Recent blockbuster cinema (Star Trek, Wolverine, GI Joe, District 9)

[wjrcbrown]

Again, brief notes and/or comments on:

1. Star Trek (JJ Abrams, USA, 2009)
2. X-Men Origins: Wolverine (Gavin Hood, USA, 2009)
3. GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra (Stephen Sommers, USA, 2009)
4. District 9 (Neill Blomkamp, USA/New Zealand, 2009)

Star Trek

To boldly go.

I for a long time have wanted to write that the logic of Star Trek's famous split infinitive is a perfect embodiment of the logic of human technology. That is to say, we desire to use technology to split infinity and to become masters of the universe.

Although doing as much remains a science fiction, it is interesting how science fiction does allow us to try to conceptualise what this might look like. And in so doing, there is something inherently interesting about science fiction: like any great work of art, it allows us to see new things, and to see things anew.

In an age of digital technology run amok in cinema, some might argue (or rather have argued) that all cinema that uses digital special effects is in some sense science fiction (even if not possessing many of the other traits that we associate with the genre - space travel and the like).

From this, I might push the case that digital special effects show us a universe in which infinity has been split. Cosmic zooms, flying through walls, flying through characters, ripping backwards and forwards through time as if time could be crossed in any direction, much as space is navigable in any direction. Morphing humans, objects and landscapes that shift shape and defy fixity and the fixity of fixed meaning. All suggest a post-camera (and post-filmic) cinema that has split infinity, that has broken the laws of physics and offed all bets.

So of course Star Trek should return.

Henry Jenkins has complained that JJ Abrams' film busts too many of the myths that were left obscure in the original TV series and films, myths that precisely enabled the kind of fan slash fiction that Jenkins sees as a crucial element of film and media culture: speculating about gay romances between Kirk and Spock, Spock and Uhura, etc.

And Jenkins is right, for this the film does indeed do: Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto, whom I could not help but just stare at) are rivals for Uhura's (Zoe Saldana) hand (and Spock 'wins' her). Unlike Jenkins, I didn't mind this (but then I am neither a Trekkie nor a massive fan of slash lit and fan fiction).

But unlike Jenkins I might also say that the film's strength also lies in making us see anew certain things that had become staple and therefore commonplace and arguably dull about Star Trek. And strangely, Abrams does this not by drawing on tropes from previous Star Trek films and shows, but by drawing upon Star Wars (George Lucas, USA, 1977): big space battles and the like, with thousands of laser beams and dogfights crying for our attention, an upside down Enterprise flying through the space, its central blue light functioning like some sort of cosmic eye, the planet Vulcan imploding on itself. Scale and destruction, scale of destruction: making us look at things as bigger and smaller than we normally see them - to see them differently...

Some ideology: I was disappointed by the film's thesis that although Kirk had to learn some humility and rationality in order to counter the dangers of his gung ho nature, the real emphasis on the film is (as far as I can tell) that Spock must learn to allow his emotions and instincts to come out. That Spock must in effect endorse and follow the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later principles that are so redolent of US culture. Action is always better than reflection - even if the moments in the film that inspire us see things anew can only do so by inspiring reflection (even if these moments also contain much action).

I was also disappointed by the idea that Vulcans are without emotion, which, though not Abrams' idea, shows a misunderstanding of the evolutionarily useful and biologically required nature of emotions. By which I mean to say, in the spirit of Antonio Damasio, that merely to have a body is to have emotions, since the brain and the body are inseparable, meaning that emotions have bodily origins, as does thought itself, which can be seen reflected in the fact that thought is a function of neurons firing in the brain. In other words, Vulcans could not exist - not from this standpoint and not without a wholly alien biology (which seems not to be the case, since Vulcans and humans can procreate, hence Spock himself).

Not that this in itself need be an endorsement of the physical over the mental, of action over reflection. But simply that the two are conjoined inseparably. My disappointment was that even if the film does allow for both (Spock and Kirk as the perfect team), it still seems to be Spock who was in the first place wrong, while Kirk just has to become more right.

