuvre within in. Some of the twists are signalled a little early, but there’s enough
going on that it never feels entirely predictable, either. It’s lightweight, but also impossible not to enjoy. As Black previously co-authored the Magisterium series of fantasy novels with Cassandra Clare, comparisons to The Mortal Instruments series feels inevitable. This doesn’t feel derivative, but there’s a similar feel to the story – while Jude’s more of a badass than Clary, and her love life is less complicated, the two of them would probably get on – so Shadowhunters fans should read this at their earliest opportunity. Sarah Dobbs
★★★★★ IF YOU LIKE THIS TRY… The Coldest Girl In Coldtown Holly Black Goth teenagers are drawn into bloodsucker ghettos in Holly Black’s vampire novel.
THE FEED is a blend of cautionary tale and post-apocalypse wandering, beginning in a near future in which pretty much the entire world is hooked into (and hooked on) The Feed; hardwired knowledge, messaging, and advertising pretty much removing the need for spoken communication and learning. Until, that is, something comes through, hijacking people and turning them into murderous monsters until The Feed goes down. Now, several years later, Tom and Kate survive in the countryside in a small group, watching out for the warning signs and doing their best to make a life for their daughter Bea. But when Bea is taken, they will have to set out into this broken world to find her. It’s a busy marketplace for stories in which characters remember how we triggered our
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Tune out own destruction while walking through the ruined landscape, and they need to have a pretty great hook in order to stand out. For much of the first half, The Feed gets by on its sense of danger, as our characters risk possession every time they fall asleep. Things don’t really kick off until a major event at the halfway point when the novel gets much more interesting. Until then, most of the characters seem withdrawn, as do the more unusual elements of the technology. Once Windo shows his hand, The Feed is able to carve out a niche for itself and move away from obvious points of comparison, from the sequences that channel the brink of destruction of Children Of Men to the ruined British landscape of The Girl With All The Gifts. It’s hard to talk about the most interesting and affecting elements as they almost entirely occur in the latter half of the book, but
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What you lot have been reading this month? “Just finished Paris Adrift by @Catamaroon which was excellent and well worth picking up. #BookClub” @Cascararogue “Late to the conversation, but I’m finally reading Dune - and loving it! #BookClub” @Tom_Wookiee “La Belle Sauvage - so lovely to be back in the worlds of His Dark Materials. #BookClub” @martang66 “I’m reading Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell. And I really like it. #BookClub” @JasminMaaz “Just finished Revenger by Alistair Reynolds. Arh it be pirates in space. Good, page turner. #BookClub” @tall_n_moody “Book 2 of 3 of The Lazarus War by Jamie Sawyer. All giant space ships, creepy aliens, and ray guns etc. Fast moving and no messing about sci-fi. Loving it! #BookClub” @johntheboy
Details Author: Nick Clark Windo Publisher: Headline Price: £16.99 Released: Out now
Nick Clark Windo’s debut
EADS R R U YO
“Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Am loving it. #BookClub” @sqbrose “I started reading Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett at the weekend, and so far I’m loving it. I’m just annoyed that I didn’t pick it up sooner! #BookClub” @reading_escape
once Windo really gets into what’s driving his characters, the reader’s patience is rewarded.
Jonathan Hatfull ★★★★★
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IF YOU LIKE THIS TRY… The Dark Net Benjamin Percy A demonic force goes online in this sharp and nasty SF horror tale.
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“Inhumans by Paul Jenkins. Far better than the TV series. #BookClub” @Jbarnes532 “Currently reading Alien: Out Of The Shadows by @timlebbon and really enjoying it. Great addition to canon. #BookClub” @MCM_EnglishGent
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The Girl In The Tower // The Book Of Joan
Katherine Arden Publisher: Del Rey Books Price: £12.99 Details Author: Released: 25 January
THE GIRL IN THE TOWER
Muasdt re now!
Into the wide world
The sequel to Arden’s debut The Bear And The Nightingale, The Girl In The Tower finds Vasya travelling from her village into the big, wide world of medieval Russia where she soon finds herself in trouble. When it looks like someone is making a play for the Muscovite throne, Vasya finds herself and Morozko, the Winter King, at the heart of it. The fairy tale tropes that Arden played with so adroitly in her first novel are transplanted into a more urban setting here and it works very well. Vasya meets familiar faces in her brother and sister, both now residing in Moscow as well as conversing with the magical beings that guard the homesteads of the Russian people. The folklore element is still present and correct, but the city adds a different dimension to it. Vasya is still a headstrong heroine who might not always take the
correct course, but does so with the best of intentions. She spends much of the novel disguised as a boy, allowing herself access to parts of society ordinarily barred to her. Arden uses this as an opportunity to explore gender politics, ongoing religious tensions and the blurred boundaries between folklore and reality. Arden approaches each through the prism of Vasya and her family, keeping a human focus that grounds the themes as well as the magical elements. The Girl In The Tower is a worthy sequel, allowing Vasya to make mistakes along the way as well as being the kind of heroine everyone wants to root for. Becky Lea
★★★★★ IF YOU LIKE THIS TRY… The City Of Brass SA Chakraborty Nahri discovers a world of magic beyond Cairo after she has an encounter with a djinn.
“ARDEN KEEPS A HUMAN FOCUS THAT GROUNDS THE THEMES AS WELL AS THE MAGICAL ELEMENTS” Lidia Yuknavitch Publisher: Canongate Details Author: Price: £14.99 Released: 18 January
THE BOOK OF JOAN
Written on the body History is written by the
victors. Right? Maybe not. In her futuristic retelling of the story of Joan of Arc, Yuknavitch delves into the art of storytelling, and the ability of the written word to shape the world. After an apocalyptic event renders the Earth unliveable, the remnants of humanity huddle on space stations. Living in space has changed them: their skin has bleached out, their hair disintegrated, and their genitals shrivelled. With sexuality and reproduction distant memories, the brutal Jean de Men strives to keep the species going through cruel experiments. And on the radioactive, barren world below them, someone – or something – has survived, inspiring a new kind of mythology. There’s a lot to absorb, and Yuknavitch’s prose takes some
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getting used to. It’s exaggerated and sprinkled with obscenity, which can be jarring and the stylistic quirks will push some readers to close the book in frustration. Work at it, though, and Yuknavitch asks some interesting questions about our relationship with each other and the world around us. Episodes of gruesome violence punctuate the story, giving a horrific grounding to a story that often threatens to tie itself in ontological knots – though, again, that’s as offputting as it is audacious. This will polarise readers but its ambition can’t be faulted.
Sarah Dobbs ★★★★★
IF YOU LIKE THIS TRY… The Year Of The Flood Margaret Atwood A religious sect predict a world-ending flood in this feminist sci-fi novel.
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The Devil’s Highway // The Wolves Of Winter
Details Author: Gregory Norminton Publisher: 4th Estate Price: £12.99 Released: 25 January
THE DEVIL’S HIGHWAY
It is happening again
In Roman-occupied Britain,
“A CAUTIONARY EXAMINATION OF MAN’S CAPACITY VIOLENCE AND THE EFFECT ON THE WORLD”
a boy is torn between betraying a terrorist plot and staying loyal to his countrymen. In the present day, a former soldier is trying to find his way in civilian life while a teenager wrestles with the effects of her parents’ divorce. In the future, a group of feral young people struggle to survive in a world that’s been destroyed by climate change. Their connection? The landscape in which they find themselves, Bagshot Heath, a microcosmic world that survives through the ages. Gregory Norminton uses his threenarrative structure to explore a world changing through time, even as man stays the same. Violence punctures each of the three strands and the threat lurks throughout. Norminton’s style is sparse, but affecting and though the book moves between characters, each of them feel welldrawn and multi-dimensional. Fascinatingly, Norminton presents the future narrative with a broken
English, reflecting how language has been broken down and transformed over the years, reflecting the way society has decayed. However, it can be difficult to follow. Likewise, the structure, though cleverly wrought to draw the parallels between the timelines, can make the book feel disjointed. It is an interesting exercise in narrative and thematic construction, but it also has the effect of holding the reader at arm’s length. The Devil’s Highway is a curious book and one which is not always entirely successful at keeping the reader close. Nevertheless, Norminton’s novel is intriguing, a cautionary examination of man’s capacity for violence and the effect on the world around him. Becky Lea
★★★★★ IF YOU LIKE THIS TRY… Cloud Atlas David Mitchell A globe-trotting, timespanning exploration of human nature.
Details Author: Tyrell Johnson Publisher: Scribner Price: £14.19 Released: Out now
THE WOLVES OF WINTER
Into the wild
The world as Lynn McBride knew it has gone. No more sunny days, no more cosy suburban life. Now she’s a hunter in the frozen forests of the Yukon territory, adapting to survive in the aftermath of a devastating flu epidemic. That means the biggest danger is other people, and when a mysterious stranger arrives, she’ll realise that the outside world is closing in. There seem to be two competing novels in Tyrell Johnson’s debut. The first is a survival thriller which pits a young woman against the elements and the occasional human threat. This is where the author seems more comfortable, as detailed passages dealing with Lynn’s survival skills help to ground the story. The second is a more explicitly ‘genre’ tale which looks at how the world ends, and this works somewhat less successfully. When Johnson keeps his focus
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narrow, there’s an effective blend of mourning the world she’s lost and looking ahead to the badass she’s turning into. The sequences involving the creepy Immunity scientists offer some moral ambiguity and some nice details but they feel rushed. Johnson is also keen to keep things gritty and a couple of moments feel jarring with the rest of the novel’s YA tone. That said, Lynn is an intriguing heroine in a compelling environment. When the novel sends her off into the wilderness, it sings, and the generic plot points don’t overly distract from the atmosphere. The Wolves Of Winter is worth taking a chance on.
Jonathan Hatfull
★★★★★ IF YOU LIKE THIS TRY… Defender GX Todd A young woman and a badass travel in a world where your inner voice can kill you.
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Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man Vol. 1: Into The Twilight
Details
Writer: Chip Zdarsky Artists: Adam Kubert, Michael Walsh Publisher: Marvel Comics Price: £14.99 Released: Out now
PETER PARKER: THE SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN VOL. 1: INTO THE TWILIGHT Back on the street
Launched to coincide with the cinematic release of Spider-Man: Homecoming earlier in 2017, Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man offers up a jumping-on point for new readers, taking Spidey back to the streets and away from the complicated continuity of writer Dan Slott’s mammoth run on the flagship Amazing Spider-Man series. With Chip Zdarsky on writing duties, there’s a sense that the lunatics have taken over the asylum, as Zdarsky, known for his playful and eccentric work on Howard The Duck (as writer) and Sex Criminals (as artist), has one of Marvel’s most iconic heroes in his toybox. This is a Spider-Man series with the quip-factor dialled up to 110%. This isn’t to say that Spectacular Spider-Man is all quirk and no superheroics. This arc sees the return of the Terrible Tinkerer, as well as shady goings-on with Project Twilight, an off-the-books SHIELD program that’s collected data on the weaknesses of the world’s supervillains and superheroes. Teresa Durand, once brainwashed and positioned by the Kingpin as Parker’s long-lost sister, turns up with the stolen data, and the government on her tail. It’s all convoluted stuff for what is at first glance a fresh-start series. Those hoping for Spectacular Spider-Man to take notes from Howard The Duck and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (the two smart-aleck jokers at the back of the Marvel classroom) won’t be disappointed, but will have to dig a little. The series is at its best when the comic tone takes over, finding Spidey teaming-up with heroes including The Human Torch, Ant-Man and Ironheart, as well as dropping our hero into the high-stakes world of dating . Industry veteran Adam Kubert (Ultimate X-Men, Ultimate Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk) provides the art, coloured by two-time Eisner winner Jordie Bellaire, giving the book a slick, spectacular sheen that is particularly striking when Kubert 086 |
flexes his muscles with action-packed splash pages. It’s a good-looking book, and it’s often very funny too, but Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man still seems to be in search of its identity. The best issue in the collection is its final chapter, and it’s guest-illustrated by Michael Walsh in a more grounded style that couldn’t be further from Kubert’s. ‘My Dinner With Jonah’ is a contained, intimate episode that finds Spider-Man sitting down with J Jonah Jameson – former Daily Bugle publisher, now a bitter blogger with a stronger anti-Spidey bias than ever. It’s a delightful deep-dive into a relationship that rarely gets such treatment, and hopefully points the way towards the series’ future. Michael Leader
★★★★★ IF YOU LIKE THIS TRY… Howard The Duck Volume 0: What The Duck Chip Zdarsky & Joe Quinones Brilliant revamp full of razorsharp parody.
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GRAPHIC NOVEL REVIEWS
Black Bolt Vol. 1: Hard Time // Spy Seal, Vol. 1: The Corten-Steel Phoenix
Details
Writers: Rich Tommaso Artist: Rich Tommaso Publisher: Image Comics Price: £12.99 Released: Out now
Details Writer: Saladin Ahmed Artist: Christian Ward
SPY SEAL, VOL. 1: THE CORTEN-STEEL PHOENIX
Publisher: Marvel Comics Price: $10.99 Released: Out now
BLACK BOLT VOL. 1: HARD TIME
Not just a clever name
Behind bars and voiceless
A strong contender for the
Before the story even starts, this first solo book dedicated to the Silent King of the Inhumans has quite a foe to conquer: an unshakeable meme, born from Black Bolt’s unavoidably ludicrous full name – Blackagar Boltagon. Writer Saladin Ahmed, author of the Hugo nominated Throne Of The Crescent Moon, here makes his comic book writing debut, and embellishes a relatively straightforward story with odd, surprising flourishes. Hard Time is, at heart, a prison breakout adventure: Black Bolt, after sentencing his brother Maximus to incarceration in a deep-space, high-security prison, finds himself locked up instead, and left at the mercy of a sadistic jailer that tortures, kills and revives the prisoners at his will. And what’s worse, Black Bolt’s earth-shattering voice, his unique, calling-card power, has been stripped from him. Only through aligning himself with the other inmates (including Crusher Creel, aka The Absorbing Man), making peace with his inner struggles, and finding his true voice, can he escape. Throughout, Ahmed weaves into the story intriguing themes of imperial histories, suppressed voices and outmoded hierarchies, in not-too-dissimilar a fashion to the post-colonial textures glimpsed
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Muasdt re now! beneath the gags and schtick in Thor: Ragnarok. Likewise, artist Christian Ward finds a thrilling balance between the conventions of mainstream superhero yarn and the sublime psychedelic weirdness of his work on the Image series ODY-C. Mint-teal palettes blossom into vivid reds, electric blues and kaleidoscope swirls of colour, while his dynamic panel layouts split and cascade in action scenes, or rip apart into gorgeous, bewitching splash pages that are equal parts Brian Cox astronomy doc and progrock album cover. Unfortunate hero names aside, this is a distinctive and daring start to a promising new series. Michael Leader
★★★★★ IF YOU LIKE THIS TRY… Silver Surfer Vol. 1: New Dawn Dan Slott & Mike Allred A very Doctor Who-y take on Norrin Radd.
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Ronseal-sponsored comic book title of the year, writer-artist Rich Tommaso’s Spy Seal is an espionage adventure starring – no, not the soul singer – an anthropomorphic, turtleneck-sporting marine mammal. Dapper flapper Malcolm Warner is looking for work when he stumbles right into a web of intrigue involving the art world, extremist terrorists and the secret service, and soon finds himself enlisted by the MI6, shipped off to the continent and sent in search of the mysterious Red Cortex Phoenix. Tommaso’s artwork, a colourful tribute to the ligne claire style of Hergé’s Tintin, is a delight: vibrant, full of humour and packed with distinctive (and well-dressed) animal characters. Narratively, Spy Seal is a stylish genre blend of Bondalike international caper and twisty John Le Carré thriller, and Tommaso tips the hat to many of the masters and tropes of the form, often playing like Hitchcock’s North By North West or The 39 Steps recast in the form of Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo. The collision of styles, influences and inspirations doesn’t always play out smoothly. While the book is a treat to look at, and is at times a more-than-pleasant read, the complexities of both the plot and the heightened tone results in Tommaso cramming dialogue and exposition into often unendingly wordy speech
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balloons and caption boxes – some of which expand to fill a third or more of the book’s tightly composed panels. It’s a shame, because Spy Seal has tremendous visual flair, and is most compelling when it is unburdened of text, and when Tommaso indulges in wordless sequences of action and suspense. Malcolm’s escapades by foot, car, rail and air are the most engaging parts of the book – and one would hope to see much more of that if Spy Seal’s adventures continue. Michael Leader
★★★★★ IF YOU LIKE THIS TRY… Blacksad Juan Díaz Canales & Juanjo Guarnido Compelling anthropomorphic detective comics.
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© Karen Mijkamp
Interview
SECRETS AND LIES Marieke Nijkamp tells us about her small-town mystery Before I Let Go WORDS JONATHAN HATFULL
How well do you know your friends? In Marieke Nijkamp’s Before I Let Go, a young woman returns home following the sudden death of her oldest friend to find out exactly what happened. She soon discovers that her hometown is harbouring more secrets than she could ever have imagined. We talked to the author of breakout sensation This Is Where It Ends about mysteries in Alaska, diversity in YA and being a gamesmaster at heart. How would you pitch Before I Let Go to a prospective reader? Before I Let Go is the story of Corey, a girl who goes back to her hometown in wintry Alaska to investigate her best friend Kyra’s death. It’s about friendship, grief, mental illness, how we treat people who are different from us, and more than a hint of magic and mystery. Was there an element that came to you first? The location and the general weirdness of the story – I really wanted to play with cruel winter and harsh community and things that aren’t necessarily quite real. There’s something about an icy white landscape that makes it seem as if everything is possible and the veil between 088 |
worlds has lifted a bit. And while in some cases, that may be magic, here it may be murder. Lost Creek, Alaska is a wonderful setting. Were there any inspirations for it, and what was the process of creating it like? I spent an obscene, delightful amount of time researching ghost towns in Alaska, and especially old, abandoned gold rush towns. It may be the historian in me, but I love creating fictional settings based on erstwhile real places. So Lost Creek is set in place of an actual former rush town. And from there I both extrapolated and designed what I wanted to be a part of the setting. I’m a gamemaster at heart, so I love the idea of setting as a character, as essential to the story as the real characters. What’s the most important thing, or the hardest thing, to get right when you’re writing a teenage friendship? For me, the most important thing to get right is the intensity. When you’re a teen, and especially when you’re a teen who doesn’t fit in with or is actively ostracised by their community, friendships can be the centre of the universe. For Kyra, friendship is literally one of the things
that keeps her alive. And that intensity can be wonderful, but it can also be dangerous or toxic, even. It’s everything, all at once. As well as being a mystery, the story also looks at mental health and sexuality. How important is it to see these issues treated sensitively in YA stories? Oh, incredibly important. Teens deal with issues of mental health and exploring and figuring out sexuality. It’s only right they should see that reflected sensitively in media too. Could you tell us a little bit about your project DiversifYA? DiversifYA is one of the various projects I worked on over the past couple of years that centre around diversity and inclusion in YA literature. It’s a collection of interviews and personal stories from people from all backgrounds, abilities, orientations, and identities. A means to show how varied and diverse our world is, and how we are richer for celebrating that.
Before I Let Go is available now from Sourcebooks.