Kirk: what does the church have to do with action? I am sure people have written about names in Star Trek and the New World(s) conquest conducted by the Church/Kirk, but I'd like to know more about this.

As has been noted, the film has a great use of 'Sabotage' by the Beastie Boys (although its use is not as good as the video by Spike Jonze that accompanied the original release of the song).

And the film also uses a lot of creative lens flare (which has probably been added digitally).

Light: the limit of speed, the limit of the visible, of knowledge. Lens flare: making light visible. Mastering light via lens flare: splitting the infinity of the universe (in a film that is also about transcending time and being able to travel through those things from which light cannot escape, black holes).


X-Men Origins: Wolverine
Wolverine showed promise at the start: some arresting images of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and his 'brother' Victor/Sabretooth (Liev Schrieber) going mental in several of the major combats featuring the USA in the 20th century.

However, this soon became a tired film, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I like what the X-Men films can offer us - with X2 (Bryan Singer, Canada/USA, 2003) as perhaps the best of the films so far. Morphing characters; the manipulation of space and time; 'impossible' camera moves; all the kind of stuff described above regarding cinematic digital special effects, and how these make us think anew space and time and how we negotiate them - as well as identity (perhaps the most pertinent issue with regard to X-Men).

But not here.

Most disappointing is that this film has Gavin Hood as director. An Oscar winner with Tsotsi (UK/South Africa, 2005), he has seemingly readily left behind any idea of filmmaking that looks critically at identity and politics, in favour of fairly retrograde filmmaking (which I also found apparent in the oddly conservative Rendition (USA, 2007)). Small wonder perhaps that Hood is slated to direct a film called Olympia, about the first Olympic Games, but which has obvious overtones of Leni Riefenstahl's classic but Nazi propaganda documentary of the same name about the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin. The apparently egalitarian ethos of Tsotsi is arguably seen in retrospect (i.e. after two other films and a third slated film) as too much politically correct filmmaking in order to leverage a successful career making conservative films in Hollywood: politically correct filmmaking done in bad faith.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the scene where Wolverine and Sabretooth barge in on and kill some evil Nigerian warlords. Black Africans here pass simply as evil, a problematic representation if ever there was one, one that only with difficulty can be considered as still the work of the man who made Tsotsi. Perhaps good for Gavin Hood for being unpredictable in how politically correct he is; but disappointing, too. More on the portrayal of Nigerians in recent South African-directed cinema when we turn to District 9.

(Also disappointed by how straight the film is in comparison to Singer's film(s) in general - Hood has Wolverine in despair over a lost girlfriend, while the others had characters who 'mutant' nature seemed allegorical of a sexuality little understood by the rest of society. And the misappropriation of John Murphy's score to Sunshine (Danny Boyle, UK/USA, 2007) in the trailer is equally a disappointment.)


GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra
Stephen Sommers is the writer, director and sometime producer behind The Mummy films (USA, 1999-2008) and the ride associated with the film. He also was responsible for one of the films that, to my mind, is among the most woeful of recent times, Van Faesling. In other words, a money-making special effects-toting computer.

So no surprise that it is he behind GI Joe, the film version of a popular comic book series from the 1980s, itself (in the UK at least) the bastard child of Action Man and Action Force, which themselves were comic books, all since the 1960s owned or leased out internationally by American mother-company and toy manufacturer Hasbro.

The relationship between toys and films remains under-analysed, particularly in the manner of the relationship established between costume/dressing up and films as analysed by the likes of Jackie Stacey and Rachel Moseley. How toys helped people when children or even in adult life to form an identity, be it one directly based on the films from which the toys emerged (think Star Wars), or the films from which the toys emerged (GI Joe and its inevitable sequels).

However, although I've signalled this and although (I am sort of embarrassed to admit) I used to enjoy playing with GI Joe figures in the bath when a kid (you know, using your tummy as an island/discovering that the toy boats did not float, etc), this is not what I want to talk about. Rather, what sets this film apart and makes it worthy of a quick blog is that, more than other blockbusters I saw in the summer (such as Terminator Salvation (McG, USA/Germany/UK/Italy, 2009)), is its scary vision of the future.