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The Outer Limits Doctor Who Halloween: H20 MARCH 1975
£1.50
THE PREMIER SCI-FI, FANTASY, HORROR & CULT TV MAGAZINE ™
A M SCIF ON IN TH OW LY
© Jérémy Pailler/Poster Posse
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THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO
THE OUTER LIMITS THE GREAT RIVALRY BETWEEN SF AND HORROR ANTHOLOGY TELEVISION SHOWS OF THE EARLY SIXTIES SAW THE TWILIGHT ZONE GO HEAD-TOHEAD WITH THE OUTER LIMITS. WHERE ROD SERLING’S SHOW WAS PACKED WITH IRONIC TWISTS IN THE TALE, THE OUTER LIMITS WAS A DARKER, MORE MONSTER-DRIVEN, ALTOGETHER WEIRDER SERIES… WORDS BRIAN J ROBB
Running for just two seasons between 1963 and 1965, clocking up a total of only 49 episodes, The Outer Limits made its mark on pop culture. Unlike The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits dispensed with a creator-narrator like Rod Serling, opting instead for the eerie, unknowably alien Control Voice of Vic Perrin who started each episode reassuring the viewer that: ‘There is nothing wrong with your television set…’ Whether it’s the almost human-faced invading spiders of ‘The Zanti Misfits’, a man with a glass hand pursued by alien soldiers around the Bradbury Building (‘Demon With A Glass Hand’), or David McCallum mutating into the man of the future (‘The Sixth Finger’), the series’ best instalments are well-remembered by an avid fan base. We are controlling transmission Leslie Stevens, the creator and executive producer of The Outer Limits, came up with the idea that the viewer’s television would be hijacked by an unknown force that would then beam stories of ‘awe and mystery’ into their homes. Television was still a young enough medium in September 1963 – when the series debuted with ‘The Galaxy Being’, written and directed by Stevens – that such a conceit seemed entirely plausible. He’d pitched the idea off the top of his head during a meeting with an executive from ABC Television. As the pilot episode approached production, Stevens reached out to his chosen ‘showrunner’, hiring Joe Stefano who’d scripted Hitchcock’s ground-breaking Psycho from Robert Bloch’s controversial novel. It was largely Stefano’s work that produced the moody melodrama of The Outer Limits. Drawing on Fifties monster movies with a healthy dose of Forties darkly-lit film noir, Stefano produced a 090 |
series that not only captured the attention of young viewers in the mid-Sixties, but also stood the test of time through the decades. Stevens called Stefano’s episodes ‘magnificent, gothic extravaganzas’. Stefano’s imprint was evident on virtually all the first season episodes: he and story consultant Lou Morheim (The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms) rewrote virtually every script. Experienced TV writers and genre authors alike were invited to contribute, but Stefano had his work cut out for him. “I got scripts from well-known writers you just would not have believed. They were unproducible. We initially tried science fiction writers – they were the worst!” Morheim recruited such emerging talents as Robert Towne (‘The Chameleon’) and Meyer Dolinksy (‘The Architects Of Fear’). “Whenever we had to start shooting and didn’t have a script, I went home and wrote one,” admitted Stefano. His
original work and re-writing brought a trademark dark verve and weird ambience to the initial run that helped make the show so memorable. ABC wasn’t really prepared for the show Stevens and Stefano delivered. The network expected ray guns and bug eyed monsters, a mindless adventure show following early ‘kid vid’ TV shows like Captain Video or Space Patrol. Instead, they got contemplative meditations on the nature of humanity and nuanced explorations of the unknown. The opening episode was a taste of things to come. ‘The Galaxy Being’ starred Cliff Robertson as a radio engineer who comes into contact with the title creature, a non-conformist like himself, broadcasting from a far-off alien civilization. Transporting itself to Earth over the ‘radio waves’, the alien encounters human hostility in the form of spooked soldiers and freaked out townsfolk. In the
Robert Culp in ‘Demon With A Glass Hand.’
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“IT WAS LIKE BEING PART OF A SECRET CLUB. YOU EITHER GOT IT OR YOU DIDN’T” DAVID J SCHOW
Photos courtesy of David J Schow, author of The Outer Limits At 50 (Creature Features, 2014) and The Outer Limits Companion (GNP/Crescendo, 1998). An expanded 3rd edition of The Outer Limits Companion will be available later this year.
THE OUTER LIMITS COMPLETE GUIDE
end, it opts for ‘dispersal’ rather than a return to its own controlling society. Watching that first episode in 1963 was a young David J Schow, now a horror and fantasy author, and the historian of The Outer Limits. “The alien was teased in the first few seconds of the show, and when it showed up, [it] didn’t talk about invading Earth or eating people,” recalled Schow, “[It] discussed things like: ‘Is there a god?’ and: ‘What is death?’ [Watching The Outer Limits] was like being part of a secret club – you either ‘got it,’ and enjoyed being surprised, or didn’t.” Veteran director Byron Haskin (War Of The Worlds, 1953) also joined the production. He helmed the next two episodes: political thriller ‘The Hundred Days Of The Dragon’ and the weird ‘Architects Of Fear’. In ‘Dragon’, a foreign power gains control of a US Presidential candidate, has him elected President, and then begins to create policy to their advantage. In ‘Architects Of Fear’, Robert Culp stars as the subject of an experiment to force the warring nations of Earth to unite as one when faced with an artificially created threat from outer space, a ‘Thetan’. Clearly, these were not the pulpy sci-fi ideas that ABC thought it was buying. Two further additions to the team helped Stefano
“IT WAS THAT MAGICAL MOMENT WHEN FILM PRODUCTION VALUES FOUND THEIR WAY INTO TV” DAVID J SCHOW
refine his approach. Director Gerd Oswald (film noir A Kiss Before Dying, 1956) and cinematographer Conrad Hall (who would go on to win a trio of Oscars) helped created the stark noir look of the series’ black-and-white photography. Between them, Oswald and Hall developed the distinctive stylish approach of The Outer Limits to gothic science fiction. The team of Stefano, Hall, and Oswald were responsible for 14 of the first season episodes; a third of the first year’s distinctive output. For Schow, the difference was obvious. “The Outer Limits was produced during that magical moment when film production values found their way into television shows,” he says, “in that heartbeat before TV shows became standardised to save money. Stevens, Stefano, Hall, Oswald and the rest brought a cinematic approach to what they were doing; they wrote, lit and shot for features, not TV, which was still feeling out its new direction. Compare The Outer Limits to the very set-bound nature of The Twilight Zone, which was shot mostly in the way a filmed stage play would be shot.” Oswald’s first episode, ‘Specimen Unknown’, was more in line with what ABC wanted. An Earth-orbiting space station is taken over by alien plant life that then makes its way to Earth, only to be destroyed by that most common of elements, rain WWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UK
The show features amazing guest stars.
water. Oswald also helmed the surveillance-themed episode ‘OBIT; Corpus Earthling’, which sees Earth invaders disguised as rocks; weird monster-in-a-box tale, ‘Don’t Open ‘Till Doomsday’; and ‘Soldier’, the second season’s opening episode, among other distinctive episodes. Although the cost of realistic alien settings and dynamic effects and make-up work were substantial, the larger part of The Outer Limits’ budget went on securing top name acting talent. Across the run of the series, character actor guest stars included Martin Landau; Adam West; William Shatner; Barry Morse; Martin Sheen; Simon Oakland; Bruce Dern; Vera Miles; Neil Hamilton; Donald Pleasence; Warren Oates; Sally Kellerman; Robert Duvall; Henry Silva; Kent Smith; Leonard Nimoy; and Thirties movie star Miriam Hopkins. “I can’t think of any actors who worked on The Outer Limits just thinking of it as six days work,” said Stefano. “Some of them did the best work they’d ever done.” When ‘The Galaxy Being’ debuted, the series was widely welcomed, with The Hollywood Reporter dubbing it “handsome and smooth”, while Daily Variety said the show was “unique and interesting”. However, Stevens was aware of the growing reservations about the offbeat series at ABC: “[They were] terrified we weren’t going to do a good, solid, commercial monster show.” Awe and mystery While the writers and directors were exploring ever more avant garde ideas in the scripts and the style of the series, ABC insisted the show needed more monsters. In his instructions to writers, Stefano pointed out the need to include such ‘bears’, as the monsters were dubbed. “Each play must have a ‘bear’,” demanded Stefano. “The bear is the one splendid, staggering, shuddering effect that
THE UNKNOWN SPIN OFF Towards the end of the first season, ABC considered producing a spin-off series from The Outer Limits to be more supernatural than science fiction in tone and called The Unknown. Joseph Stefano wrote and produced ‘The Forms Of Things Unknown’ originally as an instalment of the first season of The Outer Limits, before ABC showed interest in developing a sister show based on it. “[It was to be] an un-science fiction series,” recalled Stefano. “Kind of scary, spooky, and mysterious.” The episode was shot two ways: the first offered the standard Outer Limits science fiction explanation of events, while the second was a darker, more gothic tale of madness. Both versions, however, revolved around a ‘time tilting’ device that is used to resurrect a murder victim. Gerd Oswald, working with cameraman Conrad Hall, replaced Stefano as director on the show during the negotiations over the second season of The Outer Limits. Although The Unknown never progressed and the episode aired as part of the regular The Outer Limits run, Stefano was pleased with what had been achieved. “That whole Val Lewton school of filmmaking – the shadows on the walls, the sounds – is absolutely fantastic.” According to The Outer Limits producer Leslie Stevens, the spin-off show was dumped for one reason: “It was perceived as being far too arty”. Another The Outer Limits instalment, the show’s only two-part story, ‘The Inheritors’ was set to be developed by Seeleg Lester as another planned spin-off to be called Century 21. It would be built around the character of the Secretary of Science, purposefully introduced in ‘The Inheritors’ by Seeleg to function as a ‘back door’ pilot for a show tackling the controversies of new scientific discoveries. Like The Unknown, Century 21 failed to get beyond the idea outline. Lester later went on to work with Leslie Stevens on the David McCallum-starring The Invisible Man series of the mid-Seventies.
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COMPLETE GUIDE THE OUTER LIMITS
Allyson Ames poses with some of the show’s most amazing creations.
induces awe, wonder, tolerable terror or even merely conversation and argument.” The Outer Limits highlighted its difference from The Twilight Zone: this show was about the monsters. “In the old vaudeville days,” explained Stefano, “when the audience was getting bored, out would come a comic in a bear outfit. That’s what we do in each of our shows – we bring on the bear!” For Schow, the monsters were an important part of the appeal. “Prior to The Outer Limits, monsters were ventured only occasionally on TV,” he says. “Never before – and few times since – had
“NEVER BEFORE HAD TV SEEN A MONSTER AS WILD IN DESIGN AND AS COMPLICATED AS THE THETAN” DAVID J SCHOW
television seen a ‘monster’ as wild in design and as complicated in execution as the Thetan invader from ‘The Architects Of Fear’. Probably the least successful Outer Limits monsters were the most conventional ones, the kind of which you see a plethora today – just a guy with a goofy forehead or weird eyes. That’s not what people came to The Outer Limits for.” Creation of the ‘bears’ largely fell to the Project Unlimited team, led by Wah Chang and Gene Warren. Chang was ‘chief monster maker’, having 094 |
come to The Outer Limits from creating the miniature time machine for George Pal’s 1960 movie of HG Wells’ The Time Machine, and creating creatures for Seven Faces Of Dr. Lao (1963). Byron Haskin, who’d headed the special effects department at Warner Bros. for almost a decade, humorously described Project Unlimited as “a rubber and glue factory that stunk up the neighbourhood”. Hailing from Honolulu, Chang had been a childhood artistic prodigy who met Gene Warren when they both worked on 1957’s not-so-epic monster movie The Black Scorpion. They were soon in business together. “To reliably bring weirdlooking aliens and monsters on a weekly basis required a virtual factory for the manufacture of those monsters, and that’s what Project Unlimited was,” notes Schow, “the first actual, all-inclusive ‘monster shop’ in the business. Effects maestro Wah Chang brought a definitive ‘look’ to the many masks he sculpted, which became another hallmark of the series.” The Project Unlimited team’s collective work, quickly done under the combined constraints of budget and time, has stood the test of time. Equally as effective as the monster suits were the weird make-ups provided by The Planet Of The Apes’ Oscar winner John Chambers, aided by Fred Phillips (who’d learned his trade from silent movie make-up maestro Lon Chaney Jr.). One of his most memorable efforts was his transformation of David McCallum into the ‘future evolution of man’ in ‘The Sixth Finger’. According to Schow: “The John Chambers make-up for David McCallum provoked a cultural archetype of the big-brained man-of-the-future that persists to this day.” Working from a ‘life mask’ of the actor’s head, Chambers worked up a series of
One of the escaped Zanti Misfits.
Meet the creature known as ‘Turdo’.
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THE OUTER LIMITS COMPLETE GUIDE
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COMPLETE GUIDE THE OUTER LIMITS
Michael Ansara consults his feline CO in ‘Soldier’.
foam rubber appliances which took three hours to apply, meaning a 4:30am call time for McCallum each day for a week. It was the combination of the men-in-suits monsters and the distinctive humanaltering make-ups that helped make The Outer Limits a hit… for a short while, at least. The inner mind For the second season, ABC had the not-so-bright idea of moving The Outer Limits from its Monday night slot – which Stevens felt was ideal, as it followed the weekend, when viewers were still relatively refreshed – to the ‘death slot’ of Saturday night, opposite the popular Jackie Gleason Show
on CBS. In the midst of preparing proposed spin-off The Unknown, Stefano announced he was not keen on staying with if the show was moved to Saturdays. “I knew that Jackie Gleason was not going to be brought down by The Outer Limits,” said Stefano. Leslie Stevens felt the same, and the pair threatened to shut down the show. “I would have stayed with The Outer Limits at least for another year,” said Stefano, “but I stuck to my guns and ABC stuck to its, so I walked away.” ABC wanted the show to continue and gave Ben Brady the task. He had been a former independent producer, and was one of the ABC executives who’d originally given the show the go-ahead.
During the first year he’d clashed several times with Stevens and Stefano over what The Outer Limits should be. “There was a violent schism between what [Stefano] wanted and what ABC wanted,” admitted Brady. Stevens saw Brady’s appointment as “the gargoyles taking over the cathedral”. Brady inherited a clean slate – Stefano and Stevens had left no producible material behind – and had to implement swingeing budget cuts (including a day less shooting time on each episode), to make the moderate hit more affordable. When Stefano and Stevens left the show, so did many of the other creative talents that had helped make the first season so dramatically distinctive from any other show on American television. Cinematographer Conrad Hall – who’d done so much to bring Stefano’s gothic imagination to life – also moved on. Brady’s take on the show removed much of Stefano’s trademark allegorical subtext, replacing it with hackneyed science fiction concepts that were far from new, but better appealed to ABC. While lauding the first season, show historian David J. Schow believes there are still gems to be discovered in the compromised second year. “Season Two deserves an almost separate evaluation as a wholly different series,” he says. “Stevens and Stefano were deposed as producers, Conrad Hall moved on to features, the ethereal music was replaced, and the budgets and schedules were slashed. [It was] cheaper, less cinematic, less oddball; more episodes done in the manner of a police procedural – mysteries to solve and status quo restored. Outwardly, [it was] the same series, but now changed in dozens of different ways.” In between hastily written original episodes, Brady put a new emphasis on adapting the works of published science fiction writers. Harlan Ellison
THE OUTER LIMITS TOP TEN MONSTERS THE ZANTI SPIDERS (THE ZANTI MISFITS)
One of the best-remembered episodes featured these near human-faced spider puppets, actually criminals from outer space who’ve crashed on Earth. It was filmed at Vasquez Rocks (later made famous by Star Trek), where Bruce Dern confronted creature maker Wah Chang’s puppets that were partly manually manipulated and partly depicted through time-consuming stop motion animation.
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THE THETAN (ARCHITECTS OF FEAR)
Inside the complex costume of the Thetan was stuntman Janos Prohaska, who was raised a foot off the ground and strapped in to backward-tilted stilts. The lengthy arms were cable controlled from inside the suit. The giant head featured blinking and eye movements controlled through air pressure, while Prohaska could only see out of the nose.
THE EBONITE (NIGHTMARE)
In the episode, ‘Nightmare’ this pointy-faced alien kidnaps a human space ship crew (which included a young Martin Sheen) to subject them to tests and torture to truly establish the full capabilities of Earthmen. Working against the clock, the creature makers over at Project Unlimited worked late into the night preparing the gargoyle-inspired masks for the Ebonites.
THE ‘BIFROST ALIEN’ IKAR (KEEPER OF THE (THE BELLERO SHIELD) PURPLE TWILIGHT)
The classic The Outer Limits episode, ‘The Bellero Shield’, starred Star Trek’s first doctor, John Hoyt, under a rather heavy mask. The actor played the benevolent creature trapped by scientist Martin Landau in the episode. “I could see with only great difficulty,” later recalled the Star Trek actor, “and it was impossible to eat and drink.” It was most definitely worth it.
Dome-headed, pointy-eared and crunchy of face, Ikar, who is the leader of the aliens in the ‘Keeper Of The Purple Twilight’ episode, is perhaps The Outer Limits’ most definitive extraterrestrial. These pulp sciencefiction creatures were judged to be so incredibly impressive that they were widely used in the publicity material for The Outer Limits’ monster-heavy second season.
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THE OUTER LIMITS COMPLETE GUIDE
scripted two of the show’s most influential episodes. Second season opener, ‘Soldier’, was based upon Ellison’s 1957 short story, and featured Michael Ansara as future fighter Quarlo, accidentally transported to 1964. Ellison went on to write the show’s greatest episode, the award-winning ‘Demon With A Glass Hand’. Apart from the two Ellison episodes, the second season limped on as a fatally wounded beast. The budget cuts meant Project Unlimited had less money and less time to produce their monsters, so the quality suffered. Even the soundscape of the episodes was affected, with Dominic Frontiere’s first season 64-piece orchestra replaced with Harry Lubin’s electronic score. New story editor, Seeleg Lester, struggled to match the ambition of the scripts with the constrained realities of production. “Brady and I were always conscious of how little money we had,” admitted Lester. “The special effects of the first season would have been impossible in the second.” The show only managed to complete a half-season of 17 episodes before the axe finally fell. The second season still produced some worthwhile instalments, including ‘The Brain Of Colonel Barham’, a riff on the influential Curt Siodmak story Donovan’s Brain, and the Leonard Nimoy-starring ‘I, Robot’, while ‘The Duplicate Man’ was one of the earliest examples of cloning on series television. On the flipside, the second season also featured some of the worst episodes of the show, including ‘Expanding Human’ and the risibly titled ‘Behold, Eck!’. Shellacked in the ratings by CBS’s popular Jackie Gleason Show, The Outer Limits entered a slow decline. “Each week we couldn’t push the ratings up,” recalled Brady, “was another nail in the coffin”. The last two episodes shot – ‘The Premonition’ and ‘The Probe’ – were made after cancellation, and
‘TURDO’ (DON’T OPEN ‘TILL DOOMSDAY)
This one-eyed blob monster, who was known by the cast and crew of the series as ‘Turdo’ (for quite obvious reasons), starred alongside Miriam Hopkins in one of The Outer Limits’ weirdest ever episodes: ‘Don’t Open Till Doomsday’. Copious amounts of dry ice fog was used to try and hide the creature’s rather obvious shortcomings – it didn’t work!
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were thrown together for the least expenditure possible. As the end approached, ABC contacted Rod Serling – whose The Twilight Zone had just been cancelled at CBS after five years – to ask if he’d like to produce a sixth season for ABC to replace The Outer Limits. Serling, burnt out after half a decade of fraught scripting and producing, declined the offer. The Outer Limits was never forgotten by those who caught its initial run, one of whom was ‘superfan’ David J Schow. “I believe that in the case of The Outer Limits, the parts really do add up to more than the whole. Everything from the music and monsters to the unique look of the entire series, and the wild dramatic chances it would gamble upon. It automatically provokes that urge to engage in ‘remember the one where…?’”’ The time in which the show first appeared was just as important, says Schow. “[It] is very much a product of its era – the downfall of Kennedy’s Camelot, the escalation of the Vietnam war, the seeds of national distrust and blanket paranoia; the simultaneously restrictive yet liberating obligation to shoot in black-and-white when the prevalence of colour TV was right around the corner; the fact of low budgets compelling creativity; [and] the cinematic eye versus what evolved into the [standardized] ‘TV eye’. It was a perfect storm of creators that existed for about a year before the band was broken up, so to speak. [You] cannot recreate that perfect storm of time and talent.” Too weird for television in the mid-Sixties, The Outer Limits had a lasting effect on all who saw it, many of whom went on to become writers, directors and creators in their own right. With the release of the entire re-mastered series imminent on Blu-ray, new audiences will soon be able to experience the ‘awe and mystery’ of The Outer Limits in a sharper, more focused form than ever before.