(In fact both films have a scary and sometimes impressive vision of the future, but at least GI Joe is more honest about loving technology, while McG's film seems hypocritically to say that ultra-tech is evil, all the while fetishising ultra-tech as boys' own masturfantasy, which means you kind of have to hate the film if you want to agree with the film. To paraphrase John Conner - here a butch man rather than the effeminate kids who have played him before: if you read this, you are the resistance.)

So: GI Joe is no masterpiece, and it is often incomprehensible, but its vision of bodies enhanced by technology (suits that make you move faster), together with its green iteration of the so-called grey goo as so hysterically described by nanotechnophobes (for a more sober consideration, check out this book, which I recently started reading and which is interesting), is as believable (oddly) as it is disturbing. That and instant holographic telecommunications systems that in effect allow speakers to be in a second place at the same time as their supposed 'real' physical location. And soldiers controlled by nanotechnology and a snake-induced wetware.

It is not that we are not on the cusp of having such things in our everyday lives, but the portrayal of the military-industrial-entertainment-complex that drives technology innovation and the ideological adoration thereof (itself not essentially a bad thing) is plausible enough that war does become entertainment, both in the sense of us loving to see destruction (e.g. of the Eiffel Tower) - destruction being perhaps a defining feature of cinema, as opposed to theatre which likes sets that have been built to stay up, and in the sense of soldiers revelling in the thrill of the speed of the chase rather than fearing that their life might end.

That said, the Eiffel Tower being devoured by nanobots is reminiscent of Team America: World Police (Trey Parker, USA/Germany, 2004), a film with which GI Joe shares another key theme but with a twist. And this is that while in Team America it is an actor who overcomes adversity to save the day ("Let's get one thing straight, actor. I don't trust you. And if you betray us, I'll rip your fucking balls off and stuff them up your ass so that the next time you shit, you'll shit all over your balls, got it?"), in GI Joe it is the ultimate actor - in the form of Zartan (Arnold Vosloo) - who at the end of the film emerges as part of an evil conspiracy to take over the world.

If Team America was happy to show that its puppets had strings attached to them, a gesture that we might perceive as being that of a film determined not to hide its desire to manipulate audiences, even if manipulate audiences it still does, GI Joe says something different. Team America revels in fakery, making an actor its hero, while GI Joe revels in fakery (special effects, etc), only to disavow fakery as 'evil' (in the form of acting).

I suppose that in brief this is precisely what I have said of Terminator Salvation, about which I have not written a 'full' blog. But in GI Joe, the mixed message or the incoherence of the film does seemingly make for something marginally more interesting. And that is perhaps because GI Joe is quite tongue in cheek, whilst McG's film feels bound not even really to adopt the occasionally wry humour of its predecessors. And this humour does help the film.

Besides which, in rejecting the actor in GI Joe, the film also rejects its human elements as being unworthy of trust - unless they are working in close conjunction with technology. Odd for a film that, even if simply for reasons of having it appeal for commercial reasons to many markets in multiple audiences, has such a multinational cast (Byung-hun Lee, Saïd Taghmaoui, Vosloo, and others from both sides of the pond) - i.e. for a film that appears to have put at least some thought into the human elements of its construction. And the American and British stars (Channing Tatum, Marlon Wayans, Sienna Miller, Christopher Eccleston and Joseph Gordon Levitt) are high-profile and up-and-coming enough to make this 'of interest' too (although we could say the same about TermSal for casting Christian Bale as well).

Interesting, too, that the destruction of law and order is carried out by a vengeful Scot - played by Eccleston - who is replaced by a vengeful geek - played by Gordon-Levitt. In other words, revenge drives humans.

And also of note was the film's use of footage from Black Hawk Down (Ridley Scott, USA, 2001) in order to refer us back to combat that some of the characters - subsequently both good and bad - had participated in (namely, Middle Eastern conflict, not Somalia). In spite of this 'confusion' of locations (BHD was actually shot in Morocco) in BHD, GI Joe also tries to use this film to persuade us of the 'realness' of their histories. What does this mean?