THE ‘CHROMOITE’ HUMANOID (THE MICE)
Gene Warren created this grotesque ‘thing’, which is simply described in the script as ‘repulsive’. The upper part of the creature is blob-like, with dangling claws, wiggling tentacles, and various possible mouths, while the bottom half is stunt man Hugh Langtry’s legs. The upper portion was reused as an alien brain in the later episode ‘The Guests’.
STAR TREKKIN’ FROM THE OUTER LIMITS The Outer Limits functioned as a kind of bridge between the black-and-white speculative tales of The Twilight Zone and the gaudy colour explorations of ‘new worlds and new civilizations’ of Star Trek. Both of Star Trek’s lead actors, William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, appeared in The Outer Limits, as did Janice Rand actress Grace Lee Witney and Scotty actor James Doohan. Producer Robert H Justman also worked on both shows. Director Gerd Oswald helmed two episodes in the first series of Star Trek, while Byron Haskin worked on the special effects for the two Trek pilots. Wah Chang, of Project Unlimited, created many Star Trek props and monsters. Several Project Unlimited created creatures from The Outer Limits turned up, slightly altered, in the later show. In another connection, The Outer Limits’ John Chambers created the original Vulcan ears for Spock. According to The Outer Limits historian David J Schow: “Star Trek would not have existed without the talent imported from The Outer Limits: directors, writers, effects people, and most importantly the quality control brought by Robert Justman.”
Mimsy Farmer meets the Empyrian...
THE EMPYRIAN THE ‘BUG EYED (SECOND CHANCE) MENACE’ It’s Captain Beaky from outer (THE MUTANT)
space. Under that mask is Simon Oakland, the psychiatrist in the Stefano-scripted Hitchcock shocker Psycho and Carl Kolchak’s boss in The Night Stalker. It could have been worse: the original design featured a foot-long beak! The script only described a creature that was ‘totally unearthly’. “We called that mask ‘Chicken Little’,” said Project Unlimited’s Gene Warren.
Actor Warren Oates, not known to suffer fools gladly, wore these bulging eyes created from half-shells with pinholes so Oates could see where he was going. Writer Joseph Stefano dubbed Oates the ‘fried egg monster’. It was so hot when filming on location that the wax used to blend the eyes with Oates’ face melted, causing the eyes to pop off his face mid-take.
THE MEGASOID (THE DUPLICATE MAN) A great episode let down by a poor monster, ‘The Duplicate Man’ features a recycled monkey suit (over stunt man Mike Lane’s frequently seen T-shirt), topped off by the Empyrian bird mask recycled from ‘Second Chance’. This was an episode that didn’t require any monster, but a cheap one was shoe-horned in anyway due to demands from ABC during the second season for ‘more monsters’.
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INTERVIEW LOUISE JAMESON
INTERVIEW
LOUISE JAMESON LOUISE JAMESON CAPTURED THE HEARTS OF A GENERATION AS SAVAGE LEELA ALONGSIDE TOM BAKER IN DOCTOR WHO, AND IS RECOGNISED FOR HER STARRING ROLES IN THE OMEGA FACTOR, TENKO AND EASTENDERS, AS WELL AS HER IMPRESSIVE LIST OF THEATRE CREDITS. WE TALKED TO HER ABOUT HER GENRE ROLES, WATCHING DOCTOR WHO WITH HER FAMILY AND WOMEN ON TELEVISION WORDS MARTIN PARSONS
How did you come to work on Doctor Who? I’d done nearly three years with the Royal Shakespeare Company with decent parts, and my agent decided (with me) that it was time I got more high profile on the television. So I turned down all the theatre work and held out for a TV series. Nearly got Angels, nearly got Survivors, nearly got something else that was going on at the time, and then along came Doctor Who. There were 60 of us, and then ten, then six, and then three and then me! It was quite a tough process, I was called back and back for it. I got on incredibly well with [director of Leela’s debut] Pennant Roberts, who is no longer with us. He also gave me Blanche in Tenko, so I have an enormous amount to be grateful to Pennant for. He really championed me and rated my work, as I did his. How familiar were you with Doctor Who at the time? Oh, very! I watched the first episode. I think I was 12 or 13 when it first came out. It was a bit of a Saturday afternoon ritual with my family. We were never allowed food in the living room but we were allowed it during Doctor Who, and the trolley came in with the cakes and the baked beans and the boiled eggs and we sat, the four of us, to watch it on a regular basis. Was there a one-line pitch for Leela? How much did you know about the character during the audition process? Not very much. Instinctive, not-of-this-world, although human, and a companion. That was kind of all I knew. I didn’t know about the costume or anything. Once I got the part the WWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UK
costume was then discussed. You know, feminists have asked me how I felt about it but I’m not sure it was gratuitous. She’s a woman that was living in the jungle, what else could she wear but skins that were very easy to move in? I think there was a reason for dressing her that way – maybe gratuitous to keep me in it for several stories! But I think it was part and parcel of what helped Leela to be such a success. It did make her otherworldly in a way that jeans and a T-shirt wouldn’t have done. Did you have to fight to keep the character in the way you wanted? I wouldn’t say fight, but I was very determined to have her not screaming and twisting ankles and things. I still am – I do the audio work with Big Finish and still play Leela – and I fight my corner there still as well. If the Doctor says ‘Leela, you have to go’ and Leela just lamely leaves the scene because it’s convenient for the plot, I say: ‘There’s got to be much more of a reason, or she’s going to hide behind the bushes and spy.’ You know, keep her feisty!
When we met Leela she was on trial for heresy.
You bridged two quite different periods in Doctor Who. From your perspective, was there much of a difference between the producer-ships of Philip Hinchcliffe and Graham Williams? Yes, I think there was actually. I think Philip was incredibly talented at hauling a group of creatives together, and he was not frightened of being unpopular sometimes. I think Graham wanted to be everybody’s best friend and was much more hands-on and on the floor. I felt very safe with Graham but I’m not sure he was quite ruthless enough to be producer at that time at the BBC. The first story in Williams’ era was ‘Horror Of Fang Rock’. It was a bit of a troubled production. Do you have many memories of making it? Paddy Russell directed it, and Tom wasn’t the most welcoming to her. He called her ‘sir’ the whole time. Tom and I had a little contretemps over a particular shot that I wanted filmed one way, the way we had rehearsed it, and he wanted filmed another. I, for the first time really, put my foot down and just went: ‘Can we do what we rehearsed?’ and there was definitely tension in the air. I went up to him afterwards and said: ‘I’m sorry, but I think that for the programme that shot was necessary’ and he went: ‘That’s alright love’ and I thought: ‘I wish I’d done that weeks ago!’. But now we get on – I consider him a really dear friend. He’s mellowed and he’s apologised for being difficult and complicated to work with. I don’t really want my lasting words about him to be that he was bolshy at the time, because he’s so adorable now! | 099
“I WAS VERY DETERMINED TO HAVE HER NOT SCREAMING AND TWISTING ANKLES” LOUISE JAMESON
Paddy Russell was one of very few women to direct classic Doctor Who. How did you find working with her? I found her a little… unbending. But I think, probably, she had to be strict and come in under budget and with time to spare because she was a woman. I don’t think back then I quite appreciated what a ground-breaking person she was. I found she clipped one’s wings a bit, rather than helped you fly, because she’d got her camera schedule worked out before she came into rehearsals. So, consequently, what we had to offer wouldn’t necessarily get filmed because she was going: ‘I need a reaction from you, I’ve got a close-up of you here, can you give me a reaction?’ rather than seeing where the reaction came naturally. People mention the rat in ‘The Talons Of Weng-Chiang’ and the CSO in ‘Underworld’, things that maybe didn’t really work, but did you have moments that you thought really did work? I actually quite like the rat in ‘Talons’! It is Leela’s only scream, being eaten by a giant rat. I don’t want to diss the giant rat, I think he brings a smile to everybody’s faces. The Colour Separation Overlay, however, was an absolute ****ing nightmare to work with, to be honest. We were trying to hit marks and not knowing what we were walking through. It was an experiment that didn’t quite work, I don’t think… Not too long after Doctor Who, you starred in The Omega Factor. Was there a big difference in that this time you were the star of the show, you weren’t an assistant? It felt like that at the time but I’ve looked back 100 |
– because again we are doing them with Big Finish – and I was still a rather laughing-at-themen’s-jokes, serving-the-food, pouring-the-drinks type of woman, wasn’t I? It wasn’t all ‘scientist Anne Reynolds’, it was kind of ‘woman scientist Anne Reynolds’. I don’t think it reached its full potential at all but apparently Mary Whitehouse came down quite heavily and we never got a second series. Both Doctor Who and The Omega Factor got the [Mary Whitehousefounded] National Viewers and Listeners Association’s backs up – did you have feelings at the time, or now with hindsight, about their response to the shows? Well at the time we rubbed our hands together because it added two million onto the viewing figures every time! I’ve only recently found out that another series of Omega Factor didn’t happen because of her and that does piss me off, because it’s quite tame really. In 1993, you came back as Leela for [Doctor Who’s 30th anniversary Children In Need crossover with Eastenders] ‘Dimensions In Time’. How was that experience? Now that is a script I didn’t understand! I kind of gave up on it after a while, it just was impossible to comprehend! And the costume made me look like a sack of potatoes… I just thought: ‘Think of the charity and do it.’ Did you take any persuading to get involved with Big Finish, or were you immediately on board? To begin with I read all the scripts extremely
thoroughly before accepting them, but found them to be of such good quality. I take the scripts sight-unseen now because I love them. I LOVE them. I love working with them. I think David Richardson is an absolute genius producer. You hardly know he’s there, he just quietly moves around making sure everybody’s happy. If anybody is a diva, if anybody plays up, they’re just not employed again. It’s a prerequisite of the job that you have to be quite a nice person to work with! More recently, you appeared in Mark Gatiss’s adaptation of MR James’s ‘The Tractate Middoth’, as a Ghost Story For Christmas. Did you enjoy that? I loved it! When I got the script, I said: ‘Who’s playing my younger self?’ and he went: ‘You!’. He said: ‘We can do wonderful things, don’t you worry! Also, can you ride a bike?’ I said yes but I hadn’t been on a bike for I don’t know how long! So yeah, it was a challenge, but I loved it. I absolutely loved it. You played a strong woman in Leela, but also a lot of others throughout your career. How do you think the TV landscape nowadays has changed is in terms of gender equality and in terms of roles for women? I think it took a real dip at the turn of the century. A real dip. But I think women are… there’s a tidal wave coming, if not a tsunami. There are many more women writers that we’re seeing. Female casts of Julius Caesar, King Lear. The soaps are now moving back to the matriarch leader and away from the East End gangster. I think we’re going to be alright, but we’ve had to fight for it. That’s one of the reasons I write now. WWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UK
INTERVIEW LOUISE JAMESON
NOBLE SAVAGE WHAT MAKES LEELA SUCH A GREAT COMPANION? Free spirit
Leela’s first scene [in ‘The Face Of Evil’] is a perfect introduction to the character. On trial for heresy, she stands her ground and won’t let others speak for her. The Doctor doesn’t exactly invite her onboard the TARDIS either – but once she’s made up her mind there’s no stopping her!