Well, BHD was praised for the realism with which it depicted (the American) experience of combat. But the fact that I use parentheses around the words 'the American' also shows that the film was one-sided and therefore as 'biased' as it was 'realistic' in its portrayal of combat, in that 1,000 anonymous Somalis are killed in the film without so much - or with only very little - time for a sense of loss, while each of 17 American deaths is in comparison a veritable tragedy (not that any loss of life does not have tragic elements to it). So, does this mean that GI Joe is claiming to be as realistic as BHD? Surely not; in fact quite the opposite, not least because BHD is brought in during a flashback: the past was a time when combat was more real than in the film's present, when combat has become fun and entertaining. This in turn does have some ramifications for our understanding of Black Hawk Down: can it have been as realistic as all that if a film like GI Joe even dares to make use of it in its own diegetic reality? Besides which: everything, even memories, or perhaps especially memories, are 'only films' now: we truly have lost touch with reality in a digital era...

Who was it who said something about the powers of the false?


District 9
Produced by Peter Jackson, District 9 no doubt came into being as a result of the New Zealander's endorsement and decision to do the SFX for this film.

But the film is so interesting that one can see why Jackson went for it.

It starts out as a quasi-documentary telling us about the history of the 'prawns' - aliens from an unknown planet - who arrived on Earth some twenty years ago starving and in need of charity. Lord knows why, but they settle over Johannesburg, where they are eventually housed in a ghetto, the titular District 9, which ends up becoming the embarrassment of the nation, and where crime rates are through the roof. In a bid to relocate the prawns (so called because of their resemblance to that earthly crustacean) to a new - and equally shitty - home further out of town - i.e. out of public view - Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) goes from door to door serving eviction notices.

Wikus discovers alien technology - about which humans have known, but in which humans have seemingly been uninterested because they cannot use it (the prawn guns seem only to fire when operated by prawns). Or should I say that white humans have seemingly been uninterested in it, while local Nigerians ganglords have happily traded prawntech for dog food (to which the prawns seem to be addicted).

Wikus becomes infected by a fuel that the aliens need to power an escape ship, a fuel that, like the weapons, also seems to be a mixture of biology and technology, since it begins to turn him into a prawn, suggesting that technology might morph DNA as much as DNA might shape technology.

The film then shifts tone from quasi-mockumentary to thriller to political captive to outright action film, with melodramatic elements thrown in (prawn families being separated from each other). One almost wants to have seen more of everything. More of the prawn way of life, particularly as to why such a species seemingly so much more advanced technologically than humans, is incapable of self-organising on Earth. More of the sinister torture and technology-research that goes on by the South African powers-that-be as they attempt to unlock prawn power-tech. More of those prawns (especially 'Christopher' and his son - the prawns who take in and form an unlikely alliance with Wikus) who seem to be the only prawns capable of electronics and engineering. And perhaps a bit more action, too.

But I don't think one can blame the film for not giving us more, nor for refusing to conform to single genre or style. In this way, the film becomes its own thing, its own style, a sign of independence from a South African filmmaker (even though the film is not backed by a South African company).

Besides, the poaching from all manner of other films and styles perhaps works in the film's 'favour', and here District 9's problematic depiction of Nigerians comes into play. For while director Blomkamp has said that the film depicts Nigerians as criminals because that's actually how it is in Johannesburg (!!!! - thanks to Leshu Torchin for pointing this out to me), and while this has caused the film to be banned in Nigeria (aliens not welcome there, either?), there is something intriguing about this.

This intrigue for me does not come so much in the nationality of the criminal Nigerians as in their behaviour. Read from the 'national' standpoint, the film surely does demonise Nigerians, not least because the lead Nigerian baddie also has a name (Obesandjo) reminiscent of a prominent Nigerian president, but also because they are primitives who believe in consuming their enemies in order to obtain their power.

Like I say, this 'primitivism' should probably get short shrift in the modern day and age, but it does make me think of another film movement in which the consumption of one's (human) enemies was given pride of place, and that is the Cinema Nôvo from Brazil. In this movement, cannibalism was given pride of place for several reasons. After Montaigne, they perceived colonialism (or rather its logical successor, imperialist capitalism/capitalist imperialism) as being a system that in effect produced cannibals: colonial humans consume 'primitive' humans, even though it is the colonials that accuse the primitives of barbarity. After Oswald de Andrade, they believed that 'cannibalising' one's own past and perhaps even other cultures was as assertion of strength and perhaps even a distinctively Brazilian trait. And, although an idea produced by a Cuban and not a Brazilian, it might be worth mentioning Roberto Fernández Retamar's idea that one might reject the ethereal and colonising/intellectual qualities of the likes of Ariel, and instead adopt the cannibalistic qualities of Caliban and see in Prospero, who admits in The Tempest that the world needs Caliban, the real hero of Shakespeare's play.

In other words: cannibalism as a way of critiquing contemporary imperialism; and co-opting cannibalism as a means to assert one's own identity in a positive fashion.

While District 9 has won praise for being an allegory of racial integration (without much investigation into what that allegory is saying, as if simply being an allegory - the default mode for a Westerner to interpret any 'Third World' text, according to Fredric Jameson - made it 'good') and for being a morality tale, it is the film's treatment of consumption that I'd like to extend here.

The Nigerians, perhaps in a way that is too much and thus problematically linked to their skin colour - since they are a darker black than many of the South African blacks that are in the film, or who at least get speaking parts in the film, consume prawns to make themselves stronger. But then, it is only by (accidentally) consuming prawn fuel that Wikus 'becomes' a prawn. And the white governmental powers, albeit in ways that involve technology and therefore are - oddly? - perceived as more 'legitimate' or 'sophisticated', are also trying to consume prawns. The prawns themselves are mad for dog food, while Wikus, while undergoing his metamorphosis from human to prawn, is also constantly on the search for food.

That the film adopts so many styles and borrows from so many genres suggests that the film also 'cannibalises' many predecessors in order to emerge as its own 'empowered' film.

And of course the production history of the film perhaps sees a South African idea cannibalised by American and New Zealand companies, while the pro-filmic and human material of the film is cannibalised in post-prod by the CGI.

Given that aggressive behaviour and shameless consumption forms such a conspicuous part of the film, then, small wonder that Blomkamp has no hesitation in 'cannibalising' Nigerians for the sake of his film.

Perhaps not unlike Tsotsi as mentioned above, hard consumption (in the case of Tsotsi, Gavin Hood cannibalises political correctness for his own advancement) emerges as a South African trait, one that might not be pleasing in the peace-loving and liberal sense of the word, but one that is violent, empowering, and arguably even revolutionary when considered from a slightly different point of view. Cinema Nôvo was praised even though it actively adopted a violence of politics/ethics/aesthetics; could the same case be made, even if under slightly/very different circumstances for South Africa?

I don't want to answer this question; I just wanted to float the thought out there.

[wjrcbrown]

Yes - this was evidently a seed for Stam's later Tropical Multiculturalism. Cheers!

(And garbage also plays a prominent part in the film - Wikus recycling garbage at the end into a flower that suggests the (desire for/appreciation of) beauty in the heart of any 'ugly' alien. This in turn reminds me of something Brazilian and a film that I know you like: A Ilha das Flores/Island of Flowers. Which also reminds me of the garbage issues in contemporary Italy - and how important and big a business garbage is, who benefits from it, who suffers from the fall-out, who has to live in or with it, etc - leading us again to that Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, whose concept of bare life might in some senses have something to do with inhabitants of rubbish heaps...)

[LTorchin]

Very nice. Given your very apt invocation of Cinema Novo in relation to District 9, I thought I'd also raise the issue of the 'Garbage Aesthetics' Robert Stam sees as tied to the Aesthetics of Hunger.