Fish out of water
Leela never fully loses her ‘savage’ identity, and Jameson does wonders with the culture clash comedy. Her supper with Professor Litefoot [in ‘The Talons Of Weng-Chiang’] plays up this angle and is charming.
Leela never met a tribe she couldn’t command.
Direct action
Leela doesn’t stand on ceremony. If something needs doing, she chooses the most direct route. When the Doctor says he needs to talk to lighthouse-keeper, Reuben, locked away in his room [in ‘Horror Of Fang Rock’], Leela solves the problem with a sledgehammer.
Always on the offensive
More of a shanking violet than a shrinking one, Leela is quick to take down anyone she feels threatened by. On occasion her attacks are hilariously misplaced. ‘I was sent by the council to cut the verges!’ says poor Ted Moss, with Leela’s knife at his throat [in ‘Image Of The Fendahl’].
Taking charge
Leela’s level-headedness means she adapts easily to any situation. When she finds herself exiled from the Time Lord citadel [in ‘The Invasion Of Time’], Leela wastes no time in taking command of a group of outlaws.
Jameson’s Leela was always ready to fight and to protect.
Litefoot is taken aback by Leela’s manners.
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FLASHBACK HALLOWEEN H20
FLASHBACK
HALLOWEEN H20: 20 YEARS LATER ON THE CUSP OF ANOTHER HALLOWEEN RESURGENCE, WE SPEAK TO H20 SCRIBE ROBERT ZAPPIA ABOUT THE LAST TIME THE SERIES ATTEMPTED TO HONOUR CARPENTER’S ORIGINAL… WORDS OLIVER PFEIFFER
Whatever your thoughts concerning the now 40-year-old stalk ‘n’ slash Halloween franchise, you certainly can’t dispute its relentless endurance. Including John Carpenter’s seminal 1978 original, its seven sequels, Rob Zombie’s remake and sequel to that remake, we’ve had ten doses of Michael Myers mayhem thus far (even if sans Myers instalment, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, only featured the boogeyman in a televised cameo). Next Halloween brings David Gordon Green’s timely 40th anniversary alternative sequel to the 1978 original that will ignore all subsequent instalments, with a script good enough to coax back original scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis (reprising her iconic Laurie Strode role for the fifth, perhaps final time) with Carpenter attached as both executive producer and possible returning composer. It’s not that we haven’t been here before, however. 1998 brought us another anniversary instalment, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, that also ignored the sequels (except the first) and even had Carpenter slated to direct until his hefty fee saw the filmmaker dropped for the more affordable Friday the 13th Part II and III helmer, Steve Miner. Robert Zappia was hired to pen the story for this celebratory seventh instalment of the popular series after an original sci-fi feature screenplay he submitted caught the attention of Dimension Films executive, Richard Potter. “I clicked with Richard the minute we met. He was just a really good, down-to-earth exec – a rarity in Hollywood,” the scribe tells SciFiNow. SciFiNow “He said they’d really like to work 102 |
with me but the only writing assignment they had open was a direct-to-home video release of ‘Halloween 7’… I was a huge fan of the original Halloween so any chance to be a part of that franchise was such an exciting thought, whether it was released theatrically or not!” Zappia’s ‘Halloween 7’ pitch set the movie, (which at this point didn’t involve the thought-tobe-dead Laurie Strode character) in an all-girl boarding school, commencing with franchise boogeyman Michael Myers found deceased in a maximum-security penitentiary. “He’s transported to the local morgue,” continues Zappia. “As you can imagine, things don’t go well for the mortician. Soon Michael Myers is out and about wreaking havoc on the students at the boarding school.” Zappia’s draft (then titled ‘Two Faces Of Evil’) evolved from here, adding – upon the insistence of regular Halloween sequel producer Paul Freeman – an incarcerated copycat killer who served a similar plot device as Hannibal Lecter does in The Silence Of The Lambs. “Before it became H20 with Jamie Lee Curtis reprising her role, I really wanted to
Laurie is haunted by her past.
make a film that I would enjoy as a fan of the original,” stipulates Zappia. “I wanted to try and recapture, as best I could, what John Carpenter had in the first Halloween. It had the lowest budget of any of them and yet, in my mind, it was the scariest of them all. Carpenter couldn’t rely on big budget effects, he didn’t have unlimited setups and unlimited shoot days. He had to boil down the story and characters to their most primal level.” With the confines of the school setting ensuring focus remained on the inventiveness as appose to the goriness of the murders, along with the copycat element adding a distinctive story device, the initial draft was complete. Producers were so delighted with Zappia’s script that it was considered good enough to coax Jamie Lee Curtis into making her franchise return. Curtis had last appeared in direct sequel Halloween II back in 1981 but Laurie Strode was somewhat unceremoniously killed off-screen prior to the events of Halloween 4: The Return Of Michael Myers. The two-time Golden Globe winning actress consequently agreed to jump onboard for the 20th anniversary film. “I think there were a number of additional factors that lured Jamie Lee back,” considers Zappia modestly. “Director Steve Miner’s involvement, whom Jamie had previously worked with on Forever Young and [Scream scribe] Kevin Williamson being brought aboard to produce… I’m sure a sizable payday also helped!” Working Laurie Strode into the current storyline was a no-brainer for the writer, who proposed she became the head mistress of the boarding school, (who hides her true identity by going under the alias Keri Tate). It was WWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UK
FLASHBACK HALLOWEEN H20
“THE BIGGEST ISSUE BETWEEN THE TWO CAMPS WAS TO KILL OR NOT TO KILL MICHAEL MYERS” ROBERT ZAPPIA
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FLASHBACK HALLOWEEN H20
H20’S TOP MOMENTS OF TERROR
Michelle Williams’ Molly is in for a rough night.
THERE ARE NUMEROUS EXPERTLYSTAGED SPINE-TINGLING SEQUENCES IN JOHN CARPENTER’S ORIGINAL HALLOWEEN. HOWEVER, H20 HAS SOME MEMORABLE MOMENTS TOO.
PROLOGUE
Mimicking the spirit of Carpenter’s classic, the tension-driven pre-title opener of H20 sees nurse Marion reenter her ransacked house with ‘the shape’ lingering into frame behind her. Despite putting up a good fight it doesn’t end well for Loomis’ former associate.
BATHROOM BREAK
We know that Myers’ vehicle is parked outside when a mother and daughter use the public restrooms. The door closes, the mother’s handbag is snatched and Myers is peeped through the crack of the door... but walks out of frame. Nothing happens but the anticipation makes it scary as hell!
FAMILY REUNION
The scene where Myers comes face-to-face with Strode, with only a circular door window between them, is a superbly unforgettable goosebumpinducing moment in this throwback sequel.
FINAL CONFRONTATION
Finally facing her fears, Laurie delivers an arresting end to her brother’s deadly doings via decapitation – cue Carpenter’s classic piano theme.
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decided early on that this latest instalment, which originally had been titled ‘Halloween 7: The Revenge Of Laurie Strode’, would in fact largely ignore events of previous films in the series in an attempt to streamline the story. There were notable exceptions however, including the revelation in Halloween II that Laurie Strode and Michael Myers were siblings and a reference to Laurie’s (now revealed to be intentionally ‘faked’) car crash death that preceded the events of the fourth film. “They felt the [series] had become too unwieldy in the story sense,” reveals Zappia, emphasising such elements as the convoluted supernatural Cult of Thorn curse that had been alluded to in sixth instalment Halloween: The Curse Of Michael Myers. “I did think it was important, however, to at least mention Laurie’s daughter Jamie (first introduced in Halloween 4 and subsequently killed off in Halloween 6) and I felt we could do it in a way that made total sense and help enlighten Laurie’s character. In an early draft, it was revealed that Laurie had given Jamie up for adoption in order to protect her and part of the pain and paranoia she was living with was knowing that Jamie was murdered at her brother’s hands.” Despite those honourable intentions, mention of Laurie’s daughter Jamie (along with the serial killer element) was jettisoned from the story during its evolution. Instead H20 ultimately introduced Laurie’s loyal but understandably frustrated 17-year-old son John (played by a debuting Josh Hartnett), who feels burdened by his mother’s overprotectiveness, which includes being restricted to the confines of the gated boarding school, the grounds of which also house their residence. Nevertheless, some other characters from the series either appear or are honourably mentioned. This included the dedicated Dr Samuel Loomis, whose legacy inadvertently serves as the catalyst for Michael Myers’ reunion with Laurie Strode, after the masked boogeyman
Look behind you, LL Cool J...
raids the home of the doctor’s former colleague Marion Chambers to gain information about his sister’s whereabouts. Sadly, legendary British actor Donald Pleasence, a series mainstay, who played Loomis in all but one of the Halloween sequels up until that point, died in 1995 – a couple of years before production commenced. An eerily authentic Loomis/Pleasence voiceover is heard however during the post prologue title sequence, which pans across photographs and Michael Myers newspaper clippings that adorn the walls of the late Loomis’ private office, the vocals of which are provided by veteran voice artist Tom Kane who repeats the doctor’s famous dialogue from the first Halloween movie regarding Myers having “…the blackest eyes… the devil’s eyes…” Nancy Stephens, who played nurse Chambers in the first two Halloween films, resumes her supporting role for H20 – a WWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UK
FLASHBACK HALLOWEEN H20
character that allegedly cared for Loomis during his final years and is subsequently murdered by Myers following the aforementioned house raid. Also noteworthy are in-joke cameo appearances by vintage slasher/Psycho star (and Jamie Lee Curtis’ mother) Janet Leigh as Strode’s elderly school secretary ‘Norma’, who complains about the drains in the girls’ shower rooms being blocked again. Also, after a latter ‘one good scare’ tête-à-tête with Strode, Norma trots toward her car (the same 1950s Ford Sedan Marion Crane drove in Psycho) to the strains of Bernard Herrmann’s original score. H20’s central focus revolves around a now alcoholic Laurie Strode and her ongoing psychological torment following the traumatic events she experienced at the hands of her brother 20 years ago. Although, in this timeline, he has failed to reappear, Strode lives in constant fear that he will one day return to wreck havoc on Halloween. Naturally, he makes his timely anniversary reappearance, sneaking past the security guard at the school gates and coming into conflict with John and a clutch of his friends (including a young Michelle Williams as John’s love interest) who have secretly snuck behind during an intended vacation break away. It all leads to a powerful showdown between Strode and Myers, which culminates with an affective decapitation scene – ultimately misdirected to make room for a planned but sadly substandard sequel. “Besides typical minor creative differences, the biggest issue between the two camps was to kill or not to kill Michael Myers,” reveals Robert Zappia, who had completed his contribution to H20 before co-scribe Matt Greenberg (who had script revised Guillermo del Toro’s Mimic) was hired to do the production polish. “Myers WWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UK
was not only [late Halloween series producer] Moustapha Akkad’s bread and butter, but I think he truly had a fondness for the character. Whereas, the other camp – Jamie Lee Curtis and Dimension Films – wanted to put a proper end to the ‘trilogy’.” Zappia confirms he’s firmly in the Laurie Strode-killing-Myers camp, where the long-suffering victim should finally face her fear. “In terms of story, it was the ideal conclusion to the franchise and I knew, as a fan, that’s what I would love to see,” he says, alluding to the bold resolution which sees the tables finally turned when Strode ‘stalks’ Myers, leading to the climatic series showdown. “It was important to me to show that fear must be faced and dealt with – you can avoid it for some time, but ultimately you have to confront it or it will consume you. In H20, Laurie confronts her fear and ultimately triumphs over it. It sounds cliché, but in the end good wins over evil… I saw the film on opening night with a sold-out crowd and that moment where Laurie Strode takes an axe to Myers got an enormous cheer that gave me chills. In my mind, that was and forever will be the end of Michael Myers!”
Joseph GordonLevitt, pre-skate.
And if that was the case we would’ve been spared the prospect of 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, which once again brought the boogeyman back to life and sacrificed poor Laurie Strode who, having now been committed to a sanitarium after mistakenly decapitating an innocent paramedic in the previous film, is killed at her brother’s hands. “What convinced Moustapha to go along with the decapitation scene was the explanation that Michael had done the ol’ switcheroo [...] and maybe more importantly, that Jamie Lee agreed to do a cameo in the sequel to H20,” explains Zappia. “It’s always hard for me to criticise other people’s work as I appreciate how difficult it is to pull all the disparate creative minds together to make a film, but I was disappointed at how quickly Halloween: Resurrection spent the equity we had rebuilt in H20.” Zappia had his own idea for a sequel to H20, which kept within the streamlined story mindset and even harked back to past events. “I pitched that Michael Myers was captured and imprisoned. His signature mask, knife, jumper was checked into the evidence room as [he] awaited trial. Of course, Michael gets loose, breaks into the evidence room and collects his things, then goes about murdering the witnesses – survivors from past films – who have gathered in the town to testify...” he relays. “I thought it would be a fun way to have actors from past films back together again. But alas, we got Resurrection instead.” Yet we still have the intriguing possibilities of David Gordon Green’s fast-approaching reimagining that, although essentially yet another ‘20 years on’ story, may finally do justice to the long-running series and perhaps poetically put Michael Myers to bed once and for all. | 105
RETRO CLASSIC JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS
WORDS JONATHAN HATFULL
CLIMB ABOARD THE ARGO FOR THE TIMELESS TALE OF JASON AND HIS QUEST FOR THE GOLDEN FLEECE! GIANT STATUES, HARPIES, THE HYDRA, THE FIGHTING SKELETONS… OH MY!
Retro Classic Film
JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS
Film RUNNING TIME: 104 minutes RELEASE DATE: 15 August 1953 DIRECTOR: Don Chaffey WRITERS: Jan Read, Beverley Cross CAST: Todd Armstrong, Nancy Kovack, Gary Raymond, Laurence Naismith, Niall MacGinnis, Honor Blackman
About
The King of Thessaly and his entire family are murdered by the wicked Pelias… with one exception. The infant Jason was safely smuggled away and Pelias has been told by the goddess Hera that he should beware of a man wearing one sandal. Years later, Pelias’ life is saved by the very fellow he was warned about, and he encourages Jason to set off on an expedition to find the famous Golden Fleece. With a ship built by Argus and a crew made up of the very finest that Greece has to offer, Jason sets sail and quickly discovers that his mission may well be impossible…
Some films have the most incredible power to take you right back to the first time you saw them. You never forget the first time you saw an Indiana Jones movie or where you were when you were introduced to Star Wars. When you watch Jason And The Argonauts you are hurled through time into your childhood, watching the swashbuckling hero and his men battle against grinning skeletons with a blend of terror, excitement and awe. There are a number of factors that contribute to the unstoppable flashbacking. The first is pure nostalgia, of course, and the power of that can’t be understated. There’s the pleasure of watching a good old-fashioned adventure story where the bad guys are easy to spot, the good guys will fumble in predictable but forgivable ways, and things all work out in the end. There are the stunning Ray Harryhausen creations that still make you wonder how on Earth he did it all. And finally, there’s the fact this is just a great story. Harryhausen loved adapting classic
The gods treat Jason as a game piece.
106 |
“NONE OF RAY HARRYHAUSEN’S FILMS HAD SUCH A PERFECT MEETING OF CREATOR AND SOURCE MATERIAL”
myths and literature, from HG Wells’ The First Men In The Moon and Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island to the Sinbad movies, but none of his films, even the superficially similar Clash Of The Titans, had such a perfect meeting of creator and source material. As John Landis often puts it, Ray Harryhausen is a unique figure in cinematic history in that he was a special effects creator who was an auteur. He’d decide which story he wanted to make and the film would be assembled, essentially, around his work. There is a lot of great craftsmanship in Jason And The Argonauts, it is well directed by Don Chaffey, there are some brilliant performances and a wonderful script by Jan Read and Beverley Cross, but you know that you’re watching a Ray Harryhausen movie. With that being said, Jason makes you wait a little while until it delivers the
master’s creations. We don’t really see a classic Dynamation sequence until we’re a good way into the movie, and the fact that we don’t just remember it for Talos, or the skeletons or the Hydra, is a testament to the film as a whole. The conflicting agendas of Zeus (a preening, pompous Niall MacGinnis) and Hera make for the secondary storyline and Jason actually delivers one of the most effective portrayals of the Greek gods in cinema. They bicker, they fight, they parry, and when we see Jason in the courts of the gods he resembles a piece on a game board. The film can’t seem to decide what Hera’s feelings towards Jason are, veering from maternal to almost romantic at times (fitting enough for Greek mythology), and it keeps the goddess from being a, for lack of a better phrase, deus ex machina by making Jason burn through his five cries for help by the halfway point. Indeed, for audiences not familiar with the story, there are a couple of nifty twists. The gathering of the Argonauts is set up like a classic ‘assembling the team’ sequence thanks to the arrival of the famous Hercules (Nigel Green) and his new friend Hylas (John Cairney), who quickly become best friends. But both characters are taken out of action after the Talos sequence when the latter is killed and the former stays behind to find his body. Jason can no longer call on Hera for help and he’s lost the strongest man in the world. He’s gone having the deck stacked in his favour to surviving by WWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UK
JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS RE T RO CL AS SI C
CLASSIC QUOTES ”THE GODS ARE BEST SERVED BY THOSE WHO NEED THEIR HELP THE LEAST.” ZEUS
“ZEUS, I WAS A SINNER. I’VE NEVER TRIED TO DENY IT. BUT I DIDN’T SIN EVERY DAY. WHY THEN DO YOU PUNISH ME EVERY DAY?” PHINEAS “WE REACH LAND AT NOON. THEN YOU CAN FILL YOUR BELLIES UNTIL THEY GRUMBLE AS MUCH AS YOUR TONGUES.” JASON
“THE GODS OF GREECE ARE CRUEL! IN TIME, ALL MEN SHALL LEARN TO LIVE WITHOUT THEM.” JASON
“ENVOYS WHO COME TO ME IN DECEIT REMAIN IN DEATH.” KING AEETES
“FOR THE MOMENT, LET THEM ENJOY A CALM SEA, A FRESH BREEZE AND EACH OTHER. THE GIRL IS PRETTY AND I WAS ALWAYS SENTIMENTAL. BUT FOR JASON, THERE ARE OTHER ADVENTURES. I HAVE NOT FINISHED WITH JASON. LET US CONTINUE THE GAME ANOTHER DAY.” ZEUS
“IF I HAD TO PUNISH EVERY BLASPHEMY, I WOULD HAVE NO FOLLOWERS!” ZEUS
“THE FEWER WHO GO, THE LESS CAN GET CAUGHT. NOW WHAT’S THE FEWEST YOU CAN THINK OF?” JASON
“IF I DESTROY JASON, I DESTROY MYSELF...” PELIAS
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| 107
RETRO CLASSIC JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS
“HARRYHAUSEN MAKES TALOS SO SINISTER SIMPLY BY TURNING HIS HEAD...THE SOUND OF SCREECHING METAL ACCOMPANIES HIS EVERY MOVE”
the skin of his teeth. We should take a moment to praise Green’s performance as Hercules. The British character actor does not have the physique you’d associate with the legend but he offers such amiable bravado as he goes through the physical try-outs that you never once question the casting. Speaking of physique, Talos himself is a truly iconic piece of work, and just a stunning feat of animation. Realising that the depiction of the character in mythology (eight feet tall and able to burn enemies to a crisp by heating his body) would be a nightmare to film, Harryhausen took his inspiration from the Colossus of Rhodes, creating a giant, expressionless behemoth that appears to be unkillable. Expressionless is the wrong word, however, because the artist makes the frozen crouched warrior so sinister simply by turning his head. It’s a moment so blood-chilling that the rest of the battle almost pales
WATCH FIRST W
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WATCH NEXT
JOHN CARTER (2012)
Andrew Stanton’s underrated epic has spectacle, heart, wit and amazing creatures. He is obviously a big Harryhausen fan.
HARRYHAUSEN LEGACY
Top 5 films inspired by the master
108 |
in comparison, although the sound of screeching metal that accompanies his every ungainly movement is wonderful. He is eventually felled by Jason going for his (full-size) foot, releasing his ichor lifeblood, which was created with a blend of water and oatmeal. The next challenge for Jason and his men are the harpies that hound poor Phineus, the man who has been harshly punished for his blasphemy by Zeus. Patrick Troughton is perfectly cast as the embattled old king who wants nothing more than to enjoy his meal in peace. The battle between the Argonauts and the harpies is beautifully done, with the screeching giant-bat like creatures trapped in nets and while they may not be the film’s most memorable monsters, Harryhausen gives them a real sense of malicious, anarchic glee as they ruin Phineus’ day over and over again. Phineus directs the Argonauts to the Clashing Rocks that will destroy any
JURASSIC PARK (1993)
1
The special effects of the first Jurassic Park film are still astonishing even today, and they owe a huge debt to the spectacle and expressiveness of Harryhausen’s creations.
ship brave or foolish enough to try and venture through (and we see some poor souls try and fail, just to drive home how dangerous this is). Phineus’ amulet prompts the arrival of great Triton, who holds the clashing rocks apart while Jason and his men row through. It all had to be done in miniature, with the actor playing Triton standing in front of a model ship, while the crew did their best to make a small amount of water look like the angry sea by filming at high speed. The Argos was constructed and sailed in (calmer) waters around the coast of Italy, although the unexpected arrival of the Golden Hind mid-shot prompted producer Charles H Schneer to bellow at an ITV camera crew that they were in the wrong century. When the Argonauts finally arrive at Colchis to retrieve the Golden Fleece, they find that King Aeëtes has been alerted to their quest by the treacherous Acastus (Gary Raymond) and that he is,
STAR WARS (1977)
2
When Harryhausen passed away, George Lucas paid tribute by saying that without him, “…there would likely have been no Star Wars,” and the great Phil Tippett was a life-long fan.
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JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS RE T RO CL AS SI C
unsurprisingly, not amenable to having his prize possession stolen away from him. To that end, the Fleece is protected by the Hydra, another creature that required Harryhausen to put his own twist on the legend, giving the beast seven heads. However, seven heads were still a huge challenge to animate, with each one needing to be in constant motion while its tails thrash away. In the documentary The Harryhausen Chronicles, he remembers how he could be distracted by a phone call and struggle to remember which head he’d been working on when he returned. And the skeletons are still to come. Seeing that his Hydra has failed, Aeëtes sows the fallen creature’s teeth and summons the warriors. It is a truly incredible fight sequence that was tremendously labour-intensive. With seven skeletons to animate, Harryhausen was sometimes only able to get through 13 frames per day (half a second) and it took four and a half months to complete while the actors rehearsed the exact moves they needed to perform with stuntmen. It’s also a great example of the film’s perfect handling of tone. The skeletons are terrifying and our heroes are in real jeopardy, but there are little moments of humour here and there (particularly when the monsters are dispatched) to keep it at the right level for younger viewers. To think, some people have to nerve to point out that skeletons shouldn’t scream when they’re kicked off the edge of a cliff. The ending of the film is more of a weird ellipsis, with the Argos sailing for home and Zeus announcing that he’s not done with Jason. It’s a tee-up for a sequel that never came, but then again, it doesn’t need one. There’s a reason why Harryhausen considered this to be his finest work. It’s a showcase for him at his most inventive and absurdly ambitious, and it’s an amazing, thrilling, wonderful adventure.
The Wonderful Worlds Of Ray Harryhausen is availble now on Blu-ray from Powerhouse Films.
YOUR TAKE ON THE CLASSIC WHAT YOU THOUGHT @SCIFINOW
”Ray Harryhausen at his best. Was completely entranced as a kid by those sword fighting skeletons!” @BobHammond2 “Fond memories of my childhood, I loved watching the stop-motion animation, the stories were really brought to life. This and Sinbad!” @StephanieMPR “Brilliant Ray Harryhausen awesomeness.” @Tom_Wookiee “An absolute classic that I used to watch EVERY time I went to my grandad’s house! That and Clash Of The Titans.” @candii_h
Which god will Jason pledge fealty to?
“Loved it! As a kid, I saw it in the theater on a special engagement rerelease. One of only two Harryhausen movies I’ve seen on the big screen. Best movie Hercules ever!” @cullenbunn
Nancy Kovack’s Medea joins Jason’s escape.
THE LORD OF THE RINGS (2001)
3
Peter Jackson also wrote that: “The Lord Of The Rings is my Ray Harryhausen movie.” It’s clear from the effects, but also the spectacle and sense of adventure.
WWW.SCIFINOW.CO.UK
“Harryhausen’s finest hour. My six-year old daughter’s all-time favourite movie and definitely in my top 10. Please never remake it, America!” @mrmarkmillar
TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY (1991)
4
James Cameron had made a fair few effects movies before this, but the design of the T-100 definitely owes a debt to Talos, especially when he’s frozen.
YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE… CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981) // MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961) // KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS (2016)
THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS (1993)
5
You’d be hard pushed to find a better union of Harryhausen acolytes than Tim Burton and Henry Selick.
| 109
?
THE SCIFINOW BATMAN (1989) QUIZ DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR FIRST VENTURE INTO TIM BURTON’S BATMAN? OR IS IT A DARK KNIGHT OUTING YOU LIKE TO FORGET? FIND OUT WITH OUR QUIZ! 1. What is the Joker’s real name? 2. Where does the film take place? 3. What was Carl Grissom’s occupation? 4. Where did Alexander Knox work as a journalist? 5. What question does the Joker say he likes to ask all of his victims before killing them?
THWACK! 6. Bruce Wayne’s parents were murdered in the alleyway between which two streets? 7. What kind of acid does the Joker throw in
Alicia Hunt’s face, badly scarring her? 8. How much money does Bruce need to raise at the bicentennial fundraiser at Wayne Manor? 9. What is the Joker’s codename for the poisoned products that, when paired in specific combinations, cause people to begin laughing uncontrollably? 10. After Vicki Vale took photos of Batman fighting the Joker’s henchmen, where did she hide the camera film?
BLAAAAAP! 11. What is the name of the chemical plant featured in the film?
DIDN’T HE/SHE DO WELL!
16-20
BATMAN
You’re the Batman. There’s nothing you can’t do, and indeed nothing you don’t know. There’s absolutely no point in anyone going up against you in a quiz setting because they will just end up embarrassing themselves.
11-15
THE JOKER
After being in the business for a long time, you have a fair few tricks up your sleeve. People do beat you occasionally, but they have to get up very early in the morning if they stand any chance at all.
12. In which building does Batman and the Joker’s first encounter take place? 13. What is Bob the Goon’s real name? 14. What number apartment does Vicki live in? 15. What is the name of Batman’s custom-built air combat vehicle?
CRUNCH! 16. Which Star Wars actor plays Harvey Dent? 17. Who wrote Batman’s screenplay? 18. Who plays Commissioner Gordon? 19. Who composed the film’s score? 20. How many sequels did this version of Batman spawn?
See how you did with our arbitrary scoring system
6-10
VICKI VALE
You’re one of the good ones. However, you’re also good at getting yourself into scrapes. Your friends are often there to bail you out, but they find it annoying to the point where they just stop inviting you to things.
0-5
BOB THE GOON
The fact that you’re loyal and committed to a cause makes people want you on your quiz team, but you’re also a bit of a nothingcharacter. All it takes is one bad day for one of your closest ‘friends’ to betray you completely.
1. JACK NAPIER 2. GOTHAM CITY 3. CRIME LORD 4. THE GOTHAM GLOBE 5. “EVER DANCED WITH THE DEVIL BY THE PALE MOONLIGHT?” 6. PARK AND GRANT 7. SULPHURIC ACID 8. $250,000 9. SMYLEX 10. IN HER BRA 11. AXIS CHEMICALS 12. THE FLUGELHEIM MUSEUM 13. ROBERT HAWKINS 14. 9 15. THE BATWING 16. BILLY DEE WILLIAMS 17. SAM HAMM AND WARREN SKAAREN 18. PAT HINGLE 19. DANNY ELFMAN 20. THREE (BATMAN RETURNS, BATMAN FOREVER AND BATMAN & ROBIN)
110 |
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The Bird-of-Prey is the classic Klingon starship - a tough raiding and scouting vessel that has served at the heart of the Klingon Defense Force for more than a hundred years. Life on board is harsh and brutal, with any sign of weakness leading to a challenge to the death. The ship itself is stripped back and lean, with everything designed for a single purpose - war. This Haynes Manual traces the origins of a Bird-of-Prey from the moment it is commissioned by one of the Great Houses and constructed at the shipyards of the Klingon Naval Academy.
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